> We now have 3d printers that can reliably make almost anything you want by fusing filament
I bought a cheap, used, Bambu Lab A1 printer after reading a comment here on HN a few months ago saying that it was basically now "download and print". And it's just that. Not saying Bambu's practices are great: what I'm saying is that 3D printer now work better than inkjet 2D printers ever did.
> What an amazing time to be alive.
I agree. In a few days I learned to model 3D pieces myself in OpenSCAD (and there are many other options than OpenSCAD) and I've already done "print in place" pieces (pausing the print, inserting a metal piece, continuing the print) to fix stuff around the house (and in the cars).
If you had told me 30 years ago that I'd be 3D printing pieces and getting help from LLMs, I wouldn't have believed it.
Openscad feels very comfortable for programmers. Some years ago I tried to use freecad first, and I felt the GUI was getting in the way. (I heard it's gotten better more recently) Declaring geometry in a programming language with variables, functions (err "modules"), for loops etc. is much more intuitive to me.
Openscad is great for flexible parameterized models as well. However, fillets and chamfers that are just a couple clicks in Fusion 360 are a major undertaking in openscad once your shape is more complicated than a cube. That alone basically kills openscad for me for most use cases
Freecad used to be way outclassed by Fusion, but seems to have made major strides in recent months to bring it closer to the state of the art (even if it's still not quite there)
I found it's not so bad to do fillets and chamfers as a for loop that gradually increases or decreases a dimension, then put it as a module to make it into a reusable high level primitive.
As a programmer, I wasn't confortable with OpenSCAD, and ended up moving to Fusion360 like almost everyone else.
The problem isn't the scripting, I am a programmer, I am fine with it. The problem is that I had to do all the math myself, or worse, use hardcoded values when it should have been computed. That is, for example, if I want a hole in the middle of a square face, I want to be able to say "I want a hole in the middle", whatever the language is, without having to solve a math problem.
That's why I prefer constraint-based modeling, like what the likes of Fusion360 offer. Paradoxically, even if it is graphical, it feels more like programming to me than OpenSCAD. In Fusion360, the model is defined as a sequence of instructions (the timeline at the bottom), these are not lines of code, but it is a program. That sequence of instructions can be manipulated, and you can use variables. And it is easier to define things programmatically than with OpenSCAD, where you often have to put in values by hand, because the math is too complicated without an constraint engine like Fusion360 has.
If you write here about the fact that France's GDP is nearly 70% made of public spending you get downvoted into oblivion.
Maybe that an article from the WSJ is going to get more respect?
France is nearly a planned economy. Public spending are through the roof, the primary deficit is plain bonkers and at this point it's likely that at some point the IMF is going to take over.
France is one of those countries where public servants are planted into the ground and as a result taxes do grow. France has something like 420 different taxes: seven times more than Germany.
The only word french politicians can say is "tax".
And basically the only public services that do work correctly are those related to... Collecting taxes.
And now that the problem is getting huge, french politicians have the solution: more taxes (I'm not kidding).
This time, believe french politicians, it's going to work!
Perhaps also because the claim was accompanied by self-pity about being downvoted, which is explicitly against the HN guidelines, and makes for bad discussion in general.
If America had launched nukes during the cold war, the USSR would retaliate. Maybe via submarine-launched ICBM, maybe using a dead man's switch; methodology is irrelevant, because the question is this: If both countries end up radioactive desert, which country would be declared the winner? Or is it possible for neither country to be the definitive winner of a war?
> Japan is one of those countries that doesn’t allow dual citizenship and they require proof of renunciation.
Japan doesn't allow dual citizenship if you acquire the japanese one later in life.
Plenty of people in Japan, like my nephew, have dual citizenship by birth. I don't know if they can keep both when they're adult. But as kids 100% guaranteed Japan allows it.
And then a great many mixed couple do, on purpose, give literally two different identities to their kids. One by registering them, say, in Germany with the name written in roman characters (say "Akane") and the other in Japan with the name written using kanjis (or kanas for that is allowed to).
I'm not talking about dual citizenships / two passports: I'm talking about the same person having two entirely different identities because his parents registered him, on purpose, differently in two different countries.
So, yes, there are literally a few people counted twice on earth. And you probably don't want to do that with the US citizenship (for US taxes its citizens worldwide and it's a reporting clusterfuck). But if you've got, say, a japanese identity and whatever european one: you're totally fine.
