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I think this is almost spot on.

There is also people with just toxic personalities that everybody tries to avoid. In Europe unfortunately, is not easy to get rid of such characters and they often victimize teams and jeopardize entire projects.

Septic avoidance and minimizing interactions, sticking to process and keeping the distance are absolutely necessary for mental health.


It looks to me like an alien smiley :) of course aliens have only one eye.


What is happening with QC is very sad.

Research on this topic should be a long term scientific endeavor, like nuclear fusion has been for many years.

Not the circus it has been so far.


The fact the department had to be dismantled to solve the issue indicates the bad actors had effectively taken over.

This is clearly a failure of leadership that dragged for way too long.

Those kind of personalities need to be punished early and decisively otherwise everything rots.


> Those kind of personalities need to be punished early and decisively otherwise everything rots.

Yes, but unfortunately that’s illegal here in Sweden, leaving bullies with the upper hand.


From my point of view YouTube with Adds is unbearable. And I don't feel the subscription service is offering as much value as any other streaming platform.

If it was a bit cheaper I would may be consider it, but for my specific use case (just watch random videos and some channels) at this price is just not worth it and I will just stop using the platform.


I pay $14 a month for YouTube Premium. YouTube is my most used streaming service and I think it's completely worth it. Maybe if you don't consume a lot of YouTube it's not that valuable to you but I'd rather have YouTube over Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc all combined.


> I'd rather have YouTube over Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc all combined.

Had the realization recently at a family reunion that, aside from Succession, I haven't watched a full season/series of a TV/streaming show in the last few years. I actually don't know what the shows of the moment are. I almost exclusively watch YouTube in the evenings, if I'm watching anything at all.

I've been sub'd to YouTube Premium since it was called YouTube Red. Anytime I have to watch it withs ads I'm horrified. I wish I could give yearly subs out as gifts.


You can upgrade to the family plan and add people


Horses for courses I guess, but I don't think I've ever seen anything on YouTube that I would consider paying for. I'm sure I'm in a tiny minority, but I find the relentless chasing of "fame" to be completely grotesque and a large contributor to the rise of fascism. No way I'm going to fund that.


Sorry, but this is a bad take. There's so much non-shitty attention grabbing content on YouTube that it's arguably one of the single most valuable educational tools on the planet. There's even tons of amateur <insert literally any form of content in video form> content out there. Clips of comedy skits, amateur documentaries, programming tutorials, short/mid-form animation, etc.

It's on you for not seeking out better content.


Sorry you seem so offended even though I pointed out that "I'm sure I'm in a tiny minority". For my personal use case, as I thought I'd already made clear, I just don't find any value in YouTube. Every time I mention that on here, someone gets extremely upset like I was talking about their mother. Of course it's "on me", I'm not going to wade through pages of people debasing themselves with stupid faces just for clicks in order to seek out better content, when I can read a book, or watch something made by professionals with a budget, or literally anything else.


People dislike your opinion here because you are throwing the baby out with the bath water.

There are plenty of ways to search the youtube index for the good stuff while avoiding most of the BS you mention.


It's unfair to downvote the parent. Youtube is really uneven - yes, some great stuff, but somewhat hidden in a sea of bad content. The recommendation algorithm isn't that great in my opinion, emphasizing popular and clickbaity stuff over high quality, intellectually stimulating content. While I do watch Youtube quite a bit, and like it in general, I had to invest a lot of time in finding the right subscriptions. It's quite possible that the parent got steered by Youtube itself towards the bad content they describe.


> Maybe if you don't consume a lot of YouTube it's not that valuable to you

I'm in this bucket. I think for YouTube my no-brainer price would be around 4.99 or so. Even if it just gave me like 20* hours ad free or something.

I do pay for Twitch Turbo (£11.99) however, I've almost always got a stream open. At least YouTube ads don't run over the top of content, haha.

* Number completely out of thin air, not thought about it at all. Insert fair number here.


> I think for YouTube my no-brainer price would be around 4.99 or so. Even if it just gave me like 20* hours ad free or something.

Uhg. I hope paying for hours of """premium""" streaming service isn't where the industry goes.


We're already there, it's just ~740 hours instead of 20 :P

Fair comment though, I do get what you mean but I'd be ok with it if it meant things were more affordable. Each to their own and that.

