M
Ask HN
Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
Doesn't matter what domain and how big or small.
I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it.

Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.

She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.

I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.

She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)

So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)

> I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)

methinks: Calcium is required to make the egg shell. Calcium supplements would help, just in case "Life finds a way".

Funny enough, people often scramble chicken eggs in this case :) I guess enough calcium leeches off into the eggs themselves. Maybe I'll try that tonight.
A beautiful pause in my day reading this - many thanks. Would love to see a photo!
:) Thanks for reading.

No egg this morning yet. But here's some pictures of her! My pretty little Christmas colored bird.

https://imgur.com/a/AZDdvgO

Good luck to both of you!
  • e40
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Do you have two of them?
Seven, if you can believe it! She is the only crimson bellied conure.

I have a peach front conure, two green cheeks, a meyers, a senegal, and a half-meyers-half-senegal. Quite the flock.

Their bonds are criss crossed. The bird laying an egg is peaceful to everyone but not hard bonded. So it is... weird that she is laying an egg, lol.

I got a handheld emulator console as a Christmas gift. Configuring shaders that emulate crt TVs, I realized I had no mental model of how those TVs worked at all.

I’m used to “pixels are three little lights combining rgb colors”, which doesn’t work here, so I went on a rabbit hole and let me tell you, analog TVs are extremely impressive tech.

Getting an electron beam to hit a glass, making the chemicals on it spark, covering it in a “reading motion” for hundreds of lines, and doing that 60 times a second! And the beam is oriented by just careful usage of magnets. It sounds super sci-fi for an already dead, 130 years old technology.

I also learned that my childhood was a lie. Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!

Don't forget how they found a way to squish closed caption information into analog broadcast. The electron beam traces a path on the CRT display by drawing the odd lines from top to bottom (which draws half the image) and then the even lines (the rest of the owl) from top to bottom. While the electron beam is repositioning itself from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen, there is a brief period of time where other data can be transmitted. That's where closed caption data was shoehorned in.
Teletext used the vertical blanking interval too. It consisted of numbered pages of text, each number input on the numpad on the remote control as a form of hypertext. Page after page was transmitted after one-another, repeatedly. It was sometimes used for subtitles, with some pages with a transparent background. Better receivers cached pages so you wouldn't have to wait for its next transmission when going to another page...

Digital television formats adopted the framing from analogue formats and sends the same data in digital form within the vertical blanking interval. Many channels have stopped offering teletext. One network here in Sweden still uses it to deliver news, and I often prefer that format because the articles are concise and distraction-free.

BTW. I was once asked to hack together a system for using data in the vblank period to control relays at a remote site.

Technology Connections does a really good video on this on YouTube
> Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!

Wasn't this the reason behind different versions of the game for PAL and NTSC etc.? So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?

>So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?

That was my assumption as well! But nope, gameplay was coupled to framerate for a surprising range of years.

You can see comparisons on YouTube, check the music of the pal/ntsc version of sonic for the genesis/megadrive.

Apparently it was still happening to some extent during the PSX era. I remember the turn meter bars in FF7 filled very slow, and this explains it.

If you have an original copy of Grim Fandango, the elevator-and-forklift puzzle is impossible without a patch, since the scene moves at (iirc) the processors clock speed, so modern CPUs ran too quickly to make the action possible to solve the puzzle.

This is obviously fixed in the remastered version, though

> Wasn't this the reason behind different versions of the game for PAL and NTSC etc.? So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?

Yes and no. Some games play at a similar speed but some (most if I recall correctly) weren't modified for the PAL market so they play slow and the image is squashed down. Street Fighter II on the SNES (PAL) is a classic example of this.

Damn, Street Fighter 2 on the SNES is literally the first game I remember ever playing. I never knew I was playing an inferior version!
It was simultaneously such a delight and a frustration.

It was a treat to play without having to empty your pockets (where I am it cost the equivalent of 120 arcade credits) but compared to the arcade it wasnt as good as it could have been.

If you had an action replay or a game genie you could use codes to speed it up though.

The vertical resolution was also different. Some games developed for NTSC got black bars, or a silly banner in the PAL version. Many PAL games were not ported for NTSC regions at all.
What other sci fi technology is being lost on us now? I always that the complexity of the local-battery-powered copper-cable telephone exchange system was bonkers. It was the backbone for all our landline calls.
The telephone system also powered the phone, and often worked when the power grid did not.
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
well, not quite with the 50hz thing. They slowed them down to run at 50hz, but they could've rewritten them to work at full speed by dropping frames
I went on a tour of a miso factory today and learned about how it's made!

What surprised me the most was that shiro (white) miso and aka (red) miso are both the same mix of soybeans, salt, and rice malt but fermented for different periods of time. As the miso ferments for longer, its color becomes darker while its flavor becomes milder and more complex. Beyond 3 years of fermentation, you get diminishing returns as its flavor becomes too acidic.

After the tour, we got to sample some of the naturally fermented 3 years old miso, and it was easily the best I've ever had. Most miso you can buy in a grocery store is created through forced fermentation over a few months, so if you ever get a chance to try naturally aged miso I would highly recommend!

Same as white, green, yellow, black, pu erh tea, and all of their different varieties within those categories, it's all the same leaves, just different processes.
Well, not exactly in that there are cultivars and farm differences. In that way it is a little bit like grape wine, where different processing can produce very different wines from the same grapes, but there are also differences in grapes that can come through within a style.
In a way, yes; Wuyi rock oolong will be different than a high mountain Taiwanese oolong. But what most people think of as green vs black tea, they don't realize that it's the same exact plant. Camellia sinensis has only 2 cultivars, var. sinensis (the main one) and var. assamica.
Right. A lot of people also don't realize red and white wines often come from the same red grapes.
This is quite incorrect. Of the top 10 planted wine varietals in the world [0], all ten are red grapes to red wine or white grapes to white wine:

Top grape varieties by planted hectares 1. Cabernet Sauvignon - red grape, red wine. 2. Merlot - red grape, red wine. 3. Tempranillo - red grape, red wine. 4. Airén - white grape, white wine. 5. Chardonnay - white grape, white wine. 6. Syrah - red grape, red wine. 7. Grenache Noir - red grape, red wine. 8. Sauvignon Blanc - white grape, white wine. 9. Pinot Noir - red grape, red wine. 10. Trebbiano Toscano / Ugni Blanc - white grape, white wine.

There are some wines which are produced with red grapes which are not left on skins so there is no impartation of red colour, but they are really not common and the result is most of the time a bit closer to a light rose than what would be considered a white wine. Perhaps the only style that would be semi-frequently encountered are some French Blanc de Noirs wines, various champagne examples being the most common of these. (And of course standard champagne itself, but I am not sure if that is really considered a white wine). Still, rare. It is also not possible to produce a red wine with a white grape, there is no colour in the skin to impart.

[0]: https://londonwinecompetition.com/en/blog/insights-1/how-the...

Thanks for the correction!

This was some trivia I learned long ago, but I guess without enough context for how often that process is done. Clearly, I am not a wine expert...

I live in a condo complex in Florida where the onsite staff at the front desk know me well and they are mostly bilingual and know I’m learning Spanish.

I went up to ask then something and jokingly said “no hablo inglés, ¿Hablas español?” and I was able to carry on a more or less complete conversation with them in Spanish and ask for what I needed without pre rehearsing lines for the first time.

So I found out within the past 24 hours that I can carry on a simple conversation in “survival Spanish”

Now you can say "Me defiendo" when asked how much Spanish you speak :)
Thats awesome. I remember when I finally learned numbers well enough to understand the cashier when I was abroad.
My home office gets up to about 1500ppm of CO2 by the end of the workday, which explains a lot about why I often feel exhausted after the end of a long, uninterrupted session in there (especially when I’m on back to back zoom calls).

I now have several plants in there that are supposed to be especially good at sucking up CO2, and my sensor reports that the current level is slightly below atmospheric ambient CO2 levels.

I also wrote up a blog post about the structure of the Washington state legislature, which began its sixty day session for 2026 earlier this week. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2026/01/how-the-washington...

You might be interested in this: https://youtu.be/ib-D1EelH4Y

It's about a company (https://neoplants.com/ ) which genetically enhances plants and soil with a product you can buy to make them much more efficient at filtering the air. It apparently does work rather than being a placebo.

I went out to the neighborhood plant nursery and bought a spider plant and snake plant, and the CO2 ppm is now down to ambient: somewhere between 395ppm and 410ppm.
Interesting, i would not expect this at all tbh.

I open the window.

Any chance you can share a picture of the size of your room and amount of plants and type of plants?

I have a co2 device which gets red and this triggers the window opening for me asap

I measured my office too, with an Adafruit SCD-30 sensor, it also got to 1500ppm faster than I expected. And it took a long time (12+ minutes with fully open windows) to get it down to an acceptable level again. Certainly compelled me to do that more often.

Surprisingly, i couldn't find any calculator or theoretical approach for estimating this (given room of a certain size, how long does gas need to equilibriate with outside atmospheric composition to within some tolerance, through a hole of certain size)

I wonder if there is a way to integrate this woth home assistant for historical data collection, then use it with other sensors to build a prediction model or some usedul analysis. A bit less principled approach but voild be interesting!
Ikea makes a reasonably priced CO2 and 2.5 micrometer particle air quality monitor. https://www.ikea.com/global/en/newsroom/retail/the-new-smart...

ALPSTUGA

My house stays around 800-1000ppm CO2 all the time The HVAC is poorly designed in my opinion.

That’s exactly the CO2 monitor I have ;)

Actually, the entire new line of Ikea smart home devices are really fantastic. They're all equipped with Thread radios and use Matter, which means they integrate directly into Apple's Home app without needing a separate hub.

And they're dirt cheap. I haven't been able to find another Thread/Matter button for less than $20, but Ikea's is like $6.

Checking it out locally, they go for 30€ here. That's cheap! I remember just a few years ago such products costing 80~100€ if you wanted it in a polished product (not a sensor from China, needing to write code to read it out). Is this a direct CO2 measurement, not one of these that uses VOC as a proxy measurement?
  • tomni
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I was able to find this blog post of a deep-dive into the ALPSTUGA: https://danieldk.eu/Hardware/Smart-Home/IKEA-ALPSTUGA.

The part from the post that answers your question is this:

The sensing platform used is a Sensirion SEN63C, which uses a STCC4 for CO₂ measurements. Unfortunately, this is not an NDIR sensor. Instead it uses less accurate thermal conductivity sensing. This allows building smaller/cheaper sensors, but it depends on the input of the temperature/humidity sensor, because e.g. humidity influences measurements. Also, the sensor relies on the air mixture being 78% N₂, 21% O₂, 0.93% Ar, 400 ppm CO₂ and will stop giving accurate readings when this composition changes (modulo CO₂). The operating conditions are also more limited than most other CO₂ sensors (10–40 °C, 20–80% RH).

From what I could gather and what is also mentioned in the conclusion is that the sensor is fine to get a general feeling of the CO2 trends, but that you're better off getting a better sensor if you care about exact values.

Oh, that's a shame :( Similar to when I bought a TVOC sensor that claimed to have CO2 as well. Until I realized it was eCO2 which is pretty much useless because it just guestimated based on TVOC counts.
Interesting. What hardware do you use to measure this?

I have a Netatmo home device that measures PPM and have been observing the trend lines throughout the day. At some points my flat gets up to about 1400, which the device says is bad, and sometimes it goes down as low as 500. I've noticed a pattern but can't quite connect that pattern to my activity or the surroundings. It starts going up around 4pm, which could be homewards-bound vehicles, but it seems to trend even on weekends when there is lower traffic. Maybe I start breathing differently at these times. I'm quite interested in getting to the bottom of it. Unfortunately I'm west facing so plant use is quite limited.

What is the atmospheric ambient CO2 level? Is that variable based on location?

I've learnt a few things:

- I had my sensor on my work desk which meant the CO2 pooled, and was increased dramatically by my breathing almost directly onto it. Moved the sensor at least 1.5m

- I had the sensor quite low down, where CO2 pools (being heavier), so moved the sensor to eye level

- CO2 seemed to increase when cooking (same room), so while cooking I open the windows and let the warmth flow out of the building

By far the largest impact I’ve observed on my CO2 levels are from the hvac. When the fan is on the levels go down and tend to stay down, so I usually leave it on circulate which runs every ~15 mins (based on the graph structure). I use an SCD30 in the corner opposite to where I sit.

