skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't read programming books any more because they are mostly shit or expensive or expensive and shit.

That’s consistent with the first reason given in the article:

> I lay part of the blame squarely at the feet of the technical book publishing industry:

> Most programming books suck. The barrier to being a book author, as near as I can tell, is virtually nonexistent. The signal to noise of book publishing is arguably not a heck of a lot better than what you'll find on the wilds of the internet. Of the hundreds of programming books released every year, perhaps two are three are truly worth the time investment.
Parent is responding to this:

> I threw together a quick proof of concept of it working over HF radio.

I'm not aware of any HF bands you can use in the US without a license. And it is prohibited to use any kind of secret encryption on amateur bands.
I think it's a dubious proposition that aircraft are worse than driving a similar distance.

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10311

The worst thing you can say is that aircraft allow people to travel more miles than they would have otherwise. I could fly to Cancun and burn more fuel than my car uses in a year.
thank you very much!

i think physical-layer disruption like lora jamming is kind of a separate consideration, but physical-layer traffic analysis might not be

i had misunderstood you to be saying that the second reticulum node ever was at your house, so i had assumed you were the author
While these patterns are pretty to look at, I don't think bullet-hell shmups are fun to play. The challenge becomes to very carefully dodge bullets that appear in the same pattern over and over again, instead of, you know, actually shooting at the enemy. Yes, dodging is part of shmup gameplay, but I find it much more enjoyable when the bullets don't have a recognizable pattern, and when the goal is not to overwhelm you with the amount of them on the screen.

I love the shmup genre, but would rather play traditional ones like Raiden, DemonStar, R-Type, Gradius, Blazing Star, etc., and modern entries like Sky Force, than Ikaruga and the like. But, hey, to each their own. :)
Why is this always posted as some sort of "gotcha!"

Break them up to? Break everyone up.

Ask me any company over 5k employees. It should probably be broken up.
Fun fact: About 89% of Canada's land area (8,886,356 km² or 3,431,041 sq mi) is Crown land: 41% is federal Crown land and 48% is provincial Crown land. The remaining 11% is privately owned. For example, 92% of Quebec, 87% of Ontario, 95% of Newfoundland and Labrador, and 94% of the land in British Columbia are Crown land. So when you “buy” land, you actually become a tenant to the Crown. If you don’t pay the property taxes, “your” property can be registered for sale. The laws around properties in Canada are extremely complicated and stupid. A friend of mine, after building their house and wanting to connect the sewer to the municipal one, was required to pay more than $50k! After 2 years, they ended up having a septic tank instead.

Unfortunately, there’s no hope to fix the housing issue in a democratic way because the majority of the voters are landlords. The only possible solution is like Japan (where houses are depreciated assets) by having centralized control over housing, zoning, permits, and everything to maintain a flat price. Other than that, the future is grim for young people or anyone who doesn’t already own a house. I remember a year ago I saw a mortgage here in Canada of 70 years, so if you bought a house at 30, you will become a Crown tenant by 100!

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land
Nearly 40% of the United States is public land, supported by taxpayers and managed by federal, state, or local governments. -- https://headwaterseconomics.org/public-lands/protected-lands/public-land-ownership-in-the-us/

Allocating a few more percentage points of that for housing could have a large effect on prices.
I've been using https://www.npmjs.com/package/html2pdf.js for a project, and it works pretty nicely - it will render a DOM element into a PDF for me.
This is maybe a stupid question, but if credit is cheap, shouldn’t it be easier to finance a housebuilding operation? In the very low interest rates from say 2008-2020, I think we saw less housebuilding in the United States than before.
There is no law with being a monopoly or anticompetitive. A company must be found to be both. Proving a monopoly is the first hurdle that will continue to be challenging with Apple. That's why defining market is so critical in these cases. The government is already suggesting slices like 'performance smartphones' that make Apple look dominant.
I try and re-read Fred Brooks' _Mythical Man Month_ every year or two. That is a short series of essays that I seem to always find a "new" idea from. My most recent re-read the line that stuck with me was "plan to throw one away. You will anyhow."

What I took from that given the situation I was in at time was that the best way to build an abstraction is to build the first one without any abstraction, and only then, when you understand how whatever is being abstracted will be used, try and build the abstraction layer, rather than starting with the attempt at abstraction. There are other ways to interpret it- it can point you to a more Agile design philosophy even though he was writing decades before the Agile Manifesto.
Land and homes also make for excellent inflation hedges; thus, property owners become advocates for money printing and suppressed interest rates.
ScaleFlux https://scaleflux.com computational storage might offer some of what you are imagining. Their NVMe drives have onboard ARM cores and perform hardware compression and advanced flash management with no drivers beyond standard NVMe. I believe you can tap into the computational capabilities with additional code.
Fantastic.

