But why?

It's just a silly experiment; the real endgame is to make a bootloader that is customisable using HTML/CSS/JS

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Pretty neat, though.

https://archive.is/1Zbeg

This feels like piracy to me and an unintended usecase of archives.

> Are paywalls ok? [0]

>> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

>> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Are%20payw...

Claps!

It be nice to get the 3 or 5 longest distances from a specific point, not just the longestest

This is my favourite kind of HN post, and I absolutely love this one. Would love to see photos from each of these views.

Also: ask me anything.

i remember watching your DNS course, it was very good! Do you have any other resources that you like? where i can learn internet infra, dns or anything. Thanks!!

Oh thanks!

Depends on how you prefer to learn, but here are a few suggestions.

I've heard good things about the Computer Networks book by Tanenbaum and Wetherall, but I haven't read it myself. Very broad and comprehensive. The most hardcore way would be to make reading RFCs your hobby. It can be tough to get through, but if you regularly take half an hour to do it, you'll learn so much. I've recently started a course at https://classes.pracnet.net/, which is good too.

another one bites the dust.

Honestly they're probably big enough to get away with it.

If it was only friend groups it would kill them for sure, we've seen that many times, but given the absurd amount many large online communities on Discord, I'd wager they can force it down and be relatively unscathed.

They played the long game - they provided a good service for 10 years, and got REALLY big before they started the enshittification process.

Any age verification process that does not consider the age of the account as a verification option is a data trap, plain and simple.

I love SimCity 2000 and these roads look really cool but I'd really like to see a city-builder go in a different direction.

One of the biggest problems with North American cities is their endless, car-centric suburban sprawl. SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities.

New Urbanism, traditional neighbourhood design, streetcar suburbs, one-way streets, bike paths, walking paths, mixed-zone walkable villages (light commercial with residential), smaller single-family houses and duplexes, triplexes, houses behind houses. Many of these are older and more traditional techniques to yield higher density neighbourhoods without building up to large apartment buildings.

It would be really cool to see a game that focused more on creating these kinds of realistic and aspirational living spaces instead of the usual cookie-cutter suburbs linked up by huge roads and a large downtown core.

this is definitely doable in CS (+mods), search YouTube for "cities skylines European" or something like that.

you need "plop the growables" and "move it" mods at minimum to nudge all the buildings close together.

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I deleted my matrix account after I receive some very nasty spam in form of Element Android notification. I think it wasn't Matrix direct fault, but as I used some Matrix chat groups and the list of member was public .. But I got really alarmed and angry when I receive so disgusting spam.

Never heard of Matrix before (as a protocol) what's it's advantage over XMPP?

Why govt needs e2ee? Transparency is all we need.

However good (or bad) this idea may be, you are shooting yourself in the foot by announcing it on Twitter. Half the devs I know won’t touch that site with a ten foot pole.

Who trusts people who still use X?

I still prefer it to Wayland for various reasons, and I don't think Wayland would work properly on my mid 2010 Macbook anyway.

Thank you for writing/publishing this. I especially appreciate the prominent warning at the top not to mistake it for a production library and to suggest an alternative. (It’s surprising to me how often people forget to add disclaimers like that to their code.)

Appreciate it, TheTaytay!

Oy.

Who specifically is this intended for? It's a wonder that the model didn't spice things up with some tangential compliance catnip like FIPS or PCI DSS.

I would be curious to see the prompts used to create this.

Recently, I don't think there could be a better example of applicability of Brandolini's law.

This looks interesting! I wanted to find more info about the Gemini protocol, and it's annoying how un-searchable it is now due to Google Gemini.

I wonder when contemporary developers will (re)invent Emacs/Gnus: the unified inbox for email, feeds, and news, because what really matters are text messages + eventual multimedia content, personal and private scoring to manage them, and a consistent local UI that allows for personal archiving and resharing.

I've looked at the Fediverse, objectively with little hope and many design issues, I'm watching Nostr with interest even though it seems more like a rough sketch lacking the ideas to move forward, but that concept of Gnus and Usenet, so simple in itself, still hasn't managed to resurface.