Maybe do a cloud-style pricing? x/hour, capped at £12.99/mo. Same thing if you're already paying for premium but allows for affordability.


For me it’s the exact opposite, I’d rather have Disney+, Prime Video, Apple TV+, etc. over youtube (and I do).


From my point of view YouTube with Adds is unbearable.

It is that way by design


No, it’s really not. Maybe you’re thinking of Spotify whose goal is to get everyone to subscribe to premium, but YouTube’s cares much more about completely cornering their market and has no problem sustaining itself with ads. Why would they purposefully design their app to annoy the vast majority of users?


I assume it's more that kids are far more tolerant of ads and they'll relentlessly watch youtube all day regardless of the ads.


I do wonder about this quite often nowadays - is it because they're kids or because particular apps provide continuous stream of content that doesn't distinguish between ads and the content. Or is it both of these things?

Youngest generation will be the perfect customers in the nearest future, it seems. That kind about which corporations dream about now; they won't complain about privacy or ads because they're being programmed right now to consume whatever they see. And that scares me tbh.


That's incredibly illogical. If you intentionally make something unbearable, you end up with X/Twitter. Google might be stupid, but they aren't Musk.


Where else are you going to find videos to watch? Vimeo? Bing? YouTube has a dominant market position And wants you to pay for it. Their reasoning could be that if they give you enough ads that make it unbearable, you will pay just to get rid of the ads and wants you to pay for it. Their reasoning could be that if they give you enough ads that make it unbearable, you will pay just to get rid of the ads.

From a business perspective, it's completely logical.


There are different kinds of unbearable.

If Musk had simply cranked up the ads to increase revenue, it would have worked / probably wouldn't have hurt the platform like all his other changes. The problem at Twitter (from a short term profit perspective) is that his changes - or rather, what he wanted to do - were not all so simple.


Have you ever tried to use the video controls on YouTube in Safari for iOS / iPadOS? Or manage a GSuite (or whatever it's called this week) account? I'd say Google are both malicious in intent, and incredibly bad at design.


MSX was a Japanese home computer standard indeed, developed in collaboration with Microsoft, who provided the BASIC ROM implementation. It became very popular in Japan and in a number of European and South American countries. I wasn’t aware that MSX-DOS was also started by Microsoft but I am not surprised. Later versions of the OS were developed by ASCII corporation in Japan.

Fun fact is that the source was released not long ago with restrictions, and there is a newer version developed by an enthusiast called Nextor. Still in use today by many hobbicists.


> the source was released not long ago

That sounds interesting. Could you perhaps provide a link? I cannot seem to find anything by myself.


Check the readme on this:

https://github.com/Konamiman/Nextor


Is really hard for me to understand how running an VM on a resource constrained device has any benefit. There is a reason why those devices run using very lightweight "OS"s like FreeRTOS and Embedded C.

Why the constant obsession to apply a technology designed for a specific purpose everywhere else, even when it doesn't make sense?


Say that to the millions of ID cards, transport cards, SIM cards, and other smart cards with a secure element that run Java (a lot of times only powered by the small current from the NFC tap).


Java was originally intended for embedded devices...


It's not a bad decision for scripting provided the VM is lightweight enough. Things like "FORTH interpreter" or the old "BASIC stamp" microcontrollers. And it provides a degree of robustness vs running arbitrary binaries.


The Apollo program went to the moon with a complex VM on top of an extremely limited physical architecture. That's actually one of the main reasons to do it, because you can implement a strictly better (in all sorts of ways) virtual machine on top of really awful hardware.

Not to say that's valid in this instance, but plenty of early VMs were entirely made to improve resource constrained hardware


Making it easy for hobbyists who already know that technology to have access. Micropython has been successful, and this is an alternative to that.


The github project indicates "DeviceScript brings a professional TypeScript developer experience to low-resource microcontroller-based devices."

If you tell me is a toy, and somebody's pet project: fine. Is all about having fun.

But then don't mention "professional" in the project description.


It's not an experience for professional typescript development, but the experience that professional typescript developers are used to.

This isn't in competition with C or C++, it's in competition with micropython. Python isn't a great language except in its ubiquity. I'd rather work in what I know, which is TS. This opens up microcontroller development to JavaScript devs of whom there are a lot of us.

Types are really helpful when dealing with unfamiliar APIs. When doing embedded projects, you deal with a lot of APIs. There are the language built ins, any libraries you are using to interface with peripherals. This project opens up microcontroller development in a big way to a LOT of developers.