The LSP story is definitely one of Elixirs big weaknesses. Issues with performance, missing autocomplete, not being able to jump to definitions inside macros, are quite annoying to deal with.
> It seems like such an increase would benefit everyone except the speculators.

Correct, a simple power law tax formula on unimproved/vacant land that forever increases the cost to hold onto land near and in the middle of population centers would do wonders.
NeuroAI paper proposes "Embodied Turing Test" to evaluate AI (2023)
I got to see that yesterday with my daughter: her algebra book used PV=nRT as an example of joint proportion and asked some questions about it. She, having never seen the ideal gas law, was quite thrown by it.

That said, after we went through it and had a brief physics lesson, it worked quite well and I'm glad they used the example instead of just making something up -- but it required having a tutor (me) on hand to help make the context make sense.
List of heads of state and government Nobel laureates
>And I realized that to call these businesses “homebuilders” is misleading. It’s striking how little of their business has to do with, well, building. For instance, here’s D.R. Horton in 2023: “Substantially all of our land development and home construction work is performed by subcontractors.” Here’s Lennar in 2023: “We use independent subcontractors for most aspects of land development and home construction.” I suspect most of the other big guys would say something similar. These aren’t builders, they are financiers that borrow cheaper than real developers and use that cheap credit to speculate in land, hiring contractors to do the work. They are, in other words, middlemen.

This is pretty far out there. They are the general contractor and have substantial value add to the project.

Most of the rest of the article is misunderstandings like that.
People who don't come to use a computer for the first time until middle age or later tend to struggle mightily. I'm not sure why, but they seem to have a strong aversion to experimenting with the system. I face this issue almost every day with my 74-year-old father and his iPhone. He can only do the tasks which I explicitly teach him and anything new (like changing a setting he's never changed before) requires me to show him the steps. The fact that changing a different setting in the Settings app is an almost-identical process never occurs to him. He just asks for help every time.

Back in the Classic Mac OS days he did just fine with a 1-button mouse. He was able to click on and interact with everything and got what he needed out of the computer. A 2-button mouse is just utterly baffling to him. It turns every single thing on the screen into a fork in the road: do I left-click this or right-click it?
> No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places

It's not enough to have land, though. The land needs access to water and electricity, not to mention roads, or it's a nonstarter, especially if you want to build a bunch of homes on the land. And the new homeowners will need access to food and supplies, i.e., stores. You need an entire community.
The fix is to enshrine remote work for jobs that can be remote (labor regulation and whatnot), enabling labor mobility to where housing is affordable, but the ideological challenges prevent that. So, instead, we gnash teeth and say there is no solution while we slowly build more housing stock and hope that'll catch us up eventually. It will, eventually, as immigration slows, and the death rate exceeds the birth rate and household formation (see: Japan), but that will take time.

To destroy housing values to increased affordability, you must destroy locality as a value factor.
You must be old. Nowadays even Harvard students aren't expected to be able to read anything complicated. From coincidentally, another New Yorker link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the... -- "The last time I taught 'The Scarlet Letter,' I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb," she said. "Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago."
You seem to be spinning heavily the contributions of those people, as well as the intentions of the company.

Also, the assumption that the affected departments should've known this was coming doesn't match up with a lot of what we've heard from many other of the "cut x%" layoffs the last few years.

Regarding "entitled" to a job, you're responding to a comment that suggests considering it as an economic problem: many people don't want to be laid off, so hopefully those people (part of the market) can apply negative feedback to that undesired behavior.
I say "board" too but hear "bar" sometimes in SA.
"uncencored"

"non-woke"
This was really nice.

I'll just say, it starts out deconstructing the way "magic" in the modern world has given way to "engineering" and thus mythological things like 'deals with the devil' are no longer believed.

But, in my view, a significant part of the appeal of the 'deal with the devil' is that it isn't mysterious. A Faustian bargain works according to exactly the letter of the deal, and the devil always keeps his end of it. Part of what makes it interesting, enticing even, is that it looks like there might be ways to outwit the devil. The devil then is a force of nature to be engineered just like any other branch of engineering in modern times, not an arbitrary fact of life beyond our comprehension.
I don't see an obvious mechanism for leaving said feedback. If I'm dumb enough to miss it, maybe others are too. Could you point us in the right direction?
Super exciting to read about this! Building an off-grid mesh is the central premise of my scifi novel 'Mesh.' https://inkican.com/mesh-middle-grade-scifi-thriller/
Real estate is not competitive nor dynamic because of the disproportionately low property (specifically land value) tax that property owners pay relative to the utility they get from society (police/military and courts to protect their land as well as myriad other policies that ensure a stable society).

