skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is safe storage of the radioactive waste from nuclear plants a solved problem?

Depends on what you mean by 'solved'.

Its not solved in the sense that there is a political solution and agreement.

It is solved however in so far as that all scientists and technician agree that there is a simply solution and that the money for that has already been accumulated by fees payed on nuclear energy.

We are just now again seeing some progress on this front but sadly this topic has been covered in mountains of shit.

> Even if the current fears about nuclear are overblown (and I'm not convinced that they are) what do you do about waste that remains dangerous for many human lifetimes?

Actually the whole way we talk about this is wrong.

Nuclear 'waste' is not waste in any meaningful sense. It actually contains highly valuable materials. The waste majority of the 'waste' we have now is fuel that can be used in reactors (if we ever manage to build new reactors). Other parts of it can be used for nuclear batteries that we use to explore space, other parts can be used for medical isotopes and the list goes on.

There are geological places that have no moved for millions of years and will not for millions of years as far as we can tell.

In order for it to endanger lives you would have to come up with incredibly complex story. Nobody has ever died from nuclear waste and its very unlikely that anybody ever will.

Compared to solar or coal the waste is far smaller. The output of coal plants is ironically more radioactive then a nuclear plant and ash pile is worse then all nuclear waste combined.

Solar leaves behind mountains of electronic waste the then go to childeren in Africa that take them apart and get poisoned.

Nuclear has the smallest amount of population or waste compared to any all other technologies. It is by far the safest for human in both cases.

It is also the saves form of energy production (including all nuclear disasters) in terms of human lives.
> This is an epidemic that needs strong legislation. The use of sugar, salt, and fat in food needs to be regulated otherwise it's an arms race for brands that just keep adding all 3 to their products.

Lobbying from the food industry is extremely powerful and pervasive. They're using the same playbook as the tobacco industry a few decades ago. For instance the traffic light nutrition labels (that I believe originated from the UK) were shot down at the EU level, under the pretense of not stigmatizing the important gastronomic heritage in several European countries.
California Can Lead the Way in Open Access
How to Secure Yourself Against Bitcoin Theft in 10 Minutes
Plumbing putty has been around for a couple of decades and is available in most hardware stores. It hardens to a waterproof seal.
PCIe-Based SD 7.0 Spec Closing In, Set to Be Announced This Month
The keyword here is energy density. Batteries are really good when measured in electrical energy stored per volume. Your proposed mechanical potential energy store (lifting mass) cannot compete. The amount of stored energy is aurprisingly low in comparison. I did the math over a decade ago because I had the same idea and the numbers were underwhelming.
This problem is much deeper than just automation and has been spiraling out of control since at least the 1970s. https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/product...

Years of tax cuts for corporations and the rich combined with the destruction of Unions and workers ability to collectively bargain has created this problem. Start taxing wealth and corporate profits at post-ww2 levels, increase protections for workers. Encourage co-operatives, profit sharing, and other forms of worker control and ownership.
Once a week, I fast for 24 hours. There's a number of studies showing the benefits of IF and once a week is easy to commit to.
Can't speak for Australia, but at least in the US, a big part of the reason rooftop solar ends up looking like such a savings is net electric metering, where power companies buy surplus power from solar panel owners at the same rates that they sell those users power at night. The tricky thing is that the price users pay for power doesn't just include generation costs, but also transit, grid maintenance, etc., which rooftop solar owners benefit from even though they no longer pay for it -- these costs end up being borne by other rate-payers, who effectively cross-subsidize rooftop owners' freeloading. In the early days of solar, there was a good public policy argument to be made here: solar power is a net societal good (air quality, carbon footprint, creation of solar economies of scale that drive prices down for everyone, etc.), and power companies weren't going to do solar on their own.

Now, though (again, at least in the US), utilities are making massive investments in grid solar, and it's dramatically cheaper than rooftop solar. Like: a quarter the cost per kilowatt hour of generation capacity. So now I think it's sensible to ask: if we're going to ask ratepayers to subsidize solar generation, does it really make sense for us to spend their subsidy on a way of doing solar that's objectively much more expensive just because it saves a few specific users money? They could be getting 4x the bang for their buck if we spent that subsidy on grid-scale instead, and then the economics of rooftop solar mostly go to shit (as well they probably should -- it's needlessly expensive).
Reading is AWESOME. I am in the same boat as you - never read much as a kid, mostly read stuff on the web up until about a year and a half ago. I found a couple really cheap used bookstores near me around that time, and I have never looked back.

For me, fiction is such a nice break from the technical stuff that I am exposed to day in and day out. I feel it has helped me to be more empathetic, has exposed me to all sorts of different characters/personalities, and has made me a more well-rounded person in general. I also feel as though I am more frequently able to find the right words to adequately express my ideas.

