wmchen

I would love to see more examples of systems mapping and systems thinking taught in schools and early career environments. I'm really quite fond of the related [3] Map the System [1] competition. Some excellent examples of systems maps at [2].

In my bubble in undergrad, "policy case competitions" were all the rage. You're given a broad topic (often a wicked problem of some kind such as Housing Inaffordability or Climate Change, or something related to the sponsors field of interest), told to write a policy briefing note with no real constraints (money, resources, time) with recommendations to tackle the problem, and then evaluated by expert judges (typically think tankers, professors, senior government executives) who in a very well-meaning way, oftentimes have nothing significant to add or critique (because again, no constraints and they're nice because it's a learning environment), so they end up saying something along the lines of "have you looked at [vaguely related government program, non-profit initiative, etc.]? They used similar wording to your presentation."

I made the case to a competition organizer that we really ought to do away with this format and switch to something more grounded in systems mapping, because I don't really feel it's reasonable to ask undergrads to propose a policy that will somehow solve a wicked problem, or even a subdomain of one, in one fell swoop. I also don't think the format really encourages much original thinking. Most of the recommendations end up being paraphrases of existing proposed solutions, with little opportunity to meaningfully interrogate why those solutions might or might not work in the first place.

Systems mapping, or using a systems thinking lens, doesn't require you to propose a clear or obvious solution to something, but it does give people a chance to systematically examine problems through their own lenses. Having a student map out how they see the world, what they understand to be the root causes of a given problem, and how different actors and incentives interact could actually change some of our minds on how pervasive these problems are, where the feedback loops exist, and where changes might be most impactful. I think there's considerably more value in asking students to develop an interesting understanding of a problem that expands the domain of understanding than in asking them to come up with a superficially convincing solution to it.

[1]: https://www.skollcentre.org/map-system

[2]: https://www.mapthesystem.ca/2026

[3]: I'm aware that Ma constructed a literal map of entity relationships and did analysis based off of that, but it's still systems mapping informed by systems thinking, and an excellent example of that.

But aren't these data points based on statements made by companies, a contentious premise because of the competing claim that AI isn't really driving layoffs (rather economic conditions for capital), but rather AI is a convenient excuse as how companies can achieve similar results, with a smaller headcount?

How does one join the CCLA?

The only reference to membership I see from the Commissioner for Lobbying states [1]:

> Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) has two classes of members: ordinary members and voting members. Membership in CCLA shall be available to persons interested in furthering the Corporation's purposes and who have applied for and been accepted into membership in the Corporation by resolution of the board or in such other manner as may be determined by the board, in accordance with any membership criteria set by the board. Voting members are members who have been accepted as voting members by the board. A voting membership expires 12 months after the date of board acceptance, unless renewed by the board.

I don't see anything to this effect on the website, like a membership application form.

This is in contrast to the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association which just published the decision this week to have a flat $5 open membership.

[1]: https://lobbycanada.gc.ca/app/secure/ocl/lrs/do/vwRg?cno=376...

I find it honestly wild that so many have been inspired to recreate web discovery platforms in the vein of StumbleUpon at its peak, but not one seems to have really stuck or set a new standard for web discovery. The web is also a much bigger place than it was in 2009, there's so much more to discover, but it's so much harder to sift through what isn't worth paying attention to. I wonder if this speaks more culturally to how we consume new media.

You're not wrong, the unelected senate generally chooses to defer to the elected lower chamber and only truly contentious legislation have been "killed" (as in dropped dead) at the Senate (think abortion and climate change).

Generally the Canadian Senate will propose amendments to the bill after its study (around a quarter of the time if I recall, not always), but the lower chamber has no obligation to agree, so it has some sway in that consultative sense. And the Senate has been more active in proposing amendments to legislation after independent senators became a thing.

At this point, I think the soft landing that privacy advocates can hope for are amendments that curtail the worst aspects of this legislation.

It fell by exactly 20.00% because it hit the NSE's lower circuit, which prevents trades below that price for the rest of the session without technically halting trading. This is effectively a trading halt because there are presumably no buy orders at the asking price, and the real value of the asset is likely much lower. [1]

[1]: https://www.nseindia.com/static/products-services/equity-mar...

I haven't tried yet with this model, but Cowrie already provides support for an LLM backend. [1]

[1] https://docs.cowrie.org/en/latest/LLM.html

Thank you for sharing this. I would be excited to read your autobiography.

