skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One of the animals raises her head over her enclosure and gazes pensively at me, her widely spaced eyes and odd, rectangular pupils seeking to make contact—and perhaps even connection.

One time I did scuba, and I'm swimming in the water. There were fish, I have no idea what kind of fish, kinda small, maybe they size of an open hand. One fish swam in front of me, facing me, and stopped. It just chilled there. You can't speak under water, and even if you could you can't communicate with a fish. But there was some kind of connection we were making. I realized at that moment, in that moment, we were both experiencing something, and we were both inquisitive of each other. Me, a foreigner to the water, a tourist, and the fish, a local, wondering about this one biped that looks kinda funny.

After a few minutes I guess it decided that the "conversation" had come to a natural ending and swam away. Out of the many fish that were near me that day, that was the one to stop and say hi.

There are many tourists in this world. I have gone abroad and witnessed the tourists expecting something from the locals. I also see a lot of tourist and noticed they look at me, a local, like I'm a (non-human) animal. Over the years I like to think back to that specific individual fish, and realize that our differences aren't so great, and humans are the tourists that expect something from them, entire industries that capture a number of them every year that's so large many of us can't even comprehend.

I have a few stories similar to this fish with other animals, and because of that the above quote resonates with me. I hope more articles come out which are not about just "sciency things" void of the humans and non-human condition, but the self actualization and realization of the individual that we're not alone.
Its wild to see the community notes under most of the ads warning of scams. I've see debates break out in the comment thread under the ads about just what kind of scam it is.
This seems way more likely than some unknown ritual. Back then humans were much more frequently in combat with animals.
Tenses, pronounciation that is completely divorced from spelling, idioms, prepositions, word order, articles, and so on.

As a foreigner that observed a lot of other foreigners speaking English: it is not an easy language to master.
Electronics, or just a simple electric current?
Stoic Logic
It’s probably this one: https://www.zdnet.com/article/flipper-zero-can-lock-up-an-ip...

This attack was mitigated in 17.2: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/15/24003406/apple-iphone-fl...
I've often wondered why mono LCD projectors aren't more common - it seems like they'd be easier to make by a nontrivial amount and allow higher brightness/efficiency. I guess it's a matter of market scale as usual, or maybe I just don't know the right search keywords.
(You do see mono LCDs nowadays in SLA 3d printers though.)
My answer to whether "software is getting worse" is it depends on the age of the software. I can't think of a single body of software that's been under continuous development over the last few decades that hasn't got markedly more stable. The Windows kernel, the Linux kernel, Android, iPhone, gcc, web browsers, web servers, Office software, and even RAID off the top of my head are all vastly better than they were. (I've lost more data to early hardware RAID and IBM SAN's than to failing HDD's).

But that old software is swamped by new software - web pages in particular, but also IoT, Tesla self driving, smart TV's, Max 737's, my robot vacuum and my step daughters desk (it refuses to go up unless you reset it). As predicted software is indeed eating the world, so new software is everywhere. A day doesn't go by without me having to work around the deficiencies of some piece of crap.

So you could be forgiven for thinking that software is getting worse if all you are doing is comparing mature software to new stuff. But remember a long time ago (well not that long, as I was a programmer back then too), that mature software was just a new and unreliable as todays new software. With very rare exceptions like the space shuttle software (because it requires a metric f*k ton of money to get bugs per loc in new software down to 5 or 6 nines), all new software is shit.
"public key encryption. Are you familiar with that?"
"Yes, I am."
"And how is it that you're familiar with public key encryption?"
"I invented it."
Problem is fingers are a bit more important than toys. Also there are tribes today still practicing this. Chop off the finger and eat it for good luck. Not hard to imagine the occasional psychotic shamanistic dude starting this practice from time to time. And we still practice circumcision in some Western cultures today.
If you would like to contribute to a Python Text Editor / IDE, I would suggest https://github.com/Akuli/porcupine

It has a great (but very small) community and the maintainer is phenomenal as well.
I'll just be a Flipper Zero with a new Firmware - https://github.com/Flipper-XFW/Xtreme-Firmware Maybe something else but this is the easiest/most obvious.

