1. Setris – Tetris with Sand Physics
Total comment counts : 33
Summary
The article is about a downloadable game called Setris that is available for Windows and Linux. It combines the gameplay of Tetris with falling sand. Users have been leaving positive comments and suggestions for the game, including requests for a Mac version and a mobile version, as well as some bug reports and feedback on game mechanics.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author expresses a desire to see a source repository for a game, with the possibility of a port that could be played on various platforms such as in-browser or on SteamDeck.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The physics engine in a video showing a sand simulation appears to run in reverse, with sand going up from the bottom of a valley to the top, rather than from the top down. However, the end result is the same. A link to the video is included.
2. An open-source alternative to QuickBooks
Total comment counts : 37
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The author expresses frustration with Intuit for discontinuing a Brazilian financial management software called Zeropaper that the author’s company relied upon, without offering an alternative. This experience taught the author to prepare an exit strategy as soon as possible after a product acquisition, regardless of reassurances given.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses open-source accounting solutions with a focus on the lack of integration with banking and taxes outside of the US, especially for businesses in Asia, South America, or Africa. The author suggests that Akaunting may be the most promising free and open-source solution for SMEs.
3. I gave commit rights to someone I didn’t know (2016)
Total comment counts : 30
Summary
The author of an abandoned Django project on Github learned the valuable lesson to trust open-source contributors. After reading a blog post about the benefits of giving diligent contributors commit rights, he allowed a person he had never met to fix bugs and orchestrate a group of contributors around a fork of his project. The author was surprised to discover his obscure project, django-money, had become wildly popular, with several hundred stars compared to the few stars of his other projects. He discovered that after giving one contributor commit rights, another had quietly been maintaining the project for several years, and it was being considered for use at a crowdfunding platform. The project was eventually moved into its own organization, and the author praised the original blog post for its advice on trusting contributors.
Top 1 Comment Summary
Raymond Hill, the creator of the popular uBlock adblock extension, wanted to hand over the ownership to a contributor. However, the contributor removed all references to Hill and began charging for the plugin, turning it into an affiliate marketing product.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s reluctance to review a pull request on GitHub because it seemed too large and time-consuming. They question whether others share this sentiment and wonder if it’s common to have small pull requests at work. They also ask if it’s sloppy not to review larger pull requests or if it indicates a problem with the code base.
4. I criticized Amazon’s policies in a blog – their lawyers have subpoenaed me
Total comment counts : 48
Summary
The article is a notification that JavaScript is disabled in the current browser being used to access Twitter.com and suggests enabling it or switching to a supported browser to continue using the site. It also provides links to the Help Center and the various policies of Twitter, as well as copyright information.
Top 1 Comment Summary
Amazon has requested the same information as California’s attorney general (AG) from Molson, a witness related to the antitrust investigation against itself in California. The motion also asks for additional information that the AG may have regarded as immaterial to their case to discredit Molson as a witness. Molson confused being subpoenaed with being sued in his response to Amazon’s motion, and this was confused with the legal complexities of the case and the lack of clarity in the wording of the thread.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses a lawsuit filed by the State of California against Amazon in which Molson is a witness and not a party. It appears that the discovery process in the case has overwhelmed Molson, and the author suggests that it is California’s responsibility to assist him with document requests.
5. NASA’s Laser Link Boasts Record-Breaking 200 Gbps Speed
Total comment counts : 10
Summary
Researchers from NASA, MIT, and other institutions have achieved the fastest space-to-ground laser-communication link yet, doubling the record they set last year. The TBIRD platform, currently orbiting Earth on NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 satellite and produced using highrate optical modems developed for fiber optics communication and high-speed storage, allowed the group to achieve data rates of up to 200 Gb/s. This represents a milestone in the pursuit of high-data-rate traffic based on very-high-data-rate optical communications from low earth orbit and beyond and is applicable in a broad range of situations including science missions, black hole exploration and Earth’s climate and resource data collection.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the benefits of high-bandwidth communication for deep space missions and astronomy. Linking multiple telescopes through high-bandwidth communication would allow for increased angular resolution and parallax information, providing depth perception. It has been done on Earth and in Earth-orbiting satellites, but for microwave or far infrared wavelengths, many gigabits of bandwidth per second would be required, while for infrared or optical, terabits or petabits per second would be needed. These high bandwidths are no longer as incomprehensible as they used to be.
Top 2 Comment Summary
Researchers have set a new world record for internet data transmission using a single optical chip, capable of transmitting over a petabit of information per second on a single laser. This has implications for space-based communication advances and is a testament to the effectiveness and low cost of fiber optic cable, which is expected to continue to be used for the vast majority of terrestrial traffic in the foreseeable future.
