TimBurr

From the people who brought you:

Biden Tax Rule Would Rip Billions From Big Fortunes at Death

and

Richest 100 Americans Would Pay $78 Billion Under Warren Tax

I think that billionaires are bad for democracy, and that Bloomberg is not aligned with our interests as non-billionaires.

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-04/biden-tax-rule-would-rip-billions-from-biggest-fortunes-at-death

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-01/richest-100-americans-would-pay-78-billion-under-warren-tax

This even works for some non-antique cars. Jeep Wranglers (TJ generation) and Mazda Miatas (NA generation) have both appreciated somewhat in recent years.

Of course, no one's getting rich when a car appreciates from $5000 to $6000 or $3000 to $3500 over a few years. Net of repairs it's probably break-even. But it's nicer than losing value :)

This might be a different Ask HN, but does anyone have suggestions on avoiding the content farm stuff? Searching reddit works, but amounts to being trapped in a walled garden.

I've found a lot of great stuff on random independent websites (i.e. https://woodgears.ca/, http://gizmology.net/) that have no Reddit presence. Filtering those out is a great loss.

Something like the Yahoo Directory (hierarchical tree of hand-sorted topics) could work, but that's long gone.

Thoughts?

On a quick and dirty look, I don't think those figures are right. Here's what I found for 2020:

USPS 2020

  Revenues & Expenses
  Package revenue:  $28,537M
  Overall revenue:  $73,123M
  Overall expenses: $82,309M
  Net profit:      -$ 9,176M

  Mail volume - pieces per year
  Packages:         ~6.4B
  Marketing mail:   ~75B
  First class mail: ~54B
  

The press release listed all volumes as changes and percents - I've made a quick effort to back out approximate total volumes. Data from https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/1113-...

Fedex

  Revenues & Expenses
  Package revenue:  Unknown
  Overall revenue:  $69,217M
  Net profit:       $ 1,286M

  Mail volume - pieces per year
  Packages:         ~4.6B
  Marketing mail:   N/A
  First class mail: N/A

Packages are presented per day, but only count operating days (255/yr) The source I found split expenses up into cost of goods sold/SG&A/other/operating. I'm not clear what each one means and don't want to misrepresent - try the link! Data from https://www.fedex.com/en-us/about/company-structure.html and https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FDX/fedex/financia...

So USPS carries more packages, as well as insane volumes of mail that UPS/FedEx won't. Despite the significant volume differences, expenses are within 20% between the companies.

Here's a NASA blog with slightly more detail:

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/296/mars-...

> An issue identified earlier this month showed a 15% chance for each time the helicopter attempts to fly that it would encounter a watchdog timer expiration and not transition to flight mode. Today’s delay is in line with that expectation and does not prevent future flights.

Thanks! I looked at some tank drawings, but couldn't tell if they were omitting auxiliary tanks for simplicity's sake. Didn't want to say anything inaccurate.

I'm not sure what was on the Shuttle tank, but other vehicles carry hydraulic fluid (for engine gimballing) & hydrazine (for small thrusters). They're usually vented at the end of a mission to safe the vehicle.

If you're wondering about practicality, Skylab was a Saturn V tank. Unlike the external tank suggestions, Skylab was built on the ground and never had fuel in it. But it was basically the same structure as the Saturn's third stage. Like ISS, Skylab had some micrometeorite shielding outside of the main tank.

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

More recently, Nanoracks has looked at refurbishing ULA's Centaur upper stage into a habitat. Like the Shuttle, Centaur runs on a H2 + O2 cycle. Their plan is to lift an equipment kit onboard the Centaur. They'd cut a hole after the end of the mission and use on-orbit welding (not mature yet) to install all the floors/decks/airlocks.

https://nanoracks.com/in-space-outpost-demonstration/

There are similar limits on photos/video. MMS photos are resolution capped at ~1MP, and videos have are compressed to be barely legible.

iMessage transfers photos/video at their native resolution.