Also important is using a direct CO2 sensor (NDIR or photo acoustic) and not eco2 which can give false positives from other things in the air.

  • footy
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Atmospheric CO2 is currently around 430 ppm. It's minimally variable based on seasonality, think a 15 ppm difference between the lowest and highest points.

It's been a long time since University for me but the standard measurement location is the Mauna (sp?) Loa Observatory in Hawaii, if I recall correctly due to it being the longest-running continuous measurement site.

  • frxx
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Depending on the measurement method and your method of calibration, I'd assume "slightly below atmospheric" is probably just atmospheric. Funnily enough, more CO2 in the blood can actually increase athletic performance and resilience against it is also helping with that. I just open my windows though from time to time.
My issue is that, during winters, the bedroom's CO2 raises to the 2000ppm levels. But I keep all doors open in this (small) apartment and not much changed. It's too cold to keep windows open like we do in the summer and it's nighttime so plants won't help.
do you have 10 plants per square-meter?

it's unlikely that you can add enough to make a big difference. plants are nice, but people often ascribe far more to them than is really happening - have you improved the ventilation too?

https://www.lung.org/blog/houseplants-dont-clean-air

I was going to say the same thing! It’s a simple energy balance: the human body uses about a 100 watts of energy by burning carbohydrates or fats.

Plants would have to fix 100 watts worth of carbohydrates to simply maintain balance. Only a few plants can achieve 5% efficiency, so minimum you’d need 2 kW of light being absorbed by your plants.

That’s a weed grow room, not an office!

Opening the window works well for me.
Wow, my home office is a small box room with no exterior windows (as it's on the inside of the apartment).

I often feel tired at the end of the day and I'd attributed it to just working quite long hours, but maybe it is related to this.

I have started exploring Seneca/stoicism again. Prompted partly by a recent submission here, partly by personal reasons. Instead of consuming other peoples interpretation of stoicism I decided to go as close to the source as feasible for me. I have read Letters from a stoic a number of times before and my copy is filled with highlights, but this time I think I will try to limit myself to one or two letters a day and then really think about them properly.

The first one really hit me hard and prompted me to write out my own thoughts (https://jesperreiche.com/seneca-letter-2/) whether I will keep doing that I am a little unsure. It feels on the border of how personal I want to be/share on my blog.

P.S. I can see the irony in writing about me going to the source instead of consuming other peoples interpretation and then sharing a link to my own interpretation :)

This reminded me of this post (https://www.reddit.com/r/Stoic/comments/1823mip/). I don't really know what stoicism means but that was hilarious.
Haha I apart from both of them relating to stoicism I am not sure there is much connection. But scrolling through some of the comments on reddit sure made me smile - so thanks for that :)
Good read thanks. I totally can relate to the choices problem. It's rather easy with physical books (or was, as we have little room left for even more books ;-0) but ebooks are "dangerous" too.

Regarding cameras, it's harder (and more expensive) to wrangle with gear acquisition syndrome (GAS) but after switching from Canon EOS to Fuji, because the Canon stuff was too heavy when hiking, I managed to restrain myself most of the time. Because the question always is whether my images would become better with different gear or with more trial and error.

I opted for trial and error and eagerly watch a selected number of YouTube channels who almost always show me that I should and can improve myself and not my gear.

Thanks a lot! Yes, I agree that it is easier with physical books although even there I can already see that I may be painting myself into a corner. But ebooks are obviously "worse" in that regard. I loved when I found StandardEbooks.org and Gutenberg - all these classic books for free. But over time I have realized that I have so many of them on my kindle and always seems to find new ones rather than finishing existing.

With regards to cameras, I also came to Fuji although from Nikon. But I agree, the important part is getting better at photography and the better you know your camera the more it can become an extension of yourself.

There is just something very alluring about the daydream of having the new camera and taking those "perfect" images. When in fact nothing is keeping me from going out and shooting those "perfect" images with the camera I already have.

> Instead of consuming other peoples interpretation of stoicism I decided to go as close to the source as feasible for me.

Good for you! Everybody has their own "twist" on Stoicism, and that's fine. You have to find your own twist on it; you have to make it your own.

In my own experience, what is most rewarding and promotes my progress the most, is when I put philosophy into action. Then I get authentic feedback from life about what actually works. It helps me separate mere opinions and good sounding ideas from true insight.

I think you hit the nail on the head here and something else I seem to struggle a bit with. I am very good at reading, thinking, contemplating. But I need to get more out of my head - from lack of better wording. I actually wrote "read less - do more". In my notebook recently. So I could not agree more with what you are saying.
Based on some reading in a study group using both the Hays and Waterfield translations, I'd definitely recommend Waterfield over Hays.
Interesting. I have read quite a few translations of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and also found a clear favorite. But I am actually not even sure which translation of Letters from a Stoic my current book is. I have just always liked the language in it.
Thanks for the writing and for posting about it here! Found some nice photographs and other content that I'll dig more into later. Liking what I've found so far :)
Thank you very much for your kind words. I think that I have finally reconciled with myself that I will primarily be sharing images on my own website and not social media, even though that may mean that very few people see it. So I am glad to hear you saw some and liked them :)
To me, if you read On the Shortness of Life and take it to heart, you would delete your blog as a waste of time and mental energy.
I get your point. But it depends on how you read it. If I get joy out of writing then I would not consider that a waste :)
Thank you for sharing. The choices piece hit home for me. Forwarded this to friends.
Thank you very much.
I hope you get more out of it than I did. I don't recall which of Seneca's work I read several years ago, but to me it was ... meh?

Some of the stuff I strongly agreed with, but I didn't derive value because I already had the mindset. Other stuff I disagreed with, and the book didn't really convince me. Then there was the stuff in between.

Overall, it felt like something you or I could have written - I didn't see something insightful that enlightened me.

Not to take away from your essay, which I thoroughly agree with :-)

  • dzink
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Make your own. Your mental health loves you when you come up with stuff. Humanity has generated so much content and none of us have the lifetime to consume it all, but that shouldn't stop you from making your own any chance you get.

Make music - you don't need an instrument if you can whistle. Make stories - just say them to a recorder or your kids or write them down. Make food experiments - nothing will please your taste-buds more than listening to them and iterating on ways to get better. Make your own apps or experiences - with AI or by hand, your ideas may be surprising and worthwhile. Knit or make your own clothes, toys, wearable tech. Design your own 3D objects and maybe print them or animate them.

We know that workouts lead to endorphins for the body, but the brain version of that is not only enjoyable but also can be scaled to be enjoyed by other humans too sometimes. Don't go through life without trying your own things.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Some more ideas:

DIY you car service and wash

DIY house improvements and fixes

Cook. Make bread

Fix old electronics/appliances

Surströmming, the Swedish can of fermented fish, is strongly recommended to be punctured while submerged in tap water. It is not pasteurized and is actively fermenting in storage, and the content will spray around if opened under atmospheric conditions.

When transported on cargo flights, they are double packed as cans in a barrel in a crate, and considered UN classified "miscellaneous dangerous goods" with identification number UN3334 "Aviation regulated liquid, n.o.s." with accompanying scary(albeit monochromatic) warning stickers, if at all accepted. When transported on ocean going vessels, they are often required to be in its own shipping container, again double packaged and correctly labeled.

reminds me ... I opened a can of Illy coffee today. It has a big red warning saying similar under pressure warning. I went...."pfhhh, how much pressure could be in this little can?" and it went ba-boom, coffee grounds all over me and my kitchen. I will heed the Sustromming warning if I ever come across a tin
You forgot to mention that it is actually quite delicous.
I hope you didn't find that first paragraph out the hard way today!
Haha, no, I just came across these trivia... it scares me more than it intrigues me :p
It is also mostly eaten outdoors :)
Is it even good?
  • 8note
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
its an acquired taste.

good when you pair it with the right stuff - dill, capers, etc and on kinda neutral crackers

The origins of Port and Starboard on ships.

Chosen to be independent of a mariners orientation.

Starboard - most sailors were right handed and the steering oar was placed on the right. Star = steer. Board = side of boat.

Port - as steering oars got bigger, boats tended to dock on the left hand side. This became to be known as “lardboard” which sounded too much like starboard, so it was changed to “Port” (as in the side typically facing the port side.

In French, there is babord and tribord. The mnemonic is ba-tri, or “battery”.
Oh I didn't know this one. For me the mnemonic was " 'ba' has an 'a' like 'gauche' (left), and 'tri' has an 'i' like 'droite' (right)".
In Spanish, it's babor and estribor. My personal mnemonic (me and most people being right-handed) is that the estribo (the stirrup, but I always though it was the reins - TIL) in a horse go on the right hand and the boba hand (the clumsy hand) is the left one.
In German it is Steuerbord und Backbord. And my mnemonic is the "r" in Steuerbord = the "r" in right hand side (when looking to the bow that is).
Both likely come from (middle) dutch bakboord (the side of your back) facing the stierboord (the side with the steering oar) . Stierboord became estribord then tribord. Its more explicit in modern german and dutch.
A fun mnemonic I use to remember port is to the left is "lp unix command = line printer = left to port".
I just remember that port is four letters and left is four letters. :)
I just remember that left and port have the same number of letters.
I've learned that being truthful in your resume as a SWE doesn't work anymore. I've had nearly 0 response rate to my applications, even if I was nearly a perfect match. Dude that we fired a while ago for being abysmally bad and non-productive gets interviews, raises and just got into ycombinator backed company by making up 75% of his resume(which I saw). We need a reset, this is getting ridiculous.
Same general experience. I have seen friends and former coworkers who I know are mediocre devs but good at talking themselves up get placed multiple times this year.

I've secured a single interview, company seemed like a great fit. System level Go apps, my bread and butter. No longer have to split my time with frontend? The dream.

On round 2 their CTO basically shut me down 2 minutes in saying they're unwilling to do any sort of training and only looking for existing experts in their very specific niche. In round 1 the interviewer told me I seemed like a very good candidate, very positive about my experience. Said they'd been looking for a long while and I was one of the most experienced Go backend developers they'd interviewed. Round 1 was frankly one of the most positive interviews I'd ever had. Got extreme whiplash as round 2 was cut short at about the ten minute mark.

I don't know for sure but I think a lot of companies are looking for an absolute Cinderella given the glut in applications. I don't think that guys going to find her.

It's been a couple months now, their job posting is still up. I'd have been well up to speed and making meaningful contributions by now.

  • geuis
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Sounds like you could use some resume review help. And I'm not talking about bs AI linkedin level "resume review". I mean some review from someone who's been in the industry for a while. There's a way to contact me via my profile. If you can find that I'll try to help you out.
On a recent trip to Costa Rica, I discovered "Rice and Beans," which is not Gallo Pinto, but a Caribbean-influenced dish made principally of white rice, red kidney beans, coconut milk, and thyme. The dish name is in quotes because it's really the English words "Rice and Beans." It's marvelous, and I couldn't wait to try making it myself at home. Unfortunately, so far, it's been a mushy flavorless mess. I'll try a third go tomorrow. What I have so far:

- soften diced yellow onion and green bell pepper in 1 tbsp coconut oil

- toss in 3 minced garlic cloves

- toast 1.5 cups dry rinsed white rice in the mix

- pour in 1 can coconut milk

- add 1 can black beans (still looking for red beans)

- add lots of fresh thyme

- put in 1 whole habanero (still looking for Panamanian pepper)

- add 1 tsp salt

- add 1 can chicken broth

- if you have it, add a tbsp of Linzo sauce

Then simmer until the rice is cooked.

Next time I'm going to try with fresh coconut milk straight from a real coconut. That's what I explored today: how to make coconut milk.

Would appreciate advice on improving the recipe.

Late edit: on the plane back from CR I watched The Thinking Game, a documentary about DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis. Recommended.

I really miss gallo pinto. I went to Costa Rica in 2009, and since then, nothing has been the same (in NYC).

It's mind-boggling that such a simple recipe can be so good in CR but so bad over here! I hear there are some Costa Rican restaurants in Paterson, NJ, but I haven't had the chance to check yet.

