1093 points | by ajdude2 days ago
> I will not be adding any of them.
This, right here, is how you communicate non-goals of a project. Just perfect open-source communication best practices. We all stand to learn from this project.
(Though, predictably, some of us sit to interact with it.)
We already have precident on that topic via that short story about the reverse isekai airplane carrier to ancient Rome that was written on Reddit in early 2010s.
By writing the original on a social media platform you've effectively given full copyright to this company. If royalties need to be paid, they'd be paid to yc, not you
Can you please talk about this some more? A cursory search did not give me anything. What short story are you talking about and which adaptation of it?
> On October 21, 2011, Reddit administrators explained that the licensing terms were designed to protect the site from potential legal action, and that they did not intend to block the production of the movie.
... do you mean precedent of a scifi premise from social media being turned into a movie? or the precedent of a piece of media using a piss-tank's levels as a means of communication?
you're giving full copyright to the social media website you're posting on. If someone wanted to buy a licence to use this - whatever it might be - the discussion would be between the social media platform and the licensee. the original author of the work would not have any stake in that theoretical situation.
If you were wondering which specific case I'm referring to, ForHackernews linked to the wiki article. there is a small note on the licensing issue at the end there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509955
From what I remember, he had gotten a WB offer - which ultimately didn't pan out because a licensing agreeming couldn't occur. He'd have had to rewrite the story off-reddit for them to be able to license it. And that never happened.
(Well, he did rewrite it - but probably took too long, so the window of opportunity had already closed and it was never made into an actual movie)
A social media site typically takes a soft licence allowing it to store and reproduce your content (which is needed to be able to function), and maybe use it in marketing. Some go a little further, but please show me one mainstream site that takes over all your (copy)rights when you post?
What I feel comfortable stating is however that we have precident for the exact scenario the person I responded to (wanting royalties for a storyline they posted on a social media website) and this precident showed that are least the lawyers of WB were of the opinion that a rewrite outside of any social media platform was necessary.
As for the ASCII table, I wouldn't be surprised if it is one of the most commonly reproduced data tables in print and I would be surprised if it wasn't the mostly commonly reproduced table digitally. Virtually every *ix system will have a copy of it. The documentation for most development tools will probably have it. All you need is someone technically inclined in your life, which you will almost certainly have on a mission to Mars, and you will likely have a copy of an ASCII table (whether anyone knows it is there or not).
The turning around and returning to Mars bit may have been realistic. They would have needed fuel to get into Earth orbit. (That said, the timing to return to Mars in any sane trajectory would likely be off.) The real problem would be getting into Mars orbit at the end of the return journey.
If we're talking efficiency, I wonder why he didn't consider Morse code. Well I guess that's easy, even though it's faster it takes a skilled operator to read it in realtime, and he had little time to write any individual bit of information down (cumbersomely writing in sand is slow)
If you're going to require 2 digits, then that can be done with 2 decimal digits as well. So there's no need for hex, and no need for ascii tables.
However, if you need more than just the 26 letters, e.g. if you also need numbers and/or punctuation, then ascii might be useful, and hex might be useful to encode ascii into 2 digits.
Why do I need to send it to you 2 digits at a time? It's valid hex that converts to ascii, only 1 symbol at a time, which is how he communicated.
He could've done it with just a card for 0 and another for 1 if he really wanted.
The points of my previous comment:
* Ascii is only needed if we need to encode things other than just letters (or if case matters).
* Hex is only better than decimal if hex allows the number of digits to be reduced. If we need to only encode 26 elements, then hex doesn't reduce the number of digits compared to decimal, so hex has no advantage over decimal in the 26-element case.
Using just 0 or 1 will increase the number of digits needed, so has a clear disadvantage compared to hex or decimal.
He had more than 26 things to encode, I believe he started with numbers, letters and a question mark.
> Using just 0 or 1 will increase the number of digits needed, so has a clear disadvantage compared to hex or decimal
Using 0 or 1 decreases that to only 3 cards (including question mark), and increasing the safety margin to 120° on the setup he had. It'd take longer but be more robust.
Ok, then hoten's comment had an error which propagated to my comments:
>26 division of a circle was too much for reliable determination of which sign the camera was pointing at
for (unsigned char i = 0; i < 127; i++) { printf("%x: %c\n", i, i); }
bash: spaceman: command not found
Danny Boyle - 28 Lightyears Later.
Be sure to also read the project page:
Only thing now is how to haul my ass up there to do that
If you take a ride on Starliner, you might need to ensure your schedule is extremely flexible
scam some boomers with Real World Assets(tm)
I'm so delighted that this is easily my most popular OSS project over the past 15 or so years (I have my "serious" stuff elsewhere), and I'm not being sarcastic here.
