skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I formerly worked as an escalation support engineer in Microsoft's Product Support Services (PSS) for Windows networking. I, and a lot of other people, were at our desks in Las Colinas, TX for the Y2K rollover. Nothing happened. We got a press call from a reporter asking if anything was going on. I said I wasn't allowed to talk to the press, but half the people on the floor were already drinking.

We knew early on that the Windows dev teams had done their job as Y2K hit Australia and nothing happened. Then Europe and nothing happened.

Even though I "missed out" on the big Y2K celebrations and instead had to celebrate with a bunch of nerd coworkers in a boring office building, it felt good to be a part of something where we all banded together and pulled off a major piece of work.
> If you want to see "societies" making decisions every single day, look at the market. Not so irrational at all, though.

Except for the stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987, the dot-com bubble, the housing bouble followed a crash, the tulip mania, ... Markets are not always rational.
Indefinitely means "for an unlimited or unspecified period of time".

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/indefinitely
That means the only countries that are going to invest and progress in nuclear technology are the ones not subjected to public accountability, such as China. Perhaps we need other coubtries to either outpace us or show what can be accomplished before the United States jumps in.
yes. Modern large airplanes are more complex than reactors and have more uncertainty, and have more places on the chain they can go wrong. But they don't, at least not in the US in last 15 years. Why?
> with years or decades of lifespan left

But that’s not what happened. Merkel arbitrarily increased the lifespan of reactors, without any technical viability tests, then, after fukushima, turned it down to exactly what the experts had suggested originally.
Two things: firstly, the article was about the long term problem of automation, so not sure the meantime is a factor here. Secondly, who is to say that even without waiting there will be enough jobs returned to make any dent in the joblessness of that "middle of our IQ bell curve".
Even if you artificially lower apartment rent, there would still be a lack of housing in cities. It would actually make the problem worse because more people could afford to live in cities, and less people would want to build new units.

Either young people need to be okay not living in cities, or governments need to encourage more housing to be built in cities. But, instead, young people want urban living and municipalities are only increasing restrictions on building new units. Obviously in this senario prices will go up, it's basic supply and demand.

Note: I am a young person living in a city.
It's not a stigma, it's societal expectations that ones offspring do better than their parents. Those expectations are being dashed, and heartedly. The millenials know we're being screwed, but the wall of people with massive equity/net worth tied up in their homes isn't budging. This will be a huge crisis going forward as we approach Australia levels of housing costs. Mark my words, in the next 20 years I believe will see a huge asset inflationary bubble that will be worse than the Great Recession.
You should email this stuff to the mods since they don't read every post. It's definitely a confusing title.
> A lot of people have this notion that welcoming (muslim) immigrants is like asking for terrorism, that they take away jobs...

To be fair, he did give a good deal of jobs to these people at his warehouse. Jobs that would have otherwise gone to locals. I know this, because I used to have one of those jobs and still have a number of friends that work there. Whether or not those jobs deserved to be for someone local or not, I can't say, but it's disingenuous to label people xenophobes for having legitimate concerns about how they, and their community, will continue to provide for their loved ones as jobs/livelihoods are given away to people from outside their communities (especially in a region that was hit pretty hard by the auto-industry issues of recent years).
They probably just don't want to break a bunch of applications that haven't updated yet. It would be nice if they could make it a configurable option for those of us who don't use / care to use apps that are still not using HTTPS. "Allow Secure Connections Only" checkbox in Settings or something.
What resources have you found particularly useful? I've seen more than one comment on HN cite how few human lives have been lost as a result of Fukushima, which is one metric that can be used to quantify the effects of a nuclear reactor disaster. I'm not arguing that it's a useful metric, so recommending concise references available that support your position would be very helpful.
note that the rankings in that article, as well as this year's rankings, include a month (and a half) after the election occured. I'd imagine a good amount of the edits came after the first tuesday in november.
Transmission losses aren't the restriction that many people imply. Modern HVDC lines have less than half the losses as compared to a similar-length AC line.

There's a cable under construction from Scotland to England that will have a 2,200MW capacity, will run over 400km, and will have losses under 3%.[1]

Brazil finished a 7,700MW line that runs 2,400km from a series of hydroelectric dams to major population centers with something like 8% losses. Sure, 8% of 7,700MW is a ton of energy lost, but 8% for moving power from the equivalent distance of Denver to NYC is pretty damn good.

It's not out of the realm of possibilities to build a HVDC line from England to the US within the next decade or two. If you figure 6,000km and 1.5% losses per 1,000km, you might be able to keep the total loss below 10%. Run an 800KV line (or a pair of 800KV lines) and you could probably install a 15+ GW of transmission capacity.

[1] - http://www.eaem.co.uk/news/world-beating-%E2%82%AC11bn-under...
It's more that it only affects poor people, regardless of age, and they really don't care about poor people.

