skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shipping solar panels overseas is not a significant source of bunker-fuel emissions, and it probably never will be. Complete solar panel modules, without legs, weigh about 10kg per kilowatt: https://www.amazon.com/ECO-WORTHY-10pcs-Watts-Module-System/.... So each TEU of solar panels contains about 2.2 megawatts of generating capacity at 22 tonnes net per TEU. If the world installs 150 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2018, that's about 70000 TEUs.

The Emma Maersk carries 11000 TEUs on every voyage, so the amount of solar panels that will be installed worldwide in 2018 is about 6 shiploads.

What about the future, when photovoltaic becomes the dominant source of marketed energy? According to the IEO, current total world marketed energy consumption is 20 terawatts (20'000 gigawatts), which would amount to about 90 million TEUs, or 8000 shiploads. Call it 30000 shiploads to account for photovoltaic's low capacity factor, typically in the 20%–30% range (though we can expect that to become more efficient as development moves to more equatorial areas with less clouds).

There are currently about 9000 container ships in operation, so current world marketed energy consumption is about three trips for the world's shipping fleet, in the form of photovoltaic panels.

Total container shipping volume is already about 470 million TEUs per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship#Container_ports

We can presumably expect panels to become smaller and lighter as time goes on, further decreasing the energy needed for shipping, and eventually the proliferation of solar panels will depress the price of energy so low that not even bunker fuel can compete with syngas, at which point the bunker fuel emissions problem will be over.

(Edited to correct order-of-magnitude calculation error.)
It's also real-politik. CN is trying to corner the market on PV production. Obama supported fracking to punish Putin (RUS is a petro-state). There's more going on than what is read in the NYT. Take your area of expertise and go read about what is written in non-academic settings on the subject. Then realize that this isn't a one-off for your area of expertise. This. is. Everywhere.
Worked in many AWS shops, I bet almost none of them switch to alternatives if the price rose 10%.
In the US, for the most part, inter-city buses (in particular) are almost exclusively transportation for those who can't afford anything else. People lining up for a Megabus in NYC without any sort of covered waiting area aren't there because they prefer it to Amtrak or flying. And the Port Authority may not be the worst bus terminal on the planet but it's pretty awful.
> Boring tunnles

>> high capital cost

Apart from this one?
How does a BPU obviate the ASICS?
We've worked with talking in different languages altogether. They understand German but speak it badly, for me it's the same with French. So I speak German at them and they speak French at me. It works pretty well interestingly.
That's nice but when are they launching to the public in Phoenix?

Everytime I see Waymo news I hope it's about that Phoenix launch and then am disappointed when it isn't.
That doesn't save you from this attack - you can send the index page and some JS over with a long Cache-Control header, and then trigger the site to get loaded some days later when DNS has been changed to point to localhost. The JS will trigger the same XHR and it will succeed this time.

(.. and now that I think about caching, the various "within the same tab" solutions elsewhere in the comments don't work, because they'd force Gmail / OWA / Slack / etc. to get reloaded with a full cache flush when they change IP addresses, which everyone would hate.)
Im sorry it still doesnt make sense to me. "buy 1 tone of fish pay $10 per kg", "buy 10,000 tone of fish, pay 1 cent". Doesnt make sense!! At some point more is not that much cheaper. I doubt coming back to my CDN asking for price on 1,000 TB would bring price to 1 cent per TB.
Python was big in scientific computing before ML went mainstream. In college we were taught using matlab Mathematica and sci-py. So there were a lot of stats and science libraries available in python. Academics typically don’t care about software engineering or typing so python is an easy approachable choice.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170422171000/http://www.porkca...
Sounds like textbook "not understanding how addiction works" to me.
> As a side note, is there a front-end equivalent to Elixir? Elm is functional but is non intuitive. Elixirscript is a thing but seems a bit too early.

Purescript?
Where do you learn all this stuff?
I am not an expert in air pollution control systems, or even an amateur. I don't even have an air filter installed in my house. I read some Wikipedia articles over the last couple of years, Googled, and watched some videos on YouTube (including "how-to" videos on the care and feeding of electronic air cleaners.) That doesn't make me an expert. That makes me some sort of approximation of a journalist — and if you've ever read those people writing about something you know about, you know how much they get wrong.
Unrestricted gene editing in humans is probably a bad idea. (1) Evolution has been pretty effective to this point, (2) decreasing genetic variability will make humans as a species more susceptible to extinction from a single event, and (3) it will probably backfire as humans do not possess the foresight to know what the world will be in 1-3 generations and what traits might predispose their descendants to success.

