privong

Definitely. I have openBSD on my X201 and use it pretty regularly. That being said, I'm not sure I'd want to edit photos on it, so I have a newer machine for that (a used lenovo "micropc").

Thanks. I did hear about it a couple years ago, but I think I was put off by the expense and the presentation of the page (spelling, etc.). The latter felt like a bit of a red flag, but maybe I was just looking for an excuse to save the money :)

Agreed. I had an x201 and an x250. The 250 main board eventually stopped working (I think due to flex when the laptop was picked up from one corner repeatedly -- a known issue from what I understand). My x201 still runs great (with occasional refreshes of the thermal paste). A version of the x201-x220 era machines with modern internals would be my dream machine.

Maybe I am misunderstanding what you wrote, but "state" in the context of functional programming refers to the state internal to the program, not the state external to the program. So whether the input data comes from the real world is orthogonal to the question of whether a program preserve state.

I'm not sure I follow...were there ever (many) jobs in the ham radio community? There have been people making/selling kits and radios, but it is _amateur_ radio, so was inherently non-commercial.

I agree with you. But to be fair, gasoline powered cars are also converging on being crappy tablets with wheels attached.

Analogously, there's evidence that companies will make extensive use of available techniques (browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc.) to track and surveil users without their knowledge and often against their will. The exposure of that arguably also hasn't triggered an effective backlash against those companies. So, as with the pre-Snowden evidence for domestic communication interception by the NSA, I think there's ample evidence of the willingness of companies to exploit whatever technologies they can in order to surveil users.

> This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but [...]

Isn't this what people said pre-Snowden? Not that NSA spying is the same as corporate "surveillance capitalism", but if companies can make more money off it and the technology exists, it seems prudent to assume companies are trying it.

The downvotes may be related to community enforcing what's in the HN guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

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

We're saying the same thing -- one radioastron satellite isn't enough, you'd need a constellation of them.

> How about putting our astronomy experiments into space as well? There'd be no light / em pollution there, as well as no atmospheric interference etc.

One would need to put the telescopes into fairly high orbits in order to avoid the interference. I think that even images made with the Hubble space telescope have sometimes seen the impact of satellite constellations.

> In space there are no limits, see Radioastron for example, and that was decades ago.

Radioastron required cross-correlating the signal with ground-based radio teleacopes in order to do science. The collecting area, dish distributons, etc. would need to be fully replicated in space if one wanted to avoid using ground-based facilities entirely.

There's at least two issues with this line of thinking:

1. many astronomical observations are long integrations (many minutes of open shutter) and you often cannot read out the pixels during the exposure. So you can't selectively ignore pixels on a "by moment" basis. And with enough satellites, enough pixels could be affected to render an entire image effectively unusable

2. It seems you're thinking only about optical astronomy. There's also a ton of radio/millimeter wave astronomy that's done from the ground. Satellites have radio-wave downlinks that can be powerful enough to destroy the electronics used in radio astronomy receivers. The US's National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been working on data sharing with Starlink to mitigate this, but it's basically up to companies to agree to work together. Other satellites / companies don't engage in this coordination and so some radio telescopes need to go to a "safe"/stow position to protect the electronics. This costs valuable observing time.

Can you elaborate on how this is doable (in, say, Racket) and what tooling is needed? I'm afraid your reply doesn't add much information beyond the same assertion that I quoted that was in the article posted to HN. And I haven't been able to find information on this with Racket.

That could very well be it. I guess I had gotten my hopes up, seeing the statement in a piece that purported to be specifically about Scheme .

> You can pause, inspect objects, change values, and even redefine a broken function on the fly to test a fix in any environment (yes even in production, while running).

I see this mentioned often, and it sounds amazingly useful (especially the part about fixing in production!). But how truly widespread is it among the Lisp dialects to be able to connect to a running program, debug, and hotfix it? I understand Common Lisp has it, but I struggled to figure out how to do it in, say, Racket. Admittedly I'm am relatively inexperienced Lisp programmer, so maybe I wasn't looking in the right place or for the right words. Which Lisp dialects do indeed support the extreme version of this capability to inspect and edit running programs?