Another thing that's great about reading is talking about books with close friends. Their insights on the book might be something that would have otherwise gone completely over your head.
Loads of questions here that seem to be based on only reading the abstract. Most of these are addressed in the paper.
This is a solved problem. Adjust your user agent.
Last time I bought Sugru was back in august last year, some of it is starting to get hard in the package now. Definitely more than a few months.

Also if you put it in the refrigerator it lasts much longer.
Big projects take time. Decades. The financial models of power utilities are based on multi-decade deprecation of plants that cost hundreds of millions (or billions) to build.

Adding solar/wind to add new capacity or replace retiring capacity is a different and much better financial model than replacing equipment that is not yet fully deprecated. But it's a much slower one. Be patient.
If you're dealing with a struggling smaller town, as codingdave said, and they take that attitude, well, there's another struggling smaller town right next door...
Fastmail limitations are:

When I signed up in 2016 (I’m still a customer btw) it was a big pain to get my custom domain added after paying for an account. I had to contact support for assistance. I somehow have to have two accounts for my plan but only one has a mailbox. Crazy bad experience here.

The amount of space we get for mail is low for the fee. I pay around $12/year in additional fees with Google for another 70GB of space outside of the 30GB they give for the base plan. Fastmail was pricier last I checked.

There is zero quality collaboration option for me. Even if you added one the fact that anyone who wants to collaborate would have to have a paid account with me creates a barrier for me to even try and use it for anything but just email.

The spam filter is about 30% as accurate as Gmail. I try and train it but don’t have time to always be doing that.

The mobile app on ios doesn’t remember me. It doesn’t even have an option to remember me. What a pain, I hardly even bother to use it because of that.

That all said. I like some things about fastmail:

The web interface is fast.

The admin features are robust and easy for adding aliases and new custom domains.

The fact you are pushing to make the world a better place for email is why I keep paying for the service.

What you are doing is hard. Your competitors are massive and well established. I hope you continue to make progress.
> why is HN and much of social media rife with lies and misrepresentations

Clickbait (economic or personal gain), or people perpetuating things that sound good, or things they want to believe. Emotion influences the perception of information, and information can influence emotion.

> Solar energy is going to be a minor part of the world's energy strategy unless a revolutionary breakthrough happens ( a significant breakthrough on par with cold fusion ). That's a basic fact of current state of physics

What physics based on what equipment? An array of photovoltaic cells may or may not be as efficient as the Ivanpah solar facility. Ivanpah produced 719,398 GWh/yr across a six square mile area. Theoretically we would only need to cover half of the Mojave with such sites to provide for the US's annual electricity need.
>>" It's not the government's job to provide you a job"

Maybe now things are how you say, but it's not a divine mandate.

If you see the government as a tool of society, it's the society who should choose the role of the government through the democratic process.
The slogan was that of a campaign that was launched on the premise that most Mexicans coming to this country are rapists and murderers, and that by the law of large numbers some end up being good people. Immigration is a hot button issue, but the President has fanned those flames considerably since he came on the scene, and every colored person and minority in this country has felt it. Every KKK member if you ask them will tell you they feel emboldened and empowered by this President in large part due to his rhetoric. If you ask any of your friends of color, they'll tell you things are markedly different now, in large part due to the rhetoric of this President. MAGA is completely tied in with that rhetoric, because what does it imply. What exactly was proposed by the MAGA coalition?

- Build a wall to keep out brown people

- Prevent Muslims from entering the country

- Judges of Mexican descent are unable to do their job because of their race

- Inner cities are hellscapes that require law and order and perhaps the national guard to regain peace

- Homosexuals don't deserve the same rights as the rest of us (ask any Trump supporter if they believe Trump believes in gay marriage and they will tell you no)

- Women deserve to be mocked, disbelieved, assaulted, and their bodies controlled, and there are no repercussions for doing so.

That's what MAGA represents to 50% of the population. So if you want to bring it up in your technical document as a little side quip, and not give a shit about what your readers think, more power to you. But as someone interested in Prolog and would like to see it have a renaissance, I was lost as a reader on the cover page. I don't want to be reminded about the guy at the grocery store telling me to get out of "His" country and go back to where I came from while reading technical documents. MAGA.

> Heck, the recent hubbub over calling MS-13 animals and then saying its racist shows how screwed these views are.

Strange how brown gang members are clearly, unequivocally all animals, but this President has to point out in a group of white torch-bearing khaki-clad Nazis there are still good people! I wonder how many white children in America are separated from their families and held in cages in windowless detention facilities in accordance with official DOJ policy.
A variation of this is only eat half the portion and save the other half for the next meal.
Sex / health education too made big difference.
We have computers doing diagnostics now.

