skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you elaborate a bit on this. There seems to be a genuine group of people who are against burning fossil fuels. Burning natural gas causes health issues in cities, create water pollution that kills lakes, rivers, and ocean, and it causes global warming. Fossil fuels are also a major contributing to geopolitical instability in Europe, with all the recent wars having major aspects of fossil fuel politics in them.

It sucks for individuals that removing fossil fuels in Europe will have a negative impacts economically in the short term until either nuclear or alternative solutions can replace existing fossil fueled infrastructure. Replacing existing infrastructure is always costly, and core infrastructure is even more expensive. That said, the current wars and current problems from fossil fuels also cost a lot of money. The longer we wait on upgrading existing infrastructure the more it will cost in the long term.
If heads of product were forced to use their own products for a full afternoon every week the quality of the web would increase a lot.

The amount of high level product people that can't demo their own product and cannot find features they hype up in slide decks is depressing.
> How do you get your dog to the vet?

A taxi? I don't know how uber or whatever work, but you can just ask for a taxi to take your dog somewhere
I find this really fascinating as my company has several products and we've been considering for years whether open source is a better direction than what we are doing now, which is to sell closed source software to enterprises. Needless to say, this is a very different market than the one Prusa is attacking, but I've still got opinions.

I find it interesting that this comes the day after Xmas. My house was already completely swamped with cheap Chinese (or similarly cheap manufacturing country) crap. Plastic toys, fire-retardant ugly Disney-esque pajamas made in Myanmar. My kids threw tantrums because they "only" got 14 presents instead of the 16 their siblings got, but almost all those toys are forgotten now a day later. I bought my daughter reproductions of prints from Anna Atkins (the first person to create a book of photography in 1843), a kit to make cyanotypes (the technique she used), and had them solve riddles to get their presents (my daughter's clue was "blue"). I bet she won't remember that. My kids are buried in junk, and it is partially my fault, but let's at least assign a little blame to relatives trying to make up for their parenting failures years ago.

I say all that because I disagree with DD's assertion that the low-cost strategy at Best Buy is something that will always win and is what Prusa should have done. Sure, they probably would have earned much more by somehow offshoring to China. But, I still try to buy things consciously, and would making a bunch of cheap plastic shit from a cheap 3D printer from China be better for my life? I am skeptical.
> [Firefighters have] had 100 years to train and to understand how to deal with internal combustion engine fires,” the NFPA’s Andrew Klock told Vox. “With electric vehicles, they don’t have as much training and knowledge.”

> But MSB’s Per-Ola Malmqvist has developed webinars that explain how to safely put out battery fires. In a 2022 webinar, he described the tools and techniques that were used to put out a raging EV battery fire in 10 minutes using only 750 liters of water. In another webinar about EV fire suppression best practices, Malmqvist interviewed a firefighter from Vestfold Fire Service in Norway, where the extinguishing method Malmqvist recommends was tried for the first time in battling an electric-vehicle blaze.

Not surprising. However, I would have liked to have heard a better explanation of the problem about EV fires self-reigniting, which can happen hours or days later. They touched on it, but passed it off as lack of firefighter training.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/29/electric-vehicle-fires-are-r...

Simply dousing the fire with water as mentioned in the article is not sufficient.
There’s a bigger issue I noticed lately that really concerns me more than situations like Prusa. I’m trying to build a Millennium Machine Milo CNC and sourcing the aluminum plates cost a pretty penny. Whereas if you were in China, you probably know someone that can machine it for you for a fraction of the cost even factoring cost of living. You can see people on YouTube making these really elaborate hobby projects like 6 DoF robot arms with parts they machined and anodized. This makes me concern about our future and what it means for future companies like Apple.
PR is unreadable due to being redacted like a story with irrelevant details.
My impression is that the concern with EV and battery fires is that they can occur in the home or while otherwise stationary, unexpectedly causing much more catastrophic damage. ICE fires, in contrast, seem to be mostly associated with collisions, or somewhat less so with driving; it seems uncommon for ICEs to suddenly catch fire in an enclosed building.

e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649

I'm not an expert on this though, and these are just my general impressions, which is maybe the point of the article. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to address the nature of EV fires in a scientific, public-health kind of way.

I think the thing most people are concerned about is a question like "how likely is my car to cause my house to burn down just sitting in the garage, while I'm sleeping?" Maybe the answer to that is the same with ICEs and EVs but that's the question that needs to be addressed.
> That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source.

You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does:

- develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees.

- sell support and consulting on this product

- sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this product, with support

Totally withing the free software / open source spirit. The world gets great open source software for free (not open core: truly and completely open source), and the business behind it is sustainable as well. We also donate to some open source projects that we use, chosen by employees.