Hell what we think of as genetic "diseases" give an evolutionary advantage under the right circumstances (ex. sickle cell anemia + malaria, cystic fibrosis + cholera).
I'd love to have some support for a real number. I found a source [1] for the cost to retailers to collect a tax (about 4.23% of tax collected in WA) but while most states make it pretty easy to see how much sales tax was collected they don't make it easy to see what it cost to collect that tax, separate from the other taxes they collect (income tax, corporate tax).

If you have any insight into this, or suggestions that are less painful than "read the state budget detail", I'd love to have a cost number that is based on facts.

[1] https://dor.wa.gov/content/retailers-cost-collecting-and-rem...
Trump didn't create this dispute--it has been ongoing for years, and Obama imposed tariffs on solar imports from China too.

China subsidizes solar and nearly all US manufacturers have been forced to move plants to compete, declare bankruptcy or shutdown.

The question is: after China obtains a stronghold in this market... then what? The Chinese subsides will eventually be removed, and solar panels will return to their natural price--but with all of the supply chain, supplies for materials, r&d, knowhow, etc centralized in and around China.. making it hard for non-Chinese companies to compete.

So look further out--when China no longer subsidizes solar... is that good for the US economy?
Steel-on-Steel rail are generally also most energy efficient compared to rubber-tyred vehicle.

And IIRC, one of the most expensive part of rail building is the dedicated right of way, so if you are also doing that for self driving vehicle then might as well as go for rail (if there's demand, that is)
...is that you, Dave? I had no idea you had H19s!
That is very dependent on where you are at. We have suburbs around here with lot sizes of 2178 sf (for houses of ~1800 sf).

I don't really agree that developers are particularly responsive to the market in this regard, either. Or rather, they make quite a lot more profit from two 6K lot houses than they do from a more expensive house on a 12K lot. Builders always, always want to go for smaller lots unless they're selling super-premium houses of at least $1M (for context, the average house price here is probably right around $350-400K right now).
Discord (a heavy Erlang/Elixir user) runs on GCP, right?
Amazing you need a third party service now to replicate what netflix was all about in the DVD era.
Probably not secret anymore. CMS (the "Code Morphing Software" that implemented the x86 emulation) originally went straight to translation which was difficult to get correct and was expensive to do for code that might only be run once. Linus, when he joined said "That's stupid" and wrote an x86 interpreter which then acted as the first tier in the emulation. That let to a massive improvement in quality as more workloads could be tested and enabled an awesome creation by Jim Mattson (IIRC): self-cosimulation. CMS could be run in a mode where all translation were cross checked with the interpreter before the results were committed.

This was before my time and I'm sure he did much more. I only have first-hand knowledge of his work on TVM, the Transmeta x86 Virtualization which predated Intel (and AMD's) hardware support for x86 virtualization. Sadly it never productized. I suspect we couldn't find a way to monetize it.
> What value is being created here, exactly?

It's the greatest advance in money laundering ever invented. For that to work the proles need to be conned into participating so there is plenty of transaction volume to hide in.
To be fair, you are paying what? 11 dollars? Netflix isn't meant to be "all access to everything." If you wanted access to everything immediately it's going to cost a lot of money.

For a while, it was "access to nearly all old TV." a few years ago. But that was when old TV had little value. Nobody was paying for old TV and you couldn't even find it elsewhere.

Now, Netflix has made old TV valuable and has made new TV less valuable. Shows like The Expanse need to monetize on the reruns because the "first run" isn't enough anymore.
Yeah, democrats are totally trying to attack an open internet and pass draconian laws and regulations that give ISPs unfettered power, and republicans are absolutely trying to fight for free and open access to information. The FCC vote totally wasn’t along party lines either. Nope nope nope, no siree!
indirectly with chip suppliers
Q4 is always big because people get new Netflix capable devices for Christmas.
Usually: contributor license agreement.
I can relate to this. One has to wonder how much of this is inherent to buses as a transportation mode vs the fact that it's normally the cheap option.
It becomes much less of an issue if the connection is re-negotiated periodically, and a new key may require a physical action (touch) from the key generator.
NY, Boston, kind of. Portland... a little bit, downtown, and starting, a little bit to be that way in some areas.

With the Supreme Court's Euclid decision in 1916, we've had zoning that has only gotten worse and worse since then, so most things built in the years following that have deviated from that sort of walkable, incremental city that we used to have here too.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...
My impression is (for the US) that trains are the optimal way to connect major cities, while buses are good for connecting smaller cities. Ideally, of course, one would have a dense rail network connecting even small towns, as Germany does, but that's never going to happen in the US.
To be fair, DEC was once in the same position as Google; in fact, by employee count, it was twice as big (140k vs. 70k) and by market share of the whole computing market (you could speak of a "computing market" back then), it was significantly larger. In the mid-80s, the idea that a VAX might be supplanted by a massive worldwide computation network of billions of computing devices would've seemed like science fiction. (Note that at its peak, Digital had only sold 400,000 VAX.) You could be fairly confident that storing your data in the OpenVMS filesystem would be fairly future-proof.

