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ragtagtag

224 karma · joined June 25, 2019

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ragtagtag··on PractiCal – Self-hosted calendar, contacts, and tasks written in Rust
This looks great. I love RustiCal, so I'm keen to give this a try!
ragtagtag··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
They had a CI/CD problem, so they fixed... version control.

They've ripped out and replaced the most carefully thought-out part of the CI/CD chain with something less carefully thought-out, while leaving the teetering house of cards in place.

ragtagtag··on Show HN: tale.fyi, we deserve a home for fiction
This looks lovely, thank you. Is there a source repository available?
ragtagtag··on Show HN: I rebuilt the recruitment process from the ground up
Sounds interesting. How do candidates update their profiles? It can be annoying to have to replicate information that's already on both a CV and LinkedIn into yet another recruitment system's custom format. I can understand the limitations of parsing a CV, but how do you make it easy for candidates to describe themselves?
ragtagtag··on Semicolons bring the drama; that's why I love them
Too much drama; too much!
ragtagtag··on Who isn't a big fan of "impartial" news? People who don't have power
This is one area where richer countries can learn a lot from poorer countries, should they choose to listen.

When I lived in Liberia, there were about 10-15 different newspapers in the capital, from websites to print to one guy with a massive chalk board on the main road. This diversity of sources served quite a small population, but there was a massive appetite for news.

In such a situation, you don't expect impartiality, but each news organisation's perspective sites is more obvious, and reading about events from multiple perspectives gives, in my view, a broader and clearer window into what happened.

I think it could make sense to value in news, not impartiality, but diversity of viewpoints.

Conveniently, the internet does make this much easier.

ragtagtag··on Decent living standards for 8.5B would require 30% of current resource use
I would add that the terrible politics doesn't need to be local. There are a large number of international norms that benefit the already-wealthy, at the expense of the poor, for example, by supporting authoritarians in other countries.
ragtagtag··on Decent living standards for 8.5B would require 30% of current resource use
You may or may not be correct, but I'd say, citation needed.

It's not self-evident that life is such a zero-sum game that more people necessarily means fewer resources to go around; I'd even venture that the last hundred years of development suggests the opposite.

It's quite possible that more people enables a slew of network effects (such as technology improvements due to more minds attacking a problem, say) that improves everyone's living standards.

ragtagtag··on Migraine is more than a headache – a rethink offers hope
> I also do the bending while swallowing trick that was on HN sometime back

Could you share the link for this, if you can find it?

ragtagtag··on Ask HN: What's a good electrical UPS for a home dialysis machine?
You might want to look into EcoFlow. I use their River system to provide backup power for my home equipment (I have frequent power outages, usually about 2 hours in length). I can't tell you whether it'll work for medical equipment, though.
ragtagtag··on I would have shit in that alley, too
> Who’s going around giving pro bono Brazilian waxes to the homeless?

Apparently this is most likely to be a local clinic; when handling lower-income clients, it's often a routine part of any sexual health treatment.

(A friend who is a medic is slowly enlightening me on all the necessary parts of life and healthcare that we're too polite to talk about in school.)

ragtagtag··on Banach–Tarski Paradox
What's an anagram of Banach-Tarski?

Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski!

ragtagtag··on Linux is like ice cream
Ubuntu is an isiXhosa/isiZulu word, and the concept (and similar words) exist in other Bantu languages... But, although Swahili is a Bantu language, I don't think it's a word in Swahili. (To be fair, I can't claim fluency in Swahili, but it's not in any of my dictionaries.)
ragtagtag··on Reality might be a strange loop
"A strange loop is a paradoxical structure where the highest level emerges from the lowest level, and the lowest level, in turn, gives rise to the highest level."

This is saying the same thing twice; does the author mean that the highest level emerges from the lowest level, and the highest level then gives rise to the lowest level?

ragtagtag··on Which is better for your dog, kibble or raw meat? Research yields health results
The headline is click bait. The results aren't surprising: more research needed.

