skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consumption and production are both inelastic and storage costs are high.

Traditionally when a producer produces more of a good than consumers want to buy, the price drops, consumers buy more, and producers produce less. If consumption & production are both inelastic, consumers won't buy more and producers can't produce less. The excess goes into inventory, where it's treated as an asset and then sold (often at lower prices) when supply and demand equilibrate.

You can't put electricity into inventory, at least not without batteries or similar tech, which cost money and leak charge. Hence, if you produce extra, you have to pay someone to manage the storage or usage of that extra current.

There are a few other industries that function like this. Garbage is a big one: you have to pay someone to take your garbage because demand for garbage is much less than supply and storage has non-zero cost.
> Energy storage (at cost) is an unsolved problem.

Super-true. It's actually pretty fascinating how it's currently done in the grid; storage of energy is often done by converting it (at significant efficiency loss) to a mechanical format.

Those formats can get very creative---traditional is "pump a bunch of water uphill into an artificial reservoir," but in areas where big dry mines are available, capping the mine and pressurizing the air inside is also used, which feels super-weird but apparently works?
Google it. No seriously. Multiple articles. It's all over Reddit.
Asbestos brakes are also the reason why blowing out undercarriages, wheel wells & rims w/ air pressure is illegal. Does your shop not have a sign directing anyone who observes such behavior to report it? Pretty sure in the US, it is mandatory to post in commercial garages in plain sight.
Also interception by drone.

I know somebody who was having a nuisance/peeping tom issue with a neighbor and a drone. They had an unfortunate accident where their cheapo drone somehow collided with the neighbors.
What gave it away, where they said "generalized" or where they said "typically"?
If you can store large amounts of compressed air to take advantage of energy gluts, it's probably better to just storing it and generate electricity to sell on the market when the price is high...
Machine learning technique reconstructs images passing through a multimode fiber
> Vulkan can be used in classic win32 apps but not in "modern" UWP apps.

Why is this/how do they enforce that?

The Xbox is hardly a surprise, but then again you're only going to target that for games so it's less of a problem.
I think any opinion predicated on the purpose of the electoral college at this point is invalid. That's because it was originally intended to allow the states to choose independent electors, but since they are now bound by the statewide popular vote, any effect of that is unrelated to the original purpose.

The fact that sometimes they elect the candidate who did not win the national popular vote is simply a bug in the evolved system, and all defenses of it are post-hoc rationalization motivated by the assumption it will continue to favor Republicans.
A desal plant is a useful thing and can be run around the clock off traditional energy sources. The "free energy" hours would help lower the costs.

I can even imagine a SETI-like application where people who over-generate power are able to donate it to causes of their preference...
What happens if I refuse to sell my share?
> Neither LC or TMs are "natural ways of thought"

I agree. I think it's like Moravec's paradox: we tend to forget how hard it was to first grasp the concepts of programming, and go on to treat whatever's most familar as being "obvious", even if it's not.

Still, there are a few specific points I take issue with:

> Lambda Calculus, Turing Machines, etc. are no different in this regard. One has its steps realized in reduction and substitution rules, the other has its steps realized in movements of the head and manipulations of the tape.

There is a very big difference between TMs and LC in this regard: each step of a TM takes a constant amount of resources (time, energy, whatever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum_axioms ); whilst a single beta-reduction "step" in LC may require an arbitrary amount of work (depending on how many times a variable occurs, whether we need to rename to avoid name capture, etc.). My (perhaps naive) assumption is that the work required for beta-reduction is only bounded by the busy beaver function.

This is probably why most computational complexity research sticks with machine models (operational semantics) like TMs. Still, there are alternative approaches which are very natural for LC-style programming, like "cost semantics" (essentially an alternative set of reduction rules for LC, which evaluate a program into its the algorithmic complexity, rather than into its return value).

> Turns out that TMs won out not only because they admit an easy physical implementation, but also because they're compositional.

I'd hesitate to call TMs compositional. As I wrote at https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/21705/what-is-t... TMs can't really be re-used. Consider a TM (or program for a universal TM) for adding two numbers: it's hard to actually use that as part of any other TM/program, since it may clobber the rest of the tape, we need to setup the contents of the tape, state and read-head just right before invoking it, and clean up afterwards, those may require that we shuttle the rest of the tape contents along to make room, and so on. In contrast, LC lives in an abstract world where subexpressions can expand and contract without bumping into each other, terms can be duplicated and rearranged without having to drag them across the intermediate symbols, etc.
Interesting point! It seems to me that the economy regularly takes a beating on extreme weather days. However, these things are factored in. For e.g. whenever there is a cyclone brewing near the Louisiana coast, gas prices go up.

If there is a blizzard, people stay home. Then there are forest fires - these might cause property destruction and have a long term health impact - directly and indirectly affecting the economy. Although the exact timing of these events are not predictable, a huge part of our economy - the insurance industry tries to factor extreme weather into account. Similarly, mining during windy days should even out, given enough players are invested.
Dart type or rust type? They refer to different things, which is the source of the confusion, but they're both strongly typed.