I also have fond memories of gallo pinto in Costa Rica from 1997 but when I describe it to family they just look at me blankly in mild disgust. Would love to know what the secret sauce is.
Good luck on your quest. Part of the issue might be lack of good ingredients. I watched a depressing YouTube video the other day about why US restaurant prices are so high but the food is uniform and uniformly bleh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RsJ5a_QVVA). The TL;DR is (1) Sysco and US Foods control most of the supply chain to restaurants, (2) they've raised prices aggressively since the pandemic, and (3) listeria and salmonella outbreaks have caused chains like Chipotle to stop sourcing ingredients locally, preferring factory-prepped food from Sysco et al, further increasing their dominance. This means it's increasingly difficult for even your neighborhood hole-in-the-wall restaurant to find local, fresh, authentic ingredients.
I don’t know specifics of this dish but usually you want to cook everything else first and only add in the rice for the last 10 mins so it stays firm. The choice of rice matters too, basmati tends to stay separate. Also wash the rice first so excess starches get drained off.
I'll give that a try. Some recipes prepare the beans separately from scratch, and then pour the toasted rice into that already-seasoned liquid mixture.

I'll pick up some basmati today, during Day Three of the local Panamanian chili pepper search.

Good luck on your pepper search! Also you probably want to have a 1.75:1 water:rice ratio in the pot when you add it in and it’s important to cover the top for the rice to fluff up. You don’t want a tight seal just a plate loosely covering the top so some steam can escape. Finally for some real flavor in these dishes you might want to use bouillon instead of the broth and add a good amount of it or it’s going to be bland. You can also skip the salt once you do that.

Usually rice and bean type dishes always go with something on the side so you should probably have another protein/meat dish on the side to properly appreciate the dish. Maybe ladle some of the juices that come off the protein over the rice when you eat it.

Thanks! I did notice the loose lid on some of the videos I watched.

I absolutely have my plantain and chicken game down. Butter and a little brown sugar for the plantains, cumin/garlic/black pepper/lime juice for the brined chicken breast. And extra Lizano sauce always helps.

This is really interesting as it more or less sounds like the recipe for Jamaican "rice and peas" which is delicious and very easy to make. This recipe (minus the bacon, which has no place in rice and peas imo) is a solid easy entry recipe so might be useful: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/oct/05/how-to-make-ric...

happy cooking and eating!

Thanks! I'm following that recipe right now. Already had the beans soaking overnight, so it's perfect timing.

Update: this recipe has the desired consistency (though I switched to basmati rice, so that's another factor). I had some emergency lard in the refrigerator as a bacon substitute, and that helps a lot. I'm still struggling with capturing a strong coconut taste; I used canned milk, because the fresh coconut I got is a white coconut, so the meat wasn't very flavorful, and I didn't end up using it. The journey continues.

Ahh we’re getting there! If it’s more coconuty you need then I’d suggest seeing if you can get coconut cream where you are. Usually comes in a tin but sometimes carton. Make sure it’s 100% coconut. Then you can experiment with adding a dollop or two during cooking.
Canned beans are already cooked, so add them at the end to heat through. Or, start from dried beans, but it takes experimentation to get them to the desired texture.
Starting with red beans from scratch is on my list. I was hoping to get 80% of the taste with 20% of the effort -- seems like a simple enough dish, after all -- but last night I was watching a video of a guy making his own coconut oil (not just milk) from fresh coconuts, and it's clear I'm going off the deep end.
  • ilinx
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.

I also recently learned that you can get ancient coins for very little money if you don’t care about resale value or need them to be in pristine condition. I bought some coins from kingdoms that I’d never heard of. Many are thousands of years old! It’s fun holding a piece of history like that.

> I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.

Oooh, thats a good one. Next read the Architects paradox, Why Greatness cannot be planned and Understanding Variation and your views of the world will be forever altered. Or pick up "Architecture Modernization" by Nick Tune if you want more tools to do stuff and if you do not want to achieve enligntenment.

_____

Where did you acquire cheap ancient coins? ebay? May be cool to get some for my dnd group

  • ilinx
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Thanks for the recommendations! I’m actually getting to the end and wondered where to go next. Perfect timing! I’ll go ahead and order those today :).

> Where did you acquire cheap ancient coins? ebay? May be cool to get some for my dnd group

I bought most of mine on VCoins. The few I bought weren’t certified or anything, but they have lots of very well established sellers. I got a few bronze and silver coins from the Middle East and India. They were in good shape at about $10-20 US (plus international shipping). I also got some nicer Byzantine and Roman coins in the $50 US price range. I tried to group my orders from each seller to save on shipping. So far everything I’ve gotten is exactly as pictured, and the transactions have been very smooth. I got a couple more from a local dealer. The prices were a bit higher, but he was a lot of fun to talk to, which more than makes up for the price difference.

Ancient coin collecting is an awesome hobby! I have one that scholars think was made by / designed by Pythagoras himself. For a few hundred bucks!

Recently I learned that only 3% of Latin works from 1450-1700 (including renaissance and scientific revolution) have been translated. Secondrenaissance.ai

No way

At this point just learn latin

Latin isn't terribly hard to learn, and it is surprisingly easy to read "technical" documents in Latin; because once you learn the terms the other parts are relatively basic.
Declensions seem very extensive and unintuitive to learn, like they had a completely different structure than modern languages (verbs adjective noun articles)
Getting declensions right is a pain when trying to write Latin, but of reading it you can often just ignore them entirely and work it out from context.

Of course you have to basically memorize the common things but those are all non-standard anyway.

Are you sure you are actually understanding the subtleties? I can definitely read latin and work out what is meant. But when I read my native languages, I can tell that there's A LOT of meaning hidden in subtleties that I would definitely lose if I were to analyze sentences only through etymological meaning of each independent word, to say nothing of the pain of having to parse ambigueties:

e.g:

Ambigueties: "Defended Warrior" - "Warrior Defends" / "Bellator defendit" - "Bellator defensus"

Subtleties: - "Defense! Defense!" "Defend! Defend!" (Basketball vs war)

- "No good", bad? Or bad/neutral?

- "Do you take me for a fool" / "Do you think I'm dumb?" (Accusation of cheating vs Earnest)

That's not to say you don't have the tools to derive meaning from context and parse ambigueties, but if you are simultaneously parsing syntactic ambigueties, then you have much less energies to parse semantic ambigueties and to try to work out what idiomatic phrases would have meant.

And the effect is multiplicative, if you have 2 declensions you don't remember, you have 4 combinations to parse. Multiply that by 2 possible meanings of the phrase (or more) and you have 8 meanings ( or more).

Sure, you can read somewhat, but I'd be skeptical as to how much you can understand what you are reading, sure it's more than chinese since we share a lot of roots, but there's still a lot of meaning that is missed, and knowing declensions is like level 1, it doesn't guarantee you will understand latin either.

Yes, there's tons of subtleties (my Latin is mostly relegated to philosophical and theological texts, not known for unsubtle clear language!) - but they're usually restricted to the document and one or two for each given "phrase".

You become somewhat of a tokenizer and realize what the token means and can parse that way.

It's not day-1 wheelock and can read, but it's way sooner than "I can fluently ask Caesar to make me a hamburger down by the docks."

Not sure what you mean, all the Romance languages are derived from Latin. German, Russian and a lot of languages have cases.

The tough part is having to memorize feminine/masculine/neutral genders + the million cases for how they transform. Genders seem completely useless, Im curious as to why they developed so extensively in language at all.

Right, and we descend from amphibians, but we diverged quite a lot.

I took a look into german, it seems that their case system is much more stable than latin, based on suffixes mostly, and most words having the same form for many cases.

Why genders or specific declensions exist? Being a native spanish speaker I can say:

- Error correcting code: If a gender or number doesn't match, you can reparse what you heard, or ask for clarification.

- Proof of consistent thought: Forces to think ahead in sentences, you can't just make things up as you go, if you used an article early in a sentence it's because you already know what you are referring to. If someone can't even match their genders or numbers, you can pretty much discard what they are saying, or surmise they are intoxicated. Consider how basic autopredict would fail and instantly be detected in spanish, while not necessarily so in english.

As for latin declensions: - Classism: I don't think the purpose of language is always to increase communication, I think that a high bar for communicating was placed, no doubt there existed simpler languages that could have reached more penetration, but I believe that the incredible amount of cases serves as a test of memorization, a display of mental virtue which one must pass through in order to be worthy of communicating. It would not doubt be a more extreme form of proof of consistent thought, but I imagine it would be much more notable, it would be easy for a roman citizen to detect a non citizen or a slave by how they talk based on their lack of schooling, maybe they couldn't even form complete sentences to collude, they could just be limited to saying yes/no.

My native language is Armenian which also has cases, no definite word order, and word endings, but no genders. I think cases are great. Latin sucks cause it has 3 genders and neuter has like 3 different forms, each changing the word endings. The system overall is great, its the inconsistency that makes it difficult. In english, you still have to denote the intent behind the decelerations somehow.

https://latindiscussion.org/attachments/declensions-1-jpg.24...

To everything else you said: I think language develops more naturally without such intent.

> I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.

Because they didn't take advice from that book or because they DID take advice from that book?

  • ilinx
  • ·
  • 20 hours ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
The former. I didn’t realize how few of my projects have even had an intentional architecture. So often they go from feature designs to mockups to tickets to code without any real discussion about how the pieces fit together. There’s certainly never been an attempt to create a common “language” that is shared across the org. On a project half the company might refer to a catalog item as a “product”, and their definition may or may not align with what another team refers to as an “item”. I’m starting to understand that situations like that are why everything gets so complicated.
Curious what have been the main insights you've gotten from the book around what causes hard to maintain projects?
Any recommendations on where to acquire?
  • ilinx
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I buy mine from VCoins. They’re pretty inexpensive if you don’t need them certified or anything, and many sellers are very above board and professional.
I learned about this book / concept: Tools for Conviviality [0]:

> Illich proposes the idea of a 'convivial tool', one which allows its user to exercise their human autonomy and creativity.

This came up as I was reading about UX / UI design and trying to understand the fundamentals of how to increase human autonomy. Although my key takeaway is a bit shallow at the moment, mostly focused on applying this map towards existing tools in order to try to identify ways in which they can be modified and improved to maximize autonomy.

The Wikipedia article also references this concept of radical monopoly:

> Tools for Conviviality also introduced Illich's idea of a 'radical monopoly', which describes a technology or service which becomes so exceptionally dominant that even with multiple providers, its users are excluded from society without access to the product.

Which has extended to me wondering about what the world will look like as people are increasingly pushed to use LLMs or other AI tools in more and more interactions. And in particular, what actions can or should be taken to maximize human well-being.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality

It wasn't literally today, but about 2 days ago I discovered the -H (and --host) arguments to systemctl. These allow you to pass a hostname of a remote server, so you can use systemctl to manage systemd services on remote machines. It layers over ssh, so the cleanest way to do it is to have passwordless ssh with certificates set up to the remote host. If you do, running systemctl commands remotely is totally seamless.

https://www.tecmint.com/control-systemd-services-on-remote-l...

What's the advantage to

  systemctl --host foo status httpd.service
vs

  ssh -t foo systemctl status httpd.service

?
> What's the advantage to ...

For me personally, I'd say "not much". I'm used to using the latter form, and it's fine. But I will say that now that I know about this, I see using it in scenarios where I'm running a lot of systemctl commands over and over again in close proximity and have the "muscle memory" of typing "systemctl" more in mind.

For example, when working with a new service that isn't quite working right yet, and doing many iterations of:

    $> systemctl start something.service
    $> systemctl status something.service
    $> journalctl -xeu something.service
    $> emacs whatever
    $> systemctl start something.service
    $> systemctl status something.service
    lather, rinse, repeat
Especially if I'm testing on my laptop AND a remote deployment, I think it's easier from a cognitive viewpoint to always "think systemctl" instead of having to "think systemctl" sometimes and "think ssh systemctl" in others.

To be fair though, it's all a pretty minor point. But I do think it's cool that systemctl has that option. shrug

But that seems worse? If all your commands are systemctl, then you just have to ^p and edit/rerun, but there isn't a `systemctl $EDITOR /some/file`, so you'll have to ssh to run emacs (or use TRAMP, if using emacs), at which point you might as well just have a shell on the other end and do everything without having to tack --host onto your commands
I don't know. Maybe. It seems like something that could be handy, but I don't yet know how much I'll wind up using it. For what it's worth, I was working on a scenario exactly like this earlier tonight, and I wound up just ssh'ing into a shell on the remote box to do stuff. But that might just be inertia from being used to doing that, or maybe it was because I had a lot of other stuff to do on that box at the same time...
Was wondering the same. "Do one thing and do it well" philosophy...