At some point, if you want open source to take over, you need it to grow and strive, and having it supported by business is a great way of getting this. The world probably cannot be run only by side projects.

Not saying that all open source companies behave this well, but it's not an impossible outcome.
We can still use browsers as UI without using any cloud.
It can be useful in general, but it is hard to provide the type of tolerances expressed in physical units you’d expect in an engineered solution when all the constants are ignored.
Researchers used ML model to find antibiotic against drug resistant infections
Absolutely!

We went into these hotels telling them "I know you offer WiFi, but we are a tech conference, we're going to be using the WiFi harder than your normal event." They'd all say "It's fine", but they'd quickly learn it wasn't fine.

There wasn't really the option to use the cellular network for data at that time.

We eventually ended up running our own WiFi for quite a few years, because the venues consistently would just end up a smoking crater. The first year in Chicago the venue had this fancy centrally controlled wifi that was supposed to be all smart, but even after a field upgrade because the central CPU couldn't keep up, it was just a disaster.

Ended up going with a bunch of relatively inexpensive APs all set on low RF power, where the venues always wanted to have one or two APs on high power. Basically solved our problems.
Crab bucket.
I've flown to Newquay as well.
Part of the "nuclear renaissance" is extending the life of the current fleet.
They're superior for lots of things, but inferior in ways that are very important for many cooks. I cooked professionally so I've got a whole lot more experience than most using stoves— including induction stoves at work.

If a typical home cook was buying a stove for their house, I'd recommend induction without thinking twice, especially if they have kids or can't have a hood that vents outside. Even without considering environmental concerns, I'd choose induction for restaurant pastry work— the precision and consistency are really great. It's also nice to not have all of the heat from 30 90k BTU burners all the time in a small room, too.

But for most uses, having a flame you can see, hear, and feel affords much more expressive heat control than digital displays and pan temperature alone. Most pan work is about feel rather than "heating something at x temperature for y time." Also, being able to pick the pan up a few inches to jostle the contents while still getting nearly the same heat transfer is really important for high heat sautées. It's also much much more expensive to get an induction burner that doesn't have a tiny hot spot in the middle of the pan— even with a relatively small burner, the gas flame still spreads out more, which is critical for things like searing large cuts of meat properly. In many ways, gas is a better tool from a functional perspective, environmental issues aside.

My dad is a retired mechanical engineer— he was the chief engineer at a fairly large company for years, and he knows a lot about heat transfer. He won't even entertain the idea that induction stoves are inferior to gas stoves in any way. He's probably also used a stove about two dozen times in his life and standing in front of one he vibes like someone learning to drive. It's the equivalent of his arguing I should use a compass, French curve and drafting templates when figure drawing. Induction being more precise and efficient on paper doesn't make it better in all use cases, and some use cases are really important to some people. Ultimately, the emissions and efficiency make induction the way to go, and I've only seen glib countetarguments against that. But the people telling others— even ones with vastly more experience cooking— they're wrong for preferring gas as a cooking tool are saying more about their own understanding of cooking than the other person's.
Even web search sucks now
LTO. I bought an LTO-5 system to backup 6TB of critical data and 12TB of nice-to-have data. LTO-6 is better if you can afford it.

Downside to tape backup is you need throughput, or the ability to do disk-disk backups
I've never been lucky(?) enough to reach a scale or level of domain messiness where the standard method of indexing things naievely in elasticsearch or even typesense breaks down.

Especially to such an extent as the umbrella example.

What's the failure mode here? Microservices that "own their own data"?
I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful search (Like these examples)

You can get better results with a 5minute tsvector in Postgres, At least it will show the words you typed in in the results!

And yes I understand it may be a different "scale" of products, but do people not test these things?
There are a few things on this comments that is causing noise in my mind.

>might make you a better programmer, it won't make you a better software engineer

I think it is a short-sighted definition of SE but in any case, there are not any mention anywhere in the article claiming that this was aimed to software engineers.

Also, although I appreciate the concerns of "Not Invented Here" doctrine, we also have the other side of the spectrum, where we don't know how to do a left-pad anymore [1], and introduce dependencies everywhere.

The third point is that I don't think that having more knowledge on how things works contributes with the "Not Invented Here" mindset. I would argue is the opposite. When engineers are hungry on learning, they find excuses to make address that appetite at work, but once they know the tradeoffs and amount of effort to make it work, they will think twice before starting anything from scratch.

[1] https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-...
I love the quote 'we’ve gone from designing systems on a chip in Silicon Valley to systems on a ship'
I use Rider on Linux, it's great.
Not disagreeing, but this example seems like a data/tagging problem which is probably some other department.
While the current medical establishment isn't perfect, and I have many anecdotes of them failing my family/friends and I, they are definitely better than those so called support groups.

