beardicus

Thank you for posting this, and engaging here on HN. Do you think this collection of interesting things would be a good candidate for digitizing and getting up on the Internet Archive?

"What the heck is the GRID dataset", I says:

http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/gridcorpus/

Very not-real-world corpus, but still impressive.

> Grant is promoting saving the money you earn, but counter to most advice, he says to put the money in a good old-fashioned savings account — where your money is accessible at a moment's notice — until you have at least $100,000. Then, you can start investing.

I get what the guy is saying, sort of, but it's also the stupidest advice ever for most people. Saving $100,000 in a savings account is a whole lifetime of savings for many people. Meanwhile you're earning nothing on it, and it's not tax advantaged.

> It doesn't entitle you to ask for a handout.

Good thing they're selling a product then, not asking for a handout. And hey, as a bonus, they're releasing a fully refreshed set of icons for free!

Your perspective on what open-source can/should be is utterly unrecognizable to me. I'm glad it seems like the majority of people are finally getting comfortable with the idea that you shouldn't have to choose between making a living and contributing to the open source ecosystem.

> When people treat open source projects as their day job everybody loses.

That's a new one. How does someone getting making a living while developing open source software mean "everybody loses"?

Shockingly, the original blog post's title is much less sensational and certain than the submitted title. Mods, please update.

> They claim to be amazed, but surely if we've learned anything over this election cycle, it's that the worst systems you'll ever find are systems in use by people in government.

These are email servers mostly for Trump's private business.

Well, you'll probably want to read up on trademark law before proceeding.

The first number, "33" is the pin number of the CHIP Pro, "CSID4-SDC2-CMD" are the functions, and "PE8" is the actual pin name from the GR8 module. The key on that diagram is confusing.

Is it the various pay-per-view and on-demand services?

> as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country

Of course. There's no deep ecological need for wild honeybees to exist in North America.

> The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite.

This is likely overstated a bit, though I can't find any recent definitive surveys of persistent feral honeybee hives. The best I can do is this:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

but they don't actually test any feral hives, just attempt to determine factors that could lead to survival with varroa infestation. Anecdotally I know of a few feral hives that have survived multiple years in trees and barns, but I can't rule out the possibility that they're "seeded" by swarms from managed hives every spring (they're too far away for me to inspect regularly). Also, Youtube has a few folks doing cutouts of wild hives that have taken up residence in houses and sheds, and there's clear evidence of multiple years of work in some of these hives.

A bit of a nitpick, I admit, but I'd go with "mostly wiped out" personally.

The article does address this fact, though the headline writer chose to omit any such subtlety.

Agreed, annoying headline. I was ready to write some angry rant in response, but at least the article actually does address (unlike the last time this same article was written) the economic realities of constantly treading water to keep your bee population up.

Holy shit these articles are truly tiresome.

I am learning Javascript in 2016. I also learned it in 1998. It was a simpler time back then, sure, BECAUSE YOU COULDN'T DO MUCH. Rollovers, alerts, scroll some annoying text in the status bar of a browser. This was about the extent of it.

I can do SO MUCH COOL STUFF with 2016 Javascript. Much of it comes with a complexity cost, but of course I'm free to code "raw" Javascript in the browser just like I used to. Instead, I choose to learn some new tooling, because the leverage it gives me to execute my ideas is worth the effort.

Is SpaceX trying to simulate the long, tedious trip to Mars with this scheduling delay and "endless space" intro graphic?

This makes me sad, not because I wanted to use Firefox OS, but because JanOS[1] (a hacked up FFOS) turned cheap Firefox phones into really powerful Javascript-based hardware hacking platforms. It's really quite fun, and I love the idea of abusing the economies of scale of cheap consumer electronics to make creative hardware tools. Most dedicated hardware development boards with all the features of a phone would cost 4 times as much.

