skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another set is CS Lewis' Space Trilogy

Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength

Note that like a lot of CS Lewis, there is a very heavy Christian view.
Yeah I also didn't like the book at all, it read like a cash grab. However, just listen to a sample of the audio book, it's just hilarious how much effort Ray put into making the characters become alive. Certain significantly improving the lack of writing, of course it can't fix the writing.
Peter Watts really explores the concept of alien intelligence in a way that challenges our perceptions
The idea of using SQLite to serve static content based solely on the "35% Faster Than The Filesystem" page from 2017 sounds half-baked, to say the least.

Modern web servers like Nginx employ optimal strategies for handling static files, starting with sendfile and extending to io_uring and splice operations, all within well-designed thread pools based on epoll, kqueue, or eventport (whichever suits your needs).

Meanwhile, the best SQLite can offer (at least natively) is its memory-mapped I/O support (https://www.sqlite.org/mmap.html). This might work well for single-client services, like locally hosted web apps (see also https://github.com/electron/asar). However, for large websites, as mentioned in other comments, it attempts to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Let me throw my hat in the ring. I'd recommend Grass by Sheri S Tepper.
It felt fresh and original in a way few science fiction books are, the characters are really well done and it just stays with you. Despite being the first book of a trilogy, it works well on its own.
That's a good point. As a non-native speaker, I use Grammarly to improve my writing. But often, when I add clauses that indicate uncertainty, grammarly complaints about how I can be more concise by dropping those parts.
This 418 stuff reminds me of a previous job where we had some arguments about putting emojis in our applications. I was against it and a coworker was for it. Like putting rocket ship emoji when an operation succeeds.

My main argument was that if you put things like that in your applications then people start having opinions about it and they want to discuss it and add more to certain places or remove from other places and bring it up when you are trying to discuss unrelated things.

The increase in communication is a big detriment in my opinion, especially if there is no user behavior tracking to see if those emojis actually improve any user-related metrics (this was a b2b application so we didn't do a lot of user tracking).

It wasn't even about professionalism or anything like that, just the fact that those kind of things are subjective (some people like, some don't, some don't notice, some like a lot and want more) created small-scale friction often enough that I was getting annoyed by it.
I love this genre, and there is such a plethora of interesting reads. I think one of the most interesting, in terms of presenting technology's role in varied societies, is A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Great read if you are bored of the classic space opera.
It's kinda the other way around. They're using oscillators as a means to an end, ie solving physics and math problems based on the Ising model[1].

While the Ising model was created as a model of ferromagnetism, and is deceptively simple at first glance, it's turned out to be quite versatile[2] and can be used to tackle many different problems[3]. However computing solutions can take quite a lot of computing power, and this analog solution supposedly can potentially do it faster.

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

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11917 Everything is a quantum Ising model

[3]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2015.109... The cellular Ising model
Cool, hopefully it will be in your top downloads ;-)
I have been thinking about a similar idea for a few months - a location-focussed social media. But my idea is more like Instagram with an extra location layer. You have a 'local' feed that shows public profiles of people in your area. You can then add those local people to some kind of 'friends' list - they can then see a more private profile, and you see their posts regardless of distance.

The key idea is that you can only add 'friends' if you've actually met them once in real life. So it wouldn't be overrun by celebrities and pseudo-social relationships, influencers, etc. I'm hoping it would foster more local connections - e.g. if someone often runs into a certain person at the same places and has similar interests, maybe they'll add each other as 'friends'.
Sightseeing is unbounded. Your losing 40 hours driving at reasonable speeds from SF to NY before considering detours or extended stops.

As such 5 days is just a reasonable baseline. It lets you see the country along the way, have some slack, and show up without being exhausted. Got an extra day, week, or month and you can find plenty of things to do along the way, but you still need to account for the underlying distance. Alternatively, if you’re in a hurry there’s plenty of ways to cut that down.
>What's 21st century capitalism's plan for people who aren't any good at Latin and Greek?

Let them become homeless and addicted to fentanyl and slowly wither away and die or have to resort to crime to survive then lock them up and tax the people who are good at Latin and Greek to pay for their upkeep or UBI so they don't get robbed or murdered on the street by the people who aren't good at Latin or Greek and have nothing left to loose.
You might like https://citymapper.com

Lots of features but I'm not sure how many are available in Tokyo to be fair. In London I can ask it to take me home and get presented with a list of methods that optimise for cost, walking distance, speed, changes, accessibility, etc.
What do you think about Jasmin?
> On my machine the King James Bible epub file, 1.7MiB of compressed text, was converted in less than a second.

I took almost a second. Since we don’t know what your machine is, the statistic is irrelevant. What’s the harm in providing the model?
Good engineers want to create the best product possible, and are demanding from the product team. They want clarity and visibility on user insight in order to be able to do the right tradeoffs to maximize customer satisfaction.