If I want to run remote commands, I know how to do that already (namely, as you've shown), why learn to use a new tool for it? It's like these options to tar for compression: if I want to have a gzipped tar I'll run the tar c /sdcard output through |gzip thank you very much! (and drop in zstd instead)

I found out today that the location header of an HTTP redirect can be a tel:+ URI and phone's will actually ask you whether you want to call that number.
Links can have that as their href and it will also work as you'd expect. It's the telephone equivalent of the more well-known mailto: scheme
  • econ
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Now we should add a ?message= query string to be read out loud in the users voice.
Did you know that you can assign arbitrary programs (protocol handlers) to arbitrary protocols?
  • kulor
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
We've recently been without water in the UK for 5 days (water company failings). I've come to appreciate mains water and how its utility is hard felt by omission for toilets, washing & cleaning. Immensely grateful to have it back now.
I was reminded of the US Constitution's 10th amendment and reading some of the history around it.

> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Very relevant to what's going on today with National Guard and ICE deployments.

https://www.axios.com/2026/01/14/10th-amendment-ice-trump-il... (or please google whatever source you find reliable about the topic)

Also related and worth a read, I think, is the Supreme Court case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). The content of the dispute is different, as it involves the President seizing private property, but it is (one of?) the seminal cases regarding the scope of presidential powers. Justice Jackson’s concurring opinion is, at least for now, considered the best articulation of when the President may take unilateral action.
I'm doing PHP for the first time in years. I needed a function that returns the date of last week's Monday. Turns out PHP has a funky date querying language. I can just do: $today->modify('monday last week'). Makes me happy.
The relative date formats are super useful. It can get a bit confusing when there's timezones involved though.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.formats.php#datetime....

[It has been (1) days since the last time that I needed strtotime]

Don't know how to do this without PHP, so I actually use it on the shell inline between a bunch of Bash. I assume that's the same function with new syntactic sugar

PHP is always there for you.
PHP is just awesome.
Right? I don't do much web dev, but now that I do, I don't see why I'd use anything else.
I found 2 super cool blogs today, and spent most of my time digging into it

For understanding how internet works https://how-did-i-get-here.net/

How a computer runs our code (or anything in genral) https://cpu.land/

Also spent some time on reading about E2EE encryption because of some blog on HN I think :)

Thank you for this. Wish I have had this 25 years ago!
Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.
I was digging around my home state of Indiana's marriage records from the 1800s as part of my ongoing genealogy hobby when I came across the absolutely brilliant way they indexed information. The marriages were recorded sequentially, and that index number was written in special alphabetically tagged pages with the grooms surname and the page number. The brides surname was used as well.

Generally a new book was stared in each county each year.

So, even if there were an error in the indexing, generally you could find a record in 3 operations, doing an exhaustive search was quite unlikely.

  • dzink
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
It was the killer app for personal computers as well. From Lotus123 to my family's small business in a tiny country that could only afford a computer in 92 for the business.
Indeed. That's why I am doubtful about LLMs, they just aren't doing something particularly well or solving a basic problem. No one in their right mind would let an LLM do their accounting. Just today I was looking something up and that AI summary was just so wrong. How can I trust it with anything important?
You can't judge AI in general and LLMs in particular by the abysmal Google summaries.
Any titles or resources you have found particularly interesting?
Warning: opening a can of worms. Ann Blair is a great source on general, but there are so many facets to this topic here's a list that I have read or am going to read.

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen * The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin * Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair * Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann * Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design * Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare * Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski * A System for Writing by Bob Doto * Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte * Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan * Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini * The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson * How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens * Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene * Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern * The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen * The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul * Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari * Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo * Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle * How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess * A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham * The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll * The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles * Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas * The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon * The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales * Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser * Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser * Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet * Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by Harold Billings. * The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller * The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither * The Oxford Handbook of Expertise * Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont * Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * What is a Document by Michael Buckland * The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair * Make Better Documents by Anil Dash * A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi * The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams * Information by Anthony Grafton * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann * Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire * Living in Information by Jorge Arango * How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos * Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos * Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango * Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)

Wow, I've had an interest in the history of note-taking but that is a huge list. Have you read all those books? Do you have a top 5?
Yeah, this subject is a bit of a rabbit hole. I've read about half of the so far. That's my list of sources from those that I have so far.

I would say start with:

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen (This is a fast micro history that hits the highlights.)

* Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair (She is a scholar that has a lot on the subject.)

* Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini (This is a collection of pretty deep essays.)

* Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski (This is about the development of paper-based databases.)

Thanks for taking the time, I appreciate it. If you write anything on the topic I'd be interested in reading it.
My day just started but I found out that when I type a message in a MS Teams chat open in Chrome in Mac OS there are three separate independent spell checkers fighting to twist my meaning.

Sorry, no positive news yet. But it's only noon.

  • elric
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I too am actively fighting the Teams spellcheck and autocorrect garbage. I can't seem to turn it off permanently, every time I log in again it switches itself on again. It refuses to understand that I speak multiple languages, and that no, I do not ever want this shitty tool to change words as I'm typing.

Another classical case of MS not understanding consent, I guess?

> Another classical case of MS not understanding consent, I guess?

Not sure if Apple is better in this respect, with the "helpers" at least.

For MS, this job only switched to MS from Google less than a month ago but I could whine about new annoyances for 4-5 more paragraphs. And before using it, I thought Google is too enterprise oriented and getting in the way of getting work done. Compared to Slack. But not compared to MS.

> Not sure if Apple is better in this respect, with the "helpers" at least.

Since I posted that, I got a popup trying to trick me into upgrading to Mac OS 26 again. I thought I had the workaround to get rid of the idiotic popups applied, had to apply it again.

I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector, so now the cable needs to be male-male. After searching online for hours, I believe that is impossible to find as everyone only sells male-female cables.

I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.

I've recently been modernizing an old milling machine, and learned that for most types making your own cables is not that hard. The one painful thing is that there are a zillion tools involved for the different types of crimps and terminations.
I had a great euphoric epiphany feeling today. Doesn't come along too often, will celebrate with a nice glass of wine :)

Am doing data engineering for some big data (yeah, big enough) and thinking about efficiency of data enrichment. There's this classic trilemma with data enrichment where you can have good write efficiency, good read efficiency and/or good storage cost, pick two.

E.g. you have a 1TB table and you want to add a column that, say, will take 1GB to store.

You can create a new table that is 1.1TB and then delete the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and often breaks how normal data lake orchestration works.

You can create a new wide table that is 1.1TB and keep it along side the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and expensive to store.

You can create a narrow companion table that has just a join key and 1GB of data. This is efficient to write and store, but inefficient to query when you force all users to do joins on read.

And I've come up with a cunning forth way where you write a narrow table and read a wide table so its literally best of all worlds! Kinda staggering :) Still on a high.

Might actually be a conference paper, which is new territory for me. Lets see :)

/off dancing

Sounds off to me tbh.

Were your table is stored shouldn't matter that much if you have proper indezes which you need and if you change anything, your db is rebuilding the indezes anyway

You mean you discovered parallel arrays?
specifically I've discovered how to 'trick' mainstream cloud storage and mainstream query engines using mainstream table formats how to read parallel arrays that are stored outside the table without using a classic join and treat them as new columns or schema evolution. It'll work on spark, bigquery etc.
Whats a good place to see parallel arrays defined. I have no data lake expetience. Know how relational db works.
I mean,

    Table1 = {"col1": [1,2,3]}
    Table2 = {"epiphany": [1,1,1]}
    for i, r in enumerate(Table1["col1"]):
      print(r, Table2["epiphany"][i])
He's really happy he found this (Edit: actually it seems like Chang She talked about this while discussing the Lance data format[1]@12:00 in 2024 at a conference calling it "the fourth way") and will represent this in a conference.

[1] https://youtu.be/9O2pfXkCDmU?si=IheQl6rAiB852elv

Seriously, this is not what big data does today. Distributed query engines don't have the primitives to zip through two tables and treat them as column groups of the same wider logical table. There's a new kid on the block called LanceDB that has some of the same features but is aiming for different use-cases. My trick retrofits vertical partitioning into mainstream data lake stuff. It's generic and works on the tech stack my company uses but would also work on all the mainstream alternative stacks. Slightly slower on AWS. But anyway. I guess HN just wants to see an industrial track paper.
Why a paper? A repo should do the trick.
That code is for in memory data right? I see no storage access.

What is really happening? Are these streaming off 2 servers and zipped into 1. Is this just columnar storage or something else?

  • anonu
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
look into vector databases. for most representations, a column is just another file on disk
  • aqula
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Talking to insurance agents I realised, they don't bother to read the policy documents and have a very superficial knowledge of the policies they are selling. You can glean lot more information feeding the docs to an LLM and asking questions.
Today I learned about the difference betweeen "preconnect" and "dns-prefetch": https://web.dev/articles/preconnect-and-dns-prefetch

I have thought that they were the same...

In terms of similarities, they are both attempts to improve "perceived page speed" that actually decrease page speed or encourgae practices that decrease page speed

For example, injecting ads and tracking into web pages via connections to third party servers. This is not a practice that increases page speed

If I am not mistaken, "web.dev" is operated by an ad services company

As a web user, not a "web developer", I use clients that do not "support" these "features". For me, YMMV, this makes information retrieval from the www much faster and more resource-efficient than if I tried to use clients that do, such as the so-called "modern" browser

There are also privacy and security implications associated with choice of client, however these are not the primary reason I choose clients other than the so-called "modern" browser

The first thing your agent needs to know every time it wakes up is where it is.

“This codebase is health care SaaS. Compliance is mandatory at all times.”

Easy. Makes a huge difference.

Also, the collective noun for a group of agents is a bungle of agents.

Was reading about version control history and found out Git went from first commit to self-hosting in like a week. Linus was just mad about the BitKeeper licensing thing and hammered it out. Not some grand architecture - just "screw this, I'll do it myself." And somehow that became... everything. Wild.
  • e40
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I was monitoring the linux kernel mailing list when this happened. Wild times. It seemed then that something special was happening.
Oh wow, you were following the mailing list when it happened? That must've been entertaining.

Did it feel significant at the time or just like another "Linus is pissed and building something" moment?

  • e40
  • ·
  • 1 day ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I definitely felt like I was watching something unusual and special. Watching it go from "I have this idea" to "I'm hosting the kernel on it" was insanely cool.
Kind of wild to think the version control system I use every day was built before I could even walk. Really appreciate you sharing that firsthand context, you don’t usually get that kind of perspective.

I also found your Truth and Fascism piece on your site, and the correspondence vs. performative truth idea really clicked for me. The way it talks about institutions feels pretty universal — different forms, same power game, no matter the country.

  • dang
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I've been exploring the origins of the 'relational turn' in psychoanalysis that began after WWII and ramped up in the 1970s. Psychoanalysis got vastly more interesting after Freud and I had no idea!
Nice! What are you reading?
  • dang
  • ·
  • 14 hours ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I'm currently reading a lot of Robert Langs, who was a big deal in the 70s but now seems largely forgotten.

Besides that, Winnicott, Bion (not that I understand him), some Thomas Ogden, a whole lot of Harold Searles, a bit of Bollas, Linda Hopkins's incredible biography of Masud Khan, other stuff I'm forgetting right now.

Where do your interests lie?

[flagged]
I'm exploring adding a firewall to my home network to detect if apps are using my network as residential proxy.

My daughter likes to install random games on iOS that have been advertised to her on other apps, and I wonder if some of those work as residential proxy behind the scenes.

I once installed a private DNS with advertising block lists on a home network level. My SO was not amused, as her Android based games with "watch an advertisement for ingame credits" now did not work anymore.

Nowadays only the TV sets and my own devices are set to use this (pihole) DNS server. So that I can at least watch Disney+ without ads.

Yes, I already run Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi at home, but I had to disable it due to complaints.
I’ve been slowing crunching through Math for Deep Learning, so spent a fair amount of time looking at Hessian matrices + second order optimisation. I’ve been slowly reading this book for a year, so stopping to do most of the math by hand each time. One chapter to go!

Then I was sick all last week, so ended up down a rabbit hole about the current card collecting bubble (right word?). Super interesting.