I'll happily answer any questions folks have (expect some reply lag because holiday season). I figure the most popular question is probably going to be "… but why?" though, and the honest-to-the-gods answer is "because I thought it was funny"; I was trying to come up with a nice and simple 1st project to do with Swift (holy crap that language's concurrency story is confusing), and once I ran into iss-mimic I knew what I had to do.
I'm pretty sure I can also shove a blockchain in there somewhere too even though they're a bit passé.
or will you consider a piss left license?
I'm 100% certain this is how quantum computation works and am available for department chair positions and speaking engagements for conferences.
But the real money is in piss+poop enterprise which comes with SSO (single shit to orbit).
I can however recommend the Spiral Model [1] as a lesser known Waterfall variation, which carries a heavier focus on risk management. It resembles a conch shell, and may require up to three attempts [2] to get your toilet development process correct.
I’ve done something like this, but also used the location of ISS to figure out which country was “getting pissed on the most” by the astronauts.
I’m fairly sure I got a working script somewhere for the data, but unfortunately never got around to create a leaderboard website for it :/
It'd be fantastic to have the flag of the country last pissed on in the menu bar item.
Ie. when the tank level increased last I guess? The value doesn't always seem to just monotonically increase though, but I could be wrong – frankly I haven't paid that close attention to the value. Could also be something like microgravity causing a bit of… uh… slosh making the sensor reading slightly inaccurate, or something along those lines?
Oh well
No AI woo-woo which I consider a huge plus
https://youtu.be/xAhw_8B25N0?si=OZXH9sZ0bY_iX40V
And now 12 years later we have PissStream.. haha
lol that is a bit funny.. good to see our livestream server is being put to good use - lots of other good telemetry though :)
I love ISSMimic
But on a more serious note, while my use of live ISS telemetry is probably about as maximally frivolous as can get, it's nothing short of amazing that this sort of abject silliness is not only possible but actually trivial to pull off. So hats off to you and the rest of the hard-working folks at NASA (et al) who made it possible in the first place.
And yes there's definitely all kinds of interesting telemetry available from the ISS. Seeing the dashboard that the ISS mimic project has was quite an eye-opener
But yes, the app may be a joke but at least there's something there beneath the joke.
Created by pasting the entire Swift GitHub repo into Gemini 2.0 and asking it to port it to a web page: https://gist.github.com/simonw/b4aec4e879e50ac74f6f9cc6e1cdc...
With such variance though, it now becomes much easier for me to see why the question of if LLMs are any good at coding is so contentious every time it comes up on HN. If, even for such a small, well defined task, there's such variance in behavior from seemingly small prompt changes, it's now easier for me to see why some people see it as the second coming and others think LLM-assisted program is all hot air.
I agree, I have noticed some prompts which work perfectly fine on Claude when used in WindSurf IDE which uses Claude the same prompt did not work.
LLM models work fine for small scripts but when it comes to large Codebase I just cannot trust them.
And for anyone worried about astronaut privacy, the urine tank quantity does not reflect ... direct addition of urine from a crew member ;)
I'm also curious as to what the quantity actually does reflect – I clearly haven't peered deep enough into the soul of the UWMS.
What I'm curious about is when the levels go down. Does that mean it's emptied over some country?
static let pissYellowLight = Color(red: 0.95, green: 0.85, blue: 0.2)
static let pissYellowDark = Color(red: 0.7, green: 0.6, blue: 0.1)I added Immersive Experience with 3D for Vision Pro. If you want to see a urine tank with a fullness rate with 3D. Please check this Pr. https://github.com/Jaennaet/pISSStream/pull/7
#visionpro
Thanks, Smart Pipe!
And probably let's not apply rule 34 here, either.
It's a neat and considerate detail if you ask me.
Direct download link: https://github.com/Jaennaet/pISSStream/releases/download/v0....
#!/usr/bin/env node
var Ls = require('lightstreamer-client-node');
var sub1 = new Ls.Subscription("MERGE",["NODE3000005"],["Value", "Status", "TimeStamp"]);
sub1.addListener({
onItemUpdate: function(obj) {
const percentage = obj.getValue('Value') + '%';
console.log(`${percentage} `);
process.exit(0);
}
});
var client = new Ls.LightstreamerClient("http://push.lightstreamer.com","ISSLIVE");
client.connect();
client.subscribe(sub1);That's my favorite project of 2024 so far!