The law is somewhat vague. You have a "duty to make efforts" (努力義務) in rescinding your foreign citizenship after electing Japanese citizenship. The Ministry of Justice has never clarified its interpretation of 努力 (i.e. what counts as "making efforts"?) I am friends with a few Japan-US dual citizens who have done nothing after electing Japanese citizenship; they are essentially gambling on a gray area of law.
Note if you acquire Japanese citizenship afterwards (or never had a second citizenship in the first place), then 国籍法11条1項 automatically voids your Japanese citizenship at the time you obtain a foreign citizenship.
The Japanese law attempts to require citizens to hold no more than one citizenship and return any extra passports to your countries of origin, as would seem to be the most reasonable to Japanese laypeople. OTOH, recognizing a citizen is within sovereign rights of a nation.
So, for the Japanese government to a person to hold no more than one citizenship is beyond the rights held by the Japan as a nation. It cannot demand e.g. the King of England to revoke citizenship of a British subject, just because that guy is currently in Japan and on its own family register. If the UK's HM Government recognizes that guy leaving and converting, and amends his status accordingly, voluntarily, then that is just friendly international coordination and cooperation, and the sovereign rights of the UK is not violated.
And therefore, Japanese laws merely state its official stance of not allowing dual citizenship, and require applicant to make efforts, but it will not require the results of the effort to be exactly as it desires.
In an ideal world, there can be something like a "UN global citizen register" for every person on Earth, and the current nationality and/or recognized available nationalities can be fields in the global koseki printouts that can be printed out at a 7-11 everywhere. That would be very friendly to Japanese mental model of citizenship, but we're still maybe a century from there.
> they are essentially gambling on a gray area of law.
It's not so much a gray area if they didn't do anything at all. The translation in English isn't on a vague side of legalize. One needs to go and try to renounce citizenship and keep the receipts, so if the motion is denied or you get sucked into a bureaucratic hell, you have a proof that effort has been taken, but the bureacracy prevailed.
It's interesting, that the word "effort" doesn't have a qualifier here, like "reasonable". Hazard guess -- the general language of the law somehow implies it, that if renouncing citizenship costs 1mm USD, you don't have to try unless it's pocket money for you or at all. If renouncing takes flying half the world to a country where things are happening , something should say ah nah.
I lived in Japan and know many people in this situation. Most people just never tell the government and keep both. There's no proactive outreach by the government for these cases and it's ok unless you happen to mess up and produce your foreign passport when entering Japan instead of your Japanese passport. It's a "don't ask, don't tell situation".
There was a lawyer, originally from Japan, living in the US who did try to force clarity on this issue and sued the Japanese government. Unfortunately she lost so the status quo remains. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15077494
True, there may be complications if you travel to Japan from a 3rd country. It might be something they are aware of. I imagine most trips are directly from the other country of citizenship/residence.
0/1 Knapsack is a wonderful little problem, especially with its dynamic programming solution.
Now I may be mistaken but when I learned about 0/1 Knapsack three decades ago, my immediate thought was that for quite some cases you could do, using dynamic programming, an approximate version (requiring less memory and hence well, for example fitting into memory) and prove that your solution was "at most 1% off of the optimal solution". Never really looked into it though so I may have be wrong.
Basically say you need to 0/1 Knapsack the quantities 1739, 2989, 3798 and 4233, etc.: you can e.g. divide them by 10 and then round them up, so you've now got 174, 299, 380 and 424 and you need much less memory to run your dynamic programming solution to 0/1 Knapsack. And the best solution you find is guaranteed to be at most x% off the optimal solution.
Something like that. Does that work? Anyone ever heard about something similar?
You're basically describing the classical fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for 0-1 knapsack. I think it first appeared in the 1979 paper "Fast approximation algorithms for knapsack problems" by Eugene L Lawler.
> My first exposure to networking was a 10base2 setup I got from a closing business.
Exact same! My neighbors (still friends to this day) managed to put their hands on lots of used 10base2 network cards and coax cables / Ts and terminators from a company that closed shop.
So we put those cards in our PCs and created a LAN and we had a coax cable going from our bedrooms (my brother and I) to the neighbors' house. On the third floor! We contemplated using utility cables in the middle of the street to hook the neighbor across the street but decided it wasn't wise (we were teenagers so we still contemplated the idea). We also fancied the idea of drilling a hole between the two houses: my neighbor's father was fine with it and provided us with a really long drill but my parents didn't want to hear about it.
