Hacker News Reader

ppsreejithon A cautionary tale from the streets of San Francisco

Wouldn't the ultimate effect of land value taxes be to build more housing? (since that's how we can extract the most value out of land for a given tax)

ppsreejithon Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

In the book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, Sir David MacKay says that the reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain might be due to the amount of coal Britain had. Equal (at that time) to the amount of oil under Saudi Arabia.

Link: https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_6.shtml

Relevant paragraph: "Something did happen, and it was called the Industrial Revolution. I’ve marked on the graph the year 1769, in which James Watt patented his steam engine. While the ﬁrst practical steam engine was invented in 1698, Watt’s more efﬁcient steam engine really got the Industrial Revolu- tion going. One of the steam engine’s main applications was the pumping of water out of coal mines. Figure 1.5 shows what happened to British coal production from 1769 onwards. The ﬁgure displays coal production in units of billions of tons of CO2 released when the coal was burned. In 1800, coal was used to make iron, to make ships, to heat buildings, to power locomotives and other machinery, and of course to power the pumps that enabled still more coal to be scraped up from inside the hills of England and Wales. Britain was terribly well endowed with coal: when the Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting in coal under Britain was roughly the same as the amount sitting in oil under Saudi Arabia."

ppsreejithon Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

Seems like they're associated with the development of Nyxt since they link to Nyxt here -> https://source.atlas.engineer/

ppsreejithon Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

Thank you! This was a very interesting watch. I've also started reading the book.

For some reason, this reminds me of the debate between Peter Thiel and David Graeber on the topic "Where did the future go?" where Graeber points out the lost potential of people as one major reason.

Relevant youtube video and section: https://youtu.be/eF0cz9OmCGw?t=2373

The video is interesting in its own right.

ppsreejithon Create diagrams with code using Graphviz

One of my favourite online graphviz editors for quickly creating something is: https://dreampuf.github.io/GraphvizOnline/

ppsreejithon Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

To be fair, he may have motive for being "upset" since he was dismissed from being GNU Hurd's official maintainer by Stallman.

From the Wikipedia link shared:

"Bushnell was Hurd's official maintainer from its instigation until November 2003, when he posted to the GNU project's discussion mailing list saying that he had been dismissed by Stallman for criticizing the GNU Free Documentation License.[5] Stallman said the dismissal was because Bushnell had been inactive since 2001 and wasn't responding to mail."

ppsreejithon How We Manage a Million Push Notifications an Hour

I don't think the other answers here question the impact Gojek has on millions of people.

> If uber built these no one will question them why don't they use some off the shelf solution.

If it's over-engineered, they probably would.

Disclaimer: I work at Gojek.

ppsreejithon Languages of India

> Unpopular truth, but truth nonetheless. Why do you think so? The issues we do have with governance don't seem to be because of the diversity of languages or religions.