Young rich people are doing just fine.
Then this might be a great chance to choose one that you like, with the features you prefer, before have to make a compromise with a partner!

Keep it nice and cozy and you'll be able to invite women to your house. Seems like a solid game plan.
Happy to help pro bono. pranav [at] pranavpiyush [dot] com
Not sure how you got the impression that it's talking about parents sucking wealth out of their kids. I mean, living with parents is more or less the definition of parents helping their children, not the other way around.

The reciprocation comes later in life, when parents aren't able to be self sufficient anymore.
The paradox of the efficient market hypothesis disagrees with you. For EHM to hold enough people must be acting irrationally.
And there is a generation of people ready with hammers to knock down that wall of equity so they can afford to live. Right now we're in the negotiating phase. Wait for the right politician.
Ridiculous claim. Societal changes occur when the right incentives are at play for the change to occur.
And just how common are nuclear meltdowns over time? It's a flawed risk analysis, further mitigated by newer Gen-IV reactor designs that are going to be coming out of China and India before long. Altogether, there have only been two INES level 7 incidents and one level 6 incident since 1954 [0]. And while unfortunate and expensive, they're incidents that can be cleaned up and recovered from.

By contrast, you're stuck with the consequences of a 1-2 degree temperature increase. And they're guaranteed, and will be around for centuries before the carbon cycle could ever even hope to compensate. The loss of low-lying property and other problems tied to rising sea levels would be in the tens of trillions [1].

People tend to bake in all sorts of potential negative externalities for nuclear energy, and much of that's baked into current regulations. Unfortunately, the same isn't done for other energy sources. When you start to try and look at those externalities (and that's a very difficult task, as many are hard to precisely measure), it can drastically change the math involved. And many of those negative consequences aren't a matter of chance. They're 100% guaranteed byproducts, especially with coal for instance.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...

1. http://www.un.org/climatechange/blog/2014/06/sea-level-rise-...
>Why is Uber so belligerent when it comes to complying with laws of the land?

probably because it's working so well for them. The more noise they make about ignoring a law, the more people stand up on their behalf and ask for that law to be changed. and it usually works. Why would they stop when it's proven to be an effective way to change the laws they don't like?
The RMBK reactors at Chernobyl are of an irresponsible design, with no containment, graphite moderator and a highly positive void coefficient. Combined that with human error and zealotry and you have a recipe for disaster. Russian VVER PWRs on the other hand have excellent track record with no accidents whatsoever. Your country has at least two gen IV reactor designs with pasive cooling and negative void coefficient.

Solar is not base load. To make solar base load you need solar thermal with molten salts or a gas pipe nearby to run the turbines on gas during the night. Solar PV is good for distributed power generation, as they do it in Germany where almost every building has solar PV on their roof.

Your other bet for base load power of a comparable scale to nuclear is geothermal power, but it's highly location dependent.
It's a lot easier for us in Canada to pick and choose between war-displaced refugees and economic migrants when we have a massive ocean between us and the source of migrants. No one can arrive here without being pre-cleared by the Canadian government. European countries don't have that luxury.
My former boss told me three or four years ago that rent and electrical bills will make 75% of your income. Like back in the industrial Revolution.

Sadly I think he is right.
New Wave of Hailstorm Spam Pelts Inboxes
The suburbs are as expensive, or even more expensive than the city. I've honestly considered moving closer to my job in the suburbs, but for the same rent I get a far less desirable neighborhood (i.e. no close by bars, bad transit, nosey neighbors, mostly generic chain stores etc).

Houses have to go somewhere. Or should people just be stuck spending hours commuting?
It's actually pretty common in Hispanic countries since you build larger family homes (My home back there had 7 bedrooms, but three generations live there -> grandma, mother, daughters)
It's kind of unfortunate that the label "nuclear power" seems to inevitably bundle both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion into the same public policy debate. Their respective safety profiles couldn't be further apart.

While the economic risks for a failed nuclear fusion strategy can be argued, given even a modest chance for eventually producing large amounts of clean and safe energy output 24/7, should we not be pursuing fusion more aggressively?
I use Scheme extensively, which I would argue has the least syntax of the functional languages.

Erlang seems simple on the surface, but each type seems to have it's own DSL, allowing things that seem the same, to not be, which means you have to hold more context in your head.

e.g. Are these two the same?

ensure(A, B) ->

if A == B ->

Does -> always mean function? Or does it mean something similar to progn or begin from CL and Scheme? Or does it vary with context?

I had issues teaching where to use ; or . or end, and having people actually comprehend the reasons enough to do it without thinking.