Simply hoarding land should not be profitable, and yet it is one of the most profitable businesses because of subsidies (too low property taxes, 1031 exchange, various “farming” and other exemptions).
I don't find this article very compelling. The core argument comes from a single 2018 paper from a single author who used IV regressions to claim that increased consolidation of homebuilders is consistent with a reduced amount of new construction.

The argument in this article is that small homebuilders got caught in the credit crunch and had to flip their lots to the mega builders, who maintained access to capital and credit that the small players didn't have. So now the big players are hoarding land and not building on it to control the market.

I can believe that a credit crunch has cooled the construction market. Nothing about that would be surprising. I have a harder time believing that the major home builders have bought up so much land that nobody else can build anything, leaving them to control the market price of houses by artificially limiting supply.

Anecdotally, the most expensive housing markets are in cities where most of the buildable land has already been used by something. This is where these supposed land-hoarding mega builders would have the least influence. In my experience there are a lot of affordable houses being built in smaller cities and in the outskirts of major cities, but the demand just isn't there. More people want to live in dense and desirable locations and they're willing to pay a premium for it.
I've created many programming languages. All the ones I finished and were useful did not have grammars that "I wrote".
Before I learned the existence of Markdown, the intuitive most logical markup for me was (and after 10+ years of writing Markdown, still is):

* *Asterisks* should be bold. Like WhatsApp and Slack do. Because they bring attention to the eye, marking a strong emphasis, and also because for italics there seem to be a much better alternative.

* /Slash/ should be italics. Young me thought this was so obvious! Because italic text is leaning to the right, just like the slash bar. (Note that with time I ended up realizing that this would be a bad idea because slashes are too commonly used in plain written language. The parser would need to be too clever. But still, seemed nice for a while :-)

* _Underscore_ should be underline. I mean, the name says it all. This is so obvious to me that I never understood how it's not the case. I had been writing _this_ to visualize an underlined word for so much time before learning Markdown, that having it for italics just feels strange.

Anyway. If someone knows some resource about the thought process, discussions, or decisions that were made to adopt the current syntax (especially to decide that _underscore_ should italicize, which feels so strange) please let me know, I love reading about that kind of thing :)
In its filings in U.S. District Court in New York, YouTube said that Viacom, which owns Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central and other entertainment properties, secretly tried to use YouTube’s popularity to promote its content, posting “roughed up” videos to make them look stolen or leaked, and even sending employees to Kinko’s to upload clips that couldn’t be traced back to Viacom.

Interesting...hadn't heard of this before
Chapter X is brilliant. Galois was very brilliant. He is always my #1 choice for ever of who, if anyone from history, I would like to have lunch with.

He was introduced to me by my 5th grade calculus teacher Mr Steven Giavant, PhD. Galois bridged several disciplines and invented a new area of math.

Most unfortunately he met his end extremely tragically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois
Minimal UI is best, especially since buttons don't have man pages.
because computer performance is the topic of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41255695, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41255365, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41255195, the three levels of parent comments in the thread, one of which was by you
Every time we go through a cycle of automation, and layoffs, and out-sourcing I have to wonder where the bottom is. There is a wide gradient on how that might play out in terns of our standard of living. Will the bottom be more like Bulgaria? Or will the bottom be more like Sudan?
They don't actually want a solution no matter how much they say they do - they simply want a moral cause with which to inflict pain and suffering against the world. They will openly say this in the language of "degrowth", a euphemism hiding the government culling of humans. That is why Just Stop Oil and the like are against nuclear power - they do not want solutions, just to increase suffering.
fair
I'm curious how you feel uxn fails as a utility (eg. missed stated goals? or unstable and therefore not practical? ) and as a creative product tho it'll be hard to take comments on the latter as objective.
You’re being downvoted because you’re making sweeping unsupported assertions, likely based on an ideological opposition to blockhain.

I am guessing it has to do with anger at FTX and other negligent participants in the wider “crypto” ecosystem that has very little to do with blockchains. But that is a “non sequitur” (Latin for “it does not follow).

If I am wrong in my assumptions and you have an actual argument supporting your assertions about “all blockchains” being crap, please do elaborate on the substance.
if only the gcc and llvm maintainers, and c standard authors, agreed with you
>Those abusive copyright laws that keep shit out of the public domain? Those were payments made to Hollywood in exchange for positive propaganda.

