didgetmaster

Have the AI agents figured out how to vote up or down on comments here on HN, or can we assume real people are doing that?

Wow. I knew that astronomers had mapped and measured a large number of stars in our galaxy; but I had no idea that the number was close to 2 billion.

As I understand it, there is no consensus on the size of our solar system. We can measure the orbits of the planets, but it is much harder to measure where the Kuiper Belt or the Oort cloud ends. Estimates on both of those vary greatly.

Almost everyone comes up with an idea during their career, where they think 'this could be really big'.

The idea of abandoning the 9 to 5 job to strike out on your own can be strong. There are many stories where a solo entrepreneur or small startup team did just that, and are now well off, if not insanely rich.

But the other 90% you never hear about. They work hard to try and get their idea to market, but it never pans out. A myriad of reasons can cause a project to fail, long before it replaces your salary today.

Your personal circumstances along with talent and drive, should play a pivotal role in deciding to make the jump. Unless you have a comfortable amount to savings, I would recommend keeping your day job and working on the side project in your spare time. Don't quit your W2 until you get some real traction on it.

Although the data centers are probably optimized for AI workloads; they can probably be used for all kinds of computing tasks. If AI revenue does not meet projections, the hardware is not going to be unused.

I occasionally check out the map on the drought monitor website. The current map does not look significantly different than maps I have seen over the past 10 years.

The areas of extreme drought may change each year, but the total area affected seems rather ordinary to me.

I continue to work on my general-purpose object store; which is a 'multi-modal' data management system. Using it, you can create and manage millions of files in a traditional hierarchical folder structure; create relational tables that can be queried and analyzed quickly and easily; and manage semi-structured data normally handled by nosql systems.

https://www.didgets.com

Of these, I wonder which one is violated the most. 2.6 gets my vote.

Too many people believe that AI is going to come up with elegant solutions to problems that no one has ever solved before. Maybe someday, but for now it seems to be good at finding a solution that may be hidden away somewhere in stack overflow. If it just isn't there, then you are out of luck.

Unfortunately, too many developers (especially in the AI era) stop after the first item.

As a long-time Costco member, I can relate to this story. I don't expect to find everything I need there, but buying the 'staples' there saves money.

My biggest complaint has always been the enormous size of perishable items. Yes, you can buy a 10 lb bag of apples for much less than other stores; but does it really save you if almost half of it goes bad before you eat it all.

Even when my four always-hungry children lived at home, we had trouble consuming many things we bought. I always thought that Costco would make a killing if they broke up their fruit bags and assembled assorted fruit baskets to sell. Buy 10 lbs, but get it as a mix of apples, oranges, grapes, and lemons.

Also cut their chocolate cakes in half. They would sell more than twice as many.

You could start by putting a link to your projects or blogs in your HN profile.

The headline didn't say literally. And literally everyone knows that when a person on the web says literally, they literally mean it.

When I upgraded my computer a little over a year ago, I got 128GB of DDR5 RAM instead of just 64GB. Glad I did.

I also thought about upgrading my gen4 SSD at the same time. It was still meeting all my needs, so I thought if I waited, I could get a bigger, faster one for cheap later. Mistake!

It depends on the data. I heard that ones are heavier than zeros.

Answers are free. Correct answers cost extra!

I have taken a road somewhere between FOSS and paid software. I have a data management system that has been in a 'free open beta' for a few years now. Anyone can download it and try it for free.

Right now it can be used as a great tool or analyzing data. Feedback is appreciated but not expected. I try to respond to bug fixes and feature requests in a timely manner, but I am not required to do that.

If it catches on, I might charge something like $10 for an individual lifetime license. Businesses might be on some kind of subscription.

I remember driving by a refinery years ago and it had two or three towers with big flames that were just burning off waste gas. This seemed wasteful to me. If it can burn, then it seems like it could be used for something productive.

Do they still just burn off that gas?

The article does a good job of showing how a typical barrel of oil is converted into a dozen or more distinct usable products.

It would be helpful to also have a chart that shows how much gasoline or diesel as a percentage of each barrel is produced. It would be a bit variable, since not all crude oil is the same, but I think it would be close for most of it.

Some people think when diesel and regular gas prices diverge, that they should just be able to produce one at the expense of the other; but the distillation process shows that they are fundamentally different.

I have long thought that all content (local and remote) should be properly labeled with metadata. Just like the cans of soup in the supermarket, you don't have to open it to find out if it has peanuts, lactose, or MSG in it; you should be able to filter data before accessing it.

You could define a set of 5 or six categories (nudity, sex, drugs, violence, etc.) and have a scale from 1 to 10 for each. Each content producer would rate each category according to defined criteria.

Then each user, or their parent, can set what their own acceptable level is. If you set your violence level at 4 then nothing level 5 or higher will load.

It is my experience that most people work hard to 'get ahead' and not to merely survive. Yes, we will work for subsistence wages if no other option exists, but the goal is to thrive.

Some who are opposed to capitalism seem to think that anyone who wants to trade their talents and hard work for more than the minimum, are exploiting anyone who wants or needs their product.

Did you read the notice on the git hub site? I think he clearly states that he wanted to continue to work on the project, but could not justify it after sources of funding failed to materialize.

The project is being abandoned because the maintainer is tired of working for free. They said that they hoped someone would fork it, change the name, and pick up where it was left off.

Why would anyone do that? If the person who was most passionate about it for over a dozen years has given up because it was never worth the trouble; what fool would think things will be different going forward?

This is the curse of OSS.

I also still have an unopened box (still shrink wrapped) of OS/2 Warp sitting on my shelf.

When I started working at Novell in October 1988, I was on the OS/2 team. The version I installed first was 1.0 so I remember that there was no GUI. A few months later we got the update (1.1) with the GUI.

What I remember the most is that they ordered us memory expansion cards that gave us an extra 4MB of RAM for a total of 5MB. I didn't see the actual invoice, but I remember them telling me that the expansion card cost about $2,000. I try to remember that when I complain about memory DIMMs measuring in the dozens of GB going up a bit in price.

I guess I was overqualified. Didn't get the job.

Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where the pointy haired boss tells his team they were going to start paying the developers to fix bugs. Wally tells everyone that he is going to code himself a minivan.

I once interviewed at Microsoft. The hiring manager asked me how I would go about programming a break point if I were writing a debugger. I started to explain how I would have to swap out an instruction to put an INT 3 in the code and then replace it when the breakpoint would hit.

He stopped me an said he was just looking to see if I knew what an INT 3 was. He said few engineers he interviewed had any idea.

I agree that some topics can be dominated by outspoken 'experts' who don't have very good social skills. They can be hostile to newcomers as they try to keep their little club exclusive. They can also ridicule anyone who tries to introduce a new idea or direction.

But hopefully, the club itself will have enough reasonable members to keep those people in check.

One thing the age of the internet brought us, was the ability to easily connect with people over a broad area, who have an interest in something very niche.

You might be the only person in your neighborhood, school, or even town to have a deep interest in something. Others might think you are weird because 'nobody' else thinks that thing is cool.

But post something here on HN or other forum, and suddenly you find out that hundreds or thousands of people around the world also have some interest in it.