Remember that problem with the glassblower? He had no one to replace him because there was no market for a journeyman chem glass blower so nobody followed behind. We will have the same problems elsewhere.
I think we'll find, if we stop hitting them with stupid-sticks in childhood (I'm looking at you organized educational systems) and feed them well that most people are in fact interesting, intelligent, curious, and driven to express themselves in glorious self-directed vibrant creative constructive expression. (And if some of them turn out not to be, well then, we can toss 'em in a volcano.)

A "job" is not something you need. You need to contribute to society and you need support from society as well, and we currently structure that relationship primarily through jobs and "the economy" but that structure is what's going away. The question is, what to replace it with?

Automation is a good thing. From the point of view of the machines Moore's Law means that humans are becoming exponentially more valuable! (Thanks to Mark Miller for that gem.)

Unless you can do something that a machine can't be programmed to do you have a serious problem, though. What will your children be? And their children? We are deciding today what our distant descendants will be doing.

An A.I. koan:

Q: What can you do that a machine cannot?
A: Could a machine answer that question?
Was it Alexanders steak house? If so I did the same thing (drive by Apple HQ to see it and stopped at Alexanders).
A blockchain only guarantees that calculations are done in a certain way, not that the input data is correct. That same problem also existed before the blockchain as you can see with e.g. Amazon reviews and fake news. Traditionally that problem was solved by having a centralized authority that decides on what input data is correct and what isn't, but that, of course, comes with the usual problems of centralization and monopolies, and also, doesn't seem to work well at scale (as you can again see with the crumbling Amazon review system).

While the criticism in the blog post at blockchain as a technology is misdirected in my opinion (and maybe even purposefully misunderstanding what problems blockchains solve), I think the main problem of "shit in - shit out" is a very interesting and important one, even more so in decentralized systems where you don't have the crutches of a centralized verifier available.

However, I'm pretty optimistic that that problem can even be solved with the help of blockchain. I hoped that I wouldn't have to plug our project[0] before we have anything published, but this seems too close of a topic to pass up. Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing both code for our first testnet and our whitepaper for a decentralized information verification system that aims to solve the problems laid out in this blog post, that we worked on for quite some time.

[0]: https://rlay.com
The energy density of gravity storage is terrible. But there's still a few plans for it:

https://www.wired.com/2016/05/forget-elons-batteries-fix-gri...

> 9,600 tons of rock- and concrete-filled railcars up a 2,000-foot hill.

> $55 million

> The Nevada project has a power capacity of 50 megawatts and can produce 12.5 megawatt-hours of energy.

Using the 4 cents/kWh figure upstream, that's ... $500 of electricity per round trip.
When you bring on new investors, it dilutes the equity of employees. But when you add more employees, it generally doesn't dilute the equity of investors. Rather, pools of equity are created periodically for employees with investor approval, and employees get options from that pool.

With blockchain though you can give equity in realtime, e.g. every 5 minutes that people are working, rather than once per year or whatever. The fact that work and equity distribute can both be monitored very granularly at no extra cost means that labor can (and will) be given equal footing with capital, rather than having hiring and compensation changes approved periodically by investors with little to no input from labor.
Devos supports removal of the program and was likely instrumental in some of the other modifications to education funding from the recent tax reform: https://www.studentdebtrelief.us/forgiveness/trump-student-l...
There are rarely reprecussions for a driver hitting/killing a single cyclist, without video evidence or multiple corroborating witnesses/victims, typically law enforcement pre emptively blames the cyclist so one would expect the same thing for scooter riders.
An old editorial about this attitude:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
Nuclear power is one of the most expensive sources around.

See Lazard's 2017 numbers[1], which put the low price of nuclear power at $112/MWh. Only rooftop residential is more expensive ($187/MWh), Diesel generators ($197/MWh) and gas peaking ($156/MWh) are more expensive.

Utility solar is as low as $43/MWh, wind is $30/MWh

If you think there is going to be some magical world where people get rid of safety regulations for nuclear power, after the Fukushima nuclear accident I think you need to reconsider. Nuclear power advocate's excuse for that one was that they had lax safety standards, so dropping them further seems unlikely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Widespread technological unemployment is definitely a concern, no question there. I'm just not convinced that government is the best tool to try and solve that problem, on both moral and practical grounds. But when I say "government" I really mean "Government as we know it today" - big, corrupt, invasive, inefficient, etc. Possibly a better model could be developed which would be better suited. That, to me, is the challenge for our time.
I think you're getting too tangled up in the specific framing device the article uses. There's no easy way for Jeff Bezos to conjure up $40B in cash to hand out as bonuses, but there are plenty of ways he could have not made that $40B in the first place.

