skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a major difference though, in that book they use a long linear catapult. This helps keep the G force down (in fact it's low enough that humans can attempt to use the catapult to travel). Making a second stage for orbital maneuvering that can withstand that kind of acceleration is not particularly hard.

What spinlaunch is proposing is to use a fairly small circular catapult. The G force involved in that case is huge, something like 4 figures. We can make electronics that can survive that (although this is close to the upper limit), but can we make rocket engines and fuel tanks that sturdy? Personally I doubt it.
> I’m unsure whether to commercialize it as a SaaS product or as a traditional software program that runs locally.

Why not both?
Android already supports RISC-V, so while migrating an SOC to it is not painless (third-party binaries, device-specific drivers...), the hard work of porting the operating system itself to the ISA is done.
Apple 100% has something like Meta's Orion glasses or probably even better as a prototype in their basement.

Instead of an Orion puck for processing - it's your iPhone

Instead of the bracelet for extra precision - it's a future Apple Watch prototype.

They just won't do what Meta did - show off prototype hardware that they know they won't release in its current form and are working towards making viable for mass production.
All of those things could happen, and it still wouldn't go beyond Oculus Quest levels of popularity, i.e. low.

Apple Watch is a status symbol in the same way Airpods and iPhones are. You're paying partially to be seen wearing them. The same is not true for Vision Pro or any headset. You'll just look like a Alamy stock image that comes up in an image search for 'technology'.
Libsodium does this compiler-specific pragmas and attributes (like __attribute__((optimize("O0")))). It's also the cryptographic library mentioned in this study with the smallest number of discovered issues, but:

> "However, we want to note that libsodium is the smallest library that we test with the most limited support for cryptographic primitives. For example, libsodium does not support the elliptic curve secp256; instead,they do all of their elliptic curve operations on curve25519. Therefore, it may be unfair to compare to larger libraries with support for more cryptographic primitives."
They made it say NOICE
I spent months trying to improve the visual fidelity of Microsoft Flight Simulator X terrain for my home town. I downloaded US geological survey heightmaps for terrain and openstreetmap vector data for all roads and building dimensions. I built custom tooling to export only the road vectors I cared about using a 2D image mask (I was also using some of the same data and tooling to attempt to build an Assetto Corsa map of my home town to drive around in in VR). I cribbed an API implementation for Google's satellite tile server from someone's code. I borrowed google maps tiles for ground textures. I learned how GIS works, played around with GDAL, played around with QGIS, wrote code to convert heightmaps into 3D models (absolutely terribly, I'm pretty sure blender includes a tool to do it ten times better) which were too big, so I wrote a tool to be able to take the same image mask from the road vectors and use it to configure a lower level of detail of the terrain away from the roads. I manually drew outlines for thousands and thousands of buildings and homes so FSX would autogenerate buildings on the terrain to match the scenery, which was mediocre because FSX only autogenerated buildings that look like old germany. I used the building footprint vector data to attempt to generate 3D models but didn't finish. I had about 100 40k X 40k pixel images of ground terrain, and it looked nice in game, but only in spring time and summer time since that's what google takes images of. So I found a 512x512 "snow" texture and wrote a python program to "resample" that texture into any green area in the ground textures and despite all my assumptions that this would be hilariously ugly, it worked extremely well. It took like 15 minutes per image though because PIL is the slowest library ever written, so I built a java program to do the actual image resampling and orchestrated it in my "pipeline" python script. I didn't want to actually have to write these massive images to disk in between steps so I found an old and unloved AMD utility to create 4gb ramdisks on Windows to use as a tempdir. I was at the point where I was manually tracing out tree polygons for the autogen scenery system and manually rebuilding the local airport from the ground up when I finally ran out of steam. I looked and found a utility that does most of the autogen scenery work for you but I never finished reading the manual. I just burnt out.