Is it what you want to use for a commercial embedded device? I can't say. Is that the only standard? Then you should just be using C for everything, I guess. But something like a Raspberry Pi Pico or ESP32 has plenty of resources to run JavaScript while still being able to manage a weather station or automated garden or security camera or pen plotter. There are lots of applications that don't use the full power of the board.


Hmm?

Instead of ctrl+f for "professional" I suggest re-reading it

>professional TypeScript developer experience

It is about experience of sane programming environment, right?


Easy: because TypeScript or Python are way easier to learn than C. Learning C is a long, arduous, uphill battle against arcane error messages and undefined behaviour.

Unless you have a background in C/C++ already, most people can probably get up and running with something like this way, way faster.


Good luck understanding things like `if(!!!c) { ... }` or why a line-break after a return statement matters in JavaScript/TypeScipt ;) JS has its own footguns and legacy baggage.


I've never seen `!!!` in JavaScript, and I do a lot of it. Care to share?


Shouldn't have made an example in the if-statement as it is mostly useless there. But triple ! is very common to negate-and-convert a possibly falsy statement (undefined, null, false/true):

const x: boolean | undefined | null = getValue(); const not_x: boolean = !!!y

I added TS type annotation for clarity, although could be inferred if `getValue` is typed accordingly.


I've seen `!!` and I've seen `!`, but what would `!!!` get you here that the other two don't?


negation plus cast to boolean. See this for more info: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21154510/the-use-of-the-...


And line breaks after return statement? Is that true? Haven't stumbled on that one. So this is probably misinformation.


No, that one is true. JS automatic semicolon insertion is dumb.

   return
     <p>
       A JSX paragraph
     </p>
is a common mistake from novices; it'll return void/undefined.

In TypeScript, at least, you get yelled at for this.


How do you get that TypeScript or Python environment on the chip of your interest at the first place? How do you expose hardware interfaces without knowledge of C?


> How do you get that TypeScript or Python environment on the chip of your interest at the first place?

By having somebody else do it. Abstraction is a wonderful thing.


That's just kicking the can down the road. What if you are working on device which is under NDA? What if it is some exotic MCU which nobody else uses?


Then you probably shouldn’t use this. It’s not for you, that’s cool, move on and use whatever you’re currently using.


I am just showing you that DeviceScript/MicroPython/LUA/any other scripting language will expect from the user to know lot of C in order to be able to use its board unless they want to just run it without any input/output of data. But users want to use the scripting language because they don't know C. The whole flow is Catch-22.


I might have agreed 10 to 15 years ago when arduino was brand new and almost everything was custom.

These days... eh - pretty hard disagree with everything you've said.

Do some folks still need to know the ins & outs of the device? Sure. Will this work on every device? Nope.

Does that matter for the success of this project? Not a fucking bit.

Honestly - this looks a lot like Electron in my opinion: It gives companies a very cheap entry point into a whole realm of tooling that was previously out of bounds.

They can do it without having to hire new folks, they can prototype and run with it as far as they'd like, and then 3 years in, once the product is real and they know they have a market - they can turn around and pay someone to optimize the embedded devices for cost/power/performance/other.

The flow isn't catch-22 AT ALL. The flow is: I'm trying to do a thing that's only marginally related to the embedded device, and it's nifty that I can do that with low entry costs (both financial and knowledge).

---

By the time you are under NDA for a new device... you are established enough to be making your own decisions around tooling (basically - you are part of phase 2: optimize).


> The flow is: I'm trying to do a thing that's only marginally related to the embedded device

It's too bad that this comment is buried so deep: it should be at top level. More and more often, embedded work is just like this -- the business logic is far more important than the fact that it's running on an "embedded device." And in those cases, having programmers who understand modern software development at a high level is far more useful than having programmers who are expert in C and comfortable sitting down with multiple chip datasheets for a week, writing peripheral drivers.


One of they main reasons was that they had to: the cost of a more capable system was too high. In the last years that has improved drastically, and there are many usecases where the 5 USD increase in BOM needed to run JS/Python etc can be justified.


Exactly! But it's more like 1.50 USD (ESP32-C3 or RP2040 compared to say STM8).


8 and 16 bit home computing says hello.