When you use a microscope to magnify something, the objective (magnifying lens) is literally taking the Fourier transform of the image. The optical system recovers up to a limiting frequency, determining the spatial resolution of the image.
Gotta say, I assumed this is some sort of virtual/imaginary thing, but it seems like there's a point in the optical system where if we placed a screen, we'd see the FT of the image coming in! And before we had digital image processing people used to place masks there to filter out low frequency or high frequency details in the image. Which is absolutely insane and I have no comprehension of how the physics works out!
https://www.youtube.com/user/huygensoptics is the YouTube channel for this sort of thing. Set aside some time, you'll be there a while.
That running and taking cold showers really do make me more focused! And that i will have to be the one that fixes my life and builds my future. Deep, i know
The company I work for is rather slow in adopting AI-based tooling. Recently, I discovered that our Databricks instance exposes an API endpoint that provides access to a wide range of LLMs. So I built a small local Streamlit-based chat app that lets me switch models within a conversation, add or remove files from the context, and clean up dead ends. It actually works much better than the Microsoft Copilot app we’re officially supposed to use.
I had some eye strain and think it is because my eye muscles are overused. A doctor told me the muscles in the eye are flat, like tapes, and that I would not feel a muscle ache. I noticed the strain when I focus on different points quickly. I started to pay attention to how I move my eyes and realized I read a lot of text while scrolling, for example reading X posts on mobile while scanning the text at the same time.

Yesterday I was reminded of “Rapid Serial Visual Presentation” for speed reading, where the words are presented so you do not have to move your eyes. I am currently trying it out with a Chrome extension called SwiftRead. I set the text size so it fits into my fovea area. I used a fovea detector website I saw on HN a while ago: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM (make the pattern full screen, then you can see the size of your fovea).

I also learned that I can reduce some of the strain by moving my head more toward the things I am looking at on the screen.

  • vlod
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Maybe go outside for a walk and look at nature? give your eyes a rest. (Assuming your working too hard).

Really don't want to f.up your eyes!

  • jasfi
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Try Lutein (20mg).
That someone created a new country recently called Verdis, with a population of about 400.

I was planning a hostile takeover, figuring how hard could it be with these guys, until I found out Croatia already did that.

  • dizhn
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
How hard could it be to take over Croatia? You should follow your dreams.
Learned some turn around licks from Freddie King's side tracked, and played them over and over on a blues backing track.

I've been playing guitar for a long time, but rhythm wise, it took time to click. I'm much better at feeling the pulse, and starting and ending licks at the right time in the bar.

  • hidd
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Never expected to see Freddie King mentioned on HN! What a great performer.
  • AdamN
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I used RfP (Request for Payment) today for the first time. It was ~11k USD between IBKR and Chase and the transfer was instant with verification on both sides. It's interesting to see the evolution of payments in the US moving so quickly over the past few years (FedNOW, etc...)
Wait, can't you do that already?!

I'm in my 30s but we've had pretty much instant payments as long as I've had a bank account (20+ years) in the UK.

  • malyk
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Not in the US. It’s kinda why paypal, venmo, zelle exist. Filling a gap. Our banking system is quite backwards.
Now try getting mobile signal on most of the underground, something every other metro in the world has had for 20+ years
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/how-london-finally-crac...
I don't live in London and rarely go there, but everyone has to use banking...!
Wdym verification on both sides, did the recipient have to do anything? You can't just send money to an account number?
  • AdamN
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I was transferring to myself (different bank). The message from the sending bank triggered a push notification from the receiving bank which I approved and the money moved instantly. This works for up to $10MM I believe.
Finished "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Hemmingway

Wow, so powerful. So real. I can see why it won the accolades at the time and why it stays. The ending. You could see it a mile away, but it was so hurtful still.

Would love to see another adaptation made of it, especially nowadays. Maybe a really long movie, 2 parts?

Was a Hemmingway fan as a middle-schooler but never read this one. Your comment sold me on it! Thanks!!
Currently at page 127. Wish I didn't read this comment...
sorry!
That the FOSS bazaar broke off into megachurches while still maintaining a healthy small scale and independent bazaar [0]. That FOSS sustainability is much more complicated than just "throw money at it".

That there's "metal paste" [1].

That the zodiac killer's messages have been cracked for five years now (I didn't know they were cracked to begin with) and that it was a shift and substitution cypher [2]. The telltale clue was that the symbol frequency was uniform but under shift it become non-uniform.

How to solder those pesky connectors that come on the tiny servo motors you can get from Aliexpress [3].

That Firefox only has 2.3% market share [4].

Multiscale 3d truchet patterns are freakin complicated [5].

That prioritizing tasks by the linear combination of priority and effort remains a good strategy.

[0] https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/01-cathedral-megachurch-b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys-RMVJ89dk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CJsKJ0XKP4

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHulZtR2Qkg

[4] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

[5] https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2018/bridges2018-39.html#...

Whoa. Via Grok:

Solved Zodiac Killer ciphers:

• Z408 (July 1969): Solved in days by Donald & Bettye Harden.

Message (with misspellings): “I like killing people because it is so much fun it is more fun than killing wild game in the forrest because man is the most dangeroue anamal of all to kill something gives me the most thrilling experence it is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl the best part of it is thae when I die I will be reborn in paradice and all the I have killed will become my slaves I will not give you my name because you will try to sloi down or atop my collectiog of slaves for my afterlife ebeorietemethhpiti”

• Z340 (November 1969): Solved in 2020 (after 51 years) by David Oranchak, Jarl Van Eycke, and Sam Blake; FBI confirmed.

Message (with misspellings): “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me that wasn’t me on the TV show which bringo up a point about me I am not afraid of the gas chamber becaase it will send me to paradlce all the sooher because e now have enough slaves to worv for me where every one else has nothing when they reach paradice so they are afraid of death I am not afraid because i vnow that my new life is life will be an easy one in paradice death”

  • e40
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
YT served up the Zodiac video to me a few days ago, too. Interesting stuff!
Today, and yesterday, I've been poking about the history of what was once the longest steam powered fresh water pipeline in the world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfields_Water_Supply_Scheme

I'm looking into rennovating a massive agricultural machine shed ~ two stories high in the middle built some 80+ years ago using sections of spur pipeline as central upright poles to hold up some beefy jarrah trusses.

The "verandah" wings flaring out from there were bulit from flimsier timber that's rotting and the iron sheet walls are starting to peel away.

The posts are of interest as they have old markings and water fittings, tee pieces, etc.

It's not far from one of the original steam powered pumping stations that moved water through the main line.

I've been exploring making a camera trap to put out in my woods, to see if I can get a good photo of the very illusive bobcats we've got around here. I went out to California last month on a photo tour to get some nice shots of less skittish cats, and it gave me the motivation to continue my build of the camera trap. I just today received the custom little PCB I designed to read an IR sensor and have an STM32G convert it to focus and shutter release signals for the camera. I built the board up this morning and am getting ready to fire it up with my J-Link debugger probe attached and start the work on the firmware.
Not to discourage you from building this, that sounds like fun, but I found a very cheap trail camera on Amazon is pretty great for this type of thing.
An intern had trouble with an outdated exercise in Elixir that use an old version of an Erlang dependency, so we got to figure out how to depend on a local copy, dig into the Erlang code and do a little hack to make it work.

Basically it relied on a checksum algorithm that was previously in yet another external library but was now in the standard library so that call needed to be updated and variables carrying around the old external library had to be underscored out.

It was a good lesson in traversing error messages and going from an angry VM step by step to a clean success. Not to hairy for a junior to understand when explained, and also not too time consuming to burn out interest, while still a bit of a challenge.

  • ynac
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I have to replicate the little shoes on the cassette mechanics of a Becker Grand Prix car stereo from 1985. The plastic shoes are brittle from age, heat, and wear. I've spent the last couple weeks finding about two dozen ways that almost work. Their tiny and need to fit on three even tinier feet that ride rails for loading the cassette. This morning, I found out that I can probably make several possible plans work - good enough. Which is to say, I found out I was delaying the project with hopes for the perfect solution when good enough was already there.
  • frm88
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I found out that it is nearly impossible in Europe to buy a 10l enamelled bucket with a lid. I need one for my organic waste, since I found that both metal and plastic ones tend to keep the smell despite cleaning them weekly.
Can't say I have any odor issues with just a cheap big Tupperware-style plastic container with a lid. I throw it in the dishwasher after I've emptied it and the lid keeps any smells in during use (that's what the lid is for after all, as well as keeping fruit flies out of the organic waste).
  • zote
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Is it easier for other sizes, or equally as difficult.
  • frm88
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Equally as difficult, except for very small ones that go on a table - these are more of a decorative item than a bucket. Enamel in general has gotten somewhat rare. I found one (!) factory in Germany that does these. One.

Edit: I just checked:10l is max. There are no bigger ones and now I wonder why :)

In case you haven't found it yet; have a look on https://emaille24.de/ - they do have buckets up to 12l (with lids).
  • frm88
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Thanks to your and your sibling commentor's replies I will soon be the proud owner of a lidded, enamelled bucket :)
searching for "емайлирани съдове" in bulgarian..

https://elcishop.com/product-category/емайлирани-съдове/

https://www.mira-n.net/emailirani_rom_black.html

https://zana-bg.com/kuhnya/sdove-za-gotvene/emajlirani/kupro...

so 16L - and 50L - pots do exist.. but you have to find some importer around you. Manufacturers Seems russian, romanian, bulgarian..

  • frm88
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Thanks to your and your sibling commentor's replies I will soon be the proud owner of a lidded, enamelled bucket :)
Found out that our (small company's) VPS was compromised by a mining script, attacker probably exploited NextJS' RCE that I forgot to patch. The scripts were using half of the threads at 100%, i deleted all of them, found the watchdogs that kept recreating them and updated NextJS, luckily there was nothing to steal, now everything seems alright, but I'm thinking that I should format/rebuild everything just in case that I missed something.

I'm a junior dev with very little experience, I would appreciate any suggestion/advice

I would probably document, format and rebuild. Rotate secrets and inform anyone whose data might have been impacted.

Assume they compromised everything they would have access to by running code on the server.

I've been trying to research drone navigation tech from what we have learned so far from the russian/ukraine war. I'm very much not a hardware guy but software by itself has been feeling kind of useless or even crueler than usual.
  • khr
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I found out that the adhesives I've encountered from time to time that remain tacky and easily moved or removed are called "non-hardening" adhesives. This was after using E8000 glue for a headphone repair today.
Today, I am revising Portuguese grammar and so I've mostly been exploring the things I can remember well and those that I can't. Portuguese has a lot of verb forms that I need to get right. But it also has really interesting constructions like "ir ter com" which literally means "to go to have with" but is an idiomatic way of saying "to meet up" (with someone) and I keep remembering and forgetting it.
The phrase looks like "intercom." Maybe visualize some kind of mnemonic based on that -- buzzing the call button at a friend's apartment and asking if they want to meet up.
What do you use to revise this? Did you download or make an Anki deck?
Paper. I have revision sheets on paper.
I am deep down into the rabbit hole of assessing various open source projects to build a custom trackball with a 52mm billiard ball (appropriately, it’s the 8-ball).
Incorporated a cli AI to my daily work. Just impressive, was working on some networking code, I could think of 100 ways to stress test it, then I ‘prompted’? AI to implement those ideas, found many issues, hangs. Shared agent those, asked it to add prints, retest, improve my implementation. Now I got a good solution in a day. Previously this would take a week at least with my worrying about all the things I could test, improve…
  • Havoc
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Learning how much of a hassle moving house is. Will take me forever to get addresses on all service providers etc moved

Also learning more about mold and dehumidifiers

Not strictly today. But I discovered that there exists a special class of algorithms that are designed with the use case of streaming data to your program. I just used one to get a uniformly distributed sample from a 10Gb log file.

I knew this was something coding interviews delved into: "if it doesn't fit in memory", but until like yesterday I never went down the rabbit hole. I have to say it was a nifty trick.

I was looking at the llms.txt files of some sites today and saw how straight to the point they are and started thinking I'd love to have a browser that only loads these txt files and the markdown files they link to. It reminds me of the Gemini protocol tried to do. I think I'll try to make a PoC this weekend.

A search engine for llms.txt would be great too.

  • nkg
  • ·
  • 1 day ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Not today, but the day before I launched my 2nd attempt at making chocolate from cocoa pods. The 1st time, the fermentation failed and I just got rotten seeds in a pot.
That's super cool. Good luck!