Which means that if three iPhone users send photos in a group chat, everything's great. Add one Android user and all four are degraded to MMS quality levels.

I think my next phone will be by Apple, specifically so I can enjoy the seamless image/video sharing the rest of my family has. Probably a few generations back - I don't need the fancy cameras and screens.

I mentioned it in a different comment, but take a look at Syncthing. It does mesh-style backup to synchronize a folder between multiple machines. That provides robustness against hard drive or PC failures, and it's easy to add an offsite node for extra confidence.

You can use Takeout to bulk-download photos: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/9666875?hl=en

I don't know if you can automate syncing Google Photos to a local disk. Wouldn't be surprised if there was.

(edit: Wow. Lots of people wanting to help! I wasn't expecting two sibling responses.)

Depending on what you need, a NAS + Syncthing is much simpler than the linked article. Building a PC isn't hard, and keeps prices down. These days, a RPi 4+2 USB HDDs would run circles around the motherboard on my NAS.

Syncthing is a great continuous backup solution. I use ~/NOTES as a scratchpad, and it updates automatically between my various computers. It gives you pretty granular control over shares, and I back up critical stuff to a cloud provider.

That said, there's no calendar/email/notes. XigmaNAS is built on FreeBSD, and will happily run NextCloud or a photo gallery or whatever.

I've found http://neverssl.com very helpful for captive portals. It does what you'd expect - hosts a HTTP-only page that allows captive portals to work correctly.

Since it's only ever HTTP, it sidesteps the certificate errors or HTTP downgrades that normal sites are hit with during captive portal interception.

I am curious what happens to captive portals as HTTPS adoption rises. Some OS's (Android, OSX) already detect captive portals and launch a lightweight webview.

A few examples in the blog post stood out to me - both refine ambigous letters to clear ones, which demonstrates concerns other folks were talking about in this thread.

In this one, i's are nearly illegible, but are corrected. It appears to be correct here, but could be wrong.

https://blog.adobe.com/hlx_fa6ee5a67d3f2e5b1945745176e6b955e...

This one's weirder. In the original, I can't read many of the letters. It looks like G[EL]NE[XR]A[IL]DI[ER][XK][IT]OR - lots of guesses. The enhanced version is GENERALDIREKTOR (I think). At any rate, it's much more confident in the spelling than I am, as a human.

https://blog.adobe.com/hlx_a337d462293b51f4d91182cbbebf68cf4...

I set up a personal mailserver a few years back, and have hit a lot of painpoints. The main ones were software complexity (setup) and dealing with blacklists (ongoing).

Setup for a normal mailserver requires Postfix (SMTP send/recieve), Dovecot (IMAP mailbox management), SpamAssassin, a webmail frontend (Roundcube), something for user management (MySQL + PHPMyAdmin for me) and a generous amount of glue. Things like DNS records, config files, spam rules and classifiers, etc).

Blacklists are far more annoying, especially w.r.t. GMail. I use a DigitalOcean node, and some of their IP ranges are blacklisted due to past spamminess. Depending on the provider, there may or may not be a bounce email, and may or may not be a whitelisting process. I've even seen mixed results within GMail. I can send from my custom domain to my GMail without trouble, but emails to a friend using a custom domain on GMail are dropped silently. (That's the worst of self-hosting, I think. Silently dropped messages are way harder to detect than a mailer-daemon block notification.)

Long story short, it's a mess :)

On the flipside, similar commercial plans (3 domains, 20GB shared storage) run $30/mo or so, which is way more than I'm willing to spend on a vanity email. Sounds like a similar story for mailing lists.

I'd give self-hosting a shot and see how it goes. Since mailing lists are opt-in, users will know if they aren't receiving what they signed up for, and are likely to reach out for support help. That's different than conventional email, where a silent drop and no reply are hard to tell apart for the recipient.

Hope that wasn't too much info/text, and good luck!