A year later or so Microsoft announced MSFS2020 and I was never happier to dump $200 on a problem. It still nags in the back of my head. It's one of the biggest projects I've ever worked on and I made so much progress.
I don't think I saw anyone (media talking heads looking for engagement do not count) who said this product would be popular.
Once I wrote a Wordpress image downloader that would recursively go through a wordpress blog and download all the images. Only issue was that I had a bug that made it keep redownloading all images over and over again which made the bill for data go through the roof.

Ended up scrapping the project and didn't pay the bill. Luckily it was hosted on a platform that just complained on me for going over it instead of requiring me to pay.
Every Time Zone: time zone converter, compare time zone difference
I want people to contribute to it, to make it better game, with no bugs, better visuals etc., repository also contains assets that was not made me, so I guess only thing I can license is source code written in programming languages that was written only by me, idk, I should be lawyer not programmer :)
> In college, I had an internship at JPL writing software to help collate, transform, and combine pictures of Jupiter, for use with NASA’s JUNO mission.

This already sounds incredibly cool. I wish I had had an opportunity like this sometime. Sadly, nothing.

> The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.

Some people tend to have no humour. I think it's hilarious.
Wait times in the USA suck. I just moved to a west coast city, need to set up new doctors. Soonest I could get for an endocrinologist is February, and I made the appointment a month ago.
I enjoy learning of a concept that so eloquently brings together a bunch of gut thoughts and intuitions I've built over time.

Thank you for sharing; I'll be diving down this rabbit hole.
Segway was in a sense ahead of its time and trying to create a new market segment.

The early problems were it was illegal to use them on sidewalks but also there weren't bike lanes like there are in big cities now.

It was also pretty big & heavy it didn't work for multi-modal like using it for the last mile to/from a train or bus.

So the e-mobility space got won decades later by worse, cheaper products that were smaller & lighter .. being used heavily for food delivery app drivers using them semi-legally in bike lanes. A use case that wasn't imagined in the Segway unveiling.
The CEO of the Ray-Ban brand owner says otherwise:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/n...

Granted, it’s relative: “… the new generation of smart glasses have sold more in a few months than the old ones did in two years.”

But it doesn’t sound like they’re discouraged.
In actuality a telex release is just an email that opts you out of the secure release process so once a container has been 'telex' released anyone with the BL number can go pick it up at the port.
Degrowth economics go brrr
"high profile injuries" is a wonderful understatement. The most notable "injury" being the death of the president of the company while riding his Segway [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Heselden
The only way I'd consider using any AI-involved system is if it's all local. SaaS is a dealbreaker for me on this.

I don't think that helps you, though, since (like most of the people on HN) I am not representative of the general public.
Shouldn't XDG_CACHE_DIR handle most use cases for /tmp? I can't see any reasons why we need to keep /tmp around since we have so many better options for ipc and for storing ephemeral data.
Biking is good for your health in ways driving will never be.

You can't just look at biking from a purely transportation lens. It's better for your population for other reasons as well, having your people exercise regularly saves you millions in healthcare costs.

Not only that, but bikes do factually use less space than cars. Which frees up space for other things in the city.

I think public transportation is important to complement bikes, you're not supposed to bike to the other side of the city.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but the aggressively simple answer is that it still works pretty much the same as current launch technology: the big huge rocket gets the payload onto an appropriately high suborbital trajectory, and then the payload use its own (much smaller) rocket to circularize the orbit. They're replacing the launch vehicle with a centrifuge, but otherwise the mission architecture remains broadly similar.

The launch vehicle only getting things onto a suborbital trajectory is a key reason why SpaceX recovering Falcon 9s is possible. They are not making a round trip around the planet before coming back, which would be necessary if it were actually doing orbital insertion too since the circularization burn happens a decent chunk of the way around the planet from the launch site. It would also be insanely wasteful; the fuel needed to get that whole giant chunk of steel up to orbital velocity would be vastly greater than the cost of just putting a small orbital maneuvering engine on the orbital vehicle so that it can finish the job for itself. And as an added bonus the spacecraft also gets to use that engine for general-purpose orbital maneuvering.

