bkanber

I had an aerodynamics / rocket science professor in grad school who used to say 'planes are as reliable as toasters', and the reason for that is the literal 40 million flights per year. Planes can explode just as easily as rockets can. The reason planes have a much less risky failure mode is because we've flown them for billions of hours, not because we've added a ton of redundancies to them.

In fact many of the structural 'factors of safety' in airplanes are only 1.5, as opposed to a FOS of 8 in your car.

So again, it's not about just tacking on redundant systems, it's about getting the experience required to understand all the failure modes. The only times planes crash these days is when we encounter a new failure mode. Rocketry will get there as well.

Each time Wikipedia does a donation drive they have a thing that says "If everyone who used Wikipedia donated $1, we'd be done in 10 minutes!" (or similar). Yet these drives go on for months. The problem is that only a vanishingly small percentage of users donate.

For the last 10 years or so I've been running a free-to-use Morse Code online radio thing. It has cost me about $1000 to host so far, and has a couple of hundred DAUs.

The users are not shy about feature requests, and they're not shy about complaining that I haven't implemented their feature requests.

So I made a pledge to the userbase that if they collectively donate $1000 to the site, I'll start working on v2.

I posted that pledge to the site a year ago. Total donations: $80.

There are a couple of hundred people who use the site for hours per day and post on the forums that they love it, but haven't donated a fiver.

Asking for donations doesn't work.

Steam's Proton lets most of the popular win games run on linux. I've been playing New Vegas lately.

The Staten Island Ferry (from SI to Manhattan) uses these. I had always wondered how the ferry does some of the maneuvers it does, without having all sorts of maneuvering thrusters. The Voith Schneider was the answer.

The downside of these is that repair times are a bit longer. But I always thought they were cool because they work basically the same as helicopter rotors.

I use gather.town on Firefox/Ubuntu all the time FWIW. Seems to be perfectly supported.

I always have fun with gather.town. Pictionary in particular is a blast.

Yes, you say the same thing everyone else said before looking at the site!

I'd point out that the site also lets you target areas for stretches, which for me is awesome.

Yes, valued... on the market... as a company... whose goal is to make money.

Ask any IT pro if they've heard of Boston Dynamics: yes! Do you own any Boston Dynamics products? No.

Ask a normal person if they've heard of Boston Dynamics: no.

Ask a normal person if they've heard of Roblox: yes! Do you own any Roblox products? Yes! My kids love it!

You can't take some highfalutin notion of 'potential progress in engineering' and directly translate it to market value. Market value comes from performance in the market.

Down. Desktop app doesn't load, webapp hangs

The best(?) part of the article is this:

> In the award ceramony [sic], the Bell Labs researcher presenting the award explicitly said he doesn't understand how InstaHide is secure, but, and I quote, “it works nonetheless”. No! It does not.

Bell Labs used to have a wonderful reputation. Not so much anymore, I suppose.

I've built a few electron apps lately. That's an advantage, but another important one is that you can use node APIs in what is otherwise basically a webapp. The app I'm working on now is an SSH server monitoring thing, which wouldn't be possible in the browser (maybe with wasm, but /shrug).

I should mention though that desktop apps seem to have an order of magnitude conversion rate than web apps... it's been a slog.

There's one on the Features page -- the first shot

https://scrumsheet.app/images/scrumsheet-spreadsheet.png

I made this app because I'm very interested in using Google Sheets as a database. But as I was dogfooding the app it turns out that I really love it, and am moving my own team to it away from asana.

How do you feel about desktop apps that sync to google drive? I just made scrumsheet.app and a friend mentioned that I should do the same for a personal CRM. Do you trust Google with the data or do you really prefer it to be offline-only?

Man, this thing and the TeenySERV are awesome. Good for you, hn_expanscape. I have no practical purpose for either of these, but I love them.

You mentioned elsewhere that you have a four-monitor variant... any public page for that? And what's pricing on these like? (the smaller) $20k? 30?

This right here is what Hacker News is really about. Somebody wanted a specialized computer, hacked one together, and is now looking at running a nice boutique device business. Best of luck and looking forward to seeing more of your designs!

PS: Typo -- 'third "interation"' at https://expanscape.com/the-aurora-7-prototype/a7-m3-prototyp...

I would say one in three of the burgers I consume is plant- based, I do it to reduce meat consumption. If I find myself at BK, for instance, I always get the impossible whopper. Same at home--1 lb beyond beef for every 2 lb ground beef. Eventually the veggie stuff will get even better (and cheaper), and the ratio will flip.

Considering they're sold out now, I'd say yes, this kind of marketing works.

The "salt" in salty licorice isn't table salt like you'd use on popcorn, FYI. It's ammonium chloride. Literally tastes like ammonia. I'm sure it's an acquired taste (I had my first experience with it early this year), but it's frankly awful to my palate.

If you're in a certain industry, you're typically looking at the median in that industry and not the national median. USD $100k is ~4 year experience software engineer salary.

ctags (which is the way I used to do it) was always sort of hit or miss for me. JetBrains OTOH just works. Apparently there's a new way of doing it though, which I should look into.

This was the first thing I looked for too. Perhaps one is planned or perhaps they're counting on the community to write one using their API.

TBH the only feature I truly use JetBrains for is their Cmd+Click to jump to definition, otherwise I'd be happy sticking with tmux+vim as IDE (as I did for about a decade).

I was describing deflation on purpose, because deflation [is supposed to] happens after solid infrastructure investment.

My last sentence was misleading because I said "this is one of the various modes of inflation", but what I really meant was "this is one of the various modes of an inflationary/deflationary economy".

There's a reason commit and push are two separate actions. That said, most people commit+push in the same keystroke.

git revert is my best friend.

You and your friends are probably programmers (or similar) and have been touch typing for decades. It's always easy to forget the selection bias of self-organizing groups.

Investing in an economy increases production. If productivity increases, but currency circulation remains the same (or at least doesn't outpace productivity), the value of the currency will increase. This is only one of the various modes of inflation, but that's the idea w.r.t infrastructure spending.

> you will see that every GDP in the region rose dramatically over the period of a few years in the early 2000s. This increase in GDP in the region was not caused by turkey's investment in infrastructure, it was caused by foreign investors

Fair enough. I was not paying attention to macroeconomics at that time. Still, Erdogan used the growing economy to win the secular base, while using religion and nationalism to win the non-secular base.

And now his face is a mural on every other building you see. SMH.

The Turkish Lira experienced runaway inflation in the period 1990-2005; in 1990, one USD = 2500 TL. In 2005, one USD = 1,350,000 TL. A loaf of bread cost 200,000 TL or so.

Erdogan became PM in 2003; in 2005 the Turkish government introduced the "new Turkish Lira" ("YTL") by dividing the currency by 1,000,000.

Around the same time, Erdogan invested heavily in infrastructure projects, boosting the lira.

IMO, this is how he largely rose to populist power -- the economy grew for a short while, and he solidified his base early on.

But since then he's continually blocked the central bank from adjusting rates, presumably to maintain the appearance of a strong economy. This once again caused an inflationary economy.

Now those chickens are coming home to roost. The Turkish lira has been falling steadily against the dollar, and this seems like a move on Erdogan's part to continue the farce and maintain appearances of a strong economy.

He's very scared of the economy being weak, because that was his original source of power with the populace.

This is only an armchair analysis. Take it with a grain of salt.

This right here is what the internet should be about. Stop debating whether this makes sense to do. It doesn't, and it doesn't have to. It's an absurd academic pursuit, and that makes the world a slightly better and more interesting place.

My concern is not what can be done today, but rather in 15 years.