Like I said in my Show HN story, this is clearly a ridiculous and more or less completely useless application (probably even if you work for ISS Environmental Control and Life Support System), but it really is kind of amazing that this is possible in the first place, and didn't even involve all that much effort apart from the obvious newbie hurdles like "how in the hell am I supposed to do XYZ in Xcode?"
My motivation was entirely that I thought this was both a hilariously stupid use of a space station's telemetry stream, but also kind of amazing at the same time. Also a great excuse to learn Swift, but the sheer ridiculousness was what drove me.
Like I said in my earlier Show HN post on this (I think? Or maybe on Bluesky), it's remarkable that we live in a world where it takes an afternoon to bang out a joke application that reads actual realtime telemetry data from a space station's toilets.
I reckon more often than not "because I wanted to" is more than enough for many things.
> Not the epitome of good coding practices since this was my first Swift & macOS app ever, may break in exciting ways at the slightest excuse.
sounds like it's a learning exercise. One of my first interesting programs was a weather app; this is just a weirder version of that.
How is that even released from ISS?
It makes wishing on a falling star less romantic, though, when you realise you could be wishing on flaming astronaut poop.
And they don’t need to, because they get a notification on their desktop when you do.
Add space piss notifications.
Santa Cruz Wharf’s fallen restroom becomes an unlikely tourist attraction: https://archive.ph/k1lwt
An afternoon? Yeah, right.
Seriously though, this is a hits the sweet spot of being useless and funny perfectly.
I'd rather make something funny (but also kind of interesting) than useful any day.
https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/Wolowitz_Zero-Gravity_...
Space toilets are one of those things that are both critical and ignored in most depictions of space. Even in all the years of Star Trek they have "sonic showers" , but never depict a toilet.
It's amazing that NASA publishes this data in real time.
Why would they? They have artificial gravity everywhere and iirc it’s never failed like every other piece of technology when the plot demands it. The toilets wouldn’t look any different, except maybe the ones to accommodate non-human species (THAT would be interesting). Star Trek elides a lot of things that would otherwise be boring because “post-nuclear war Utopia solved it.”
Evacuation is only interesting in zero-G. Although to be fair I don’t remember the expanse or most other hard scifi touching on the topic.
Like, wouldn't there be one tucked away in a back corner of the bridge, or a corner of a room or passage adjoining the bridge? Shouldn't we see a bathroom door, or at least the open entrance to a "bathroom corridor", as the characters do a walk-and-talk down the hallways?
And then... regular TV shows show women putting on or taking off their makeup in the bathroom mirror, people having a conversation through the shower door, someone in a stall overhearing a conversation by the sink... has Star Trek ever shown that?
What the heck does a bathroom look like on Star Trek? And the bathroom signage?
[0] https://cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/star-trek-the-n...
Thanks.
Not that it looked distinctive in any way, so you'd never notice:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bathroom?file=Head_door...
But I am honestly amazed they did it at all.
And for other bathroom activities: One can imagine creative use of the transporter. Although: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIsauNJ392o
I loved Babylon 5. One minor reason was because a scene was filmed in a restroom. With ultraviolet lights used in place of water for the handwashing. A sign that the characters are living in The Future. Showrunner J Michael Straczynski did this specifically as a small dig against Star Trek.
* Enterprise - S1E8 Breaking the Ice
> Tucker: The first thing you've got to understand is we recycle pretty much everything on a starship. That includes waste, and the first thing that happens to the waste is it gets processed through a machine called a bio-matter resequencer. Then it gets broken down into.
> So the waste is broken down into little molecules and then they get transformed into any number of things we can use on the ship. Cargo containers, insulation, boots, you name it.
* Discovery - S3E12 There is a tide...
> Admiral Charles Vance: It's made of our shit, you know.
> That's the base material that we use in our replicators. We deconstruct it to the atomic level and then reform the atoms.
Of course there was the scene in Apollo 13 about catching the clap from sharing relief tubes that puts things in perspective
Btw is in big bang theory …
https://www.space.com/7274-mystery-explained-glow-night-sky-...
(Can't remember if these 2 are actually back-to-back, or even from the same book, but I think they were. Been a few years).
Apple please do better.
Thanks.
This is not knowledge I ever expected to have.
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/boldly-go-nasas-new-spa...
For when you need to shi(f)t into maximum overdrive?
Relevant quote: "We flew to the moon on 4KB of RAM."
/s
Sucks that you had a bad experience, it may be worthwhile posting a more direct tale of it - people here love commiserating about things and may even be able to help out.
Not sure what's up with your other racist comments though, that's pretty weird my dude.
[1] Hey, it _could_ happen. Look at Elon!
