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jamessbon The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

The comments I've seen from police are normally specific suggestions that designs be amended to follow the Secured by Design [1] guidelines, rather than blanket objections to building something.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secured_by_Design

jamessbon How can England possibly be running out of water?

The Oxford Clarion has had several posts about the proposed Abingdon damn:

https://oxfordclarion.uk/water-why-abingdons-mega-reservoir-...

https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-is-there-an-alte...

https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-what-are-the-ris...

https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-how-much-will-it...

jamessbon Ask HN: I can't remember the name of a AI CLI tool I saw a few weeks ago

I think they mean Octofriend (https://github.com/synthetic-lab/octofriend) from Syntethci Lab (https://synthetic.new/landing/home).

jamessbon Wild pigs' flesh turning neon blue in California

> there is no blue food

Have you eveer seen a blueberry? Or a Concord grape? Or a damson plum?

jamessbon 3-JSON

Nor have I; I think it is just what the developer of tree has chosen to call file descriptor 3, rather than being a wider convention or standard thing provided by the environment.

> As of version 2.0.0, in Linux, tree will attempt to automatically output a compact JSON tree on file descriptor 3 (what I call stddata,) if present

https://github.com/Old-Man-Programmer/tree/blob/d501b58ff9cb...

jamessbon Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

That depends what you mean by needing a database. MBtiles files are SQLite database files, so you need a SQLite process running somewhere to extract the requested tiles.

jamessbon Visual History of the Latin Alphabet

Looking at the page source shows that it is vanilla JS [1] with a few libraries:

* https://anseki.github.io/leader-line/

* https://barba.js.org/docs/getstarted/intro/

* https://swiperjs.com/

[1]: https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/arete/assets/js/application.js

jamessbon Material 3 Expressive

> Not the same email.

I'm not even sure they're both emails. The first looks like a fairly conventional mobile email app; the second looks like a messaging app.

Not only does it not have a 'from' and 'to' field, it also doesn't have a 'subject' field.

jamessbon Show HN: I made an open-source laptop from scratch

> Established in 1781, it is America's sixth-oldest boarding school

>...

> Exeter is one of the nation's wealthiest boarding schools, with a financial endowment of $1.6 billion as of June 2024, and houses the world's largest high school library.

>...

>Its list of notable alumni includes U.S. President Franklin Pierce, U.S. Senator Daniel Webster, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and three winners of the Nobel Prize.

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

jamessbon How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear

Apaprently there's an "Office Furniture in London" that might be it: https://www.officefurnitureinlondon.co.uk/product-category/s...

Their online listings for Aeron chairs are for more like £400, but that's still less than a third of the price when new.

jamessbon Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need

"Abuse of notation" is a commonly used term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_of_notation

jamessbon The XOR Texture (2004)

I think you probably meant to post this on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42447762

jamessbon New physical AWS Data Transfer Terminals let you upload to the cloud faster

> I wonder how this process worked in practice. Do you simply send your only one set of hard disks and hope for the best?

No, you don't put your own disks in the Snowmobile/Snowball/Snowclone. It contains disks, so when it arrives you connect it to your network and copy data onto it, and then it is driven to an Amazon datacentre.

See, e.g. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/...

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...

jamessbon 1 Dataset. 100 Visualizations

The usual example used in teaching is Ansombe's Quartet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet

It consists of 4 datasets with the same summary statistics, but when plotted look very different. It's much easier to see the patterns in the plots than in the data table.

jamessbon Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

It is a well-known proverb that is centuries old [1]: it's essentially a canonical way of refering to the concept of something small having big consequences.

Proverbs are often contrived (e.g., "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones" - who lives in a glass house?).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail

jamessbon Just Have AI Build an App for That

Interestingly, he prompts for "an app", and the agent proposes "using Flask and Vanilla JS".

This is a somewhat strange implementation choice, as there's no need to create a `/resize` API endpoint - this could be implemented entirely in JS as a static site (enabling it to be hosted by free on somewhere like GitHub Pages, avoiding the issue that "I deployed it here . . . But it's costing me a bit of money so I don't expect it'll be around for too long.").

The implementation also has bugs like trying to validate an SVG file by checking that it starts with `<svg`, when SVG files often begin with something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">

jamessbon Probability-generating functions

Yes, this provides good intuition about why it is useful: the PDF of the sum of two random variables is the convolution of the original PDFs. A convolution is awkward to work with, but by the convolution theorem it is a multiplication in the Fourier domain. This immediately suggests that the Fourier transform of a PDF would be a useful thing to work with.