However, despite the terrible headline, the article is an excellent summary of the debate and the study, and well worth reading if you have pets or are interested in raw food diets for animals.

ragtagtag··on Insult Passphrase Generator
In this case, I suspect "china" comes from Cockney rhyming slang, "china plate", "mate", as in "friend".
ragtagtag··on Astronomical Data Used for Litigation (FAQ)
In case the site is unavailable for anyone else: https://web.archive.org/web/20240127101027/https://aa.usno.n...
ragtagtag··on Sit.
Ah! Well the kittens didn't get up to any nonsense while I scrolled, they just sat, cleaning the poop that they had kicked up the wall off their legs... so 10/10, great success! Thank you! Now I just need to scroll endlessly...

(Sardine is the kitten who led the Great Gecko Chase; Anchovy is the kitten who meditatively masterminded the Amazing Poop Fling. Really need to get these guys adopted out.)

ragtagtag··on Sit.
I opened the webpage, settled myself down, and clicked "Start". A lovely bong resonated through my headphones, and I relaxed.

Immediately, one of the foster kitten sidled past me with a half-butchered gecko, still weakly struggling. I leapt up, grabbed a nearby broom, and gave chase. What followed was an episode of Tom & Jerry, but with more swearing. As I managed to part the cat from the gecko and punt the gecko outside, a calm bong brought me to my senses.

1/10, this did not make me sit.

ragtagtag··on NLP Embeddings from 1hot to Word2Vec to Bert
This is a really accessible introduction to a topic that is frequently glossed over in machine learning primers.
ragtagtag··on Show HN: Real-time AI voice chat with Santa
This is fun! I like the voice, and the picture of Santa and his helpers are cute.

After discussing with my sister-in-law, though, we won't be showing this to my nephew -- still a true believer in Father Christmas -- because she reckons it sounds slightly too generated, and she's concerned that it might break the spell. :-(

For myself, I think I would have been charmed, but perhaps I was more of an 8-bit kid.

ragtagtag··on The brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside (2020)
The title definitely seems like a strawman, but it is the best use of a strawman that I've seen in an academic article: an outrageous and amusing title that makes me want to read the paper!

(The rest of the article seems much more defensible to me: well-written without quite verging into strawman territory. But I'm no expert in the field.)

ragtagtag··on Desmond Tutu, anti-apartheid icon, dies at 90
I think there are two elements at play.

Consider a person of colour living in the eponymous mansion of the city's wealthiest neighborhood.

For a racist government, it's a symbol of defiance.

For other people of colour, who have been told by the government their whole lives that they are worthless, good only for manual labour -- one of their own is living in the oldest mansion in the fanciest neighborhood in town. It's an affirmation of their worth.

As a symbol, his place of residence had great power.

ragtagtag··on Desmond Tutu, anti-apartheid icon, dies at 90
"Without seeking exemption from the law" is the key phrase. He refused to respect a discriminatory law, and, by living there, was effectively daring the Apartheid government to arrest a sitting archbishop.
ragtagtag··on Desmond Tutu, anti-apartheid icon, dies at 90
Archbishop Tutu told me, a few years ago, that he had received a strange email from someone claiming to be a lawyer from a small English parish in which Tutu had been a curate in the 1970s.

The person was asking for Tutu's assistance in transferring the fabulous wealth of a deceased Nigerian prince to his widow.

“Ah, a 419 scam,” I said.

“A what now?”

I explained what a 419 scam was, and, fearing the worst, asked what he had done about it. It turned out that he still had a number of friends in that area, and had forwarded it on to a friend to investigate.

“Never heard of this lawyer chap,” the response came, “DO NOT respond!”

So, of course the Archbishop responded.

For a moment, I put myself in the shoes of this “Nigerian Prince”, getting an email from “Archbishop Desmond Tutu”, shaming the alleged prince for attempting to scam innocents on the internet. I started giggling.

“So what happened next?” I asked.

“Oh, he emailed me back, and tried to sell me something else.”

ragtagtag··on How to build a billion dollar audio app in a weekend
Interesting stuff! One of my clients uses Daily.co and it's a great system: much easier to use and more reliable than Zoom, especially since you're not forced into downloading software. It'll just run in your browser. I'd love to see it get broader fame.
ragtagtag··on Building a UPS with LiFePO4 Cells
You raise a good point! I spent some time thinking about this. Ultimately, it wasn't clear to me that any plastic I could reasonably work with would be more fire-retarding than the dense wood that I ended up using, and of course a metal enclosure would be a far greater fire hazard due to the increased risk of short circuits.