Hacker News Reader

biorachon James Webb, Hubble space telescopes face reduction in operations

JWT may well overturn our current theories of early galaxy and black hole formation with potentially revolutionary implications for our understanding of the Big Bang. So your statement is both premature and over confident

biorachon James Webb, Hubble space telescopes face reduction in operations

> JWST is advancing humanity's knowledge far less than Hubble did

Strong claim. How are you quantifying this?

> These are visions that will, sooner or later, come to fruition - and will completely reshape humanity.

Another strong claim.

biorachon Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough

> The real question is much energy do we need to harvest to slow down the moon's orbit enough to get exactly 12 lunar months per year?

Oh my god! That's an amazing idea!

biorachon Optimizing a Math Expression Parser in Rust

> I should stop comparing Rust to CL, better learn Rust first

Yes

biorachon How would a passing gravitational wave look or feel?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1-OmAICpU

"Brooklyn is not expanding"

biorachon Yes I Will Read Ulysses Yes

You don't need to have read Homer

biorachon I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning

> Finally, that's a much smaller number than I expected for a country of 3 million.

172.7k yurts. Assuming that these are family residences for the most part, if we take an average occupancy of 4 (which is probably too low - the fertility rate is still quite high there) gives ~691k people living in yurts - approximately 20% of the population of 3.5 million - sounds reasonable.

biorachon Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

> I find a lot of programmers don't know how to write an array of floats to disk

what does that have to do with it?

biorachon UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

The legal fees were small change to Google

biorachon I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

> Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of it's price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge cost.

That's not necessarily a bad business strategy... Sometimes you take an initial loss by underpricing a product in order to build market share.

I believe MS took a substantial hit on the XBox for _years_

biorachon Radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica

The Thing!

biorachon Show HN: S3mini – Tiny and fast S3-compatible client, no-deps, edge-ready

What were the most significant missing bits?

biorachon Introducing stronger dependencies on systemd

I've read some more. He's just nuts. Your talking nonsense.

biorachon Introducing stronger dependencies on systemd

> Read the news. That's why the maintainers forked it

It looks more like one maintainer, and it's really not clear if his problem was with corporate control, or if he just fell out with everybody.

biorachon Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

Exploitation of the indebted is a symptom that should be addressed regardless.

Plus I think your diagnosis is simplistic.

biorachon Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

They can use a different name. If someone in a position to push this really felt that advancing the cause really needed a rename they could come up with a name today, get consensus tomorrow and move on with life.

This is a non issue

biorachon Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp

They are referring to a convention, not a language restriction.

If you want to mutate two parameters just pass them to a function like you normally would.

It's sloppy and a bad habit, I would not let it pass a PR in production code. Probably OK for a throwaway script.

biorachon At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

I think you do not understand what A Google SWE actually does

biorachon Why does the U.S. always run a trade deficit?

> I don't think picking various commodities as the "true" measure of what is "valuable" is a useful exercise.

No one said that a commodity is a "true" measure of value. A commenter simply said that it is often a useful proxy. It is something that is useful to do to understand specific trade patterns.

> I suggest you put your wisdom to use on the various markets that are set up for this purpose instead of arguing with me.

I did not claim any wisdom on the subject. And I suspect you are deflecting attention from the fact that you are not arguing in good faith

biorachon Why does the U.S. always run a trade deficit?

(Not the person you were replying to)

You asked a question, they answered in good faith, and now you've dismissed their answer. I would also point out that you're dismissal is actually about a related, but separate issue - you've suddenly started talking about preferred store of value, when your original question was about how to value production.

I don't think you're arguing in good faith.

biorachon Linguists find proof of sweeping language pattern once deemed a 'hoax'

wonderful rebuttal

biorachon Litestream: Revamped

https://fly.io/docs/mpg/overview/

biorachon The first year of free-threaded Python

ah ok, sorry. I thought you were saying that they tried an EEE play on ActiveX.

You meant they used ActiveX in an EEE play in the browser wars.

biorachon The first year of free-threaded Python

> I think it’s supremely risky to hitch your wagon to their tech or services

OK, finally, yes, this is very true, for specific parts of their tech.

But banging on about EEE just distracts from this, more important message.

> Make it increasingly hard to use for FOSS development by starting to add barriers a little at a time. <= we are here

....and now you've lost me again

biorachon The first year of free-threaded Python

> A classic example is ActiveX.

Nah, even that was based on earlier MS technologies - OLE and COM

A good starter list of EEE plays is on the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

biorachon The first year of free-threaded Python

None of those were independent projects or open standards. VScode and pyright are both MS projects from the get-go.

Sabotaging forks is scummy, but the forks were extending MS functionality, not the other way around.

GitHub was a private company before it was bought by MS. Rate limiting is.... not great, but certainly not an extinguish play.

EEE refers to the subversion of open standards or independent free software projects. It does not apply to any of the above.

MS are still scummy but at least attack them on their own demerits, and don't parrot some schtick from decades ago.

biorachon The first year of free-threaded Python

> Well, you sure managed to avoid that by setting up camp on that hill. Kudos on so much time saved.

Why are you picking a fight about this?

biorachon The first year of free-threaded Python

Well they could just say that instead of wasting people's time with oblique references

biorachon The first year of free-threaded Python

> CPython is an organization that overpromises, allocates jobs to the obedient and faithful while weeding out competent dissenters.

This stinks of BS

biorachon The first year of free-threaded Python

At this stage the cliched and clueless comments about embrace/extend/extinguish are tiresome and inevitable whenever Microsoft is mentioned.

A few decades ago MS did indeed have a playbook which they used to undermine open standards. Laying off some members of the Python team bears no resemblence whatsoever to that. At worst it will delay the improvement of free-threaded Python. That's all.

Your comment is lazy and unfounded.