The Space Shuttle did something similar. Those huge main engines only got the orbiter onto a sub-orbital trajectory, too. They'd then jettison the external fuel tank while still on a sub-orbital trajectory (helpful for reducing how much space junk you produce), and use the OMS for orbital insertion. You really don't need such a big engine for this part of it, anyway. The SSME produced about 150x as much vacuum thrust as the OMS.
If you mostly use spreadsheets and web apps, you can safely buy a 10-year-old i5 and you'll be fine.

I regularly sell refurbished i3/i5/i7 machines with first/second/third generation processors to customers for very low prices (think $60 for a laptop that used to cost $800). They work fine. You can check your email, do spreadsheets, use Discord, watch Netflix.

This is an extreme example, of course, but the truth is the idea you don't need something new to do the same things you were doing ten years ago. If your expectations are to do reasonable normal people stuff, you'll have no problem at all.

Minus the caveats others have mentioned about battery life, charging speed, and portability, you'll be fine.
It's more artillery than rocketry.
Yeah wondering the same. I figure if they had anything new to show it would show up in their YouTube channel[0]. I can't even tell the difference between the Apr 2022 and Nov 2021 test launches as there isn't much detail provided.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@spinlaunch6288/videos
Trump did not read or write Project 2025. I feel like that's obvious to everyone.

But people in his past administration--who want to be in a future Trump administration--did. They are obviously going to try to enact that agenda as part of a potential second administration.
> make the very un-apple move of articulating how investments into developing for Vision Pro will extend into glasses

I doubt they will come out and say that specifically but they pushed ARKit and VRKit for year prior to the AVP.
Functions that use a field called x but do not use a field called y can use the type {x=int, ... 'a}, right?

The main difficulty I see with row polymorphism is with field shadowing. For example if you have a record with type {a=bool, x=int, c=unit}, then set the x field with type string instead, the new type should be {a=bool, x=string, c=unit}.

I suppose if you only have syntax for creating a record with a literal, but do not have syntax for updating an existing record this is not a problem.
> I search around, and inevitably end up with "by combining clickhouse and Kafka"

Those are probably some old sources of knowledge. You need to use Kafka if you want it to handle batching for you. But Clickhouse can handle batching as well by using asynchronous inserts:

https://clickhouse.com/blog/asynchronous-data-inserts-in-cli...
For me, I actually started off Sourcetree and my knowledge of git commands actually comes from their “show console output” option.
Yeah, I’m going to say you were pretty lucky. With my first I had pain significant enough to be traumatic, before the stage where I could get an epidural. I used to tell people if I’d gone out and had my husband run over my leg with the car, it would have hurt less and I could have gotten pain relief in the ER. It wasn’t as bad the second time though. It is truly a large range of experiences.
Arguably had this thing shipped during peak of COVID bubble spending, say summer 2021 - summer 2022 it might have absolutely killed.
Make the money = reasonable

Destroy the world = unreasonable

Nobody is saying the second but you. They are unrelated, hence the non sequitur.
When America Dreamed of a Nuclear-Powered Cargo Fleet (2015)
Frontend Focus #665 – The Week in Frontend
Glad they did, because now my fork illegally adding a licence is legal again. Phew!
Let’s cut to the chase: you and the shrinking fandom bubble want it to be true. You, like Zelya, are desperate for Western intervention.

But why is that? 32 months of non-stop winning—what has changed?
Considering the number of people Apple marketing is able to reach, compared to the MacRumors website --- I really don't think it will have that kind of deleterious impact on people's interest in Apple VR.

That said, Apple marketing has been mostly dead silent since the product announcement 1.5 years ago.
As someone who also uses Git exclusively from the command line, without any TUI wrappers, I agree with a lot of this. The parts about commits being revertable, bisectable and in general _atomic_ are very important, and IME the only correct way of using version control.

