I’m seeing some debate on Deno’s decision to ensure Node compatibility, apparently as it gives up a core value prop of early Deno to try and hit the reset button.
Can someone help me understand what was lost here? Is there no longer a way to use Deno without using the Node ecosystem?
Does anyone remember the “Put a bird on it!” Portlandia sketch? As if putting a cute little bird on something suddenly made it better… my personal running gag with SaaS these days is “Put AI on it!”
This is the trap I fall into. I have had so many amazing colleagues and I want to do right by them. Sometimes it’s been trench camaraderie, sometimes just really great working relationships, but I almost always feel like I owe it to my fellow employees to work hard, do well for the company, etc.
It’s taken me a long time to learn, but that form of loyalty doesn’t equate to employer loyalty.
I’m working on a live voice chat for settling rule disputes during tabletop gaming. It uses OpenAI’s realtime API to allow anyone to call in a “ref”, trained on the rules of the games, to answer questions about the rules.
Thanks for the reference. I generally agree that, from a very high-altitude, it's difficult to know whether New Deal policies shortened the depression given that WWII shook up the US so much. However, there are many things introduced during that time that have had a visceral effect on the average American's quality of life, saved lives, and would be terrible to abandon: the FDIC, the construction of a massive amount of infrastructure, social security, etc.
The electrical and plumbing books are from a series from Home Depot called "1-2-3": "Plumbing 1-2-3" and "Wiring 1-2-3". I love them but some other posters have shared books that look even better; I plan to check them out. The construction book is "Modern Carpentry" by Willis H. Wagner. I can't find the landscaping book - haven't needed that one as much - but in my stack I noticed Reader's Digest's "Home Improvements Manual" which I've also used quite a bit.
I have four books that I got from my dad - one for construction and repairs, one for electrical, one for plumbing, and one for landscaping. They’re in simple English with excellent illustrations. Using those books, I’ve been able to fix/improve pretty much everything in my house for ten years.
It’s far too reductive to compare social media to a drug. Social media participation, for better or worse, is a part of today’s society. I would say you must be very privileged to be able to avoid it. Those of us who can, need to fight to protect people’s rights with something that is all around us, permeating our lives.
I think a better comparison could be a supermarket. Just because they sell cigarettes and alcohol doesn’t mean you can just not go there. You still need groceries.
Lots of people are posting their custom solutions using org-mode, cli tools, vim, etc. There’s a wide world of people out there who don’t customize their environments, and therefore miss out on great improvements to their lives. Let’s make tools for them!
All of the “absurd” spending DOGE cites may seem like a lot of money, but it’s a tiny amount in comparison to the overall budget, and remarkably skewed toward specific, hot button issues like climate change, DEI, etc. Where are the cuts to the $852B military budget, which has been shown for decades as being insanely wasteful? Why isn’t DOGE investigating ways to cut down our $952B in interest payments due in 2025?
Unless the red tape is expensive. The trick is to be smart at striking the balance between reining in spending while not having a paperwork system that costs even more. Setting the limit to $1 doesn’t seem like striking any kind of balance.
I’ve heard these statements before, and I agree with the general sentiment, but I’ve yet to hear a solid set of solutions. Many of these statements are contradictory, or at least hide opposing principles. For instance:
> We are destroying software by no longer caring about backward APIs compatibility.
and
> We are destroying software by always underestimating how hard it is to work with existing complex libraries VS creating our stuff.
I’d say for about 75% of the projects I’ve worked on, choosing an existing complex library over writing something new was due to backward compatibility. I’d say we vastly underestimate how much work is put into to deal with back compat.
I’ve read a lot of articles like this over the past decade, and books, and papers. I agree with most of it: we need to bring technology back “to the people”. But everything I’ve read, including this, has two problems:
1. Consistently, people reminisce about older tech that they loved, and wishing they could have stuff like that again. But the reality is that people like us, on HN, are not the average person. The tools we adored were great to us because we knew how to wield their power and felt empowered to do so. What parts of those applications could the broader population use easily?
2. What should we be using to create personal/folk/situated software? How do we even accomplish this goal? Again, we (HN readers) know the tools and feel empowered. But for the ideas in this article to come to light, many more people need to be empowered to solve their own problems and tailor their tools to their needs. What technologies should they use? I never get a good answer to that one.
You may be speaking from your experience, which is valid, but please don’t extrapolate to everyone. People want and value different things, and the way the US is set up makes it very hard for many to get the kind of environment they would value. I want walkability and density, but not urban high rises, and that kind of place could exist more if we had more non-car infrastructure, as roads force sprawl.
Just a “your mileage may vary” caveat: this doesn’t work for all kids - didn’t work for my eldest and isn’t working for my younger. They’re really stubborn kids - no idea where they get it - and they see the pedals on their bike and put them in their mental model for how it all works. Taking them off, they refuse to try the “scoot & glide” and only actually try to learn once I put the pedals back on.
At first I thought this was going to be a puzzle about getting to a specific number using certain rules for navigating the pad, including the operation buttons. For instance, by pressing one or two buttons in each row from top to bottom, can you get the calculator to display 70?
There are so many incredible ideas, projects, inventions, songs, books, movies, video games, etc. that will never see the light of day because the brilliant person or team who could make it can’t afford to stop working for long enough to create them. Find things that excite you and help them become a reality.
This is meant to show that the housing can be made of wood, but the antennae and electronics still require mounting points via metal or plastic fasteners. The article gives a few reasons why this might be valuable, eg fewer toxins released during burnup, but I see this as an experiment in alternative manufacturing techniques, to see what we might be missing when we assume things like this need to be made out of metal and bolts.
I’m convinced this is the way to go. Rather than imitating commercial fab techniques, let’s find something that works without the toxic chemistry or vacuum chambers, even if it’s janky at first. 3D printers were janky at first too.
This is excellent work and I adore the result, but I can’t help but feel like the effect could have been achieved with crafted texturing. If you look at Sketchfab as often as I do, there are artists achieving this kind of thing purely with textured polygons[0]. Dynamic lighting is lost with this method, but I feel like with an artist and programmer in close collaboration could find a clever way to solve that.
This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifics of things like this enough. It challenges us to think about ideas like this in ways more practical problems cannot.
I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.
It’s an unfortunate byproduct of allowing patents to be bought and sold. Let’s say you had a patent: you worked hard on your invention and you deserve to reap the financial benefits of it. But you do not have the legal resources to protect your right as the inventor. It feels fair and reasonable to me that you can sell your patent to a third party to license and protect as they see fit, so you can reap some financial reward.
Now, how do you make sure that these companies buying patents don’t become trolls? I don’t think it’s fair to require them to use the patent, because that limits who the inventor can sell to. Personally I think the way IP lawsuits are filed and considered needs significant reform.
Don’t conflate doctor/patient confidentiality and data security. If someone broke into an office and stole medical records, that’s not a violation of doctor/patient confidentiality, even if the doctor chose crappy locks on their doors.