There should ve a variable to choose your inline image reader, between chafa, timg, some wrapper around w3mimgdisplay...

Harcoding it it's bad.

Sure, we have complex systems that we don't know how everything works (car, computer, cellphone, etc.) . However, we do expect that those systems behave deterministically in their interface to us. And when they don't, we consider them broken.

For example, why is the HP-12C still the dominant business calculator? Because using other calculators for certain financial calculations were non-deterministically wrong. The HP-12C may not have even been strictly "correct", but it was deterministic in the ways in wasn't.

Financial people didn't know or care about guard digits or numerical instability. They very much did care that their financial calculations were consistent and predictable.

The question is: Who will build the HP-12C of AI?

I don't like this thing where we dislike 'magic'

The issue with frameworks is not the magic. We feel like it's magic because the interfaces are not stable. If the interfaces were stable we'd consider them just a real component of building whatever

You don't need to know anything about hardware to properly use a CPU isa.

The difference is the cpu isa is documented, well tested and stable. We can build systems that offer stability and are formally verified as an industry. We just choose not to.

> LispE provides an alternative to parentheses with the composition operator: "."

That is a... Choice.

Breaking the pair operator in favour of something new.

Whoa I never expected to see a lisp repository from Naver

Yeah, that's pretty unclean on two aspects: breaks pairs, and breaks the orthogonality of s-expressions

A simple macro would've sufficed, say:

  (compose
    sum
    (numbers 1 2 3))

For some reason I was expecting a large wheel hub.

Being it's the Romans, and there are a lot of years of Romans, wouldn't one expect such a hub...

Every Wear?

> OSL measures when minerals such as quartz were last exposed to sunlight. Over time, these minerals build up a tiny store of energy while buried. When stimulated with light or heat in the laboratory, the minerals release this energy as a faint glow, which tells experts how long they have been underground.

Now that's just magic, plain and simple.

Hippies would have been all over this.

I was pointed to this by the Dealgorithmed mailing list, pretty nice (I'm not affiliated!)

mesmerizing...

In a high trust environment, I suppose easy addition is helpful. Probably not best used in loan agreements.

Fun fact: Chinese has separate "financial numerals" precisely to prevent one digit being changed to another, the way that could be easily done with regular numerals like turning 一 (1) into 三 (3) or 十 (10). A lot harder when they look like 壹, 叁, and 拾 instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Financial_num...

Neat, you made me one of the 10 thousand today.

Who wrote the blurbs?

The book that I looked at had the same blurb on odd-lots-books.netlify.app as was used in my local library catalogue, so I assume it's the standard publisher's blurb?

PSA: 99.999% of people should ignore most of the entries on lists like this.

I devour reading material. I love books - fiction, non-fiction, audio books, trade paperbacks, newly minted hardbacks, old musty stuff in a basement, all of it - and subscribe to Literary Review and Granta, and check in on London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement when I can. I subscribe to quality newspapers and periodicals, and I'd rather spend an evening in a bookshop with late opening hours than a nightclub. Reading is great. Everyone should do a lot more of it - it's food for the soul.

But reading lists put together by other people aren't good for you. If anything, they get in the way of you figuring out what you want to read.

Here's some simple maths: life expectancy in my home country is 83 years for females, 79 years for males. I am male, have multiple (not imminently life-threatening), health conditions, and so with a little maths I can expect to live perhaps 25 more years. Sobering. But it is reality.

If I read a book a week (which is way higher a rate than the average reading rate, and slow for a fan of reading - but I like to absorb books a little more slowly), I am going to max out at 1,300 books in the rest of my life.

Most people read a few books a year. At that rate I'd have just 75-100 books to read in the rest of my time alive. If that were my number, I should probably make each one of those books count in some way.

You should do this maths yourself, and across a few dimensions. You only have so many books, films, music gigs, vacations/holidays, restaurant visits, whatever left in your life.