I agree, this will mostly go nowhere. Sure when somebody will prepare you DeviceScript environment for *your* board, then you are good to go. But in 99% of cases, you will get hardware in front of you which almost certainly is not supported by DeviceScript. And now without intimate knowledge of C, how are you going to expose interfaces of that particular hardware, so you can work with those interfaces in DeviceScript? Well you won't, you need to know C first.

Same problem for MicroPython. Same problem for LUA, same problem for any scripting language running on constrained MCU.


The target audience for such runtimes are teams with general software engineer skills, and less embedded skills, and little hardware skills. They are likely to weight software support (including drivers) very heavily when selecting hardware. This reduces how often the scenario you describe will come up, compared to traditional hardware development.


Yep.

For example, it supports ESP32.

Every problem sure starts to look like a ESP32 nail if I have this tool chain available.


Depending on the kind of work you do, this may not be a problem.

For my day job, I use STM32/C++ because it's what the company has standardized on. For my side gig/consulting work, I've pretty much standardized on ESP32 because it's cheap, has lots of resources and good community, and I can leverage the Arduino ecosystem. It's grossly overkill for a lot of projects but no-one cares. Clients just care that you can ship fast.

My next step is moving the side gig work to MicroPython or some other higher-level language that lets me code much faster than C/C++.


Agree 100%

That was my point - the ESP32 is so versatile and cheap, it's my go-to these days for pretty much everything.

Being about to have an easy and reasonably powerful js runtime for that sounds great.

Apparently node-red also has something for esp32?

And I haven't tried it, but low.js looks cool too [1]

[1] https://github.com/neonious/lowjs


A VM can make all the gaping security holes portable between IOT devices.


I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek, but I think there‘s really the chance for better IoT security when using a VM. Those things are connected to the internet (duh) and sandboxing is probably a good idea. You obviously don’t need a VM for that, but maybe the tradeoffs are favorable.


99% of the security issues in the IoT things are software design stupidity. Using a "safe" language or "sandboxed" VM cannot save your lightbulb when it's main loop includes "fill buffer with content from HTTP endpoint and execute it"


They are a body shop. Subcontracting any crap permanent employees won't want to do.

That's why they have so many employees, that's literally their "stock".


I think indeed one of the starting points was UZI, it is mentioned somewhere in the readme or license files.


Definitely a common sense step in the right direction. Humans going anywhere beyond the moon using chemical propulsion seems quite problematic due to all the unsolved issues related to radiation and micro-gravity.

Now talking speculative fiction, the real breakthrough will come if we figure out a way to induce acceleration without an action-reaction process. Just an energy source, and no propellant. Being able to sustain 1g for a few months on a heavy spacecraft means interstellar travel (proxima centaury) would be within grasp.


Meanwhile, having engines that have higher specific impulse helps quite a bit as well. That is to say: a nuclear engine needs less propellant to provide the same amount of delta V (actual work). Since the majority of a rocket's mass is in the propellant, this scales non-linearly.

A nuclear rocket is a big improvement over chemical rockets already.


How does your initial point of 1g for a few months on a heavy spacecraft lead to traveling 4.246 light years? Genuine question!


It would take 6 years to get there (earth time) or 3.6 years (spacecraft time) if you could have constant 1G acceleration (in the opposite direction for the second half of the journey).

https://cosmicreflections.skythisweek.info/2019/09/04/space-...


With a spacecraft big enough to live in, we are talking of a time frame not too different from the one from the age of exploration by sea. I have no doubt many people would want to take such a trip even if it takes 10 years to get back to earth.

Unmanned spacecrafts would be able to go much faster, sustaining more dramatic accelerations. So getting cargo and robots there for support would be way faster.


This takes you to 0.99C, how feasible is that (thinking materials more than anything)


Sadly, not very feasible because of the hydrogen atoms floating around in the empty space, about 1 per cubic meter.

At speeds about 0.5C a collision with such an atom produces X-rays, and harder gamma rays at higher speeds. They are pretty hard to insulate against, and are actively harmful. For a spaceship of a considerable size, enough collisions would occur to be dangerous. The paper: https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=...


To make it even worse, that's based on an average density 1.8 atoms/c3. The real values would probably vary wildly, and you won't be able to "break" in advance in order to go through a high density area.

And then there's the problem of hitting an interstellar grain of sand at 0.5c.