One exception: conventional commits. I find them very useful even on solo projects, since a) they make it easy to spot the type of change at a glance, and b) they force me to keep commits atomic. That is, if I'm ever compelled to make a commit that is both a `fix` and a `refactor`, usually out of laziness :), sticking to a conventional commit message is a quick way to determine what needs to be split into a different commit. These conventions really shine when used in a team, as they improve communication and keep the history tidy (along with all other benefits of atomic commits), but so far I haven't had the luck to work on teams that agree to adopt them. Using these commits to generate changelogs would be wrong, as changelogs should almost never be autogenerated (though these days maybe AI does an acceptable job at it), but they're still useful to keep track of the number of fixes, features, etc. that were produced in a release.

And a tip: in addition to plain shell and Git aliases, I've found scmpuff[1] and delta[2] to be invaluable in a Git CLI workflow.

[1]: https://mroth.github.io/scmpuff/

[2]: https://github.com/dandavison/delta
Possibly, but I don't think it's comparable because VR/AR headsets—whatever this category is—still has an unknown future. Smart watches had demonstrated use cases and a market before Apple released the Apple Watch. The Vision Pro is more like smart glasses, a category that still can't find a foothold 10+ years after the Google Glass.
> to keep Apple in the minds of people as a luxury brand. Things like $400 wheels for Mac Pro or the $1000 stand for the external display.

I have never seen anyone look at those two examples and think “luxury”. Even the most ardent proponents of Apple products laugh at those prices and think they are absurd. With good reason. Who ever is going to look at computer wheels and think they’re a sign of luxury¹?

¹ Yes yes, someone surely will, just like there’s someone for everything. I’m making a general point.
Just spinning them up should do the trick. It'll be Elon Mush well before it reaches ejection speed.
As the basis for framework I think its amazing. It has everything I would've ever wanted and more.

Even though I critiqued the UX, the UI itself is incredibly polished. Which is a a pretty big deal for a framework. Its also pretty rare for me to see that in hackernews UI demos.

In terms of being/not-being a product; really, the most exciting part (for me) would be having (just) the doc-editor as a web component. I'll ask in a separate reply about that since others might want to know.
Clerk really is awesome. This is a good write up.

One thing I disagree with is the firebase recommendation. I’ve used it several times and it seems to consistently lead to misery. I haven’t worked with a single team in which everyone was glad they picked firebase. Auth has been part of the problem in several cases.

If you want to go with off the shelf features and behaviours, maybe you’ll be happy. React integration is definitely awkward as mentioned in the post.

I’m looking forward to the post on Ory. At the moment I use Clerk by default.

It’s possible to implement everything it does yourself, but it does such a solid job by default for such a low price that, unless your budget is $0, it’s hard to justify rolling your own. I believe they even have a fairly generous free tier, too.
Consciousness does NOT arise from the Brain [video]
>The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.

I once wrote a p2p filesharing app in college for a networking class, and I had put an easter egg in there where if you requested a certain file (lenin.jpg?) it displayed ascii art of a communism meme and started playing a midi of the soviet national anthem.

My little old networking prof sets down to test my program, and of course, that's the file she requested. She slowly turns to me, looks me in the eye and says 'be honest, you spent more time on that than the actual assignment didn't you?' ...'yes'. She shakes her head and mutters 'nerds!' under her breath, lmao
Biden-Harris Admin Announces $428M for Coal Communities
Freenode is actually dead: the Raku IRC channels are on libera.chat!
The could be looking to be bought out by someone like Boeing or such so starting making more press releases?
that actually sounds kinda cool, but do I have a permission to use it from you, or now anybody can trademark it so I have to be first to register in German with GmbH or smth :D
My experience and knowledge with CH is about 3-4 years olds now, so I might be talking out of ignorance at this point.