I don't really understand why this is mainstream news. It's happened before, because it's harmless and funny - https://www.kktv.com/2023/11/30/device-brought-tennessee-hig...

In a world where the loser Doomers think China/Aliens can cripple us with a cyberattack this is exactly what is needed more to make people harden their phones, aka run updates.
"nearby" + plaform specificity? This screams Bluetooth.

Side note: iOS's BT stack has a handful of oddly specific requirements for peripherals. It wouldn't surprise me that those requirements precipitate from... cough design oversights.
Sensor-Free Soil Moisture Sensing Using LoRa Signals (2022)
I would really love to try my hands on something much more physical, like a robot; or a drone with autopilot; maybe accurate simulation of flight dynamics of a spaceplane with programmable GNC parameters?

I have a copy of "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics" by Bate, Mueller et al and I would love to do something with it this holiday season.

I say simulation because all the rest of the stuff seems to cost a lot. I am really interested in the GNC aspect of robots, and would love some good pointers on the topic!
Exactly. People here think knowing how to code is spinning up 5 k8s clusters and running an ELK stack from scratch, when in reality, it can be much less. Musk was an intermediate level coder from his time, which, mind you, was a time where terms like Agile, code hygiene, etc, were non-existent.

Most code critics of Musk today criticize his poor coding skills due to him unable to migrate his skills from that era to today. But as CEO, he doesn't need to do that. I'm sure he understands the code on a shallow level, which is fine for his role.
"Sensor-free Soil Moisture Sensing Using LoRa Signals" (2022)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3534608 :

> Abstract: Soil moisture sensing is one of the most important components in smart agriculture. It plays a critical role in increasing crop yields and reducing water waste. However, existing commercial soil moisture sensors are either expensive or inaccurate, limiting their real-world deployment. In this paper, we utilize wide-area LoRa signals to sense soil moisture without a need of dedicated soil moisture sensors. Different from traditional usage of LoRa in smart agriculture which is only for sensor data transmission, we leverage LoRa signal itself as a powerful sensing tool. The key insight is that the dielectric permittivity of soil which is closely related to soil moisture can be obtained from phase readings of LoRa signals. Therefore, antennas of a LoRa node can be placed in the soil to capture signal phase readings for soil moisture measurements. Though promising, it is non-trivial to extract accurate phase information due to unsynchronization of LoRa transmitter and receiver. In this work, we propose to include a low-cost switch to equip the LoRa node with two antennas to address the issue. We develop a delicate chirp ratio approach to cancel out the phase offset caused by transceiver unsynchronization to extract accurate phase information. The proposed system design has multiple unique advantages including high accuracy, robustness against motion interference and large sensing range for large-scale deployment in smart agriculture. Experiments with commodity LoRa nodes show that our system can accurately estimate soil moisture at an average error of 3.1%, achieving a performance comparable to high-end commodity soil moisture sensors. Field studies show that the proposed system can accurately sense soil moisture even when the LoRa gateway is 100 m away from the LoRa node, enabling wide-area soil moisture sensing for the first time
I'm talking about what can be done with remote attestation. It forces you to be beholden to what the device manufacturer allows you to run. For now they allow you to run ad blockers.
Quick, which language is this written in?

a = [1,2,3,4]

for b in a

print(b)

end
Prep + condoms eliminates this risk.
Reminds me of the recurring "fertility cult items" or similar names in archaeological findings. As a code for "it's probably a dildo". (Yes, there are cult items too, but AFAIU this is at the level of a meme for archeologists on social media at this point)
It's not an EV thing. All this same tech is moving into ICE cars too. I know someone with a Genesis GV80 that just randomly threw itself into limp mode and wouldnt go over 20mph. Genesis support gave him the magic button combination to reboot the onboard computers and the car was totally fine. This car has all the same tech as any EV. It gets updates. Has all the sensors, screens, safety tech, advanced cruise (he says it drives itself)... Hell even my mom's Subaru Outback has all this same tech, an onboard modem, updates, etc.
Of course much of this seems obvious, but I think it's also required to pave the way for more complex research.

