rburhum

I worked on this product for a year back in the day. The cool thing about MS ESP was that we used the FSX Engine for the "1000 foot experience". Everything looked great from far above, but not close by. The solution to this was that MS Train Simulator 2 made tons of improvements for the "1 foot experience". The idea was to include a "world editor" with world-wide geospatial data, too. https://youtu.be/GXzE1Yb54xU?t=406 The physics models of the planes and the trains were great, but obviously to be a generic simulator you needed to include physics engines for other types of objects like Cars. So we grabbed the physics engine of Forza and included it there. These things combined were honestly beautiful - and add to that the backwards compatibility with all the 3rd party FSX plugins/adds ons. Bummer that this is exactly when the iPhone came out and the cloud-based strategies were taking over "classic" enterprise software. Re-org and bye bye FSX/TrainSim2/ESP. I had left before this happened, but was really a bummer not to see the full potential of ESP :-(

Just quit. Life is too short and as you get older, money is supposed to work for you, not the other way around.

I have only flown a plane once. Took off and landed it without a problem with an instructor next to me. He said I was really good and complemented me a lot because he thought I was a natural during the simulator class and the real Cessna flight. I just thanked him. Do you want to know my secret? I never told him that I worked a year at MS Game Studios as a dev for MS Flight Simulator.

So... how would you go about monitoring to create this dataset with Twitter's API? Just plain searches triggered by a daily/weekly cron job and remember user ids? Or is there something more sophisticated?

This is awesome! Is there a way to try different hardware to have a spectral range to [440nm - 2200nm]? Or am I too ambitious?

The Hawaii alert?

I wish I could upvote this more

1) VC action in this space is not just to create shitcoins. And they keep getting bigger because this stuff is being built now. https://fortune.com/2021/11/18/vc-crypto-funds-are-getting-b...

2) The example of fraction is not just a "selling platform", but an actual real problem being solved (fractional ownership of real-world items). In LATAM for example, there are exceptionally convoluted structures to partially build and own low-income centers of commerce (kind of like malls). Fake ownership documents are very common. This solves that problem squarely. There are more real-world use cases like this.

Don’t know of a resource that consolidates everything in an orderly fashion, sorry. Usually I just keep an eye on Coindesk news. Hope that helps.

If you are talking cross-border money transfer, in countries like the US you cannot just willy-nilly have an exchange that changes fiat for crypto and vice-versa. In order to sign up for Kraken/Coinbase/etc you have to pass through KYC / AML on-boarding and are under continuos AML monitoring of the size and structure of your transactions. In the original example, the US company buys crypto from an exchange in the US using fiat from a US Bank Account and will transfer that to another exchange off country (in my example it would be a LATAM country). There is a trail of the entire process on the sender (US side). However, it is true that the responsibility and thoroughness of the AML on the other side depends largely on the receiving country(the KYC/AML program requirements of the exchanges in the other side will vary great). Legally and conceptually, it is just like it would happen with transfering Fiat in the traditional way (e.g. once I send you money to your bank in LATAM you can take it out and do whatever you want with it - legit or shady), except with all the fee/speed/etc benefits. The main conceptual difference is how you create liquidity (changing from crypto to fiat) on the other end (i.e. through p2p or through the exchange). Of course the gray area is what happens on the other end, but as a sender you have gone through all the checks and requirements. You even get paperwork at the end of the year and the US exchange will submit suspicious activity reports (if necessary) to the US govt just like a regular bank would do. Totally legal and correct.

They don't even need to be NFTs per se. The idea of blockchain-backed ownership is starting to jump everywhere. There are already a few companies like this: https://fraction.co/

I keep hearing this (healthy) skepticism, but it does lose sight of what is happening in many countries. For a lot of folks (me included) Web3 is about using decentralized blockchains in a web context to reduce problems that arise with control from centralized systems. It makes sense for specific use cases, so let me give you 2.

1) Finance (DeFi). Even for valid (non-criminal) uses cases, there are numerous laws and regulations that translate into crazy fees to do proper crossboder money transfer. I transfer money every month from the US to different countries in LATAM to pay employees, and historically you get screwed with various fees depending on how you structure the transfer (e.g. to the employee directly vs. to an entity in the receiving country that disburses the money to different local employees).

During the past few years I have encountered everything:

- unexpected fees beyond the local transfer fee at the receiving end (that change some times) (hello folks at Interbank!)

- low-fee provider that canceled our account because the TOS said that the service was meant to be used to send money to family and not to employees (hello folks at Xoom!)

- holding of money transferred for a week because of some threshold passed that triggered some AML check (hello folks at BCP!)

- provider that canceled transfer to a particular country for political instability (hello folks at Transferwise!)

- etc etc

All that goes away when you use p2p networks (like the ones from Binance https://p2p.binance.com/en?fiat=CNY&payment=ALL) and stablecoins to transfer money. The fees are low (or sometimes non-existent) and the transfer happens in seconds (vs the hours/days in a traditional system). Literally millions of cross-border dollars get transferred this way every day. Additionally, I hear of other folks who have escaped authoritarian regimes but still have family in those countries where there are strict restrictions to send/receive money. Guess what they are using?