-> I think that as engineers, we also have the responsibility to create the best product (interested to have your feedback, I want to create a meetup talk on this subject)
Ya TV adaptations can fail for so many reasons that a book succeeds at. I've read so many books that when translated to a visual medium fail because of the people involved, see Wheel of Time as that one was so bad...
A lot of text there, but more deflecting than substantive. The central claim seems to be this: «In fact, according to the Orbit Media study shared above, the accuracy of GA4 as compared to Plausible –– due to the cookie consent banner’s presence –– was exactly at 55.6%. More than half of the data was missing, making Google Analytics stats not reliable!»

I think that tries to say that if Plausible generates graphs of 1000 pageviews, GA's graphs are based on 556 of the 1000, and that this makes GA's graphs half as accurate.

Say again? Basing graphs on a sample of half the users doesn't reduce accuracy very much in my experience (which is old). The per-day graphs and reports I generated looked very much like their per-week equivalent, despite being based on 15% of the data.

There's more blah, about how GA is late for example. I didn't really notice any difference between yesterday's data and that from a few days ago. Who cares about such details, really.

Some sentences I didn't notice in the article: "This lack of accuracy is a problem in practice, because …" or "Plausible detects problems with your funnels that GA4 doesn't, because …" or anything like that. They just brag about accuracy and promptness, without any argument that the accuracy or promptness makes a difference.

Sigh.
He’s very protected because less than 2/3 of the Senate voted to convict his impeachable offenses. The reality of Presidential treason depends on his/her reputation among our betters in the Senate.
I dislike both this and Miéville's Embassytown since in my opinion both set out to mislead me and then do a reveal which amounts "I misled you about what's really going on" and while that works for a stand up comic beat (e.g. Taylor Tomlinson "he cheated on me ... in my head") I don't want to read a whole novel this way.

Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.
The list starts with Project Hail Mary, which is as far from Egan as I can imagine on the science fiction spectrum.
The first advantage the homepage lists is:

> Mill can build the same Java codebase 5-10x faster than Maven, or 2-4x faster than Gradle

Speed per se can be a good selling point (having to wait for slow builds is really annoying).

I can't really comment on anything else though as I just stumbled upon it here in HN ;)
I have this side project, it's a DAW in the browser:

https://minidaw.aykev.dev/

If you don't know what a DAW is, think GarageBand. Ableton Live, Logic and Reason are other examples. It's fully built with React and a custom state-management library, that's been fun and challenging. It's starting to take shape, but there's definitely a long way to go.
The “otherness” of AI is what holds its appeal.

Imagine a scenario where instead of AI, a billion dollar pill could make one person exponentially smarter and able to communicate with thousands of people per second.

That does not have the same appeal.

This provokes me to some musings on the theme.

We imagine superintelligence to be subservient, evenly distributed, and morally benign at least.

We don’t have a lot of basis for these assumptions.

What we imagine is that a superintelligence will act as a benevolent leader; a new oracle; the new god of humanity.

We are lonely and long to be freed of our burdens by servile labor, cured of our ills by a benevolent angel, and led to the promised land by an all knowing god?

We imagine ourselves as the stewards of the planet but yearn for irrelevance in the shadow of a new and better steward.

In AI we are creating a new life form, one that will make humans obsolete and become our evolutionary legacy.

Perhaps this is the path of all technological intelligences?

Natural selection doesn’t magically stop applying to synthetic creatures, and human fitness for our environment is already plummeting with our prosperity.

As we replace labor with automation, we populate the world with our replacement, fertility rates drop, we live for the experience of living, and require yet more automation to carry the burdens we no longer deem worthy of our rarified attention.

I’m not sure any of this is objectively good, or bad. I kinda feel like it’s just the way of things, and I hope that our children, both natural and synthetic, will be better than we were.

As we prosper, will we will have still less children? Will we seek more automation, companionship in benevolent and selfless synthetic intelligence, and more insulation from toil and strife, leading to yet more automation, prosperity, and childlessness?

Synthetic intelligence will probably not have to “take over”, it will merely be filling the void we willingly abandon.

I suspect that in a thousand years, humans will be either primitive, or vanishingly rare. Or maybe just non-primitive humans will be rare, while humans returning to nature will proliferate prodigiously as we always have, assuming the environment is not too hostile to complex biological life.

Interesting times.
We've had 5 authors actually pick that one as a favorite, and they connected it to some really interesting book lists:
https://shepherd.com/book/that-hideous-strength/book-lists

I love seeing something like this as it is awesome where their minds go for what other books they connect it with...
It’s wishful thinking. Apple is being used as a scapegoat for the web’s failings here. PWAs would be so successful if it weren’t for Apple! is the easy but wrong answer.