If you jump into research that does not show results because it's too complex, you don't learn anything. (That particular experiment didn't work, not "the species is too stupid to do X")

You have to build up to it both to provide a path of credibility (we know they can do A,B,C, but when we tried D or E those didn't work) and also to develop the facilities, tools, techniques to be able to ask and answer these questions.

It feels shameful because so many farmers or 4H students know all of this stuff. We shouldn't need to publish papers to know these animals are intelligent. This is referenced in the article, though - they publish both types of research (this animal can do that & treating your animals well in this way gives these specific benefits)

I'm excited for the future where we have a much finer-grained understanding and can probe more specific questions from individual animals though
I really like the "culture matters" and "look stupid" posts. I've been allowing myself to look stupid since I was a kid in school. Dan is humble (frequently saying things such as "If an idiot like me can [do X]"), but I think this strategy requires a certain degree of intellectual security. For me the logic isn't just "this question may sound stupid but the knowledge gained outweighs that". It's also "this question may sound stupid but anyone who thinks I'm dumb is wrong".
FWIU ground discharge is a significant liability; "must've been lodestone there".

Higher EC soil is presumably a better path to ground. Lightning current is too strong and damages plants.

Null hypothesis: There are no companion planting approaches that result in greater yield due to idk symbiotic Eh-Ph homeostasis

Three Sisters: Corn, Bean, Squash

Tomatoes and potatoes grow well together in a 5gal HDPE bucket with hole cut into the side to access the potatoes; no idea whether there is electrical production from the tomatoes waving in the wind

Companion planting > Mechanisms doesn't list soil EC or electricity Output given e.g. Eh-Ph and moisture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting
> I also see a lot of tourist and noticed they look at me, a local, like I'm a (non-human) animal.

How exactly is that expressed? I often gawk at things and people on the streets when I'm traveling (and at home), but not out of disrespect, the exact opposite - awe, interest, desire to spot the details. Such as seeing a local in cool clothes and trying to figure out if it's from a local brand that I could buy from. Does that come off as treating people like animals? How can one get better about not doing that?
This was around a decade ago, but I remember having a use case where sending too much data to the Bluetooth stack on iPhone would crash the Bluetooth stack so hard that only a factory reset would fix it.

I have no doubt that lingering vulnerabilities exist in that stack.
> gRPC is immature

Seven years (the time since Google made it open source) is immature? Plus however long Google used it internally? Berners-Lee invented HTTP and the web in 1989. By 1996 we had Yahoo!, Altavista, Netscape, and the NY Times had a website.
Unless you use metaphysics there is no causation, only correlation.
Wow, what a funky little device! Thanks for the lead, I might have to pick up one of these things. It looks good for hacking but is it hackable itself? An exposed JTAG port would have this thing shipping to my home right now.
WaveCoder: Widespread Versatile Enhanced Instruction Tuning with Refine Data Gen
https://ksp-kos.github.io/KOS/ Kerbal Space Program might not simulate aerodynamics quite to the realism level you prefer, but a lot of people seem to enjoy writing GNC software for it.
Open relationships seem extremely common. I've met loads of people like this and they seem happy and the relationships last. I've only met one proper poly person and it didn't seem to work that well. They have now gone back to a typical open couple relationship.
What if we don't want to be "software engineers"?

I'm still not totally convinced that "software engineer" is even a thing, frankly.
My son and I often joke that in the same way that some countries require a period of military service, we could require a period of agricultural and meat farm service. Maybe even garbage disposal service.
Were you at the first Bitcoin conference in 2013? We had a booth there.