At least with Scheme it's always )

We also investigated using Elixir, which has less overhead, and more people find easier to get up and running with. However, at the time Mix wasn't stable yet, which counted it out.
>Except for the stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987, the dot-com bubble, the housing bouble followed a crash, the tulip mania, ... Markets are not always rational.

Crashes are expected in the market theory. Crashes are actually healthy outcomes that get rid of mal-investment. There could have been much less severe crashes in the situations you described if there has been less government involvement (there is ample evidence of the government agencies and the FED being involved in the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble).
I wanted to downvote you, but this is part of why letting cats out is cruel. They're best off living a life of leisure indoors. Make sure it's a good life by entertaining and caring for them. That's what pets are supposed to experience in the modern era.
And the interesting thing is that no nuclear plant built starting today would have any of the issues that hit Fukishima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island. Both because the material safety is better today, and we better understand how to engineer these to passively fail safe rather than have safety systems that can themselves fail.

But the political will is hard to muster. And even though something like the traveling wave reactor design will burn its fuel almost completely up, leaving very easily containable waste products, the voices against it will be shrill and loud and full of emotion.

No matter how detailed your design, or solid your physics and mathematics, they cannot win an argument with someone who is simply afraid of the concept.
Went through the article thinking "god, I do remember this movie" until I got to the Kazaam part. Kazaam fits fine into my vague memory.

It was always the Berenstein bears though, get out of my universe!

Edit - If anyone wants a good sci-fi novel, the revelation space series touches on the mandela effect a bit.
I think you could solve the problem by rightous forbidding cars and non public transport in and around the city and replace them all with taxis,trains and underground trains,busses and shared cars. So you can travel within 30 to 45 minutes to the city even when you live 150 km away.

But that, that's just a pipe dream.
This is not possible with a progressive tax system. It is likely that he misunderstood tax brackets, average tax rate, and marginal tax rate.
Much less than digging it out of the ground.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265158823_Paper_No_...

> Further, the recycling of Li-ion battery materials potentially reduces the material production energy by as much as 50%. If battery active materials can be recycled in forms suitable for reuse with minimal processing, this percentage reduction could be even higher, as considerable energy is committed to making them from raw materials.
Obviously Uber has some sort of trick up their sleeve, they're not doing this just to be cowboys, they're way smarter than that.

In a conference call to journalists the other day, Anthony Levandowski said "It’s hard to understand why the DMV would seek to require self-driving Ubers to get permits when it accepts that Tesla’s autopilot technology does not need them."

Now that Uber has an excuse to take the California DMV to court, they may be able to make the case that according to the wording of DMV regulations, all individual Teslas using autopilot are in fact testing vehicles, and if they do not require a permit, then neither does Uber. Then Uber will be able to test free from the scrutiny of the DMV, or else all users of autopilot need to get testing permits as well.

Or some such nonsense.
> I would much rather pay 2x for a safer solar plant

That kind of cost increase would hurt a lot more people than the (very) occasional reactor malfunction.

Quality of life is strongly dependent on energy availability. We need an incredible amount of energy for modern food logistics, goods production, infrastructure, R&D, etc. Keeping society energy-impoverished is a sure way to harm as many people as possible.
I know. Which is why my post reads:

> "Indefinitely" while technically accurate also implies "unlimited period of time."

It has two meanings. But is more often used to mean unlimited period of time.
> That is ONE reactor gone wrong.

That is ONE reactor that was of a design many years out of date at the time of the failure, a failure where the people at the controls turned off the safety controls, then turned off the back up safety controls, then intentionally put the reactor in an unsafe state.

France gets 76% of its power from nuclear energy and has never gone above 4 on the INES scale, with an average clean up cost of 24.7 million USD[1].

There needs to be a Godwin's law for the Chernobyl. There are so many caveats and "yes buts" and weird political contexts to everything about that accident that it really isn't helpful when talking about nuclear reactors (unless you're talking about how politics and human intervention can screw up the best laid plans of mice and men).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
> When you listen popular music on a timeline (70s, 80s, ...), you can at the same time see to the evolution of synthesizers and music production software.

I wonder how much of this is just due to taste or lack of familiarity? Not that you're wrong but for whatever reason I actually feel like classical music has a much greater variation of sound than pop music.

I'm curious whether you feel like there's a lack of diversity among these pieces (which happen to be a few of my favorites =)

Scriabin Etude Op42 No5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwqaOGikyNs
Schubert Impromptu Op90 No3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxhbAGwEYGQ
Prokofiev Piano Concerto 3 Mvmt 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AdBi5IBrto
Shostakovich Piano Concerto 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCTEx3w2_jU

I admit though that I probably am biased, because frankly I enjoy the sounds of the instruments very much. If anything I suspect that having people listen to recorded music probably makes them less likely to appreciate classical music.
That's a great point that I had forgotten.