Seems unfair to not mention that the US here was aligning with the Bernie convention[0] (life + 50 years, Copyright Act of 1976[1]) and then latter aligning with European countries[2] (+70 years "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"[3]). Seems like something that might happen without any payments for propaganda. Also, I don't want to watch a 2 hour YouTube video, so maybe you can leave a link for the specific point about the US exchanging copyright extension for propaganda. Not even sure what propaganda would even be needed in 1998 - there were no wars, no China or USSR, no 9/11. Somehow I doubt the YouTube video will mention these points either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
A browser which lacks serious adblocking cannot be a serious option for me, no matter how fast it claims to be.
We need to fine the shit out of companies that have leaks
I did a fair bit of googling on this as it was my first time using eSIM. Apparently for iPhone the network switching eats the battery, whereas for Android (which has had dual-sim support for ages) it’s not a problem.

Nothing else changed in my usage, and eSIM only worked fine, it was just when the physical sim and the eSIM were both active that the battery drained super fast (like more than double the usual rate).

YMMhaveV of course.
The neat thing about capitalism is that stores will be built to serve the community if there's a market for it. We don't need to centrally plan the whole community up front. We do need zoning laws that ALLOW those stores to be built though.
I think it is that instead of sending a boy around the store to assemble the stationary order, the assembler stays still, only responsible for what is in reach and the order moves on conveyor between assemblers.
Yes, and nobody wants to live there.
Nobody has ever achieved anything truly meaningful by forcing people and calling them dumb.
This reminds me of Meshtastic, but I suppose Nomad is for PCs while Meshtastic is for microcontrollers.

https://meshtastic.org/
Show HN: Codedraw – Draw with commands, export and share your creations
Hi HN, I recently found myself on a 7-hour train ride back home and in my boredom I thought of creating a small client-side only web application for drawing with a programming language like interface. The polished result is this web app :)

If you're interested in the implementation, please take a look at [1].

[1]: https://github.com/xNaCly/codedraw
Why does everyone want to live in the same few places? Because all ways to make money and a living are there! Give people the option to work remotely and they can live wherever they want, and that is not in crowded expensive cities most of the time.
There are lots of other approaches - IOTA DAG, HashGraph, Ripple Consensus Process etc.

I am not a fan of blockchains, though. They are overkill for most uses. But here is an example of a non-blockchain system that doesn’t even require global consensus:

http://intercoin.org/technology.pdf

Also check out the Autonomi network
It could with a few tweaks, but it lacks features when compared to bash and busybox ash. For example, it doesn't support shell scripting, configuration file initialization, etc. I wouldn't recommended it right now though since it doesn't have most features of a standard shell but if you want to test it out, give it a try.
One of the worst aspect of these big home builders is that they impose homeowners associations on all of their new homes. It's difficult to find new homes free of HOAs.
The problem is that they're written by developers. And when I say developers I mean developers, not engineers or authors. Everything is about a sausage factory, nothing more. You don't learn stuff other than copying and mimicry. And some of it is absolute monkey excrement. But when you don't know better it feels like you are learning something good.

I am considering writing a bad programming book on purpose. I will call it "how to sling together a badly written Go 'enterprise' app and smear AngularJS over the top"
WRT CockroachDB Enterprise Free's telemetry requirement:

> Required (excluding ephemeral clusters of 7 days or less)

Does that mean the cluster will stop working when it can no longer report?
Yes it’s a good point that LCD pixels are more square than the CRTs that were ubiquitous when Alvy Ray wrote his paper. I think I even made that point before on HN somewhere. I did mention in response to Raph that yes the ideal target depends on what the display is, and the filter choice does depend on whether it’s LCD, CRT, film, print, or something else. That said, LCD pixels are not perfect little squares, and they’re almost never uniform color. The ideal filter for LCDs might be kinda complicated, and you’d probably need three RGB-separated filters.

Conceptually, what we’re doing is low-pass filtering, rather than blurring, so I wouldn’t necessarily call filtering just “adding blur”, but in some sense those two ideas are very close to each other, so I wouldn’t call it wrong either. :P The render filtering is a convolution integral, and is slightly different than adding blur to an image without taking the pixel shape into account. Here the filter’s quality depends on taking the pixel shape into account.

You’re right about making note of the animated examples - this is because it’s easier to demonstrate aliasing when animated. The ‘false detail’ is also aliasing, and does arise because the filtering didn’t adequately filter out high frequencies, so they’ve been sampled incorrectly and lead to incorrect image reconstruction. I totally agree that if you get such aliasing false detail, it’s preferable to err (slightly) on the side of blurry, rather than sharp and wrong.