6. A peek inside Japan’s largest “Dagashi” store
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
Nihon-ichi no Dagashi Uriba in Okayama, Western Japan, is a large dagashi (Japanese confectionery and snacks) store that sells small packages of sweets and savouries that many Japanese buy for loose change. Founder Hideyuki Akiyama has made it his mission to keep the tradition alive even as large chains of convenience stores and supermarkets replace corner shops. Stocking a range of quainter and quirkier products, he wants to create a theme park for dagashi where children, parents, and grandparents from all over the world can visit. The store usually provides price points that children can afford and has a special section with a range of items that have prizes attached.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article describes the plight of traditional businesses in Japan run by aging proprietors or volunteers who are struggling to keep them alive due to the changing economic times and the disinterest of younger generations. The story mentions examples of an old-style café owner and a jazz bar owner in Nagasaki and Sasebo respectively, who try to maintain the tradition even though they don’t receive enough business to justify it and they don’t charge high prices. The article points out the contrast between personalized service and big business in both Japan and other parts of the world and discusses the difference between running a business for profit and running a business as a passionate enjoyment or to create a sense of community.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article argues that businesses’ main goal should be to serve society and contribute to the community, rather than solely maximizing shareholder value, as this belief became prevalent after Milton Friedman’s ideas in 1970. The article suggests that society has been paying the price for this belief since then.
7. JMAP – a modern email open standard
Total comment counts : 30
Summary
JMAP, an open API standard for modern mail clients and applications to manage email more efficiently, has been officially published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is an alternative to proprietary email APIs and can work with various platforms. JMAP is intended to be more efficient in network usage, easy for developers to work with and make email an open standard once more. All information from an RFC5322 message is represented by JMAP in a JSON structure, helping servers to operate without having to deal with complexities like encoding, parsing headers or MIME. The short answer is that JMAP is ideal for developers because it is a standard that is widely understood, essentially easy to adopt, with support in all operating systems and programming languages.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the writer’s positive experience with JMAP, a technology used to add support for Masked Emails, which generates random email addresses and passwords. The writer recommends reading about their team’s experience implementing JMAP on the 1Password blog.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses how the JMAP protocol has missed an opportunity for end-to-end encryption and instead suggests self-hosting as a solution. However, self-hosting email can be complex and not suitable for normal users who also deserve privacy. The article highlights the difficulty in using bridge applications for mail providers that support encryption and suggests that JMAP could have solved this issue by prioritizing end-to-end encryption.
8. A chiral aperiodic monotile
Total comment counts : 16
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The pursuit of chiral aperiodic monotiles, also known as Vampire Tiles, is driven by a community of people who find it interesting and fun. Although such pursuits may not have immediate practical applications, history has shown that curiosity-driven endeavors may eventually prove useful. In other words, the value of pure mathematics lies in the intellectual pursuit and discovery, not necessarily in the practical applications that may or may not arise as a result.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author is excited about a paper that describes a hierarchical substitution algorithm for creating tilings. They mention that this modification to the original result is small but impressive. The author also comments on the discussion in the paper regarding the historic definitions of tilings and reflections. They argue that most definitions allow reflections; however, for them, nature is chiral, and things cannot be reflected indiscriminately.
9. Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
Total comment counts : 76
Summary
This article introduces Crab, a memory-safe programming language with a community-driven fork and 100% less bureaucracy. It provides instructions on how to clone the source code repository, configure the build settings, and build and install the compiler, along with other tools like Crabgo, the package manager. The article also offers guidance on building CrabLang on Windows and building the documentation. Finally, it provides information on licensing and a Discord community for support.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses how the timing of certain types of posts on Hacker News can be more informative about the current zeitgeist than the actual linked articles themselves. For example, a top post about crablang could signal another rust-related event being in the news. Similarly, posts about Signal/Telegram can serve as a signal for WhatsApp or end-to-end encryption-related news.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses a fork of Rust called Crab Lang. Despite its claim of having “100% less bureaucracy,” it is essentially the same work being done by the same teams under a different name. The article notes that Rust is experiencing growing pains in terms of figuring out a governance structure that works for everyone, and this lack of transparency is leading to frustration and criticism from outsiders. The article also points out that if Crab Lang attracted actual developers, it would eventually face the same bureaucracy issues that Rust is currently dealing with. Lastly, the article refutes the idea that the Rust Foundation is to blame for these issues, as they try to stay hands-off on technical decisions and team organization.
10. Purely Functional Data Structures (1996) [pdf]
Total comment counts : 22
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The article mentions a helpful addendum about the latest developments in purely functional data structures since Okasaki. The addendum can be found on cstheory.stackexchange.com.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author of the article is reading a book which they find great. They have been working with Trees in Clojure and are facing difficulties in terms of understanding. They discovered a YouTube video from a Clojure conference which reviews some strategies for tree traversal. Despite the belief that functional Lisp would make it easy to traverse trees, the author is facing challenges. However, the author notes that functional data structures are awesome with a bit of up-front investment.