In terms of y2k effort, it seemed to me to be a small amount of code change and a disproportionately high amount of testing. The ramp up in hiring for those changes and certification, combined with the lost opportunity cost, did contribute to a later contraction.

Here's one thing that puts it in perspective though. The amount of code in the world that was Y2K-affected was considerably less than the total amount of code that exists today. And stepping outside the HN startup bubble (where code is relatively young and modernized) and into the types of companies affected by Y2K, there are many efforts that are as bad or worse occurring all the time. Stuff like regulatory changes (SarbOx or various banking reforms), technology uplift (e.g., 32bit --> 64bit, Win32-->.NET, platform ports, etc.) are as bad or worse based on the amount of legacy code it affects.

But what Y2K did is teach a lot of these companies how to solve sweeping, codebase-wide problems.
> Sure, dramatically lower the corporate income tax rate and substantially reduce the massive over-regulation in the US economy.

That's a great way to destroy the environment and increase corporate profits, but I was asking about how to get companies to ignore the profit of offshoring; how to convince them to act in direct opposition to their shareholder's interests, and not take advantage of the subsidies provided by state capitalist systems and locate manufacturing overseas.

All cutting the tax rate is going to to is make offshoring more profitable. At no time in US history has a tax cut been correlated with business growth and job growth. Quite the contrary, The Bush tax repatriation holiday gave many businesses the working capital to invest in closing plants and moving factories overseas, resulting in the net job losses in many industries. But if you have hard data on examples of cutting taxes below a top marginal rate of 40% in western countries having any effect other than increasing income inequality, I'd love to see your peer reviewed study.

And is there a particular regulation that you can think of cutting that would have more of lure for for domestic manufacturing than China dumping trillions of dollars into currency manipulation and building infrastructure and manufacturing subsidies?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127797/ is a recent report of tourists eating manchineel fruit.
Perhaps taking your experience with compose.io and applying it to all fifty-or-so services listed in this page is a bit excessive? Surely, Google Cloud isn't going to turn around and delete your data from its Datastore. It has an SLA, and I'm fairly sure the terms of service do not cover Google deleting your data at will in case you haven't passed the free tier.
I read somewhere that, if you get stranded somewhere and your last option is to eat some natural plants/fruits that you don't know, the rule was to take a small bite and wait for few hours. Most poisonous things would not kill you this way but will give you a hard time so you know it's not safe. Otherwise it's safe-ish to eat
I would recommend to check the adp application page. It does not allow the application to go beyond the "Personal Information" tab because it keeps saying "Select a Disability status" even though I have selected it. Tried all options to check uncheck the boxes. Nothing works. I have latest Chrome on windows 8.1 :)
> Here's to hoping that major infrastructure spending includes the unglamorous water mains replacements as much as the more glamorous monument-style projects.

Yes! This is a very fixable problem -- and fixing it will create jobs in the short run, and reduce dependency in the long run. Definitely money worth spending.
FLOSS Weekly 414: Minoca
>Not at all. A start would be a proof of concept device with barely working software.

And anyone can already do that. Creating a prototype is like 5% of the work. Nobody really cares about it unless you can ACTUALLY use it for ACTUAL stuff. I work in industrial automation and I have several hacked-together prototypes where I'm running some scripts or software on a micro-controller. And those protypes do "cool" stuff for a fraction of the cost. But there is absolutely no way my customers would ever ever consider using a prototype PLC for anything, not even testing. So I don't think you're getting it. This isn't Linux where your end users are mostly software/technical people. Normal laypeople are not interested in testing experimental stuff like this.

>Why does everybody assume you'd want to replace the medical devices? Did we even read the same article? The authors even say that

Because it would be unethical to produce medical diagnostic devices (or even call them that) without proper code review, validation, and so on.

>Except for sports training, do we need medical certification or perfect accuracy? No. So why is it so hard to believe that one person couldn't knock something together in a weekend if the transducers were available?

Okay so yeah I totally believe you can put together a janky POS that barely works and is unreliable. But without proper validation the results such systems produce are entirely useless.

> You know, for fun, out of curiosity?

Yes, I agree. You can do _ANYTHING_ for your own amusement, fun or curiosity. BUT... if you want to make something that is useful to other people you have to do a bit more work. And that work doesn't come cheap.
Minoca RTOS
Are you referring to the EHM that says that all stocks are traded at their fair (long-term) value? It's very easy to debunk that economical theory when you see some bubbles occurring in certain fields, not related at all to the actual long-term expectations of said company/sector (especially when no market changes and no productivity increase occur to indicate otherwise).
And are the basis of many of the new security features, including device driver and kernel sandboxing.
Not with taxes alone, but welfare cliffs can kick in:

http://www.learnliberty.org/blog/the-welfare-cliff-and-why-m...
What "privacy"?