And we didn't have the proper dedicated BNC connectors crimp tool though (and had zero idea where to buy one and were too broke anyway), so we became masters at building coax cables with BNC connectors by using regular pliers.
Them little orcs and humans from Warcraft 2 would then transit through the coax cable from house to house (so around 1995).
AEI is a conservative think tank, of course they're going to find numbers that make a policy they disagree with look bad. I wouldn't say the numbers are cherry picked, but they don't tell the whole story either. For example, the rates being compared are national acceptance rates, which is interesting maybe but doesn't tell us anything about the acceptance rates at individual schools.
They're also comparing "similar credentials", not identical applications, and they're only looking at MCAT + GPA, but the aamc says schools look at other factors too, and one school may not use the same factors as another (which is why a school acceptance rate comparison would be better than a national acceptance rate comparison.)
What is your argument? That the data in the chart is incorrect?
You don’t really have to speculate about this. Universities literally went to the Supreme Court to protect their right to discriminate based on race. The disparities in this data are similar to the internal Harvard and UNC data that came out in the SFFA litigation.
So what, red lining robbed most black families of the ability to finance homes, and decimated the equity of entire neighborhoods. Property tax funding primary school through high school has resulted in broad under investment in minority schools and over investment in white schools. Legacy admissions has preserved a egregious preference for affluent students that is a far larger distortion to a meritocracy than affirmative action ever was.
Society is better served by if a broad coalition of citizens can achieve advancement. We wont benefit from a caste system, which your analysis would create.
> So what, red lining robbed most black families of the ability to finance homes, and decimated the equity of entire neighborhoods.
If someone is poor, why does it matter what historical circumstances caused that result? If two people inherit their grandmother's houses, and both houses are worth $100k, what difference does it make that one house is worth that much because of redlining and the other because of rust belt deindustrialization?
You keep circling back to economics to justify treating people differently based on race, and it makes no sense. If you want to help poor people, just do that directly.
> Property tax funding primary school through high school has resulted in broad under investment in minority schools and over investment in white schools.
"This report documents nearly five decades of changes in school funding patterns across the
United States... Districts with the highest non-white enrollment
shares maintained higher spending throughout the entire period studied, although their
advantage was smaller, and in some years reversed if spending is adjusted using CWIFT. Like
high-poverty districts, districts with higher non-white shares also experienced disproportionate
spending growth after the mid-1990s."
> Legacy admissions has preserved a egregious preference for affluent students that is a far larger distortion to a meritocracy than affirmative action ever was.
It matters specifically because there is a coordinated effort to prevent minority communities from building wealth and achieving equality. And the results suggest it remains effective. Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.
You’re also assuming I wouldn’t agree that low income families deserve support in a similar fashion. I do. I think it’s important social policy to balance the scales across different issues that cause inequality. I think affirmative action can and should factor in geography and income levels regardless of race.
That brooking paper doesn’t support your thesis or undermine mine. Here is a quote: “ We also find that low-poverty and predominantly white districts were more protected from spending cuts during the Great Recession, and high-poverty or predominantly non-white districts were the least protected.”. So when society is cutting budgets they cut minority education first.
Here is another: “ differences in average spending between states remain a major driver
of spending inequality overall, even though policy conversations often focus on within-state differences.”. That means the more money spend the more equal outcomes tend to become.
Now this quote supports your thesis that property taxes are less of a determining factor in overall spending and I am open to revising my opinion: “ School finance systems are complex, and local taxes are salient to the public. By contrast, funding from the state or federal government, which disproportionately benefits more disadvantaged districts, is less visible.” But later the authors state that “ We agree with the authors of those reports—and the broader consensus—that high-poverty schools need more funding than their low-poverty counterparts to fulfill their mission; equal is not equitable.” Which think, read fairly means that it may take more spending in low income underperforming communities to achieve equal outcomes. So it may mean than minority communities need 3x the spending to white communities to achieve balance. The reason makes sense when you stop to think of the world outside of the classroom and the effects of poverty and racism. If a child doesn’t have enough to eat, is surrounded by instability, is mistreated in most social interactions their performance in school will suffer. If a high school student is the first in their family to apply to college they may need to figure it out on their own as opposed to a family that guides a student to their legacy Alma Mater, helps them write their admissions essays, connects them with references for letters of recommendation etc all for free. Those support systems cost money for communities that don’t have them built into the fabric of their communities.
> It matters specifically because there is a coordinated effort to prevent minority communities from building wealth and achieving equality.