> In fact, relativity was only recently fully backed up with experimental data.

Can you elaborate on the assertion you made here? In addition to the important points @elbasti made about tests performed approximately a century ago, what does it even mean for a scientific theory to be "fully backed up"? Such theories can be tested and the tests either passed or the theory disproven but it's not possible to _prove_ such a theory. And to some extent we already know that relativity cannot be the final answer because it doesn't mesh well with quantum mechanics (which has been experimentally tested substantially, arguably even more than relativity has).

There is a mission concept for a far-infrared interferometer: https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/spice/

One would need to go to space for that of course.

I don't use it often, but have you tried the Wikipedia current events portal? A reading of their brief daily summaries from the past week might be close to what you're looking for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Why copy and paste text from the article without adding any commentary?

> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money

In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).

To save folks a search:

github repo: https://github.com/lexi-lambda/hackett

Documentation: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/hackett/

I thought the same thing too, when it was announced. But I suspect, in addition to the price, that not being able to buy a medium or long bed version also harmed fleet sales. The short bed being the only option is probably a pretty big limitation for groups who are buying them as fleet vehicles.

I was thinking about employee-facing tools, but I agree that TUIs present an even bigger challenge for casual users / customers.

An interesting theme here in the comments (that I am sympathetic to) is "TUIs have steep learning curves but are fast/efficient for people with proficiency". I wonder if a small part of the modern preference for GUIs is related to a lack of employee retention. If companies aren't necessarily interested in working hard to keep employees then training new hires needs to be faster/easier and that could work against TUI and keyboard-based tools.

Of course, if that's a factor I'm guessing it's a small one in comparison to expectations about what "modern" software should look like.

@sharweek said > Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.

@JKCalhoun > in my world-view most humans want to be kind.

These two views aren't necessarily in conflict. Individuals can overwhelmingly want to be kind but still be in a system where society pushes them to behave to the contrary.

Oops, thanks. Too late to edit, unfortunately.

It could partly be that, but I've generally read that the default inks are not waterproof.

I was curious about this so I just did a quick non-scientific perusal of one fountain pen enthusiast shop's offerings. It shows 118 of the ink bottles they sell are water-resistant ink while 935 are not (looking at the Yes/No filter counts for "Water-resistant" at https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/bottled-ink). There's a lot of duplicate inks that can be purchased in multiple bottle sizes, but picking the three most represented bottle volumes (20ml, 30ml, and 50ml) it drops to 24 water-resistant inks and 578 inks that are not water-resistant.

The above includes a lot of "interesting" colors; further restricting to black ink only ends up with 3 that are water-resistant and 26 that are not.

> Left-to-right writing as a left-handed person involves a lot of pen(cil) pushing, which is a big no-go for fountain pens.

> If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.

I see comments like this occasionally and find it mildly amusing as a lefty who has been writing with a fountain pen for over a decade and doesn't have noticeably different hand position (either compared to righties or compared to my use of a pencil or ballpoint pen). Yes, some lefties do have hand positions that look incredibly uncomfortable and some lefties have trouble with fountain pens, but that doesn't mean it's a general/total non-starter for lefties to successfully/comfortably use a fountain pen.

Pen pushing is a problem if a writer used to a ballpoint pen or a hard pencil and needing to apply pressure to get ink to flow and applies that much pressure to a fountain pen. But once one makes the adjustment to a fountain pen's (low) pressure style, pushing is only a minor annoyance for fountain pen writing until the nib is broken in (at least that was my experience).

As others have said, it's also important to pick the right ink/pen/paper combination so that you're not laying down too much ink and so that it dries reasonably quickly.

> If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).

I find this slightly amusing/ironic because many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I had a sheet of paper that was full of (fountain pen written) writing on my desk when I spilled a glass of water -- after the paper dried there was hardly any evidence that there had been writing on the paper. I know that's not the parent's point, but something turned in that was written with a fountain pen would be easier to remove: a teacher would just need to dunk the paper in water!