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dogline

712 karma · joined March 9, 2016

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dogline··on A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
> I use that for journaling: I made a little system that sends me an email every day; I respond to it and the response is then sent to a page that stores it into a db.

Yes. I know note taking and journaling posts are frequent on HN, but I've thought that this is the best way to go, is universal from any client, and very expandable. It's just not generically scaleable for all users, but for the HN reader-types, it'd be perfect.

dogline··on A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
This made me think: what if my little utility assistant program that I have, similar to your Stevens, had access to a mailbox?

I've got a little utility program that I can tell to get the weather or run common commands unique to my system. It's handy, and I can even cron it to run things regularly, if I'd like.

If it had its own email box, I can send it information, it could use AI to parse that info, and possibly send email back, or a new message. Now, I've got something really useful. It would parse the email, add it to whatever internal store it has, and delete the message, without screwing up my own email box.

Thanks for the insight.

dogline··on Supply constraints do not explain house price, quantity growth across US cities
In California, at least at the time, Realtors called the Appraisers they knew could be a little generous with the numbers to make the clients happy. Speed-dial. Inflated numbers were easy to make plausible, and as time went on, the cycle became self fulfilling.

Appraisers knew this, they got lots of easy business for an afternoon's worth of work, and grew their businesses. Realtors would shrug and say "That's what it appraised at." Banks were happy. Sellers were happy. Lots of money. There was no natural regulation or push-back stopping any of this.

Source: friend made lots of money doing this at the time. They probably made out better than the Realtors.

dogline··on Supply constraints do not explain house price, quantity growth across US cities
As somebody who lived in Northern California in the communities which first started spiking in the early 2000's, I've always had a pet theory from the time.

Housing Appraisers realized they could tack on $10k per house when appraising, and they realized that nobody would stop them. Realtors loved that because they got more commission, buyers realized that houses were going up fast so they'd better get in while they could, appraisers got called back more in a tight market and everybody made money. There were *no* controls on the appraising.

dogline··on zlib-ng: zlib replacement with optimizations for "next generation" systems
I thought all of the cool people were migrating to zstd. Is this not a thing anymore?
dogline··on Storytelling lessons I learned from Steve Jobs (2022)
Yes. I've been trying to take about what makes good storytelling, or even stand-up comics who can keep an audience interested in a wandering story, and those skills are what I'd think would be valuable in a business setup. Seems like readable analysis of this sort of thing should exist.
dogline··on Show HN: FreeDemandLetter – A Weapon for Anyone Who's Sick of Getting Shafted
I like your website -- solid, professional, clear. What did you use to create it? Is it a template from somewhere I can use?

I've got a couple ideas of a one-page websites I want to make, and I'd like to make them just like this. My sites always looks like they're out of the 90's, and that's not good.

dogline··on Disappointed with the TVs at CES 2025
Yes. Can I get a 60" monitor for cheap?
dogline··on Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs
If my Brother laser printer starts while I have the ceiling fan going on the same circuit, the breaker will trip. That's the only thing in my house that will do it. It must be a huge momentary current draw.
dogline··on Software is eating the world, all right (2024)
Isn't this is same lament as "Eternal September" when AOL joined Usenet?

Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm not sure how to leverage this fact for an improvement. Hacker News is good because it's also a "self selecting group", and it won't be pretty if that ever changes.

dogline··on The story of Rogue
Yeah, maybe they're not "roguelikes", but more "dungeon crawlers". I like dungeon crawlers. Don't know why. The assembly language Rogue for the Coco, mentioned in the article, was one of my first games I spent a lot of time on, and maybe that stuck.
dogline··on The story of Rogue
Now I have to look up what's available on Switch. I've tried other Roguelikes, but often they get tedious without a keyboard (Darkest Dungeon, Into the Breach). I still want a game I can play kicking back with the Switch.