When was the last time you saw a filename of the form NODE"accountname password"::device:[directory.subdirectory]filename.type;ver?
Could Amazon Be Gearing Up for Cryptocurrency Exchanges?
‘Time well spent’ is shaping up to be tech’s next big debate
Depends on your perspective. Bioethics exist in the West because people here have cared to ask some very sensible questions about what it means to be human, and the trade offs we make as we become post human.

> Our descendants will pity us for lacking medical technology the same way we pity our ancestors.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe our descendants will be homogenous near-automatons, the product of normalizing and optimizing humanity to something that today we wouldn’t even recognize as human.

I’m glad the West is “hampered” by bioethics. China is generally not hampered by ethics or advanced social thought of any kind. God bless them.
The tricks propagandists use to beat science
Montana - The forefront of the digital advancement lol ...
Thanks for such a neutral reply. I appreciate it, especially since my comment was on the harsh side.

The article struck other people that way too, and I can see why. But this is precisely where HN commenters need to exercise a little self-discipline. If a comment is picking up on the obvious, hottest, most generic point that someone could make about the article, that's a different game than HN is supposed to be for. That's the hot public argument game. We're trying for something quite different here—call it the obscure curiosity game. We're looking for non-obvious insights, something unpredictable. The other game is more or less always the same, and is driven by very different emotions than curiosity. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that it doesn't belong here. It's off topic and it destroys what's on topic.

This is most important when an article has enough material to support either kind of discussion, which I'd say was definitely the case here.

I'd love to get better at explaining this, because I feel like if we could put it into just the right words, most HN users would see that it's in their interests to play the intended game and resist playing the unintended one.
I study stock market for more than a decade, for long term, and I perfectly now that company data should not be analysed in a isolatedly, but, any stock with P/E ratio 230.24 you need to be very careful, and put just the money you can afford to lose without disturb your sleep.

For whom that does not understand company ratios, a P/E ratio 230.24 is meaning that you need 230 years of profits to return to you the price you are paying today, of course, this does not consider that the company and profits will grow. But to have a parallel, at least in my country, really good companies have a P/E between 20 and 30, on average, and 30 is considered very high.
I use the JustWatch app on my phone. You can tell it which services you subscribe too (it has many). You can even let it tell you where content is purchase-able.
According to [1], Donald Trump did not make a single contribution to his own campaign except in the form of loans (based on my limited understanding of how the FEC reports this stuff, cross referenced against a candidates' filings who I know for certain loaned their own money to their campaign). Given that his campaign machinery started fundraising for 2020 the day after his inauguration, I feel that it is highly disingenuous to claim that those loans were in any way true political contributions.

[1] https://www.fec.gov/files/bulk-downloads/index.html?prefix=b... (I wasn't able to load indiv16.zip and analyze it but the total loan amount from the other data is a only few million shy of the $66 million total).
A few years ago I read a comment on HK which addressed that very point. The argument said that if PoW was useful, the security could be compromised unpredictably.

It goes something like this: Imagine that you are mining Bitcoin and protein folding for a drug. Let's also imagine that if your mining rig finds the protein, it's worth $15m (as a company could commercialise a new drug with that information).

You can imagine a point where you can make more money from the results than from the mining (if they are useful, they will be worth some money after all). But the security of the Bitcoin network lies precisely in the game-theoretical aspect that it's more profitable to mine than it is to cheat. But if you can mine and make some money on the side (because it's useful), then cheating [double spending] might become more interesting. Or perhaps your "side-business" can bootstrap a 51% attack.

Finding a useful & relevant computational problem, whose monetary value is predictably low far into future and whose computation scales with a simple function ... well, it's a really difficult question. So the safest option is to go for "brainless" computation. That is trying random numbers.

I think it is not useless. It does the job: "Keeping the network secure by calculating random hashes". Useless, of course, is very subjective. I wish most video games did something useful like protein folding (I consider them and the machines powering them a waste of energy, matter, mining, time and intellectual power).
> might explain a willingness to let people make choices in China

Annoying things I sometimes hear from relatives during family re-unions:

* Is it true that abortion isn't legal in the U.S.? (Of course, it's allowed, but not in all places, and ... it's complicated.)

* How come people don't understand that climate change is real? Is it because creationism is taught in schools? (Well, it's not like that in all places...)