Coordinated by who? The applicants who are applying to colleges? Because if not there's no justification for discriminating against them based on something someone else is doing.
> Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.
Nobody did any such thing. You seem to be confused: Voting rights are individual rights. There’s not such thing as voting rights for “communities.”
> So when society is cutting budgets they cut minority education first.
Your claim above was that minority school districts get less funding. But the headline result of the paper is that they don't, and haven't for decades. In fact, they specifically call out the "popular narrative" you repeated: "The findings are broadly consistent with recent academic work on patterns of school spending, which finds within-state progressivity (increasing since the mid-1990s) and usually modest national-level differences in spending by poverty and race (Tyner 2023; Corcoran et al. 2003; Corcoran and Evans 2015; Candelaria and Shores 2019). However, our findings are contrary to popular narratives that often assume that high-poverty or predominantly non-white districts have lower-than-average spending."
> Which think, read fairly means that it may take more spending in low income underperforming communities to achieve equal outcomes. So it may mean than minority communities need 3x the spending to white communities to achieve balance.
You also sound racist like Biden saying "poor kids can be just as smart as white kids." You're flipping back-and-forth between "low income underperforming" and "minority." Even if you're correct that society owes poor communities even more spending than rich ones, that doesn't justify your focus on race. There are low-income underperforming white school districts too, lots of them.
> Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.
> What is your argument? That the data in the chart is incorrect?
I already laid out my argument, I'm not going to reiterate it just so you can argue with me. Find someone else to bellyache to about the supposed racism of DEI, I don't care.
Because it is trite, surface level analysis that is historically inaccurate, oversimplifies the factual record and pretends to be morally superior when the net result would be a deeply immoral continuation of the status quo that was deliberately created with racist intent.
I've got many dumb cheap ethernet switches and I'd say as long as they're really dumb/unmanaged/not advanced: you can't go very wrong. I've got probably two TP-Link ones and they're on 24/7 and just work: zero problem since years (and they followed me in four countries). Never had any issue with big .iso files or anything.
And I've got a little homelab: VMs and ZFS on a Xeon with ECC RAM, countless Raspberry Pi, two physical different LANs (not VLANs as all my switches are dumb) with a Pi doing the bridge/routing.
It's when things get complicated: configurable stuff, "advanced" capabilities, etc. that the cheap junk stops working properly and that you're better served with proper gear.
And of course there's the $200 or $500 vs $20 question too.
But people shouldn't underestimate how reliable good old dumb unmanaged Ethernet is for home usage.
Heck, I can go from 1 Gb/s to 100 Mbit/s to then a very old 10 Mbit/s (!) switch by daisy chaining them all switches and everything simply just works (I did that for I was thinking about playing with bounded-retrieval-model, hence physically limiting network speed on purpose).
No whether you should support or not a company selling shitty managed switches and shitty routers by buying the products that are okay from them is another question.
I'd love to play with this but something freaks me out: we heard no later than yesterday hackers ruining tens of millions of food by heating connected fridges in supermarket in France.
What happens when people decide to hack the Unitree robots and have them pick up knives and stab their owner and then go on a spree in the street?
Before people say: "But that's never going to happen, nobody would ever do that!" I'd like to state again the fact that people did just remotely hack fridges to ruin food.
"But ruining food for everybody is nothing, it's just kids playing around, people would never hack robots to hurt other humans!".
Is that what people really think?
Or do they think that "this time programmers managed to create secure software that cannot be hacked into"?
Hacking into what exactly? It's entirely up to the user if they want to connect their robot to an insecure webserver control hub.
The difference between you and most professionals is that we don't play. Groceries weren't playing with their refrigerators, they were attacked, the government can find and punish or kill the criminals if they continue their pattern of failure to bring justice the world will move past them.
I bought a cheap, used, Bambu Lab A1 printer after reading a comment here on HN a few months ago saying that it was basically now "download and print". And it's just that. Not saying Bambu's practices are great: what I'm saying is that 3D printer now work better than inkjet 2D printers ever did.
> What an amazing time to be alive.
I agree. In a few days I learned to model 3D pieces myself in OpenSCAD (and there are many other options than OpenSCAD) and I've already done "print in place" pieces (pausing the print, inserting a metal piece, continuing the print) to fix stuff around the house (and in the cars).
If you had told me 30 years ago that I'd be 3D printing pieces and getting help from LLMs, I wouldn't have believed it.