For a dramatic example, Amazon could decide tomorrow to give the entire company a 20% raise and eat the stock price crash. They'd be fine. Jeff Bezos is prioritizing growth and shareholder value but it's entirely within his powers to prioritize other things, like paying his employees a living wage all the way down the pay scale. Amazon would be a slightly smaller and less important company with a somewhat lower share price and the world would be a better place.

When he says that he doesn't have anything other than space exploration to spend his money on what he means, in part, is there's nothing he can change without negatively impacting the metrics he cares about. The point of this argument is that he could choose to care about different metrics.
Even YouTube isn't using it anymore
Robots are doing that too.
Illegal Memes? Weak Safe Harbor? Unpacking the Proposed EU Copyright Overhaul
Yeah convenient as having your residence, work, and some shopping in one building would be, it's got paid-in-scrip written all over it. Also where do you meet new people? Where do you go on dates? Malls are rarely
walkable from other places.
I know that mall. The usual happened; developers wanted to build lots of housing and no infrastructure. The builder had recently reneged on elderly housing units in another development and were not believed about building a park on top of the structure.

Building density housing is cheap compared to building the schools, parks, fire, police stations, and transportation to support the new density housing.
And a lot seem to be "...is experimenting with..."
They already have shows that run a bit like that. I believe Michelle Wolff's show is one of them.
Yes, that's in the 2015 blog post https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/chaos-engineering-upgrad...
Believe it or not, a lot of people still use local tv/news for entertainment or information (of local news).

(Near) realtime would be important for emergencies, as rare as they are.
Build Houses, just a thought.
The columnist is actually a Fox news commentator.
BitTorrent Sells to Blockchain Entrepreneur Justin Sun
Youtube.com migrated to polymer in 2017
I think it certainly could be cheaper over the time scales relevant for Kardashev scale. But we have plenty of time to worry about that later.

But we need to figure out how to survive the next couple of centuries before we start worrying about efficiencies that will matter in tens of thousands of years, and rooftop solar certainly helps in the immediate term.
I started making a semi-serious attempt to write fiction at the end of last year. It has been hard to turn into a habit but as of now I crank out a thousand words or so per session, three or four times a week, and it is an incredibly satisfying creative outlet. For better or worse, that's something I seem to need and my day job doesn't scratch that itch right now (or ever, really).
It's hard to explain how important malls were to some of my younger colleagues, or to folks who didn't grow up in some no-name midwestern suburb like I did. Malls were temples and town squares. They were facebook. They were the internet. Virtually all of your exposure to the "outside world" happened there.

Malls were incredibly well built and thought through. They were the crown jewel for many mid-size towns (perhaps next to sports stadiums). They boasted large, secure, climate controlled areas, often in places that had dramatic seasonal weather changes. They were a constant.

I think they represent a tremendous bargain, provided a good deal is struck, and someone knows what to do with the space. However, the window for this to happen is small. Spaces that are that large that fall into disrepair often are unsalvageable.
Back before 3 Mile Island

And then the 3 Mile Island disaster happened, and people tighten up regulations. That seems reasonable, no?
Odds are, the scooter rider won't be wearing a helmet. And in cyclist / motor vehicle collisions, that's usually enough to make it the cyclist's fault.
You are being fooled, they never show the backside of that Tesla Model X to reveal the battery size. They are also not really an independent third party
I think in America there is a huge misconception on what 'hungry' actually is/feels like.

People think that if you don't stuff your kid 3 times a day with massive quantities of food, they will fade away over night. It's very easy to refuse food and be picky when you are not truly hungry.

My personal rule of thumb is if my least favorite food doesn't sound edible, I don't actually need to eat.
It may not, but it'd make more sense than their current offering.
"expires in a few months in the packet"

Yup, I bought Sugru. I used some. I really liked it.... but wasted half of it and simply decided at that point to not buy it again.

I don't want to have to buy it within months of needing it. I want to store it and use it as needed for as long as I have it.
I'll check it out, thanks for the suggestion.
Did you often yank out parts of other people's systems which you did not understand?
You do realize that Canonical [Ubuntu] has bricked and destroyed Linux systems with their installers and software updates, right?

Here's Ubuntu 16.04 bricking systems with patches: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/meltdown-and-...

Debian's updates causing PowerPC platforms to see random crashes and data corruption: https://news.softpedia.com/news/latest-debian-stretch-kernel...

Here's Ubuntu 17.10 bricking Lenovo, Toshiba and Acer laptops: https://itsfoss.com/ubuntu-17-10-bios-bug/

There are many open source vendors which ship shitty installers. In fact, virtually every software vendor I have ever used has had a shitty installer, if they even provide one. I don't think your idealistic position on software release reflects reality.
Not that I would advocate for such extreme lack of incentives but US gdp per cap is over 50k. Doesnt this mean that you could in theory give everyone 50k?