2) Digital Property/Rights: Whether you want to accept it or not, there is an entire market where all kinds of property is being transferred through smart contracts. Sometimes the traditional digital item (say an NFT) has an associated real-world contract attached to it that extends some sort of right/ownership of a physical item in the real world. The rights to these items is being transferred from person to person every day. That market keeps growing, and it is not just "exchanging jpegs" anymore.

For both of these use cases, there are real world scenarios where a central authority has been by-passed for a legitimate transaction. And it happens every day today. The use cases for web3 is not running a "distributed Wordpress instance", but other useful real-world use-cases like these that we are starting to discover.

SEC Comments about this report: https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/gensler-statement-preside...

Random related fact, too, the oldest university in the Americas is San Marcos (Lima, Perú) which was founded in May 12, 1551; 1 year after the history books mark the end of the Aztec civilization.

22 cats. Go with cats.

I understand that many give Robinhood crap because it is not "sophisticated enough" or because of the Gamestop fiasco. Although many startups like to claim that they are "democratizing [x]", I honestly believe they did it. I have many friends that never traded before, and after they got their Robinhood account they feel comfortable enough to do it often. Even myself, who used to only trade a couple of times a year, started with $300 in my Robinhood account a few years back. Now I have at least ~60k that I rotate around in my Robinhood account on a daily/weekly basis. Yes there are other services that I now use or other apps that seems better, but for all intents and purposes, Robinhood did "democratize" trading for me.

The proposed autofree example uses the heap with (unnecessary) preprocesor directives... but the problem is that it is not portable as written, vs simply using the heap like a normal person.

Why would you overcomplicate your life and use something like the autofree example, that is not even portable, if you can use the heap which is simple to understand and do? I understand that if it is a hot function you may run into memory fragmentation/performance issues, but there are some many ways to deal with that with custom allocators if it truly is a problem. This is one of those perfect examples where simple is better IMHO

Peru is the country with the most deaths per capita in the world. It also had a government-sponsored program to give away free Ivermectin most of last year. The region/state with the highest death count in Peru you ask? Ica. The city with the highest death count? Chincha (in Ica). It is also the city and state with the highest use of Ivermectin - mainly because the lab that sold it and the veterinarian that owns that company and promoted its use (millions spent here), lives there.

It did not matter that Merck (the lab that discovered Ivermectin), said to not use it for COVID. Tons of money made and people died. I have never cussed in HNs, but with all due respect F** tha* shi*!

Hi Nelson, maybe you can explain this to me: why so much hate towards what3words? Chris once came to our office to see if there was a fit for us to use their invention. We did not find that it solved a pain point for us, so nothing came out of it... but the amount of rage that I see that they have been accumulating towards the years. Is there a story behind it beyond "I want to do something similar and can implement it, but <patent>?" Thanks in advance

> this site and its newsletter costs about $130 USD a month to run

I have toy site that gets around 100k users a month, with background services like a postgres db... and it costs me under $20 to run. I do everything in CloudRun (serverless) with a managed DB. What in the hell is this person doing?

This "marketing stunt" raised their stock price by 8.95% today because people ran to buy stock since it signaled a changed in strategy. It is not "market manipulation", but I hope somebody gets slapped in the wrist for this.

Yes

Yes. For quick small things.

When I need a to write a small web service, I usually just grab a python micro-framework and do the work. Not much complexity and not a lot of setup required. When I need to do something more elaborate that needs structure because it will get extended over time, I will take my time to setup something like Django... but it would be too much unnecessary work do to that for small web services.

The same applies to front-end.

When I need a few quick HTML pages that need some quick DOM manipulation, I usually just grab jQuery and do what we have been doing for years. Whenever I know that something will get extended over time and needs structure, that is when I take the time to setup React/Redux and all the build scripts necessary to make it work.

Just personal preference, but I am sure I am not alone...

so what is the app? I felt like I read a full blown novel, and the last sentence with the conclusion is missing!

I have OLED screens all over my house - I can never tell if the monitors are on or off unless the screensaver kicks in. 0 regrets spending that money.

How can you be “apolitical” and pay lobbyist to push crypto-friendly govt legislation?

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...

I got another data point that (potentially) supports your claim. Peru here. Highest death per million habitants in the world (not the numbers reported by the Ministry of Health that is artificially reducing the numbers).

In Perú we are (sadly) keeping track of the pandemic by comparing the daily death count from previous years with the one for this years. You can safely assume: - there is no contact tracing - adherence to mask usage is good - social interactions are generally avoided with the usual folks that don't pay attention and an increase in those interactions every week.

These are the "death curves" of every region:

https://imgur.com/a/CWiUPiC

This is what happens when your government does not do anything and pretty much every one gets infected and your healthcare system collapses. You get a high spike in daily deaths and then a sharp drop (Lima is a special case for many reasons - size and geography).

Heard Immunity in every region (except Lima - yet). Seroprevalence studies are on their way...

Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sam n Max made me want to study CS away from my home country. I loved those games as a young teenager. 30 years later I still do...

I would add a note that if you are running in a cluster environment like Kubernetes this won’t work because your containers would be running potentially in different machines. In those scenarios you would need another service just for the locks.