I keep going back to Diablo, even on the Switch, because I can just run around and kill stuff. Hades is also good.

dogline··on Ward Christensen (of BBS and XMODEM fame) has died
That's what it was! As a kid I had the TRS-80 Coco, related to the Sinclair, and I remember one of those graphing programs you typed in from Rainbow magazine, and I think it was able to plot the equation you had in a REM statement, that also had to be on a particular line number. There was a statement at the top of the program, like what you have here (maybe a POKE?), and I always knew it did something magical to be able execute from a REM statement, but I could never put it together.

The Star Trader game was also really ahead of its time.

There was no Google, and I've forgotten about it until just now. But, that makes sense. Thanks.

dogline··on GnuCash 5.9
Your grandparents tracked money because they were also verifying the math, which could have done by hand. Now, we assume the math is right, and we're checking for fraud.

That, and we like to watch a number go up.

dogline··on Scrum is the Symptom, not the Problem
> Learning is a menace to planning

Ooh, that's a cool thought that the more learning needed, the more planning is hard. True, and I haven't put that together before.

dogline··on Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?
Like micro-services, it's not a bad idea, but it's not the hammer for every nail as people who write books and blog posts seem to push for (they've now moved on past blockchain to AI).

If you have a problem that logically has different async services, sure, use Redis or something. Databases also were able to handle this problem, but weren't as sexy, and they explicitly handle the problem better now. Just another tool in the toolbelt.

NoSQL was another solution in search of problems, but databases can handle this use-case better now too.

dogline··on Microsoft's official Minesweeper app has ads, pay-to-win, and is hundreds of MBs
At first this sounds a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the more I think about this, it might be an actual Project Management Milestone, and it's one bone they can throw to the users, where the rest of the time it's marketing towards the IT department.
dogline··on An Untapped Source of Lithium Has Just Been Found in the US
tl;dr: There are amounts of lithium in fracking wastewater that can be retrieved.
dogline··on Ask HN: Any tool for managing large and variable command lines?
If I understand you correctly, this is where I just use a Makefile, but keep it very simple ```render:\tffmtpeg ...``` Do a have dozen of those, and you now have a `make render` command to run that task.
dogline··on When was the last time we built a new city?
The town of Paradise, CA is being rebuilt, after 90% of buildings were destroyed in the fire. There is infrastructure (roads, power, water), but all residential, commerical, and things like doctors are all being recreated and reassessed. It's interesting seeing how things shape up, but it's still a chicken-and-egg problem. A couple new grocery stores are going in, some other services.
dogline··on Autogenerating a Book Series from Three Years of iMessages
You can always print it out, then run to Kinko's and use their comb binder that they usually have out. Not as elegant as real binding, but enough to make it work on my shelves.
dogline··on I disabled my mouse for a week
> And then Microsoft came along and made a car with 2 joysticks and a butt controller.

Dude, yep.

dogline··on OpenScope Air Traffic Control Simulator
Yeah, I forgot all about these kinds of games. I used to play something similar on Android, where you used your finger, so it was more game-ish, but it was a great mobile game. Anything like this for iOS?
dogline··on Understand how transformers work by demystifying the math behind them
Thank you. I guess I need to back up. This is a vector, not just an identifier, and direction and angle seem important. I need to look up how the encoding is normally done, since this isn't obvious if you haven't worked in this domain before.
dogline··on Understand how transformers work by demystifying the math behind them
Six paragraphs in, and I already have questions.

> Hello -> [1,2,3,4] World -> [2,3,4,5]

The vectors are random, but they look like they have a pattern here. Does the 2 in both vector mean something? Or, is it the entire set that makes it unique?

dogline··on Ask HN: Assuming this 2023 LtG paper is correct, how do you prepare?
LtG - Limit to Growth -- re: Worldwide growth rates
dogline··on The Death of Unity
It's higher than zero/game_sold, so it's significant.
dogline··on Soundproofing my studio
Sleep mask with speakers is my solution: https://www.amazon.com/MUSICOZY-Headphones-Bluetooth-Wireles...
dogline··on What helps people get comfortable on the command line?
What, really? Cool!
dogline··on What's wrong with enterprise Linux
Yes, these are very much alive deep in corporate data centers, and we've got to work with them.
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