As an aside, you only have so many side projects, business ideas you'll get a chance to build and test in the market, and opportunities to invest in somebody else's ideas. You should do those maths too: figure out what your error bars could look like. They're probably not as optimistic as you'd hope for.

At first, this might feel terrifying. I prefer to see it as "focusing".

Do you really want to read all 842 of the books on that list? Is this the oeuvre you want to invest a sizeable chunk of your remaining life in? Are you confident this will make you feel whole, that you will get to the end and have no regrets about making this your mission? If you yes to all these questions, and are sure: brilliant, you have found a purpose in life few others ever will. Godspeed and good luck!

For most people though, lists like this are just another todo list that create a sense of inadequacy, FOMO or regret.

In 1880, the designer William Morris said "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful".

Apply this to your reading lists[0]. Curate. Edit. Find what makes your heart sing or your brain grow, and dive in.

Do not worry about what other people think you "should" read. Do not read "the great classics" if they do not interest you. Safely ignore award winning writers - from Nobel laureates, to Pulitzer Prize winners, to Booker short-listed authors - unless something about that book speaks to you and you almost yearn for it.

Because when you do that, you'll realise a) most books are junk to you (but might be great for someone else), and b) that as you start to develop the habit of reading the things that you genuinely want to, it becomes a healthy, mind-nourishing obsession.

Come on in, the pages are lovely.

[0] Actually, apply this rule to everything you can in your life. It can be hard to start, but worthwhile.

Should the use of cliches be made a criminal offense?

If you want the prisons to be full of American sports commentators.

Sounds good.

Made me think of this gem:

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/ultima-worlds-of-adventur...

When the mars space elevator was brought down and wrapped around mars TWICE was one of the most memorable moments of any book I've ever read.

Spoilers! But yeah, that was a memorable scene.

Microplastics are bad. People are concerned that there are microplastics in your balls! And that this could epigenetically affect downstream generations. I want to test that theory with a real human, not an animal model.

My plan: collect my own sperm samples over time and do whole DNA preps + basic body metrics. Sperm regenerates approximately every 10w, so planning time series over 10w. Next, inject myself to ~10x the average amount of microplastics, directly into the bloodstream. Continue with the sperm collection, DNA preps, and basic body metrics. Nanopore sequence, and see if there actually ARE any epigenetic changes. Eventually I'll go back down to baseline - are there any lasting changes?

Of course, this is an N=1 experiment, but rather than a metastudy I'm directly changing one variable, so I think it is valuable. We should have more people doing controlled experiments on themselves for the sake of all of society - and as a biologist, I actually have the capacity to design the experiments and scientifically interpret the results. In a way, it's part of civic duty :)

Godspeed you legend.

ok, but I don't think people are injecting them directly into their bloodsteam...

The account of the youtube video linked in the article has been terminated apparently. Anyone know why or if there's an alternate link?

https://web.archive.org/web/20160422054642/https://www.youtu...

Now that was nice. I liked that a lot thank you for sharing.

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another "noahpinion"

you realize ankit is from india and i'm from singapore right lol

This sucks because the web should be the perfect, safe platform for this kind of application, but it isn't. Technically all the features exist in the browser such that you could write a homedir cleaner, space analyzer, etc purely in a browser tab, but because of the misguided (in my opinion) way that browsers refuse to do open a homedir, it's impossible.

I'm not sure letting a webapp access your home is a good idea. You're basically YOLOing random remote code to run on your machine. Maybe we can have it access some specific folder for its own data.

And then there's also Apple which won't allow functional web apps, lest it affects their app store 30% cut.

The web already has these APIs, it can be granted read-only permissions to designated directories. But the browsers will refuse to allow you to delegate even read-only access to, for example, the macos ~/Applications folder, on the pretty shaky basis of it being "system files". Because of that policy the API is not useful for the application of a space analyzer.

I have an MZ-RH10 lying around somewhere that would be neat to try working on.

