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astatine

797 karma · joined June 13, 2017

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astatine··on Ask HN: Best way to archive 25 years of emails
I was looking at mbox ... would you be able to recommend a simple (ideally, read-only) client which we can use to open and browse/search the mails in a mbox, without importing the content into a regular mail client.
astatine··on Ask HN: Best way to archive 25 years of emails
Thanks. Will check out both ePadd and Mailbagit. Unfortunately, there's no really publicly accessible content in these mails. At least none that I can classify in any meaningful way through a filter or search criteria.
astatine··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
I wonder whether people who use open source software in the way I do are merely providing the egg (in the context of tfa). Most people, that I know, rarely modify the code in any way and merely build and use. Do not even read it most times. But, it somehow conveys a sense of _doing_ something that the mere install of a binary does not.
astatine··on Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone
Bangalore has historically (over decades) been known to have a high incidence of asthma due to the high pollen in the air. It's been made worse in recent years due to pollution. The pollen is present for a significant portion of the year while other pollen regions in the world tend to have it for a smaller duration.
astatine··on Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
Entirely my opinion, but I believe that there are breakpoints at multiples of 1,2,5. So, changes in org structure are needed to adapt at 10,20,50 (and further at 100,200,500) counts. More formality, more processes, more tools, more variety of roles.

If someone is doing a task which takes 4 hours a week, in a team of 10, on scaling to 50 it likely becomes a half FTE level work. Not everything scales that way, obviously, but it's a good way to model new roles needed.

astatine··on Ask HN: Is Claude down again?
Same issue. Getting an "internal server error" message
astatine··on Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country?
VU3BNZ restricted class license
astatine··on Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal
dBase was the gold standard for this back in the 80s, early 90s. Great tool. Both the "dev" part and how it could be made available to non developers. The freedom of spreadsheets when developing and the constraints of a TUI (or just UI in those days) for users.
astatine··on There is no comfortable reading position
I find that, when I lie down, my glasses slip back closer to my eyes just enough to make things go out of focus at reading distance. The weight of the prisms could make it worse. Have you figured out some solution for this? If you have, it could be a game changer for me!
astatine··on IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
Nostalgic! Turbo C was my preferred IDE over many years in the late 80s to mid 90s. What an amazing tool! Those key bindings, used in so many other IDEs since, are burned into muscle memory. Even after decades of not using them, they bring a smile back. CodeWarrior, the debugger, helped me understand what happens when you run a program more than literally anything else I read or was taught.
astatine··on Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C
We have a server which uses Lua based script plugins. They are usually a few hundred to a few thousand lines and get invoked via APIs. I was trying to figure out how Bolt will behave in such a context and whether we could replace the Lua based plugin engine with this.
astatine··on Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C
This looks awesome. Would you have any data on the performance of large number of invocations of small scripts? I am wondering at startup overhead for every script run. which the 500kloc/s may not capture well.
astatine··on US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
You can absolutely do this in India. Every card based subscription requires an explicit authorization to set up. And every such authorized subscription can be seen in the bank app/site. You can choose to cancel those subscriptions at the bank end and the subscribed services will fail their next renewal. This is not just a service specific thing and is required by regulation for all recurring payments, incl utility bills, insurance premia, entertainment service, cloud services.
astatine··on Dunbar's Number Is Quadratic (2020)
Anecdotal, I have been using 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500,... as the 'break points' where organizational structures need a rethink. So far, it has worked for me. These also match the lines on a log graph.
astatine··on AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them
I used to think of building something related to let a mic pick up a single person to handle questions from the audience, during presentations. Will save the hassle of passing around mics.

This looks like it could do just that with the headphones feeding directly into the mixer and behaving like a focused mic.

astatine··on Uber slashes fees in Bangladesh as drivers keep taking rides offline
Take a look at ONDC. They do exactly this in India. Early days, but seemingly successful with very low fees.

https://ondc.org/

astatine··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
It would be so much fun if it's revealed that chatgpt is just a front for mechanical turk
astatine··on WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser
I use WP all the time for a variety of nearly static sites that I can let someone else non-technical continue to add content. It works great for this purpose. There is nothing close to WP for this purpose.

It does need careful curating of plugins that one uses, set up suitable cloudflare frontends and preventing users from doing something seemingly simple but dangerous.

I get the feeling that a good chunk of the hate comes from people who tried it many years ago; or had needs which don't get met by WP; or received it as a legacy.

astatine··on Ulaa: A Privacy First Browser
Indeed.
astatine··on Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten survival
There will be a significant drop in reported research spending. This will seem like China is doing more research than the US. There will be a hueb and cry. Congess will incentivise research spending. Back to where we were.
astatine··on Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten survival
I have seen several situations where this would be desirable - notably bleeding startups with vc money. There is plenty of window dressing to capitalise expenses and show a better EBITDA.

What this will do is immediately reclassify large chunks of people out of "R&D" into operational resources. Just enough to balance between nice looking EBITDA and low real profit (= low tax)

astatine··on Offline is just online with extreme latency
I would argue that it really is the other way around - online is just offline with instant synchronisation
astatine··on Consider working on genomics
I keep thinking of this space but don't know where to start. Any pointers for good resources? - books that are accessible to software engineers with no background in genomics, open source projects which are widely used, etc.... in short a good place to start in exploratory/hobby/learning mode.
astatine··on Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)
When the G20 looks like it will (in a decade?) have 15 countries who were not part of the original lot, naturally GDP as a metric will lose favor /s
astatine··on Some common geographic mental misplacements
Till I visited Dakar in Senegal, I did not realize that it lies further West than UK and Ireland. Wordle[0] has been a great game to set right some of these notions.

[0] https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/

astatine··on Toyota CEO talks about why he isn’t all-in on EVs
EVs = Tesla is probably the biggest misunderstanding many people have. EVs are about the energy source for propulsion and not about the smarts (real or claimed). A car with10 year old features powered by electricity is a perfectly usable vehicle without needing any of the glamorous things that tesla adds.
astatine··on Why aren't there C conferences? (2018)
Been a while, but an example would be the ability to work with rawsockets. You can't use this in most higher-than-C languages as this was not, perhaps wisely, considered useful for most people and hence there is no mechanism provided.
astatine··on Why aren't there C conferences? (2018)
An additional aspect of C that I really appreciate is that if something can be conceptually realized, it can be implemented in C. This is not the case with many other languages where you are often constrained by them - either accidentally or intentionally, for safety or other reasons. In most cases you will end up having to write a C shim to do the deed and make available libraries to the other language. C toys the rescue, again!
astatine··on Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M (2016)
It's been decades since I heard of Harvard Graphics. Was part of my toolkit with WordStar, Lotus 123, FoxPro and NC. MS C6.0, MASM, CodeWarrior, an editor called Brief on the dev side. Good times.
astatine··on Ask HN: CS grad who barely knows any CS
I think you have are ahead of a lot of, possibly most, others who are similarly graduating in that you are aware of what your strengths are (or not). Learning or completing those gaps, whether real or perceived, is far easier than realizing that the gaps exist. Kudos for your awareness and willingness to put in effort to bridge them.
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