I refuse to believe they are good for you. Just a bunch of people complaining and enabling hypochondria. Psychosomatic symptoms are a powerful thing. Hanging out with a bunch of people that complain about their symptoms and finding similarities with them isn't good.

By all means, expirement with diet or whatever else. But no good can come from those support groups. Or maybe I am just too cynical...
I've met a few, but they're always in weird dysfunctional relationships in which one of them is very sexual and wants more than their partner, and their partner is hopelessly in love with this person and will do absolutely anything for fear of losing them. It's vaguely abusive.
>You mean non-violent? Because there has never been a succesful yet violent civil rights movement.

No I mean violent. Those violent groups helped make MLK palatable. This is documented history. Its unclear what the trend would have been had groups like the Black Panthers(for example) not existing but it is super clear that they helped drag the leadership of the country to push forward some continued compromise because otherwise the pressure would have kept increasing and these groups were starting to affect capital. Has it accomplished everything? No. But as each one of these groups falls, another one eventually crops. up. BLM was a bust because of leadership and how they were systematically discredited before they even got going. But will it end at BLM? Of course not! It will never end until there is actual reform.

I need to stop right here: You clearly have not studied the history of the civil rights movement in the US and how violent along with non-violent struggle was a key component in getting to where we are today. The rest of your post is just strawmen because there is no cohesive argument.
> It might be a neurological trait, some people just can't live with a syntactic layer

Genuinely, I think this is the case, and it might be one of the biggest tragedies in computing history.

There is a type of brain that can deal happily with bare S-exps and once it learns to do so, sees syntactic sugar as waste.

As a result, that type of brain dominated Lisp's evolution and so the Lisp mainstream never got past that.

But, I suspect, most brains can't. And so demonstrably inferior languages thrived because they were prettier, or sweeter if that fits.
LTO5. The cost of my LTO5 system is the cost of downloading all of my data once from a remote cloud provider. It's a nobrainer
A complete FPGA toolchain running in the browser
If somebody installs something that requires a fee and extra connection when building with something semi-permanent like house appliances, kind of makes me think there is some sort of kickback scheme for them to do so.

Having gas appliances where I live is seen as a liability, as you have yet another maintenance item, and it contributes negatively to indoor air, so you have to have much more care regarding air handling in your areas where it is used. (unsurprisingly, demand for gas and gas appliances has plummeted ever since Russia started with their fuckery so people have been converting in droves as well.)
> Nintendo understands the value of the Switch library and I think would be very cautious to release successor hardware that didn't play the existing titles.

I really hope so. The switch has such a great library, it would be an absolute shame if they abandoned it all. From the rumors I've heard they're sticking to a similar platform for the next console so hopefully backwards compatibility is reasonably likely.
Many of the comments here just don't care about the potential harmful effects called out in the article. But I think there are two important questions:

1."Should I be worried about Nitrogen Dioxide from my stove?"

2."In the absence of trustworthy, detailed research, how would I know to be worried about Nitrogen Dioxide?"

I feel the focus should be on the second question -- "big stove" seems to have prevented us from making an informed decision on the topic, and that should make us all concerned regardless of the particular dangers of Nitrogen Dioxide. Personally, I'd like to know whether it matters for my health. With the existing data, I can't tell.
If "ultimate truth" cannot be attained, but can be asymptotically approached, is striving for it still a lost cause if the knowledge gained in the approach might be useful?

I'll never be able to run a marathon as fast as Eliud Kipchoge. That doesn't mean it's a lost cause for me to try to get my marathon time as close to his as possible - I can still achieve valuable things despite the goal being lofty and unattainable. Further, I might achieve more through chasing an unattainable goal, than I would if I'd set my sights lower.

It's also worth remembering the aphorism that people saying: “It can’t be done,” are always being interrupted by somebody doing it.
People, founders or not, are of little consequence when they are not owners, and majority at that. Which companies of that list are bootstrapped, and which have taken outside investment? I would only consider the bootstrapped ones valid entries, all others just haven't left the pretend stage yet.

If you already did base your list on bootstrappedness, consider this post strong agreement: because that's what I'm trying to say. Yes, there are companies that can be considered "true to the idea of open source" (sqlite! Even though technically neither a company nor open source), but there's a clear cutoff.
This part isn't optional:

> given the history of the Nakba where Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from big parts of historic Palestine

Being occupied, mistreated, droven away so that one "wants" to leave is all the same as being outright murdered: ethnic cleansing and genocide. You're essentially asking "but are you sure they know it's genocide, too? Are you sure they mind", and the answer is "it doesn't matter".
This looks like it may wind up reinventing select(2), for which one should maybe consult poll(2) to see where that approach wound up.