* So did those comments from Trump become public before or after the election? People must have felt duped that they voted for this kind of person, right? (Actually, those came out before the election. I have no words. ::shakes head::)

Things I might ask them that are annoying:

* I thought gender-selection abortion is illegal. What's with the ratio? (Ugh. Country-people* and their backwards attitudes about gender. You'd think that top-down mandated equal-work-for-equal-pay for a generation would have changed a few things. At least city people have reasonable attitudes.) Yeah, so how are they able to do it? (Never underestimate what a determined Chinese person will figure out how to accomplish.)

* Wait, I thought country people expect their daughters to venture into manufacturing hubs to be breadwinners for the whole family? (Yeah, exactly. They totally baby the boys.)

(Country-people is the closest thing to a racial slur I've heard in China. The amount of prejudice I hear it uttered with me makes me quite uncomfortable.)
When I hear that founders are more important than ideas, I wonder how much of “founders” refers to the founders’ upper-class culture sync and connections. Of course, it never represents all of that, but, could founders with only intelligence, teamwork and ingenuity skills suffice on their own?
You can get a place with a lawn in Europe, too; you just have to pay for it, or live further out.

It's very difficult to find a place like our house in Italy in the US: we could walk to schools, grocery stories, pastry shops, our doctor, cafes, pizza place, a few barbers and a tram stop to go downtown.

And that's in a suburb of a mid-size city (about 300K).
But are unilateral tariffs like this one actually helpful in combatting this?
This sort of abuse of wealth is absolutely revolting, but how do you deal with parties that have amassed enough power to basically thumb their noses at the rest of the populace?

The casualness with which such a rich asshole deprives thousands of people of their rights without any fear for consequences is absolutely disgusting.
> Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein folding? Or planet hunting? Or pattern analysis? Or something else, that can be used to build an AI brain?

It's not that easy. You need to be able to generate tasks that have a predictable levels of difficulty.
It's interesting that you pity our ancestors. They got you here.
Minimum lot sizes are pervasive in the U.S. Many of the suburbs that do have smaller lot sizes are "grandfathered in" to the zoning regulations--it would not be legal to build a new subdivision in the same county with the same layout.

Your example does not show that developers are not responsive to the market. The fact that developers can make more profit on two 6K lot houses than they do from a more expensive house on a 12K lot simply means that there is more economic value in satisfying two peoples' desires for a 6K lot house than in satisfying one person's desire for a 12K lot house.

If you eliminated the minimum lot size, people who want big lots would have to pay a lot more for them to make it worth developers' while, and that makes total sense! One person buying a house with a 12K lot pushes out two people who might be perfectly happy with a 6K lot. They should pay more.
We read this to our kids from early on, they understand - there are even more lesser known Seuss books ...

His 'adult' "The 7 Lady Godivas' with, shock! nudity ....

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-lady...

And my favourite - 'The Kings Stilts':

https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic-Seuss/dp/0394800...
looks like the guy is trying to convince himself,
If netflix doesn’t pay a dividend, does a P/E analysis still make any sense?
Yes, if China had subsidized the US installation of massive new electrical power generation capacity independent of fossil fuels that would last decades, that would have been good for the US economy. It isn't that simple to raise prices on durable productive goods — your customers have to compete against the people who bought the same goods last year at a lower price.

As for the "natural price", the only significant irreducible cost to producing silicon photovoltaic panels is the price of energy itself. Everything else is either literally dirt cheap (silica, alumina, trace quantities of phosphorus) or can be amortized over arbitrarily large production volumes (giant molybdenum crucibles, FIB lithography machines, Ph.D. physicists). In the limit where solar panels are abundant, the "natural price" for solar panels is very nearly the price of the sand they are made from.
Much of Netflix's valuation seems to be based on their ability to own the gate between people and all of Hollywood. That puts them in a position to take profits away from the people like Murdoch and bank it. The dirty tricks that the studios play on theatres don't work on Netflix or Amazon prime.
That's a very naive way of looking at the world.

Economics is only allowed a free reign so long as it meets the goals of those currently in power in a given political unit.

Try selling nuclear technology to Iran if you don't think that it applies to the US as much as to China.

Doing it strategically to prevent a nuclear war 30 years down the line is the lesser of two evils.
This article from last May says he has influence over 16.4% of blocks:

https://www.investopedia.com/news/who-jihan-wu-and-does-he-b...

Do you have any more recent numbers that tell a different story?
> profitless basic research

May not scale in 20 years. Useless research can become very valuable in a decade or two.
The Apple Cash FAQ: How much cash does Apple have?
That's my point exactly. They sell them to other people to ensure that doesn't happen.

Now I'm not actually sure if they produce enough for that to be relevant. But my understanding is they dominate the asic market and asics are the only thing that are profitable for mining bitcoin. It could be if they didn't sell and mined themselves they would have enough mining share to cause people to lose faith in the currency and crash the market.