bspammer

Visiting China will shake your world view as a westerner. It did mine.

I’m still grateful at a personal level to live in a democracy, but I’m not as certain as I used to be that it’s the only way to run a country that benefits the people.

The infrastructure is incredible yes, but the complete lack of fear on the streets, and the positive consequences of that, are something to behold. Women are not afraid to walk home alone at 2am. People young and old dance together in the street. You never feel on your guard, at all.

They haven’t completely eradicated poverty, but they seem to be giving it a real go. In one very rural area I saw an elderly couple living in a rundown shack, but they had a bunch of modern medical equipment, provided to them for free by the state.

Presumably she wrote it as "when I died on <insert day of death>"

Downloading the game wasn't a problem for anyone, as far as I know the CDN held up fine. The problem was the steam storefront, i.e. actually buying the game.

This makes sense because there are several live service games on steam that have hundreds of thousands of active players - any update will put a large instantaneous load on the CDN as all the clients are forced to update at the same time, and this happens extremely frequently so they've had to get good at handling it.

What doesn't happen very frequently is hundreds of thousands of people trying to buy a game at exactly the same time, because most games have pre-orders.

It's pretty sad that the people in that thread don't seem to know what a DRM-free game is. The idea of a game as an executable that just runs unconditionally is a foreign concept, so it must have been "cracked"

A fair comparison would include the cost of the DBA who will be responsible for backups, updates, monitoring, security and access control. That’s what RDS is actually competing with.

Even if you ignore all technical problems - the problem with electronic voting is that it provides a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. Even if an election is run perfectly legitimately, bad actors can make credible-sounding claims around hackers editing votes, or voting machines being rigged.

I must say this is something that showcases NixOS very well.

This is all it takes to start a nginx server. Add this block and everything starts up perfectly first time, using proper systemd sandboxing, with a certificate provisioned, and with a systemd timer for autorenewing the cert. Delete the block, and it's like the server never existed, all of that gets torn down cleanly.

  services.nginx = {
    enable = true;
    virtualHosts = {
      "mydomain.com" = {
        enableACME = true;
        locations."/" = {
          extraConfig = ''; # Config goes here
        };
      };
    };
  }

I recently wanted to create a shortcut domain for our wedding website, redirecting to the SaaS wedding provider. The above made that a literal 1 minute job.

Found this thread from around that time, it's fun to read now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740289

This is a pretty poor example for a few reasons, but the idea is that anyone get can a shell with the tool fully installed along with all its dependencies, with a single command:

nix shell 'git+https://tangled.sh/@oppi.li/journal'

It's massive overkill for a shell alias, but for a more complex project it can be very nice.

Minecraft was already wildly successful before a second employee was brought on board. As someone who was a teenager at the time, I can tell you that from 2009-2010 my friends and I talked about little else. None of the later updates fundamentally improved on that magic, they just added more content.

Here's a hacker news comment from Sept 2010 which talks about Minecraft's success in the past tense, and according to wikipedia that's the same month that Mojang's second employee was hired. It had already gone viral.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742163

I have the same memories. Obviously we can never know for certain but if notch had decided not to hire anyone and continued to work on the game himself, I’m very confident it would have eventually made a billion. The core game hasn’t changed since 2010, and it was already absolutely captivating in those early days.

Ahh that makes a lot of sense, thanks. I hadn't considered how elegant it is that the fund stays balanced without trading.

As someone who knows very little about finance, is there any ETF available which acts as a middle-ground between market-cap weighted and equally-weighted funds? The very high concentration of tech and AI in the S&P 500 at the moment makes me uncomfortable, but equal-weight seems too drastic to me. A fund where the weighting is done by the square root of the market cap feels like it would make sense but I can't find anyone doing this.

What was wrong with the main site? Genuine question https://www.openstreetmap.org

I'm sure they meant asymmetrical

I hadn’t had “that funny feeling” [0] for a while but yep that sub hit me like a truck.

It’s worth bearing in mind that it’s fairly small as subreddits go, I guess.

[0] https://youtu.be/ObOqq1knVxs?si=N5iqaCi5KZer0tsV

Last week I tested out the agent mode of chatGPT by asking it to plan a week's meals, then add all the ingredients to an online shopping basket for me. It worked pretty much flawlessly, the only problem was it ran out of time before it could add the last few ingredients, which doesn't exactly seem like an unsolvable problem.

It seems to require iOS 18.6, it’s working for me after updating.

Most of those numbers aren't possible to change, 80x80 is the output size, %10 is the input size.

Changing any of the other numbers would surely impact the function of the program, I don't think you could get to a 40 bit brute-force there.

I think the brute-force was done by making non-semantic changes like variable names and changing the order of the declarations.

Thinking about it more, I guess you can just change the single-letter variable names and positioning to quite easily get up to a 40 bit brute-force.

I still don't understand how it works, the source code doesn't have any obvious sections to insert data for brute-forcing. I'm as confused as the judges:

> There are no magic numbers in the program, and bits of the input map to pixels of the output in a regular way, yet it outputs a nice icon for itself, if given the MD5 hash of its own source. How?

I'm assuming the fact that MD5 is completely broken plays into it somehow...

It’s definitely tempting, but I prefer not to piss off people who are already being actively malicious.

I don't see any sense where syntactic sugar is not part of the language. I don't really care about how it works behind the scenes, the syntax is the part that I touch as a programmer.

I disagree with GP, it’s much more like Haskell than JavaScript. Function application is whitespace, functions can only have one argument, everything is an expression, let blocks are the way you define and scope variables. I see very little relation to JavaScript at all, to be honest.

The best antidote to this kind of thinking is to realise you would have been tempted to sell so may times over the last decade, that there's close to zero chance that you'd still be holding it today.

To make a lot of money with bitcoin you either need to have been a true believer for a ridiculously long period of time, or find the password to an old wallet you'd forgotten about.

Kotlin and even modern Java are both preferable for me. There’s no shortage of JVM roles.

Yeah that surprised me too - I would have assumed that ZFS had a bunch of "store and retrieve" tests in many different configurations that would have caught this.

Wow, that’s an awesome resource actually. Thanks!

No amount of in-transit encryption can help when google controls the OS.

units has (I assume room temp/pressure) densities for all elements, as well as some precious metal prices and currency exchange rates (you need to run the units_cur program regularly to update the database for these). It also has tab completion to make discovering these a bit easier.

The invocation is

You have: goldprice * golddensity * spherevol(10cm/2)

You want: GBP