That's a similar spirit to Rockstar and Enterprise - they're joke languages to poke fun at employer requirements. Rockstar actually looks fun to play with, in a code-as-art sort of way. :)

https://codewithrockstar.com/

https://github.com/joaomilho/Enterprise

Thanks for the reference! I'll have to read about those more.

Sounds like that also eliminates any fuss with oil/fuel ratios, since they're introduced separately.

You're asking really good questions :)

In my layman's understanding, those are related. Playing with the piston dimensions limits (but doesn't entirely prevent) fuel/exhaust mixing. Unburned fuel in the exhaust makes them dirty.

The site says:

> ... This expels the exhaust gasses out the exhaust port, usually located on the opposite side of the cylinder. Unfortunately, some of the fresh fuel mixture is usually expelled as well.

Another factor - since the fuel enters through the crankcase, it needs to be mixed with oil for lubricating the moving parts. That oil burns when it gets to the combustion chamber. Pretty sure that also increases unwanted emissions.

It's entirely possible modern CFD and chemistry could improve on those issues... I'd be curious if anyone else knows about recent R&D on two-strokes. They're hard to beat on power-to-weight.

If you like this, you'll probably enjoy Elmer's Engines. It's an old book full of steam engine plans, designed for people who are new to machining.

I used some of them as blueprints when I took drafting in high school.

http://www.john-tom.com/html/ElmersEngines.html

I know you mentioned exercise, but it doesn't have to be a huge commitment.

I try to bike 30 mins a day. Pre-covid, that meant biking to work and back. (I'm lucky to live close to work.) These days, I take off for a 5 mile ride around lunch.

That half-hour helps stabilize my mood, and refines my focus the rest of the day. Tying the change to a daily routine (like commuting) makes it easier to stick to.

Also, changes of scenery. Especially right now, it's easy to feel trapped at home. Going for a bike ride or driving out to the woods occasionally helps my balance.

That would be true iff prices were disclosed upfront and the pricing model was clear. I had a hospital experience recently where the surgeon provided one bill, the hospital a second, and the anesthesiologist a third.

Only the surgeon's pricing was available ahead of time. The hospital provided an invoice at the time of surgery, marked as "SUBJECT TO CHANGE". The anesthesiologist himself didn't know how much his services would cost.

Three weeks later, we're still watching invoices and insurance claims roll in.

Medical tourism is a direct testament to inflated charges as a systematic problem. Finding a hospital with non-inflated costs requires crossing international borders.

Speaking of Asimov, "The Dead Past" explores government controlled research, which the article proposed as one defense against black-ball ideas.

Without spoiling too much, the story revolves around suspected government suppression of a time-viewing device. The story's pretty easy to find online; the link below lists books it appears in.

http://www.asimovreviews.net/Stories/Story046.html

I dunno if it addresses your concerns in particular, but there is a JS-free version with normal pagination:

https://ddg.gg/html https://html.duckduckgo.com

I'm not sure. Possibly both?

Just took a look over my bookshelf, but they haven't made it with me through moves.

I do still have Incredible Cross-Sections. That was another of my favorites to flip through. It looks like there are reprints and new versions. Would definitely recommend for kids.

https://www.amazon.com/Stephen-Biestys-Incredible-Cross-Sect...

If you don't mind me adding :)

6. Prices are often unknown at time of service.

No amount of research can make up for hospitals that haven't decided how much your surgery will cost until after the fact.

I recently paid a hospital invoice, and received a receipt covered in "PENDING FINAL BILL". I can't tell if the hospital will refund me some excess, or charge an extra $1000.

To extend the metaphor elsewhere in this thread, it's like going into a garage and being told that an oil change will cost between $40 and $400. It depends. We'll let you know.

Thinking of when I was 12 (2005?), microscopes and magnifying glasses helped me understand. Depends on device DPI (cell phones have an insane number of pixels per inch; desktop screens are usually less dense).