It’s possible to deploy a PWA to Google Play so that it’s installed on Android just like a native Android app. If PWAs were as good as native apps, why would anybody build web + iOS + Android instead of just building web + iOS? Even if opening a PWA made an iPhone explode into flames, it would still be worth deploying the PWA to Google Play to eliminate Android development effort. But plenty of native Android apps are still being built every day. That’s not because of Apple. That’s because users prefer native.

I am a huge fan of the architecture of the WWW. I think it’s the most successful API and platform in history for a reason. But there are a lot of reasons why people genuinely prefer native apps, and it doesn’t just boil down to mean old Apple refusing to support things or users being brainwashed. People still choose native over web when Apple is not a factor at all. Every single native Android app is a testament to that. So when people also choose native over web on iOS, why should we think that this is down to Apple and not for the same reasons they choose native over web on Android?

It doesn’t help that the web platform veered off into web components either. When front-end developers were jumping on board React, Vue, Angular, etc., architecture astronauts working on the web platform spat out an unholy mess full of footguns. I prefer to work as close to the web platform as possible, so every so often I try again with web components before remembering how painful they are.

The people working on web components should take a long hard look at why front-end developers keep choosing frameworks that either eschew web components altogether or abstract them so far away the user doesn’t have to think about them. Telling quote from the Svelte 5 announcement last week:

> Equally, component composition is more awkward in Svelte 4 than it should be […] This is because in 2019 it seemed likely that web components would become the primary distribution mechanism for components, and we wanted to align with the platform. This was a mistake.

— https://svelte.dev/blog/svelte-5-is-alive

I really hope the web does better, but in order for it to do so we need to be more honest about its failings. If you are a front-end developer and you feel optimistic about the future of web development, I invite you to try writing something reasonably complex using web components instead of your normal framework.
Those few times I've taken a sleeper, both private (Europe) and shared (China) rooms, I haven't slept as if I were in my own bed but I got a decent enough amount of sleep to call it a a "night's rest." But, then, it's also not unusual that, jet-lag or not, I'll have trouble getting to sleep in a hotel especially first night or so of a trip. So I guess I sleep well enough on trains (and on lie-flat seats in planes).
It sure did :D
In my opinion Andy Weir is not a very good writer anyways, he is ok. When the story is interesting enough that is typically fine, like in The Martian. Hail Mary is too long certainly, characters a little flat, however, Ray can fix the flat characters in the audio book a little with his good voice acting.
Meanwhile there's not that much posted/discussed about good (so not 10x, just 1x instead of 0.5x or negative) engineering/product managers.

In my experience where I've worn both IC and TL/manager hats -even just going from "adequate" to "OK" team/engineering/product manager leads to impact/output that's bigger than having the best (so that mythical 10x) engineer.
Without getting into spoilers, the very high quality narration makes the story better.
> JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's

I'm not so sure about that. Do you know about pitch accent?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent
I liked it, he has his own style, and I love the "productivity porn" vibe of it. Sometimes I need that in this wild world.
The comparision with Gradle is not up to date. There is stated that you would end up in an untyped mess of Groovy build files, but statically typed Kotlin files are the default for quite some time now in Gradle!
https://mill-build.org/mill/0.12.1/comparisons/gradle.html
It's even been updated[1] for IPv6, so no reason not to use it!

[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6214
This is so profound, I need a t-shirt

"Process people can't resist trying to optimize things they superficially comprehend."
Thanks. Tried to get into the series too, but end up just reading the summary of things and the whole series just sounds depressing. :(
Here's an idiot's guide to sounding smart:

- use big words

- speak with utmost confidence

- if you can't convince, confuse
Still working on my Hetzner Auction price tracker: https://radar.iodev.org/

First time I'm building a proper website, used a lot of AI. Things that changed over last time:
* Switched the charting library from D3 to Apex. D3 was too low-level for my purpose.
* Reworked the design and contents of a lot of pages (with the help of AI).
* Various bugfixes for the database queries.
* Tried to come up with some kind of pricing signal detection, but currently not working well.
* Link to the actual auction results.
* Minimal E2E validation using Playwright. What a pleasure to use!

I'm planning to add alerting. Not keen on running a backend though.
They still killed the book for me. The underlying idea (no spoilers) is absolutely great sci-fi. All this useless blast-from-the-past did was make the story look silly to me. Such a shame. He could have written a great sci-fi book without superstition, alas, he apparently didn't want to be talken serious....
This add-on has an epic feature list! How long have you been working on it?
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn is also good. A classic whodunnit with a twist.
I really like the shepherd.com way of curating the recommendation. Browsing trough books and picking something to read has become much easier this way.