The underlying problem is that Oberon lacks an unordered select (WHILE ELSIF comes close but has the unfortunate —in this case, but not for many actor scenarios— repetition). Maybe something could be done with a CASE Poll(...) OF ... END?

If life were a Ponyhof, I would ask for something along the lines of:

PROCEDURE sendit(text: STRING): BOOLEAN;
VAR fail: BOOLEAN;
FailChan: CHANNEL OF BOOLEAN;
BEGIN
fail := FALSE;
FailChan := After(TimeOut);
SELECT
SENDABLE(TxChan) THEN SEND(TxChan, text) |
RECEIVABLE(FailChan) THEN RECEIVE(fail, FailChan)
END
RETURN fail END sendit;

but that'd obviously be too large a change.
It's all explained, including a 50 minutes talk, in the linked issue: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/113464
This was the conference where Ka-Ping Ye could be found huddling in the back of the room, and then a few hours later give a presentation on "look what I just did". So, I hear what you're saying, but there is also value in being on your computer in that environment.
Notably, it appears the authors of this study are the owners of https://www.earthing.com, which sells products to help ground people. This is called out in the study. Given this massive conflict of interest, I can't put much stock into these findings until they're replicated by independent researchers. Absent that, I'll assume that this study is manufacturing a (possibly false) scientific basis for buying the grounding products.
This could be a great solution for surplus power dumping perhaps?
The issue isn’t that there are some cases and users where gas is the default it’s that for most cases and users it shouldn’t be.

And there is significant cost to the default being gas that hasn’t been caught by our current legislative regimes. And that the gas companies are using dodgy tactics to keep it that way.
We produce 170TWh per year in Sweden. 41% is hydro, 29% is nuclear and 19% wind. So a large chunk is nuclear, but far from the majority.
Vaguely related but Firefox on android history search (well, autocomplete) is awful.

n -> suggests nothing
ne -> suggests news.ycombinator.com
new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com
news -> suggests nothing
news. -> suggests nothing
news.y -> suggests nothing
news.yc -> suggests nothing
news.yco -> suggests nothing
news.ycom -> suggests nothing
news.ycomb -> suggests nothing
news.ycombi -> suggests nothing
news.ycombin -> suggests nothing
news.ycombina -> suggests nothing
news.ycombinat -> suggests nothing
news.ycombinato -> suggests nothing
news.ycombinator -> suggests nothing
news.ycombinator. -> suggests nothing
news.ycombinator.c -> suggests nothing
news.ycombinator.co -> suggests news.ycombinator.com
news.ycombinator.com -> suggests news.ycombinator.com

huh???
For a public API you want to provide a clean and easy to use example.

It's much easier to do it with REST. In docs you can just have a _curl_ example. And the JSON req/resp are easy to copy-paste anywhere else. You can start experimenting immediately, even in the same browser tab with js console.

With protobuf there is an initial barrier, because before you start you have to download proto definitions or a client library.
Assuming you get the TCP/IP stack for free, you still need to build fully-featured HTTPS and a "webscale" multi-server database for document storage from scratch. The crawler is easy and so is something like PageRank, but then building the sharded keyword text search engine itself that operates at webscale is a whole other project...

The point is that it's too much work for a single person to build all the parts themselves. It's only feasible if you rely on pre-existing HTTPS libraries and database and text search technologies.
>Imagine a Prusa where it works out of the box, you can fire up a slicer in your browser which auto-connects to your printer and prints models from a Prusa-operated model repository, paying $10 for a premium model, $1 off the top goes to Prusa, with the same saved payment details which ensure that a fresh spool of Prusa filament arrives at your front door when it auto-detects that your printer is almost out. The print you want is too big for your build volume? Click here to have it cloud printed – do you want priority shipping for that? Your hot-end is reaching the end of its life – as one of our valued business customers on our premium support contract we would be happy to send you a temporary replacement printer while yours is shipped in for service.

What a nightmare. Grimly funny to see 3d printers getting pressured to take up all the 2d printer business models everyone hates (service contracts, proprietary consumables, cloud management software, etc.).
I really don’t understand the “why” here. As a toy project it’s interesting but the actual justification to actually use IRC seems to come after the implementation.

This isn’t derived from the stability of IRC itself but the network operators as there are many holes not accounted for.

You’re not guaranteed a channel on IRC networks. A network owner may decide to remove it or, if using Services, transfer ownership if someone requests. Same for nicks and other things.

I’d also be willing to bet the network operators did not sign up to host a database for free for some stranger online either.
> We always go with “good enough for now.”

The whole point of the piece is that not everyone does this and there are plentiful counter-examples, and while they never took over the mainstream, they have survived for decades despite going against the flow.

I can say this with authority because I wrote the article, and delivered the original talk upon which it's based.