If you can zoom in enough to see subpixel elements, and pull up a color wheel, it's very intuitive to see that the screen is made of pixels, and the pixels are made of three elements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model#/media/File:Ad...

The Pico-8 might be a approachable way to explore retrocomputing. It's an in-browser console modelled after GameBoy-era consoles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18240375

I don't know about books, though. I remember reading the binary/computers chapter of How Things Work and being thoroughly confused at that age. There was some extended allegory about white mammoths and black mammoths.

One more angle - competition & nationalism.

The 737 Max and A320neo are direct competitors. The A320neo was announced 6 months before the 737 Max in 2011, and both were certified for flight in March 2017. (Give or take - the A320neo has a few variants.)

Back when the 737 was first grounded, initial investigation found that Boeing and the FAA cooperated to rush the 737 into service to beat the A320neo [1,2].

The FAA has every incentive to make sure that American companies, especially large ones like Boeing, are treated favorably. Even outside of donations or smells of corruption, Boeing is a major employer and S&P500 member. If Boeing does well, our economic metrics (employment/stocks) do well, and the lawmakers who regulate the FAA are happy.

Those same incentives appeared in the FAA's refusal to ground the Max for days after the second crash. (First crash was 8/29/18; second was 3/10/19; grounded 3/13/19)[3]

I suspect we're seeing a replay of the original certification. As soon as the 737 Max is recertified, all those grounded planes can get back to making a profit, and Boeing can go back to making them.

Not how it should work, but the recertification effort seems consistent with how Boeing and the FAA acted in the initial certification. It's not right, but the same incentives still exist.

Just my $0.02.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...

[2] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/21/congress-faa-boein...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/13/702936894/ethiopian-pilot-had...

Not much of one :)

The backend is all Python - netcdf library for reading; Pillow for image manipulation. There's a second Python script that regenerates the videos daily, using FFMPEG. A simple cronjob restarts the services if anything crashes.

From there, rsync mirrors the files to a DigitalOcean VM running Apache.

The frontend is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. No jQuery or other magic. The JS periodically changes the img href attribute to force an image reload, so if you leave the page up, it'll slowly change as the day passes.

Video page is similar - the javascript snippets load different .webm videos. (As an aside, cross-browser compatibility for embedded videos is challenging. webm had the best support when I built this, but it's far from universal.)

Earth from space, as of ~30 minutes ago.

This visualization uses imagery provided by GOES-R, a geostationary earth-observing satellite, to generate near-realtime true-color images of the earth at (fairly) high resolution. (There's also animated video, top-left.)

NOAA provides raw data from the GOES satellites available in AWS and Google Cloud, if you want to play with/remix it. The source data is incredibly high resolution - 100 or 400 megapixels, depending on layer. Significantally better than the imagery weather.gov exposes. Everything's provided as netCDF, but it takes some time to find the layer you're looking for.

- https://www.noaa.gov/organization/information-technology/lis...

- https://storage.cloud.google.com/gcp-public-data-goes-16/ (ABI-L2-CMIPF is the product I use)

The source code is on GitHub. It's built with a Python backend and some pretty simple javascript to handle auto-refreshing.Should be fairly simple to hack around with.

- https://github.com/bnitkin/goesr-video

Hope y'all think space imaging is as cool as I do!

Thanks for the thoughtful response! Appreciate it.

I initially missed the distinction between affirming speech and speech designed to make the recipient feel good. Jokes can make people feel good, but don't affirm that they are enough, as they are.

The Manifesto page explains it well; the badges page doesn't have as much depth.

That's on me for not reading enough.

Have you thought about adding other types of phrase to the API, bound to different endpoints?

If the goal is to brighten people's days, a short joke or pun could do the trick. Or something like `fortune -s` (but fortune is usually multiline).

Personally, I like the kind speech idea. But a short joke might be more engaging in terms of cheering someone up, and avoids the authenticity issues.