There are plenty of ways to do it with batching, but I assume you want to real-time "insert into table" style or a direct "ch.write(data)", then no. There is no way as far as I know without batching. This is one of the main reason we stopped CH for our last project about 3 years ago for financial data analytic tooling. CH doesn't have a transaction log like WAL, so your data producers need to be smart or you need a "queue" type service to deal with it, whether it's S3 or Kafka or Kinesis to allow batching.
Foundational Vision-LLM for AI Linkage and Orchestration
I once wrote an OS hack to drive a friend crazy.

This was back in the early 1990s when we worked at a company making Macintosh utility software. My friend, another coder, liked to arrange his Finder windows so that they reflected the underlying folder hierarchy and were perfectly aligned. I mean pixel perfect.

So one day I wrote an extension to patch the OS on his machine to randomly nudge a window by just a single pixel. But only rarely, maybe just two or three times a day.

It had the wanted effect. Every once in a while, I'd hear him huff or mumble "what?" to himself. A couple of days later he asked the room, "Have any of you guys been using my machine? I know someone has. They messed up a few of my windows." Everybody professes innocence and manages not to laugh.

A few more days and he's at his wits' end. He finally says he's going to take the morning to wipe his machine and reinstall the OS.

At this point, we can't contain our mirth, and he catches a couple of us trying to hide our laughter. It's over.

I confess. He's pretty pissed and lets me have it. But he's a hacker, and I know deep down he respects it just a little.

After lunch, we're back at our desks. We're working. It's quiet. Then, I hear him chuckling. "Yeah, that was pretty good."

Edited to add: As penance, I ended up modifying my OS hack to help my friend perfectly align his Finder windows. All he had to do was hold down the control key when he opened a folder, and its window would be perfectly snapped to its parent. A bunch of us started using it. I ended up releasing it as freeware under the name WindowStacker: https://info-mac.org/viewtopic.php?t=14300
I love creative coding. I'm mostly focused on the visual stuff, especially generating vector files for pen-plotting. That said, I'm very proud of Rayven, my small vector 3D engine that mimics hand hatching:

- https://muffinman.io/blog/sneak-peek-of-rayven/

I would say it is 80% done, but it needs to be polished for a public release. I do plan to release it, and I would love to prepare a proper talk about it.

There are also other small tools I created, like Pulsar (micro creative coding playground) and Vertigo (turning raster images to SVGs). Both are open source and available here:

- https://muffinman.io/pulsar/

- https://muffinman.io/vertigo/

If you liked these, you might want to check my other projects:
- https://muffinman.io/projects/

That was a lot of shameless self-promotion, but I love these "useless" projects. They really put fun back into programming after being in the industry for a while.
Cheers!

Edit: formatting
EU's weak or distracted governments make unity of purpose hard to achieve
This is pretty similar to the argument for why humanoid robots will be a big deal. The physical world is also built mostly for humans, so having an autonomous agent that can interact with it is huge.
Character.ai Community Safety Updates
The incumbent is not just x86 but now ARM as well.

You have to think in network effects. You mention “the rest of the industry” yet ignore that it’s mostly arm , which would make arm the incumbent.

x86 is the king for windows. But ARM has massive inroads with mobile, and now desktop with macOS, and servers with Amazon/Nvidia etc

There’s a lot better incentive to support ARM than RISC-V for software developers. It isn’t one or the other , but it is a question of resources.

Intel and AMD seem fine turning x86 around when threatened as can be seen by Lunar Lake and Stryx Point. Both have been good enough to steal QC’s thunder. You don’t think ARM manufacturers will do the same to RISC-V?

TBH most of your arguments for RISC-V adoption seem to start from the position that it’s inevitable AND that competing platforms won’t also improve.
Yep. Maybe they're having a, "we're not dead yet!" PR push.
Do you think you'll ever break out the doc-editor into a standalone web component? Ex: Imagine if VS Code reworked its settings.json and used this as a UI instead. Is that within the scope of the project, or is this supposed to only be a monolith app?
TikTok is changing how Gen Z speaks
I hope you never look at household dust under a microscope
> helmets [...] made people look too geeky

That doesn't bode well for VR headsets, which also make you look geeky.