I’m curious about the context of Bitcoin in this divorce proceeding. What was at dispute?
I asked gpt4 about this first and it didn’t really know. What is it about “First Principles“ that’s cringeworthy or pretentious? I think I’m out of the loop on this one.
Thanks. I'll check this out
Microsoft Announces WaveCoder
Combat with animals, combat with each other, combat with nature, our digits are pretty fragile.
Oh no my phone turned off. Someone call the police.
> If people spent time with meat animals, there would be a lot more vegetarians.

Having grown up on a ranch, yes I know cows are smart... chickens not so much. It does not change my views on eating beef at all.

Cows are treated very well in all the ranches I've been on. One because it makes them taste better, another because we about our livestock.

Your alternative is them not existing at all, they cannot survive in nature.

The cow does not know it's going to be slaughtered.

It lives a nice happy life roaming the fields, on the last few days it goes to processing to eat a massive last great meal.

It's the nicest form of us being eating our prey.
How would you suggest going about the display? Driving an LCD or generating an NTSC/PAL signal?

Or maybe a giant array of LEDs?

Is there a good tool to simulate Verilog so you can test without hardware?
Accurate: true

Useful: false
I strongly disagree. Software engineering is simply the next higher abstraction level above programming. Just like programming is the level of abstraction above writing machine code, and writing machine code is the level above hardware manipulation.

Almost all "programming" problems have been solved. Today's software is laughably inefficient not because we need better implementations of data structures, but because putting all those existing pieces together properly is a neglected discipline.

The best place to see this is in Machine Learning. The vast majority of ML/AI software that is published (which often implements revolutionary techniques!) is of incredibly poor quality from a software engineering standpoint. As a result, practical AI applications are orders of magnitude slower than they could be.
You’re right. It’s not a lot for a machine. The point isn’t the speed capability. It’s why? What UI has 1,000 rows in, e.g., a table all at once (much less 1M)?
I genuinely love your sentiment. We have way too much faux asceticism and way too little self-mockery in this godforsaken industry that pays us all way too much money. Programming is wizardry. But being a professional one (a software engineer) is a ridiculous occupation we're coerced into. We all know this, otherwise Silicon Valley wouldn't have been a universally cathartic show.

But GP is completely correct that all of the fun, magical projects in the OP article are antithetical to the profession.
i went from using nextra to obsidian to outline.

nextra is fine for devs, just edit github repo.

obsidian is fine for personal, but its over configurability and unclear teams pricing and sync pricing is pain in the ass.

outline is the sweet spot. $10 per month for the whole team, easy to add and edit pages, easy to save. it provides that markdown-compatible WYSIWYG experience.
Another possibility (or rather, an extension on the idea of punishment) is that it's a form of irreversible social segregation. For better? as in: "we, the enlightened and courageous fingerless!", or, more likely-seeming, for worse - as in: "the shame of the fingerless shall be forever visible to all".
And if you don't, anyway? Do you not get to use the SSH(TM) logo on your product? You're reading MUST a bit too literally.
Do this in the wrong school district and they'll put you in prison. Absolutely ridiculous.
The firmware is open source, and third party software already exists

Ex: https://github.com/Flipper-XFW/Xtreme-Firmware
The standard that real world experiments are held to to qualify as "reproduction". Your hypothetical is interesting but it's clearly a different standard from what we actually use.
But nvidia isn’t pulling this crap. You don’t get one old version immediately dropped. So another choice is to use nvidia. And cuda support covers a large number of their cards. And event recent releases cover a good chunk
But how? My phone is off!
I'm so close to being a full-time mblaze user, it is truly excellent. There is something so smart about being able to use your standard shell tooling and interaction facilities to interact with mail. It is like everything that was a good idea with mh¹/nmh decades ago, just better all round and with a nicer message format.