One scifi book that was very impactful to me is the black cloud by Fred Hoyle. It's such a well thought out story and has held up remarkably well for a 50 year old novel.
> A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

It's a great book, but everyone has heard of it already.
What aspects of the culture in The City & the City stood out to you the most?
You have to keep in mind that Gradle Inc. earns money by providing consulting for complex builds. An easy build tool would destroy this business model ;-)
Study here: https://repositori.uji.es/items/156fbd65-070d-4ca4-9856-9415...
hi all, founder of Shepherd here :)

If you want to share your 3 fav reads of the year, you can do that here -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/my-3-fav-reads

You get a cool page like this -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/bwb

Plus, it goes into our "best books of 2024" voting -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024

I am slowly getting more into place on this website, I have been working on it for 3.5 years now.
The SF Masterworks series is a good source of forgotten classics in amongst the many super popular picks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks
There is a problem too that scientism has a dual meaning.

There is the belief in science as the best means to get at the truth and then the pejorative of using science as a type of orthodox religion. So for the true believer in the pejorative you can't even use the term.

Personally, I think this is a lost cause. Scientism in the pejorative sense is a new religion and most likely we are at the very early stages. Even when it comes to lifting weights, every youtube video pretends to be "based on science".

I might be too old to see it happen but I fully expect at some point in the future instead of a movie getting 5 stars, the commercial will say this is scientifically proven to be great movie. A restaurant will claim to have the best tacos based on science.

This is clearly the road we are on and I don't see a way back. Actual scientist will have to be more and more certain in their language because that is what scientism in the pejorative sense is to the true believer and the cult of the true believer in pejorative scientism is growing.

"SCIENCE IS REAL"
I really like that, but I definitely thought A Deepness in the Sky was even better despite probably being considered "classic space opera".
I do not think we’ll be writing code by the end of next year. AI will generate all code from natural language.
The Bobiverse Series by Dennis Taylor.

These books aren't anything that will change your life, but they're well written and a lot of fun.
Ontario schools haven’t had a formal exit exam for as long as I can remember. Final exams of individual classes was what defined your exit grade (usually 20-30%).

If you are referring to the exit exam in the link, you also have to remember that grade 8 in 1912 was available to a privileged few. This filtered out people with learning difficulties whose families didn’t feel like spending money on school was a worthwhile investment.

Those that had the means to attend school in the 1900s also had time to dedicate to study.
username checks out. (sorry, couldn't resist)
I use one, a General Electric clock/radio unit from 1982. I bought it about a year ago so I could use my FM transmitter hooked up to my computer to send audio at specific times. It's just nice to have a dedicated device sometimes.
...which is obviously designed to be maximally visible from the public space.
Just finished a very good audiobook, Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini and started another, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by the same author.
Does English not have a native word? It would be „Durchfall“ in German, and the Greek word only be used if one wanted to be fancy.
Private property visible from a mile away :)
https://archive.ph/jdhGZ
I hope you win and get some big cash rewards for these kinds of accusations.
Many treason cases do not depend on Congress declaring war:

Slave rebellions

Puerto-Rican separatists

American citizens implicated in terrorism

The Congress has never even come close to declaring war in any of these circumstances.
Headlamp tech that doesn't blind oncoming drivers–where is it?
Thanks so much, that is super motivating for me :)

I am working to really improve genre and topic accuracy this winter. Right now it is a mess. The data we pull in from publishers is so messy. They don't know how to use the BISAC classification system and they often mislabel sci-fi (among others). I have a big upgrade coming to improve both our systems (we use NLP/ML on the topic side).
https://denostatus.com has an update which suggests they might have fixed the issue. I had already redeployed all of my projects before their update and cannot confirm their fix.
So...android tv .
Are you sure you didn't mean 5 times per hour? Turn up and go for a six times a day service seems a bit optimistic :-)
While not Sci-Fi, I found that The Screwtape Letters could actually be enjoyed even from a fairly agnostic perspective, as an allegorical dive into human cognitive foibles.

Though I suspect Lewis would be unhappy to hear that, especially since he wrote a fourth-wall-adjacent bit about devils preferring that humans don't believe in them.
And the prequel A Deepness in the Sky is even better with very alien aliens (and a neat way of hiding that alien-ness from readers) and some very nasty antagonists with truly terrifying technology in the form of "focus".

Mind you, Vinge's Rainbows End is also really good and set in the near future with what may be an emerging AGI as a key character.
Infinite Backrooms Eternal Mode
It's not worded super clearly, but they mean that the rope is being tied diagonally from the top of the building to a point 30 feet away from the building's base (horizontally). Like you, I initially interpreted the question to mean that the building was 30 feet above ground level, which left me a bit confused.
Surely that should be a 401 unauthorized?