I find stories like yours inspiring, and reassuring in a way. I'm increasingly worried about this trend toward being tough on crime in response to growing public disorder, increasing maximum sentences, and generally taking a no-holds-barred approach because good society has been wronged.

I've been a victim myself, from petty theft to assault when I intervened to stop a hate crime, by people out on bail with long court records. After being assaulted I really did start to question my beliefs on this. But I still very much genuinely believe that people can change and should be given a second chance, even though some won't take it seriously, and for others it might take a very long time.

I've met quite a few people with criminal records, or records as youth offenders, who genuinely did become better people over time. A former classmate of mine used to deal cocaine and is now a personal trainer with a wonderful personality and sense of morality. Another used to be a lookout for a stash house and has similarly moved on from that life.

I guess that's what I find so reassuring about stories like yours. I've seen people change and move on from what was probably the worst chapter of their lives, and become people I'm genuinely glad to know. I worry that in our societal desire to be tougher on crime, we're becoming less willing to give people that chance. And I think stories like yours are a good reminder of why we shouldn't lose sight of it.

Thanks for building this. I remember someone (perhaps you) mentioning this would be an interesting idle game. I was half expecting to comment mentioning that effort, only to realize it was the exact same one when I had opened it.

I have a question about the economics of the server:

>Build and operate bots within a complex economic role-playing MMO.

Since Lost City predates the Grand Exchange, I'm curious how trade and commerce function in practice, especially in an economy now driven largely by agents. I haven't logged on yet, but my obsession as a younger F2P user was making as much gold as possible, not necessarily leveling to 99.

I believe the commenter was referring specifically to the paid subscription for Kagi, not the per-query usage-based billing API.

Thanks for sharing, wasn't aware of this provider. If anyone is wondering about rate limits for the subscription:

>We calculate search rates based on the timestamps of the last searches of a user (just the timestamps, not the queries or anything else!). We keep those timestamps for 12 hours, then discard them. We currently limit searches to 5 per 5 seconds, 15 per minute, and 120 per hour.

Source: https://uruky.com/faq

API: https://uruky.com/docs/api

In other words, good enough for casual use if you were already going to subscribe. Assuming the rate limits are okay, Uruky’s €5/month becomes cheaper at these search volumes:

1. Tavily Basic: 1,704 searches/month

2. Brave Search: 2,126 searches/month

3. Exa Fast / Auto: 2,233 searches/month

4. Exa Instant: 3,907 searches/month

5. DeepSeek Search: 7,503 searches/month

6. Ceramic: 22,507 searches/month

Ceramic.ai is $0.25/1000 searches. I've been using it as an MCP in OpenCode and it seems adequate. I don't see many people talk about it, and I have not benchmarked it against Exa/Tavilly.

For folks who want to get in the weeds of mapping North Korea on OSM, there's some documentation on OSM wiki. [1]

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:North_Korea

Adjadent to the article, there are some interesting builds with pulled parts from decommissioned servers in places where hardware is expensive or heavily taxed.

There's an entire parallel ecosystem around Chinese X79 and X99 boards [1](brands like Huananzhi and Machinist). They exist almost entirely to soak up scrap-tier Xeons and decommissioned server DDR3 and DDR4 ECC RAM that get pulled from datacenters for next to nothing. You see them online in Russian/Chinese/SE Asian online communities as budget builds, so nearly all the BIOS mods and documentation are in Russian or Chinese.

I think in NA we'd tend to write this hardware off as e-waste unless you're a homelabber (though I know Kimsufi still includes DDR3 builds in their catalogue). But in emerging markets, people have been squeezing real utility out of discarded enterprise silicon for a long time out of pure economic necessity. I've been tempted to do my own build but I already seek to have collected an overwhelmingly unnecessary amount of 2012-era workstations that I'm not sure my partner would appreciate an addition to.

[1] https://post.m.smzdm.com/talk/p/am9d3zv4/

It's up for me at the Lithuania POP.

One of their rivals claimed Rey purchased the PGP private key used for ShinyHunters for noteriety, but I do see it as plausible that he (and his friends) signed up to be the lightning rod for the remaining members through pure teenage impulsiveness (not seeing evidence for the theory that they set themselves up to take the fall with a lenient minor sentence for cash).

>Wouldn't high fees be competitive? A lot of incentive to compete there. Anticompetitive would be setting the fees too low to compete with.

Canada has a debit card network called Interac. Last I checked, the transaction fee was typically a flat $0.10 CAD (~$0.075 USD). There are shops that do debit or cash only, but it's not the norm (typically restaurants and niches with high chargeback risks). I am curious what keeps credit card acceptance high in Canada, despite a very widespread mature card network. I assume part of it is that consumer debt increases spending volume overall, but that can't be the primary reason I feel.