Even if you don't like the idea of using command line tools as your MUA, you can easily make mblaze interactive with common tooling. For example, you could use mlist via fzf along with its --preview window as pretty awesome interactive client. Everything works as you'd expect, and you have all the power of every single tool you use to mangle that mail at any point.

I just seem to fall back in to mutt too easily in the end, I can't get over the final hump. I've even implemented a chunk of mimicry bindings so that I shouldn't even notice, but mutt pulls me back in for "that one tiny feature" every now and then. I've been doing this dance for at least a few years at this point², but I think it may be longer.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System

² https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze/commits?author=JNRo...
No, I agree: I'd want some kind of app/webui where I could select which people I really care about, and the counter will show me if those people, and only those people, have sent me messages. So basically, my most immediate family and my girlfriend and that's it. If any of them send me a message, I'm willing to check it out.
The life and death of open source companies
Maybe it can be connected to a voice-interface system so you have to actually tell it "show me the time".
Nope. That would turn off nearby Android devices and laptops as well.
Sometimes I like to wave at people. On tour buses they will almost never wave back, off tour buses they will sometimes. In the latter case I'm not really making a judgement, but in the former case it feels like a safari kind of thing.

Of course it's a subjective feeling I have, but I think this is different than people watching which I suspect you're referring to.

In the your comment I've started asking people about their cool/interesting clothes. Some people are receptive others aren't. This is an aside from what I was saying but just want to mention I've started having fun and interesting conversations that way.
Any libs to help with that? Thanks.
Some concepts seems to be permanently defined as a spelling error and will just be impossible to search for.
That one is on my to-read list. Only hear good things about that book. And I see that C# 12 in a nutshell is just released.
> Cows are treated very well in all the ranches I've been on.

Unfortunately the entire premise of your argument is based on a personal anecdote that's a gross generalization of vast number of cattle farms.
I don't experience writing code as similar to writing prose. Code has a lot of technical constraints, and prose is much more about emotion.

I'm not saying they have nothing in common. Code and prose are both written in languages, and prose has certain technical requirements like good grammar, etc... There are very creative prose stories that play with the rules of language. But the primary focus of prose is it's effect on people and that has a different requirements than a program which has to run, run correctly, be understandable, and be maintained.
No. I am a subscriber to the Coop, and I am not ewilderj. There’s not much else to say about it. It’s like $15, and you get a stamped manila envelope filled with a cover letter explaining the choice of the quarter and a magazine.
Who do you think puts systems like a web search engine together?

It's certainly not people who are lost in details like string matching or how ACID is implemented in distributed databases.

Of course you need all these things in order for the search engine to work – but if you write them yourself, even if you think about them excessively, you will never finish.

Software engineering is knowing that you don't need to know everything, you only need to know where to find everything. "Programming" is an important part of it, but far from the only one.
> Your alternative is them not existing at all, they cannot survive in nature.

That's flat out false - there are many examples of free range beef, the entire clean skin northern australian market for one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBpOiEfYk6A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B-zWxDJOZU
I liked the first comment there:

> "According to an APS statement, 'by turning off those teenagers' phones, the student created a dangerous environment in which students might actually have been able to learn something instead of staring at their phones all day. We're just not equipped to handle that kind of thing, so we called the police instead.'"
nothing beats the "religious afterlife" takes. When they find some skeleton with some cooking pottery and archeologists/historians assume it's because the pre h historic culture had buried this person with cookery because he/she would need to cook in the after life - when most likely it's because the person was contaminated, and got buried/left with all his worldly possessions and everything else was burned off.
Freedom of Critical Knowledge Act
Not to split hairs but writing machine code is programming. I'm not sure what you're thinking about as "hardware manipulation". Programming is just one (and a very important one) part of what it takes to be a "software engineer" (or software developer, or whatever you want to call having skills to deliver, or be part of a team that delivers, major software projects).
You can hook it up to a monitor and stream the graphics over HDMI. And yes, there are ways to simulate Verilog