~I watched a video series where someone did the techniques in isolation in reverse order and I thought it was a good idea. That way you're always learning on perfect ingredients. i.e. buy chips and learn to temper, then buy roasted nibs and learn to refine, then buy dried and learn to roast, then buy pods and learn to ferment and dry.~

I've been exploring kefir. I'm looking at finding some live grains to boost the store bought variety here (10-20 varieties) up to 50-60 varieties or so, like the kefir in Eastern Europe / Russia. The store bought stuff in my country (UK) is more like a diluted, gimmicky thing. However, I believe the strains of bacteria they do include are some of the more influential ones. I think it would just be interesting to expand the scope a bit.

This came from reading about the gut microbiome, which was spun off from reading a book about Ultra Processed Foods (Ultra-Processed People). I've been trying to remove UPF foods from my daily consumption, trying to lower the ratio of them I eat (the average is supposedly 60% for adults in my country), since the academic link between UPF and dementia is quite strong now. It's quite shocking to see just how much of a typical supermarket/food store is UPF, and where many of the emulsifiers and preservatives come from.

  • cik
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I went down a similar path, sans book. I opted to remove processed foods from my diet in its entirety - to be clear, I consider neither oil, nor vinegar to be processed. This has resulted in basically the only processed food in my life now being soy sauce.

The hard reality is that food, which I already enjoyed, tastes significantly better. Similarly, when I fall off the wagon and have some UPF (crips).. it just tastes flat. Highly recommended, even without the health benefits, frankly.

That's quite hardcore. Well done.

I've noticed the same flatness you're describing with a similar product. The other week I had two items spaced across different meals. I'm still permitting bread as long as it's real or homemade (4 ingredients max, hard after 2/3 days), which was the first, and then later I had "made-in-store" chips with the a bunch of UPF and spices (preserved).

After about 2 weeks of minimising UPF, the bread tasted much better than it usually would, even on its own. Then not only did the chips taste flat like you've experienced, but they didn't taste good, and I felt I could almost tell what they'd added to try and get you to finish them.

I find it quite insidious how much food is falsely branded as healthy ("Just Natural" snack bars) or fresh. Not just items that are dressed up as if they are made fresh in-store, but foods proudly showcasing claims about things added, or nothing bad being added, only to be invalidated by checking the ingredients on the back.

The extra difficulty to eat was a pretty big takeaway for me from that book. Imagining most processed food as having been broken down and reformed, the breaking of the food matrix, the sort of pre-digestion that stops my body doing that instead, the hurrying of the eating process to get more in before the body works out its full, have all been useful for me to slow down my eating and avoid this stuff in general.

I have noticed that my scattergun approach of avoiding stuff that's been transported long distance and overly branded (judged by packaging in both cases), has made supermarket trips very quick and simple. 80% + of the big stores must just be rubbish.

It's led to me doing most of my shopping at local markets, where things are loosely packaged in paper. The book > avoiding branded packaging got me down the road of avoiding plastic wrapped consumables wherever possible, because plastic leeching is also a concern.

The only disadvantage is that my food environment has shrunk a lot, and as an endurance runner it's made it quite hard sometimes to get enough energy in. For that reason I don't think I can drop pasta and bread entirely.

In 2026 I started writing letters. I mean, docs on my computer that will end up printed in physical form, then handed to someone, or shipped to someone in an envelope with a stamp.

I feel I will do more and more of this, this year, as a little experiment. I will most likely experiment with different types of papers, etc.

  • mbb70
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I explored the space of valid Spelling Bee puzzles and found out the lowest scoring puzzle is (x)bejkou with 14 points.

Hoping they do it for April 1st one year.

I learned about fan-out, and just how the average size of groups in messaging servers affects their load. It is pretty basic stuff I guess but not something you think about unless that is your jam.

I was stress testing a server I made and noticed a discrepancy between two tests. In on test 15 virtual users could send 450msg/sec (not realistic I know) for about 6750 incoming messages per second. In another, 1000 users sending a message about every two seconds was the limit, about 500msg/sec incoming.

Took me a little bit to figure out why, the outgoing messages between the tests were wildly different. In the smaller user tests the groups were about 3 on average, in the larger one they were 30. Group size is effectively a multiplier on incoming msg requests so when looking at the total traffic it was much closer between the two tests 15k and 20k.

  • jtr1
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I spent some very enjoyable time browsing courses and tutorials in the Santa Fe Institute’s complexity explorer![1]

I wish I had encountered complexity science earlier in life. It touches on so many of the questions that have sparked my imagination over the years, I’m so pleased to find such an accessible introduction.

I found out that the guy who broke the thing I was working on was… me.
Today I took the subway at a different time than I normally do, and I saw a very different mix of people. Fascinating.
Been working on sheet cutting optimization for https://measuretocut.com today and it sent me straight down the cutting‑stock / 2D bin‑packing rabbit hole. What started as “wouldn’t it be nice if the site could tell you how to cut your wood sheets optimally?” turned into reading about NP‑hard problems and flipping through old operations research papers like I was cramming for an exam.

The funny part is how far the mathematical version of the problem is from what measuretocut.com actually needs to output. In reality you have kerf, ugly offcuts, and the fact that nobody wants a cutting diagram that looks like a circuit board. We really have to take into consideration a 2nd optimization, it needs to be an output that a person in a shop can glance at and immediately understand.

I found out I can automate my 5,12kWh house battery through local-only RS485 connection, and directly setting registers using ModbusTCP from Home Assistant. I then drafted an automation with hysteresis and damping that tries to aim for Net-Zero export/import (pv surplus/grid). It appears to work!
What brand/make of battery is that? I'm tentatively interested in home battery storage, but definitely not interested in shit that requires an app, an internet connection, and shitty saas spyware...
MARSTEK VENUS E 5.12kWh. Got it in August 25 for 1050,00 EUR. It is awesome how open it is designed, I was able to activate and automate it without adding it to my local network (wifi) or using the Marstek App even once. I wrote a blog post here [1].

[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-01-11_marstek-battery-homeassi...

5 kWh for 1k€! Wow! Thanks for sharing

Edit: and thanks for the writeup. This is exactly what I was looking for

Thanks for the kudos. Just note, I will add an update tomorrow - I optimized the automatic, it is now working pretty well. Before it was "overshooting" and the battery fed into the grid, or went into standby too often, just to start discharging again.
The deranged thing about RS485 and modbus is it's old cheap and just works.
I found out that killer whales hunt and kill great white sharks. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/orcas-spo...
Learned about superheterodyne receivers. Recently I've been studying up on RF technology, happened to come across superheterodyne receivers a short while ago, decided to research them today, saw that Technology Connections had a video on them, watched it, and felt reasonably enlightened.
Are there AI enabled antennas by now?
I don't know about AI antennas, but smart antennas[1] are a things since more than 15 years. Basically they are array of antennas that can change via software the directivity (mainly used in radar systems) or increase/reduce power transmission and direction (this is used in 5G cell).

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_antenna

There's also this, from long before the gen AI era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
This is probably one really fascinating projects, but there is no AI behind this kind of things. It's just randomly trying new configurations and select the best ones in an evolving way.

During my master degree, I attended an antenna design course and I almost burnt my laptop trying to optimize a dipole array as a side project.

Set up motion detection on my home security camera. Caught four stray cats playing in the driveway at like 2am. Kind of annoying that the detection is unconditionally "object-based" (ANN is used to filter false positives like lighting changes).

Also been thinking about game ideas for a while. Finally settled on an open world RPG where you control multiple (>10?) characters. Core gameplay loop will be configuring / optimizing schedules (farming materials, grinding xp, etc) and watching damage / currency numbers go big. Though if I'm being honest, I just want an excuse to build something that involves a node-based UI. So even if I don't finish, I'll have at least scratched that itch.

I finally kicked off my browser based game with the help of codex cli this year. It has been like having a junior developer that takes decent direction. There have been some missteps but "we" have made a lot more progress on it than I had the last three years. And it let's me spend my time optimizing the things I like doing.
End of the day for me, as usual trying to walk around as much as I can with my partner, with the hopes to stumble upon stuff. Just found a great pasta spot, followed by a watering hole. Grateful to live in this city! Hope you guys are having a good one as well.
I found out that the reason my Mazda CX 5 infotainment console reboots repeatedly when the temperature drops below freezing is because of a low quality SD card used by the manufacturer. I'll be replacing it this weekend.
That lodash-es doesn’t ESM lodash/fp, which means there is no straightforward way of using it with Vite after version 5. God help me.

I don’t even want to use it, I just want to get legacy code building on a modern version of Vite without rewriting a couple thousand lines of code. Aaaargh

Another fun fact - lodash/fp doesn't deduplicate with lodash when bundled. For a couple of months I was wondering why our app had bundled two copies of lodash. I dismissed it as a measurement artifact at first. It took so long to realize there was actually two copies of lodash and it was because one developer on our team had a preference for fp syntax.
> lodash-es doesn’t ESM lodash/fp

Most of my career has been JS and TS and I have no idea what this means.

I'm guessing you're only a few years into your web career, so I'll provide some background. lodash is a popular library that fills in many blanks that pre-2015 JavaScript had. It still provides value in modern JavaScript, but it's no longer as important as it used to be.

JavaScript is actually based on a standard called ECMAScript. ActionScript shares this standard, as an example. In 2015, we got ECMAScript 5, which modernized JavaScript in many ways. With that came many changes such as ECMAScript moving to a yearly update cadence, in response to the large amount of effort involved in implementing ES5, which came with a ton of changes.

One of those changes was ES modules, or ESM, which provided an official way for working with modules. The import/export syntax you're used to is a part of that spec. Before this, we had competing non-standard specifications for module loading, such as CommonJS.

ES5 reduced the need for tools such as lodash, and so it's less common in newer projects. It also is old enough to have been around before ESM was adopted, and is a large project, and so like many projects it either had to completely rewrite everything, or use transformation tools such as babel. If not, the user was responsible for using babel/etc to transform the code. Now, in modern stacks, because this is unnecessary, native support for CommonJS is being phased out, leading to OP's conundrum.

Now we have TypeScript, and the horrors of JavaScript 10+ years ago are a fading memory.

Nope, I'm about 15 years in and (unfortunately) deeply familiar with all of that. As someone else pointed out below, it was the use of ESM as a verb that threw me off.

Thanks for taking the effort to type out a history lesson though, hopefully someone will benefit from it.

Sounds like we both got into JS around when node was released. Good times. I miss early JSConf and NodeConf.
Things have changed so much in what feels like a short period of time!
Nope, I'm about 15 years in and (unfortunately) deeply familiar with all of that as I lived and worked through it.

As someone else pointed out below, it was the use of ESM as a verb that threw me off.

It’s not just you, nobody uses ESM as a verb, I think they mean:

The package doesn’t export lodash/fp in the ESM version.

Well, some people use it as a verb :)
I'm exploring writing a point and click adventure, and I've found out that they're basically just hierarchical state machines with a pretty UI. This is useful because it simplifies a lot of things.

The downside is that now I'm wondering if I could write one in SQL.

Welp I'm going through my folder of notes on publishing type stuff - site generators, hosting providers, headless CMSs, all-in-one platforms, etc. First time seeing it all at the same time and being able to compare features/workflows etc.
On the command line the `strings` command will list out printable characters in a file (including compiled binaries).

I don't do any systems level programming but found myself down a small rabbit hole of learning about reverse engineering tools. https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra is an open source one. It will show you the assembly code, does its best at giving you a C representation of that code and lets you interactively rename variables and symbols to make it more human readable.

I found out that, as I thought, I'd probably rather have read Frederick Law Olmsted on his travels in the antebellum South than Tony Horwitz (Spying on the South) on Olmsted on etc.

I found out that falling out of bed is not just for children, and that bringing an adult's body mass is not an improvement. I don't suppose that I'd fallen out of bed since LBJ was president.

I found out that YouTube has some interesting notions about me: the opening ad on a rather bland video was anything but bland, astonishing even a jaded old man.

That I promised my boss to check the office fridge for what we need for the team breakfast and forgot about it.

Also that Newfoundland has a pretty unique music tradition, that captures what irish music sounded before the Great Famine

I read the Wiki page for Thurgood Marshall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurgood_Marshall

This part surprised me:

    > Marshall retired from the Supreme Court in 1991 and was replaced by Clarence Thomas.
I remember watching the hearings about Clarence Thomas as a kid. At the time, I had no idea what a legal giant was Thurgood Marshall.
I explored the programming language nim a bit deeper for use in game programming with SDL3 bindings, but I came to find out that compiled nim code on Windows often triggers anti-virus because, from what I hear from people, nim is used a lot in malware development currently. Which is a shame because I really like that language. I haven't tested it myself, it's just things I have heard and read. Someone on r/gamedev told me to write the code in nim, generate C code and then compile it with zig cc.