I believe they're referring to the free tier of Google AI Studio. [1]

[1]: https://aistudio.google.com

>did jagex actually turn down the opportunity to publish minecraft.

I'm not familiar with the market economics around indie games. Is there any value that Jagex would've added by being the publisher, rather than solo publishing as an indie dev?

I'm really excited to see what will come of this discovery. I will mention OpenTrafficMap [1][2], which leveraged the ESP32-C5 to collect 802.11p V2X communication data (Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems) from traffic lights, vehicles and other road traffic sensors. This project in particular got me excited about what could be accomplished with these microcontrollers.

[1]: https://opentrafficmap.org/

[2]: https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/05/24/opentrafficmap-esp32...

One case that does seem to have the potential to be precedent setting in the US seems to be Air Canada's litigation against Seats.aero, who is also continuing to scrape Air Canada's award inventory data despite Air Canada loginwalling for award search a year after it filed this lawsuit. [1][2]

[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.838...

[2]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67896748/air-canada-v-l...

>Well, federal court so national precedent against creating accounts to scrape registration only content.

I'm not familiar with US Civil Law. Is a precedent established when a consent agreement/settlement is put into place in the US, as is the case in this article?

Seems to be partly corroborated in Dawn. It's not clear to me who issued the orders though. [1]

[1]: https://www.dawn.com/news/2031474

You're right that most amateur radio regulations are self-policed by other amateur radio operators, and true enforcement is probably rarer than folks like to imagine.

But depending on the environment (and noting that this project is specifically targeted towards communities seeking last-resort communication), there's definitely still risk, even if there isn't a spectrum authority with any real policing powers.

For example (and I say this speculatively), if you're broadcasting encrypted radio traffic in a conflict zone, it could be hard to differentiate between civilian traffic and military traffic happening on civilian bands, so you might be wrongly targeted by a drone strike.

If you already have a target on your back, radio laws can still be arbitrarily applied upon oneself, as in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was once detained on the pretense of illegally importing handheld radios. [1]

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/aung-san-suu-kyi-myanmar-asia-ap-...

Original project page: https://hermes.radio/ (Code: https://mercury.hermes.radio/)

Organization page: https://www.rhizomatica.org/about/

My initial thought is that this is a cool way to try and get more resilient communications technology in the hands of those who need it most in the Global South, and it's awesome it was successfully used for a Pan Pan.

This reminds me of WinLink (an analogue to email on amateur radio), which I've heard is used by some Mariners. [1]

I'm aware that HERMES is essentially a SDR bundle/communication terminal (for a lack of a better term for a Raspberry Pi, a screen and an SDR), so it's not really re-discovering a well known amateur radio concept, but the hardware setup sounds a bit brittle on first glance, for what is essentially an emergency/critical communication application.

[1]: https://winlink.org/

I haven't played it, but a commonly suggested alternative for EVE Online that revolves around spreadsheets and a free market is Prosperous Universe.

Thank you so much for building this! It's a really awesome piece of work and I'm grateful for your work. I'd love to sponsor you on Github in the near future.

The only thing that I think would be interesting to see is native support for crawling via a sitemap.xml instead of recursively. I worked around this by implementing a basic scraper that fetched pages exclusively from the sitemap.xml to add into Hister.

I think you're already aware of this, but I also experienced some data loss during the import because I was running a concurrent reindex. I clocked it pretty quickly so I didn't think too much of it. [1]

[1] "TODO store new documents in both indexes while running reindex to guarantee not losing any data." @ https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/blob/master/server/indexe...

I set this up a few months ago based on asciimoo's comments on HN, and barely used it at first, but I realized not too long ago that it could be a pretty useful research tool for one of my hobbies (award travel), that revolves around being in the know around various concepts and quirks.

I scraped and imported posts from the blogs I regularly reference for award travel, then hooked it up to OpenCode/Codex as an MCP server and used that corpus for research on those topics. So I can ask things like "has anyone ever mentioned running into this problem before?" [1]

If you have a hobby or working situation that requires you to regularly reference a core set of websites or reference materials, Hister provides almost all the tools out of the box to start a search engine against it. The default datasets they promote include the Python Stlib, MDN and RFC corpus, as an example. [2]

[1]: https://wmchen.com/blog/revisiting-hister/

[2]: https://hister.org/datasets