As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Asking mainly because we generally view this period as a rock-bottom, but nostalgia seems to be as good as natural, so what do you think people in 5, 10, 15+ years will remember overly fondly about the present?

2 years ago we planted a lime tree in our backyard. It was already about 5-6 feet tall when we planted it. There's a lemon tree next to it that is probably 50 years old and produces more fruit than we can use. We're constantly giving away lemons to our friends and neighbors, baking stuff with the ones we keep and we still too many left! But our lime tree barely produces anything. The first year it produced 3 limes, all of which were hard and almost juiceless. This year, so far it has produced a single fruit which doesn't yet look ripe. The thing is that it produces tons of buds that look like they're going to become limes, but they either die or are eaten by squirrels, I guess. I've heard a similar story from a coworker about her lime tree. Is there any secret to getting a lime tree to produce fruit?

Talk about anything you have "automated" in your life. No restrictions on the tools or things to automate. You have a simple "silence your phone at work" thing? Great job! Do you have a complex thing with hundreds of lines of custom code? Wonderful! All are welcome!

I myself have automated a bit of stuff, and am constantly looking for more (that's why this thread exists):

Home:

• My room will turn on the lights when it detects the brightness inside is going down, but will slowly do it relative to the current brightness so it doesn't suddenly turn on at once. (Tries to keep a certain brightness at certain times)
• I can send "loff", "lon" or, "lauto" through XMPP to turn my lights off, on, or toggle the automatic mode mentioned above from anywhere. I am blocking internet connections from my smart light hub so I had to re-implement that manually

Computer:

• Copying any YouTube links (or Invidious links, which get translated into YouTube) will automatically prompt me about opening them under MPV

Phone:

This is where I do the bulk of my automation, as Tasker is a very convenient way to automate stuff.

• Toggle full brightness and/or auto rotation on specific apps (Gallery, NewPipe, etc.)
• A couple of Android "Share" targets for
  • Uploading dumb images to my webserver
  • Adding links to Miniflux (abusing it's bookmarklet functionality)
  • youtube-dl through Termux
• And some (mostly gimmicky) text-to-speech notifications for calls and XMPP messages

Planned:

• Miniflux notifier over XMPP. My last attempt failed because Node-RED apparently doesn't reconnect over to XMPP when its connection drops :(

I went to college in Massachusetts, and after awhile the winters began to get to me. A study-abroad trip to Paraguay helped me fall in love with palms. After I graduated, I explicitly looked for work in areas of the Southeast where I could grow palms, eventually settling in the Midlands of South Carolina (USDA Hardiness Zone 8a), which can grow a reasonable variety (our state tree is the cabbage palmetto, Sabal palmetto, and it is incredibly common in the area). I’ve currently got two potted palms: a European fan palm, Chamaerops humilis, and pygmy date palm, Phoenix roebelenii (the latter needs to be housed in the garage during the winter).

note: I posted this on hacker news, some people here seem knowledgeble about hacker news so i though i would ask here also.

basically in Reddit enhancement suite you can filter comments to only show comments that are “unread”, you click on a comment to mark it as read (or with email when clicking on a message marks it as read and you can even mark it as unread).

Is there something like that for hacker news? (a browser addon or some custom client).

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I want to talk about Person of Interest. A CBS series created by Jonathan Nolan, more famously known for his work on Westworld (and brother of "that" Christopher Nolan, talent runs in the family). This is a spoiler-free post.

Premise: An ex-military badass is hired by a rich ex-usgov genius who built an AI that is plugged into the NSA's spying supernetwork, and can predict crime based on all the datapoints.

Strong similarities with: Westworld, Mr. Robot.

Person of Interest is a series that really took me by surprise. I didn't really care for Season 1, which I left running in the background after it was apparent to me that this was a very run-of-the-mill CBS police procedural. I gave it a chance based on a friend's recommendation, and because IT/sec references were accurate and didn't make me cringe. It also had an interesting premise which was written pre-snowden and raised some interesting philosophical questions on privacy and crime prevention.

Then towards the Season 1 finale, the music got pretty good, the scenes were very action-packed and the series started feeling like it was getting very entertaining. So I kept watching.

Without spoiling: throughout Season 2, the series actually completely shifts genre almost unnoticeably, from "generic police procedural" to "long-arc Westworld-style tech scifi".

I was stunned by how smooth the genre transition was. Of all the series I watched, it's something truly unique to that one, which is one of the reasons I rate it as one of the best TV series in my catalogue. It's also, from what I heard, Nolan's strategy from the get-go in order to get a very unique show greenlit on a "safe" network like CBS.

By the end of the series, Person of Interest had inspired me. Made me extremely interested in AI and data. It affected my work and the way I think about the world. POI really toes the scifi line by taking concepts which are possible, but not there yet and explores the possibilities (again, Westworld); unlike most other Sci-Fi shows which take abstract ideas of what we may want to see in the future, regardless of how possible/reasonable they are.

POI does require some suspension of disbelief. You have to accept the trope of a "supergenius" who can build an AI like this all on his own, for example. I think that's fine, and I found that the show was very rigorous at taking only practical shortcuts with very little fridge logic.

I keep mentioning Westworld and that's no accident. POI predates WW and it feels that WW was a continuation of Nolan's ideas about the implications of AI, in a much higher budget setting. (And as an aside, if you haven't watched Westworld, you should)

Tag spoilers in comments :)