If anyone has any experience with this, please do chime in :)

It's usually code compiled with Mingw that gets AV false-positives in Nim. But, indeed, you can use clang or zigcc compilers instead.

Nim has good support for Clang, so it works by just switching a single flag: `nim c --cc:clang main.nim`

For zigcc - there is a wrapper package you can install with nimble: `nimble install zigcc`

Then you can use it with: `nim c --cc:clang --clang.exe=zigcc --linker.exe=zigcc main.nim`

Of course, you can save the flags in configuration files. You can look at my setup for inspiration [0].

[0] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/grabnim/src/branch/master/conf...

I don't have any nim experience (sorry!) but I'm also exploring SDL3 with odin. I was able to get a naive battleship clone up and working very quickly, pretty neat. Next step is the new SDL3 GPU API.
I haven't looked into Odin that much but I hear it's swell, so maybe I should!
I don't really musically understand reverb (to the point where I just know oh this needs a plate at X length), so I've been learning future garage forcing me to use a lot of reverb hoping it will click. Inspired by Urban Waifs sharing of some of their process in their Youtube videos. https://www.youtube.com/@UrbanWaifs/videos
I’m learning about the “era of the nations” thinking from Hungary’s Balázs Orbán, via an episode of a podcast called the Winston Marshall show. YouTube just randomly suggested it to me.

I just rebuild a speed queen dryer that broke with spare parts from Amazon, which revealed a remarkably simplistic engineering. Very surprised by how simplistic the mechanism was. It’s incredible how over engineered most laundry systems have become.

Also spent some time digging into the integrations between Tesla FSD and rideshare services today. It’s remarkable how much progress has happened.

Be careful what you believe from Balázs Orbán, as a Hungarian I can say he is mostly concerned to come up with a ideology to explain whatever Viktor Orbán is doing and not building a consistent model of world politics that drives actions.
Indeed. I think that’s an astute assessment. I listen to a massive variety of perspectives, and as a NATO member I think what they have to say is worth hearing at least. Thanks for your comment — appreciate it.
  • e40
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Still using my Speed Queen washer and dryer. Bought 30 years ago. You’ve given me confidence to try to fix it when it stops working. Thanks!
Absolutely.

Ours are 10 years old, and the bearings wore out (well they were squeaking!) on the drum.

It took 20 minutes and a ratchet set to repair — couldn’t be easier.

It’s the best appliance we have ever owned. Can’t speak more highly of the company. Definitely the best on the market.

30 years is impressive!

  • ·
  • 1 day ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Today I learned why Harry Potter's wand sometimes acted on its own. It had a will of its own (due to the phoenix feather core). It remembered the enemy (Voldemort) and attacked him to protect its owner.
Playing around with Dictionary Services[1] (an api in iOS and macOS).

Figuring out how to create my own dictionary with Dictionary Development Kit to create a dictionary where people can find definitions of terms.

Also let the system learn names of products and services, so the system can do better autocorrect.

1. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreservices/dicti...

currently learning 3d "solid" design with blender for 3dprinter. I am aware blender is not the fit a cad app would be (), but it 'works' if you are careful what you do (I am not). This morning I had to clean the poor 3dprinter of a spaghetti-gone-wrong accident, because my hubris-3d-design submitted last night was not as clever as I naively thought. () the advantage of using blender is that, as a byproduct I will eventually have learned blender..
I found just now that my telecom operator - Airtel - randomly subscribed me for OTT services and charged me for it. But upon calling them and contesting, they just asked if I want to unsubscribe and then reverted the charges. No threats, pleading, or back-and-forth involved from either side. Mildly surreal.

I wonder that's a new corporate strategy - charge randomly till someone goes through the pain of IVR and spends 15 mins with support. Must generate quite an upside for them if it is indeed a strategy.

> Must generate quite an upside for them if it is indeed a strategy.

This is the same Airtel that auto opened payments bank accounts without customer consent or knowledge while getting a sim card. They even got cash deposited into those accounts from the govt direct benefit schemes while keeping their customers in the dark.

I'm sure its completely "accidental" and they'll have more of these glitches and mistakes in the future.

  • e40
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
What country is this? That’s nuts!
  • ff00
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Found out about finding timing of http requests https://susam.net/timing-with-curl.html
A talk about creating from Ethan Hawke called "Give yourself permission to be creative"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9Gek4V5Q

But my takeaway was more like "Give yourself permission to be bad"

Felt good to be reminded that if you want to make interesting things, it's ok to flail around. It'll feel foolish and that's completely ok, perhaps necessary.

mDNS

In the past few weeks I have been exploring mDNS and IPv6. Your router doesn't provide local DNS? Not an issue, add .local to the hostnames and boom, everything works.

For example, run `python3 -m http.server` on your laptop, then open the browser on your phone and browse yourlaptopname.local:8000 ! There's more, services are advertised on mDNS, that's how your printer magically appears on your computers and phones.

  • raybb
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I am in Mexico City and I learned quite a bit about Santa Muerte. Hard to know how much truth there is in what the locals tell me but supposedly people who live in such dire conditions they feel closer to death than to life pary to Our Lady of Holy Death for protection.

Wikipedia says it is the fastest growing religion in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Muerte

There does not yet exist a (strong) chess engine that tries to force its opponent to win against it (who is assumed to have the same objective)
You might enjoy hatetris (tetris, not chess, but it optimises against you in a way that felt similar)
I learned there was a group of people in NYC in the late '70s and early '80s that may have been the biggest serial killers in American history. They killed at least 200 people, sometimes 4–5 people per week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_DeMeo

  • 8note
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
i learned that windows has many different touch/pen implementations, and that the most recent one takes multiple inputs for a location, one at the pixel scale and another at the pixel scale multiplied by something like 2600 or so. i havent figured out why they did that yet, but ill find that out by eod
Tangentially related: if I do this frequently how can I frame it as a hobby normies can understand?

Knowledge explorer sounds too esoteric.

I like to describe myself as gaining/having "an approximate knowledge of many things"
"Space Cowboy" makes it sound like you're in a cyberpunk future
  • kej
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I've heard it as "my hobby is finding new hobbies".
I call it hoarding tools and am a major offender. I buy all the tools and kit to do the hobby, then lose interest
OpenCode has 11 options for installation.

I knew curl, npm, and docker, but asked Gemini about the rest:

bun, pnpm, yarn, brew, scoop, chocolatey, paru, mise.

Although its wonderful that people are building and creating, I also hope it calms down somewhat so I can choose from well tested few options in the future.

Exams in a week! I found out that it's actually pretty easy to fill an entire 150 page notebook with rough work in <2 days.
  • jjice
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Postgres replica identities and logical replication, while working with some RDS blue-green deployments in staging. Very impressed with how good the blue-green deployments are now. I haven't used them in a few years and the UI and documentation around them is really solid.
That my colleagues like me despite me being a bad fit for the role here at my company. I feel good, I really like them here at Chatwoot but I'm not who they need right now. It's my last week here, and it's only been 3.5 months but they feel like family. It's sad that I had to quit but I'll miss these good people.
Today I recorded myself skateboarding and found out that I don't move nearly as much as I think I do! No wonder I'm going so slow!
[dead]
concept maps being different from mindmaps and that its better to make them by hand than on a software like cmaptools

last week: Worked with son to find time period of a pendulum (a bell attached to a rope) .. the exploration was to get to microseconds precision). I sincerely hope more people could appreciate H C Vermas physics teaching methodology https://hcverma.in/Experiments

That its impossible to find an oil can with a zerk fitting. I need one for my bridgeport that uses zerks for oil and not grease.
I gave up on that years ago. You can find guns that work but they're rare and crazy expensive. You can make an oil gun from a grease gun that works but that bitch will oil the machine and you and the floor and the wall.

I just swapped the fittings to get rid of the zerk nipples for something I could use with a standard oil fitting.

For machine tools I just use an oil can with a finer than normal tapered tip, this will depress the ball bearing in zerk / grease nipple fittings no problems, this also works with the ball oilers typically found on lathes etc. You can cut a tiny slit in the end too if that helps get oil in https://www.wentztech.com/metalworking/projects/convert-a-ch...
Interesting! I never imagined that would be a thing. Thought that zerks were only for grease.
Recently procured an AirGradient air quality monitor and set up the build environment so I can customize its reporting capability and perhaps add some different sensors. Also didn't realize how much CO2 builds up during the night in my bedroom. Will have to mitigate this as I believe this contributes to my poor sleep habits.
I found out and explored the Relax-and-Recover backup software ( https://relax-and-recover.org/ ) that makes a bootable rescue ISO and a nice backup of my 'new' Debian 13 box.
Trying to get my Klipper-like thing for ClearCore up and running (currently called Cutter) so I can have a smaller mostly unchanging c++ codebase on the mcu and do higher-level application control of motors, outputs and sensors on linux in rust.
setup a desktop with n8n, ollama, open webui, comfyui, and aider. work is dragging it's feet on AI orchestration and workflow tooling so figured I learn it a bit to get ahead of things. just need some personal projects that are interesting enough that I'll pour time into them.
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
  • geuis
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Screws weren't standardized until ww2. And even then, they really haven't been.

Related video for those curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKNB04slCUA&t=3s

The channel Machine Thinking has many videos about screws, and about the early days of machines and precision.

In Europe we have standard screws. Building with only M5 screws is a joy.

  • meken
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I found out that Eastern Europe includes the Baltic States (northern) and the Balkans (southern).

I learned this because I play a daily game called FoodGuessr, where you have to guess which country a food dish is from. I tend to struggle in Eastern Europe.

  • ojr
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I found out that Claude Code and OpenCode doesn't do vector search and embeddings but relies on grep to power their agents. Most people are satisfied with this even though I think vector search approach is way better and saves on tokens.
I remember thinking the same thing and this articles goes over most of the arguments here - https://milvus.io/blog/why-im-against-claude-codes-grep-only...

When it came out and I think it was Boris from Anthropic that said they experimented a lot with Vector Search and grep just worked better.

You can try it out using the Claude-Context MCP - https://github.com/zilliztech/claude-context

I cannot add git Bash as an option for a terminal in VSCode. I had it installed via PortableGit and the chat told me it doesn't work unless it's in a standard location. I installed in a standard location and still no dice.
I found out I turned 24 today :)
Happy Birthday, usually I don't write such things so feel honoured stranger!
Happy Birthday
That yoga classes give me more anxiety instead of reducing it. The calm and quiet of the yoga class does not similarly make my mind calm and quite. Instead, my wandering mind always wanders to bad things.
I learned that my fav part of Apennines is famous for a lack of light pollution and thus is an astro-tourism target. Never paid attention to that aspect.

I also learned that on Aug 12th this year a total eclipse of the sun can be observed from certain parts of Spain.

I am cleaning up some pointer arithmetic stuff for multi-dimensional C style arrays. I managed to replace the code with a std::inner_product minus a std::accumulate (to accomodate for the fact that the upper array bound is exclusive, ie one-past-the-end).
I once "fixed" a port of a program to Linux.

It was generating the wrong output — that is: not the same as on Windows.

My fix initialized a thitherto uninitialized array with the VisualC++(ca. 5.0) debug build default value.

I now know that in Italian I should say 'mi piacciono' to convey my liking of things (plural), e.g "mi piacciono i libri" means "I like books", as opposed to singular 'mi piace il libro' (I like the book).

When I refer to likes of multiple people, e.g. "we like this book", I should use "ci piace il libro". Plural people speaking about liking plural books would be "ci piacciono i libri".

One of my goals for 2026 is to reach level B1 in Italian language.

Yeah, somehow Latin-based languages prefer the opposite direction of the activity of liking, so it's better to formulate it initially as: this book appeals to me, those books appeal to him, ...

Opposite as in: "You borrow me X. I owe you X."

I've been working on a litle raspberry pi pico project with kafka. As someone that used to have an Arduino uno, it made me genuinely shocked at how small controllers have gotten and they're massive capabilities
I've explored various VPN settings/configurations/protocols to see what works best with my ISP that tends to throttle traffic to my work VPN.

Some things work OK, but still not as good as commercial VPN providers.

I learned that the large tree near where I live in London that has visibly grown in the last year is a Coast Redwood (a.k.a. California Redwood, a.k.a. Sequoia) and that there are half a million of them in the UK.

Loving this post.