[1]: http://janos.io/

They should teach this in business school. I never write my boss an email more than three sentences long. I never ask two questions in one email, unless I don't mind one of them being ignored.

Interesting. I've been watching "Ask a Female Engineer" for years now, except they just call it "Ask an Engineer". Here's Adafruit's weekly show by that name:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7AE4BFB81D3DC925

Bayer (which actually makes pesticides, included neonicotinoids) has an apiarist, who did an AMA on reddit about a year ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/35l4lq/science_ama...

Not sure which of these two have a harder job.

> I might be pushing an already over-touted product

Yes.

> the Flow Hive seems to simplify much of the harvesting

Probably true if you have just a few hives.

> I understand some purists are against the notion of "factory honey" but I imagine these style of hives will dominate the market in years to come.

Never heard "factory honey" as an argument against the flow hive. There's lots of bad arguments out there against the flow hive, but there's one really good one: it's super-expensive. I'm still waiting on more real-world info to judge, but I'm pretty skeptical that the mechanism can hold up after multiple seasons of bee-abuse.

Sure.

Now how about the 'total hives' vs 'annual losses' issue? I think the metric you've chosen to indicate overall honeybee health is lacking.

The article refers to wild bees, not managed.

Regardless, a better metric to consider re: managed hives might be annual colony losses, not total quantity of active hives. Of course beekeepers can make new hives. Thus far they are thankfully able to keep up with higher and higher losses each year (and honey and pollination prices are continuing to rise as more energy and money is put into raising bees instead of bee products).

This spike in losses is more recent than the varroa introduction. Graphing out one positive metric and pretending things haven't gone weird with honeybees in the past decade or so seems misguided.

> Only people with a deathwish would ride a bike on streets shared by other vehicles.

I'll grant that the risk of death in an accident is probably higher on bike, but the risk of death by being sedentary should also not be ignored in the calculation. I don't have a deathwish, and I commuted 30 miles a day on a bike for years. It was great. I've never been in better shape. We have a problem with cars killing people with alarming regularity. The solution probably isn't to avoid riding bikes or being a pedestrian.

Seems like mostly what they've produced is TED talks.

That's a bit snarky. I was pretty pumped with the project at first, but it really seemed poorly run, and also seemed to ignore a lot of prior art when designing hardware. Their compressed block machine does seem fully thought out and functional at least, but their first tractor snapped in half on its maiden voyage, and the replacement looks like a post-apocalyptic bobcat. There's a reason most farmers aren't using bobcats in the field.

Anyways, neat idea, and I hope it inspired others to focus on open source hardware for agriculture and small-scale civilization.

I don't feel like blocks really maps well to the kinds of tasks i'd do in node-red and yahoo pipes, and presumably riko (I didn't dive too deep here yet though). a wiring interface better reflects the idea of inputs, filters, and outputs, and wiring them up in flexible ways. blocks seems a little rigid and more variable/iteration/function-based.

maybe figure out a few common workflows that people would make in riko or node-red, and mock up how they'd work/look in blocks vs. wiring/pipes.

I fail to see how your quoted text has anything to do with twitter making a buck. The target here is the end user being able to do more with their paid content, including overlaying other content. Substitute a wikipedia entry as the example if twitter is causing a hangup. There are already limits on fair use when profit is involved... this is more about letting users use content in ways that are not prescribed by the big content producers, and being able to develop the devices to do so without breaking the law.

Node-RED is pretty great. I think a wiring interface is a better choice than a block-level thing like blockly.

The Internet Archive is a library, and thus has a bit more flexibility regarding copyright issues. They also tend to have a "save it first and answer takedown notices after" philosophy. The Archive Team (not an official Internet Archive organization,) doesn't give a shit about copyright, or rather they ignore it in a pragmatic effort to save more content.

Most Archive Team efforts are given a punny name (at least for the associated IRC channel), usually the offending organization's name twisted into something mildly negative. Coursera > #cursera, Soundcloud > #soundclown, etc.