Some folks have recently done screen replacements on those and that might be worth doing first.

always wanted one of these models then prices skyrocketed. now there’s not much of a point as the primary novel feature, uploading, was reverse engineered for all other NetMD models (ones that take standard batteries and have screens that don’t burn-in), just need a WebUSB browser and go here: https://web.minidisc.wiki/

Asivery screen replacement is great. Need some soldering skills but it's wonderful.

I was rewriting a mod for Rimworld recently. As Rimworld is built on Unity, it's all some sort of C#. I heard people say it's a wrong kind of C#, but since a) I had no choice and b) I never wrote any C# before I cannot tell.

First, C# proudly declares itself strongly-typed. After writing some code in Zig (a project just before this one, also undertaken as a learning opportunity, and not yet finished), I was confused. This is what is called strong-typed? C# felt more like Python to me after Zig (and Rust). Yes there are types. No, they are not very useful in limiting expression of absurdity or helping expression of intent.

Second, test. How do you write tests for a mod that depends on an undocumented 12 year old codebase plus of half a dozen of other mods? Short answer - it's infeasible. You can maybe extract some kind of core code from your mod and test that, but that doesn't help the glue code which is easily 50-80% in any given mod.

So what's left? I have great temptation to extract that core part and rewrite it in Zig. If Unity's C#-flavor FFI would work between linux and windows, if marshalling data would not kill performance outright, if it won't scare off potential contributors (and it will of course), if, if...

I guess I wanted to say that the tests are frequently overrated and not always possible. If language itself lends a hand, even as small and wimpy as C#'s, don't reject it as some sort of abomination.

> For example, in Swift, if you declare a function to throw an exception, then by God every call to that function, all the way up the stack, must be adorned with a do-try block, or a try!, or a try?.

Funnily enough, Uncle Bob himself evangelised and popularised the solution to this. Dependency Inversion. (Not to be confused with dependency injection or IOC containers or Spring or Guice!) Your call chains must flow from concrete to abstract. Concrete is: machinery, IO, DBs, other organisation's code. Abstract is what your product owners can talk about: users, taxes, business logic.

When you get DI wrong, you end up with long, stupid call-chains where each developer tries to be helpful and 'abstract' the underlying machinery:

  UserController -> UserService -> UserRepository -> PostgresConnectionPoolFactory -> PostgresConnectionPool -> PostgresConnection

Now when you simply want to call userService.isUserSubscriptionActive(user), of course anything below it can throw upward. Your business logic to check a user subscription now contains rules on what to do if a pooled connection is feeling a little flakey today. It's at this point that Uncle Bob 2017 says "I'm the developer, just let me ignore this error case".

What would Uncle Bob 2014 have said?

Pull the concrete/IO/dependency stuff up and out, and make it call the business logic:

  UserController:
      
      user? <- (UserRepository -> PostgresConnectionPoolFactory -> PostgresConnectionPool -> PostgresConnection)
      // Can't find a user for whatever reason? return 404, or whatever your coding style dictates

      result <- UserService.isUserSubscriptionActive(user)

      return result

The second call should not permit failure. You are running pure business logic on a business entity. Trivially covered by unit tests. If isUserSubscriptionActive does 'go wrong', fix the damn code, rather than decorating your coding mistake as a checked Exception. And if it really can't be fixed, you're in 'let it crash' territory anyway.

* I took a jab at testing, and now at least one of you's thinking: "Well how do I test UserService.isUserSubscriptionActive if I don't make an IUserRepository so I can mock it?" Look at the code above: UserService is passed a User directly - no dependency on UserRepository means no need for an IUserRepository.

Isn't that the classic argument "Real C programmers don't write defaults!" ?

The one that companies have spent billions of dollars fixing, including creating new restrictive languages?

I mean, I get the point of tests, but if your language obviates the need for some tests, it's a win for everyone. And as for the "how much code will I need to change to propagate this null?", the type system will tell you all the places where it might have an impact; once it compiles again, you can be fairly sure that you handled it in every place.