Related to this, I spent three years looking up 1,000 things and writing about them.

https://deanebarker.net/huh/

Neat. You're a very curious person (in the best sense).
I had a long boring meeting. I decided it was time to grow up and learn a little Lean. Let's do formal methods. Let's be serious, you know? It's pretty cool!
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Go:

    r, err:= fn()
Compiles if r is already declared. Creates a new lexical scope that has no access to the outer r. So the outer r doesn't get set. And I get a bug!
Why Bluetooth is detecting peripherals but won't connect to them on the new PC I built. Getting an antenna today but only 50% sure this will fix the issue.
during the pandemic I was exposed to the "Today I learned" comment in slack, and I really liked it because it was usually something interesting (or comical, or painful) and relevant, and also helped me connect with my coworkers. I highly recommend sharing both here and in your group/team message channel random & interesting things you learned today with the #TIL tag.
I found out more ways in which our entire socio-economic system is a scam. I literally learn something new about this every day.

I need my Universal Basic Income now! Help.

Learned to spin dopa star from cyrus, who traveled to spend some time with his parents, who work at a college near my village.

he gifted his dopa star to us.

As a student in embedded and systems programming that never did much in high level langs, i found out how fun html+js can be.
The Web APIs is the most ubiquitous "computer" that doesn't really exist!
I love how you do not mention css, this is so not fun.
Plumbing together stuff so that the files from a service that can only push to sftp server end up delivered in a Dropbox folder.
Went for a walk today.

Found a $100 bill in the grass. No-one nearby to think it might belong to them.

dang! my biggest year, while walking everyday, was like $75
I found out that reading 900 wpm and actually comprehending what you are reading is actually possible and not that difficult at all.
may you give any tips?
How did you discover this?
Might have been this thing:

https://v.redd.it/fpa35i6b97dg1/CMAF_1080.mp4

Syncthing-Fork, the primary Android app for Syncthing, isn't exactly reliable anymore. TLDR a new completely unknown dev has taken over maintenance and doesn't communicate well; it's probably not reliable without checking if someone has recently audited the source code.

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing...

That's unfortunate; thanks for letting us know. I only recently moved to Syncthing-Fork after giving up on the other Syncthing version I'd used for years, which seemed to do anything except actually sync on Android.
Messed with Remix for the first time after seeing Shopify's Hydrogen sites. Previously only used Next.js.
I am exploring various levels of prompting in Github Copilot at Org, Repo and Personal level.

Think of it as an exploration manual.

I am working on layouting library(inspired by the concepts behind Clay). There are two modes in which these things operate - immediate mode where you recreate everything anew for every frame, or retained mode where you create everything only once and then mutate the existing state for every frame and render only the differences.

HTML DOM uses retained model as it would be unimaginable to completely throw out the entire DOM and rebuild it anew with every frame. But React, Vue and other libraries use immediate mode to communicate with HTML DOM. They might internally have retained mode, but in the end they only perform mutations based on their internal differences.

So the whole web ui is layer upon layer of immediate, retained and hybrid modes all talking to each other. Now imagine how much wasted resources all of this layering implies :)

Another interesting fact is that when you have opacity or translucency in web ui, the browser render the background elements off canvas and uses it as background for the element with the opacity in order to avoid issues with various elements seeping through in many unexpected ways.

tl;dr this topic has been thoroughly discussed in here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYFBOIr6n_s

Started learning about ollama with a goal to setting up some kind of self-hosted LLM.
Google Earth Engine's Foundation model via the ITU's seminar! This thing is incredible!
Duckdb can read in json, so you can dump kafka messages into a file and filter with SQL
  • elric
  • ·
  • 2 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
DuckDB is such a great tool. Met one of the authors at a conference last year, very knowledgeable chap. Deeply impressed.
  • tejtm
  • ·
  • 3 days ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
replaced the broken spring on an ABANA style treadle hammer.

breaking it in the first place was more fun

nixos docker container where a non-root user can install packages
I found git worktree today.
Me too just a week ago. Git worktree has a high 'usefulness-to-effort' ratio!

We shouldn't feel bad, Guide van Rossum was there once too!

https://x.com/gvanrossum/status/1379893622145871873

If you haven't yet, find `git rerere` as well
Adding arbitrary raw UDP connections to my browser based web tool.
DBSCAN for grouping locations. Well, still slow...
I've read the adverserial attack paper, and I'm currently implementing a captcha based on images that have masks on them so that any LLM agent with a visual model will classify it wrong.

The idea is to use something like a slider that shows different images combined with a memory task, like "find out the pair of images" and then offer maybe a text input field where the user has to write 1,2,3 or something similar with the image numbers to pass the captcha.

The tldr is that I'm abusing the famous panda image that's classified as a gibbon as a technique to build a bot captcha.

crazy to think that soon not being able to successfully complete the captcha will be a signal that the user is human
That exporting an svg from Illustrator and dropping into Fusion as a sketch is not a very wise approach - the scale is completely off! DXF is the way to go, keep your units in mm across the workflow.

I've not used any CAD tools in a significant way in nearly three decades - all very familiar and yet not at the same time. Form-Z and ArchiCAD were my bread and butter back then, despised AutoCAD but here I am back in the Autodesk realm again with Fusion :-(

I found out it's easy to write Swift/Appkit apps without the dumpster fire that is Xcode! It turns out it's really easy to do it with good old `make`.
That sounds interesting. What reference did you use to get going?
Just the developer.apple.com docs and talking to my friendly neighborhood LLM
I'm sick of using React for personal projects so I've been building a lightweight, functional, and minimalistic reactive web framework. Turns out there are a lot of decisions that go into something like this, it truly is an iceberg of complexity. It creates plenty of enjoyable problems to think about though
tweeks.io let's you edit any website.
Where and how Cursor store all its workspaces, chats, prompts, thoughts, context, completions, tool calls, searches, schemas, and images:

"Cursor Mirror" Anthropic Skill and Python Sister Script:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46629604

cursor-mirror skill: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/cursor-...

cursor_mirror.py script: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...

DATA-SCHEMAS.yml schema map: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...

PR-CURSOR-MIRROR-GENESIS.md pr description: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PR-CUR...

cursor-chat-reflection.md session log: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

I-BEAM-CHARACTER.yml a spirit familiar embodying Cursor's soul: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...

IMAGE-GALLERY.md analysis of images dropped into Cursor chats, their context, and meaning: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...

>Note: This gallery contains descriptions, analysis, and context — not the actual images. The images live in Cursor's workspace cache. The point: cursor-mirror can find them, the Read tool can see them, and I-Beam can narrate their significance within the conversation where they appeared. Image archaeology!

you can now use windows apps on linux without emulation: winehq.org
[dead]
[flagged]
  • dang
  • ·
  • 1 day ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Agreed in principle, but replying to a concrete, personal, whimsical comment with a generic, ideological, denunciatory comment is not a good way to develop a thread on Hacker News. In fact it's the opposite. That's why the site guidelines say:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628204.)

You'd think I'd feel differently having seven parrots, but you may be surprised to find I agree with you. To an extent anyway. I struggle with it.

Don't bring a parrot into captivity from the wild. Separating them from the life they already know is cruel -- save for medical exceptions, after which you release them back.

But it's already been done, and we have domesticated parrots. They are raised by humans, hand-fed by humans, and they bond with humans. They have slim odds of reintegrating back into the wild, where they fend for their lives against other territorial birds. One swoop from a hawk and they're gone.

Gone, your buddies that are an integral part of your every day. They climb on your shoulder and attach themselves to you like velcro. They mimic your laugh and preen your hair. You trim their nails, you give them all kinds of delicious fruits and veggies every day. They throw fruit back at you that they don't want, like little children throwing a tantrum. They have a giant daytime aviary that takes up quite literally half your home, and their own night time cages to sleep and rest in.

All they know is you and the human touch. They integrated with you and you're their only flock now. The bond of a parrot is extreme and lifelong.

Imagine the devestation when their only flock abandons them. A prior owner of one of my birds left their cage outside an exotic's facility, like a child in a basket outside the fire station.

For another, she came from a flock of two. Her prior owner murdered the other -- the remaining one is laying an egg now.

For two others, their owner's parrots themselves had fertile eggs. She couldn't bring herself to boil, freeze, or smash the eggs as you're supposed to do with eggs you do not want to hatch.

For two others, their prior owner of 25 years passed away. And for one other, she simply needed a new home.

They all have a home here now where they will peacefully enjoy the rest of their lives with me. I hope to never let them go hungry, alone, abused -- so I have to outlive them and make sure I am their last owner.

But as we wish more for our children, I wish more for them. I wish they could fly to the end of a lake and back and know how it feels to feel the breeze under their wings. I wish they could be adopted by a flock of their own kind. That they could endure the harshness of the wild -- and perhaps even come home after a long, fruitful, eventful day outside.

... But who knows if they even want that. :)

"You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed" - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Thank you for clarifying and thank you for looking after the rescues!

I don't remember where I read it, but there was an interesting case for pairing abandoned parrots with veterans and people suffering from PTSD. Both suffer in similar ways, and were able to reduce their struggles together.

Could have been Bessel van der Kolk who mentioned it.

I have them to thank. On that same train of thought they saved me too :)

I believe it. In some parrots there is a look in their eye when they are scared of you. It's as though they're looking right past you, even though you're the fearful stimulus.

It does strike me as cruel too, to be denied freedom like that.

It also seems like the sibling comments are misunderstanding your last sentence, it's not about the "you" in that sentence having self imposed limitations, it's you being literally imprisoned by an external source without any way to get out. So asking "why are you a prisoner inside" doesn't make any sense.

Exactly that.
Easy for you to say when there are no bus-sized predators also flying around ready to instantly snatch you out of thin air and eat you for lunch
  • ·
  • 1 day ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Good question, if it is such.

We keep a rabbit indoors, free roaming in the house, now for 7 years, I expect he will do 10+

Would you prefer to live freely for 6 months or have a hopefully comfortable life for ten times more. Before anyone jumping to say “freedom!” why don’t you do it already? Why are you keeping your body prisoner indoors?

YOU keep a rabbit indoors.

I do not blindly believe in a long life being a good life at all. Where is this argument coming from?

And yes I'm trying to use my time but I'm also from Europe and have 32 days of holiday per year and thinking about a sabbatical

> Why are you keeping your body prisoner indoors?

What does this even mean in the context of humans? People do go outside.

"I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth. Then I ask myself the same question." - Harun Yahya
"Harun Yahya" aka Adnan Oktar the Turkish sex cult leader? Yeah he stays in the same place because he's serving 8658 years.
This was always a flawed quote because even before such a realization, people still did novel things (and literally flew to new places), much the same as birds. And the answer is still the same for birds and humans, the constraint of resources. If you have enough then by all means, fly.
The point is for you to take a look at yourself and how you are currently spending your time, from the assumption that you could do something different.
People already do that. It also doesn't relate to the person you replied to, as I said in another comment, it's about an external source imprisoning you, not you imprisoning yourself.
It’s more so a realization that you have agency, choice, but have decided perhaps without much intention or thought, to remain in your status quo.

I don’t think it’s literally about flying. It’s about ignorantly complying to a status quo and how that itself is a decision even if you’ve made it unintentionally.

Again I think the resources it takes to fly being a limitation are not what it’s referring to. A bird just lives its life in an area and never really assesses if a flight to a far off land is possible, if resources would support their journey, or any of that. They just do what all the other birds are doing or of course what their instincts tell them to. We’ve ignored migration and birds that do travel great distances as not a part of this as it’s not a literal statement about flying!

1. I used "fly" metaphorically as branching out, and doing new things, one of which is the literal "flying" on a plane to travel to a new location for vacation, but my point was still about the metaphorical concept in general.

2. The quote about the bird staying in the same place is not relevant to what ainiriand said because they are talking about being imprisoned from the outside, not by one's own self.

Ehhh, I feel like resource is still a big part of it. I like to travel, not above all else, and would like to do more of it, provided. But provided is not.
[flagged]
Published an edit today (post dated in Nov. but I've rewritten it 5x now) on my tutorial to use llama3.2:3b to generate fine tuning data to train tinyllama1.1b https://seanneilan.com/posts/fine-tuning-local-llm/ It took a while to figure out that when I made llama3.2 generate json, it didn't have enough horsepower to generate training data that was varied enough to successfully fine tune llama1.1b! Figured that out :) Something you never learn with the bigger models. Every token costs something even if it's a little bit.