If you don't say that this is what you are doing then it all seems quite mysterious.

jamessbon Probability-generating functions

You're thinking of a "characteristic function" in the sense of "indicator function" of a subset (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indicator_function), which is different thing to the characteristic function of a probability density function.

jamessbon Evolutionary history of the fruits we commonly eat

Yes, this gives a misleading view of the relationship between citrus fruits.

This diagram (on the Wikipedia article for Citrus) gives more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hybrid_origins_of_Citrus....

jamessbon Show HN: Parliament Wow makes sense of UK democracy

For what tasks is this better than the longstanding TheyWorkForYou [1]?

> every publicly accessible document, audio recording or transcript we could get our hands on

It doesn't seem like it. If I search for something e.g. "small boats" without quotes, I get no results for Parliament Wow [2], but 4000 from TheyWorkForYou [3]. If I add quotes, I get 4 matching "past sessions" on Parliament Wow [4], with no indication of which part of them is relevant to my query; TheyWorkForYou gives 2000 results [5].

[1]: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/

[2]: https://parliament-wow.threepointone.workers.dev/?search=sma...

[3]: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?q=small+boats

[4]: https://parliament-wow.threepointone.workers.dev/?search=%22...

[5]: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?q=%22small+boats%22

jamessbon WiFi suspended at big UK train stations after 'cybersecurity incident'

> What happened is that some kid phoned up helpdesk and said they were x and they had lost their phone, can you please help me to reset my password and 2fa (because the phone was nicked, its standard operating procedure right?)

Do you have a source for this?

jamessbon Rerun: Visualize Multimodal Data over Time

The Software Engineering Daily podcast had an interview with Emil Ernerfeldt (co-founder and CTO of rerun) a couple of weeks ago: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2024/08/07/creating-gui...

jamessbon How we migrated Gov.uk notify to AWS elastic container service

Gov.Uk Notify does support sending letters (as well as email and SMs/text messages): https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/using-notify

jamessbon Writing a tile server in Python

I don't fully understand your requirements, but does mapnik [0] do what you need?

It's cross platform (Linux, OS X, Windows, and BSD) [1] and written in C++. There are bindings for Python/Node/C++.

There is also maplibre-native [2] (which suports Android and iOS as well as Linux/Windows/macOS).

Mapnik is usually used to pre-render raster tiles on a workstation or server. MapLibre Native is a native alternative to the MapLibre GL JS library (both forks of the no-longer open-source MapBox equivalents) for rendering vector tiles in the browser.

[0]: https://mapnik.org/

[1]: https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/blob/master/INSTALL.md

[2]: https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-native

jamessbon I recreated Shazam’s algorithm with Go

The concepts you are looking for are the short-time Fourier transform and spectrogram:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-time_Fourier_transform

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

jamessbon Common DB schema change mistakes in Postgres

> What makes it complex is that there are 3 layers of objects (Database, Schema, Tables) and also implicit grants given to DB object owners

The main privileges systems includes Columns, as well as Databases/Schemas/Tables. You can SELECT from a table if you have been granted SELECT on the table, or if you have been granted it on the specific columns used in your query. ("A user may perform SELECT, INSERT, etc. on a column if they hold that privilege for either the specific column or its whole table. Granting the privilege at the table level and then revoking it for one column will not do what one might wish: the table-level grant is unaffected by a column-level operation." [1])

There's also a system of Row Security Policies [2].

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-grant.html

[2]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-rowsecurity.html

jamessbon Common DB schema change mistakes in Postgres

> 2. I've no idea how to temporarily drop privileges for a single transaction. Connecting as the correct user on each incoming HTTP request is way too slow.

`SET ROLE`[1] changes the "the current user identifier of the current SQL session"; after running it "permissions checking for SQL commands is carried out as though the named role were the one that had logged in originally".

Whilst it changes the "current user" it doesn't change the current "session user", and this is what determines which roles you can switch to.

The docs also note that:

> SQL does not allow this command during a transaction; PostgreSQL does not make this restriction because there is no reason to.

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/sql-set-role.html

jamessbon Kagi and Wolfram

The page with the post-mortem for that outage now gives a 404 error, but was archived by the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20240121000935/https://status.ka...

(It was discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019119)

jamessbon Show HN: Atlas – GIS and interactive maps in the browser

How does this compare to Felt [1]?

It would be nice to have some plans with listed prices in between "Free" and "Enterprise" ("book a demo"). For comparison, Felt has $30/mo and $90/mo plans.

Calling yourselves "the new standard for GIS software" seems like overly strong branding.

[1]: https://felt.com/

jamessbon Show HN: Atlas – GIS and interactive maps in the browser

> Some of your community maps deserve their own HN posts, such as the global submarine cable map:

Other submarine cable maps have been posted to HN before [1]. The one on https://www.submarinecablemap.com is more interactive and provides more information that this map on Atlas.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=submarine+cable+map