I wonder what the odds of survival are compared to sailing around the world in a Galleon.


Only 0.95 per the source linked above. I don't know.

Speculating you'll substantially blue shift the light coming from in front of you, and I suppose that can't be good for materials (or people), but I'm not sure if there is enough to matter. Any dust you collide with is also going to have ridiculous amounts of energy, but you'll be in interstellar space when you're at high speeds so there shouldn't be much of it (even for space) either.


It's not feasible. It would require more fuel than the Earth is heavy, even if we had nuclear propulsion.


It depends on the mass of the ship, but yes; quite a bit.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-does-it-take-to-accele...

I don't think that means is unfeasible if the energy source allows for that.


No, actually it does not depend.

The rocket equation says that the fuel mass of a rocketship is higher than the cargo mass by exp(delta_v/v_exhaust).

When the final velocity is relativistic, delta_v should be replaced with delta_rapidity. In our case this would introduce a factor of 2.65, but the results are so ridiculous that we can ignore that.

So, let's simply say that delta_v is the speed of light, or 300000 km/s.

The exhaust velocity for a nuclear thermal rocket is about 9 km/s.

The ratio between delta_v and the exhaust velocity is about 33000. The exponential of that is roughly speaking 1 followed by 15000 zeros.

There are less than 10^100 atoms in the known universe.

So, even if you want to accelerate just one single atom to 99% of the speed of light, you would need more fuel than the entire universe. Many, many, many times more.


Yeah well, we don't really know what happens at high speeds. Probably biochemistry stops working at 0.3c? It doesn't seem structural materials would remain solid at 0.95c... who knows.


High speeds relative to what? The earth orbits at 30 km/s, our galaxy arm is at over 200 km/s (say 0.1% c), I'm not sure relative speed matters at all


I am not a physicist but I suspect that we are already moving at significant speed relative to other bodies. We have no special frame of reference that defines our "real" speed.


That's not quite right. There's the cosmic background radiation "rest" frame, which can reasonably be taken as 0 velocity.

The laws of physics don't change in different frames (Einstein's assumption), but that doesn't mean that all frames are equivalent in other respects.


> cosmic background radiation "rest" frame, which can reasonably be taken as 0 velocity

What does this mean? The CMB is radiation travelling at the speed of light in every direction.


There's a rest frame where the CMB is (nearly) isotropic, and in every other frame there's a larger anisotropy, see the first comment here

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/2va4t6/does_no_...

> You are absolutely right in that the CMB becomes Doppler shifted when you have some relative velocity. But Earth is not in the CMB rest frame: when we observe the CMB from Earth, we observe a dipole component to the CMB caused by the Earth's motion orbiting the Sun, the Sun's orbit around the Milky Way, and any velocity the Milky Way as a whole has. I was at a talk about the new Planck results last week, and saw a plot in which you can clearly see the dipole component in the raw data. You need to correct for this motion before you can even remotely see the anisotropies that are the interesting science goals of Planck.

> There is a rest frame in which the CMB is closest to isotropic (no dipole component), and this rest frame is special but not 'absolute'. This frame is effectively the 'center-of-momentum' frame of the observable universe, in which we expect the total momentum to be zero. We know from classical mechanics that for any system of objects, we can construct such a frame, and that it sometimes has useful properties for solving certain types of problems. But there is nothing 'absolute' about this rest frame, the laws of physics operate entirely the same.

> And so this is fine, because ultimately what relativity requires is that the laws of physics operate the same in every rest frame, not that every rest frame looks the same. Because the CMB is itself physical (made of photons) and was emitted by matter, it is entirely natural that it should be affected by frame transformations, and should look different if you shift to a frame that is moving differently than the emitting medium.


The frequency of light changes depending on how fast you are moving relative to it. Move away from a light source and the light still approaches you from the same speed, but is lower frequency. Rest here is where the frequency becomes "uniform" (ish) regardless of direction.


The speed of light is the frame of reference. It remains constant for any observer no matter at which speed is moving.


In fact, you could get anywhere in the universe in your lifetime/timeframe, if you could maintain the 1g acceleration.


Depending on the nature of the expansion of the universe, that might not be true.

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


> without an action-reaction process. Just an energy source, and no propellant.

Unfortunately, in our universe, momentum is conserved.


If you could somehow convert mass into a beam of photons then the mass loss would be tiny compared to the momentum.


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