In any case, you're moving the goal post from "concrete type at compile time" to "can represent any type", which is inherently going to be specific to how the language defines types. This is not an especially useful type of dynamic representation so I'm not sure why it would be desirable.
I admit I’m confused by negative pricing. Presumably solar can be curtailed for free.

But with something like wind, I think production is all or none, and switching back and forth is a bit slow. It’s more economical to pay a tiny amount to get someone to dump the power.

On a smaller scale, it’s common for off-grid hydro to have a giant heater waste power as needed.
> Have there been any previous attempts to do this? Any success?

Many over the years, and largely not. Unreal and Unity are probably the closest to successful to date, but they are full-blown game engines, at a higher level of abstraction, rather than just graphics APIs. OpenGl mostly failed as a multi-platform solution, because vendors provide varying levels of compatibility in their drivers, not to mention unholy extension soup, and you still have to deal with all the platform nastiness of everything else besides sending triangles to the GPU.
> utilities love to just install more generation because it's in their playbook and they don't want to innovate.

I'm curious, how did you reach this conclusion?
Probably nobody had the time or knowledge to list all the features of the various important Scheme implementations, find the important ones and find out whether they exist in one of the various CL implementation or the 2..3 Clojure implementations.

I'm not surprised that the answers were not useful.
It came to mind that Hong Kong was “leased” for 99 years too.
Convolutions outside DNN explained
It’s pretty trivial for someone with basic reading comprehension to find out how to make a self-igniting Molotov cocktail.
Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software
WireGuard: Next Generation Secure Network Tunnel at Black Hat 2018
There is s stark difference actually. All prisoners is the US are voulenteers (how many are there who didn't make a choice to do something knowingly illegal?). I don't know why you think they are laborers either. None of the prisons I have toured have anyone working who doesn't want too. Sure they aren't paid much, but they can learn trade skills and the value of work.
"First, I would like to structure this so that all shareholders have a choice. Either they can stay investors in a private Tesla or they can be bought out at $420 per share, which is a 20% premium over the stock price following our Q2 earnings call (which had already increased by 16%). My hope is for all shareholders to remain, but if they prefer to be bought out, then this would enable that to happen at a nice premium." - https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/taking-tesla-private?redire...
Odd that Long Beach (210 "nice days" a year, and their winner) is so much better than Los Angeles (182, second place) and Sand Diego (178, third place).
Yeah, external HDD is the best option here, but it's problematic if you don't have fast connection. I am on 10Mbps line which is like 1.2MB/s and it would take me about a week to download all my data. And Google Takeout links are valid for only 5 days I believe. I occasionally download everything at work, but it's a little bit troublesome. In such case backing up to different cloud provider is the simplest solution.

However this is not perfect either, because it means sharing my data with another big corporation. While majority of my files in GDrive are encrypted, some are not (e.g. emails). I am yet to find a good solution for myself.

I was thinking about spawning a machine in Digital Ocean, downloading data using Google Skicka [1] (which is awesome tool btw), encrypting with gpg and uploading to different cloud. I just don't know any unix command line tool that could upload to One Drive or Amazon. Any suggestions?

Another solution I am considering is machine in AWS that would download everything, encrypt and store it in Amazon Glacier [2]. I think I'll be eventually trying this once I learn more about Glacier.

EDIT: just did some googling and it seems that rclone [3] may meet my needs.

[1] https://github.com/google/skicka

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

[3] https://rclone.org/
Are there any other resources like Medieval Demographics Made Easy (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm), mentioned on the donjon site?

The other similar resource I know about is the ancient In the Labyrinth manual for Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip.[1]

[1] Jackson recently got back the copyrights for The Fantasy Trip and they have a kickstarter going on now for newly-reissued (and updated, I think) copies.
To add to that, this recent article on HN [1] goes into a lot of great detail on how the economics of a home solar installation are part of the problem.

Basically, if there were an incentive for residential solar installations to include a little bit of storage capacity, it would be a net win for the entire economy.

[1] https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-typical-home-solar-s...
Ask HN: How did you get past the analysis paralysis for startup ideas?
A few friends and I have been talking about doing a startup as far as I can remember. After University all of us took jobs and now we feel fairly comfortable to start a business/something on the side. Only problem : Can't decide on an idea.

We create spread sheets and Google docs of ideas but can't zero in on anything. In University we would hack on anything and release it. I feel we are romanticizing the perfect idea too much.

Are we using ideas as an excuse to not start something?

Should we randomly hack on things that we like?

How did you get past your stage of analysis paralysis?

Some advice, I have received is to not look for ideas but to solve problems that you see in this world. How do you pick what problem you'll be spending the next few years on?

How did you find your idea?
Ask HN: What do you do to have more positive social impact?
Let's say you were a fairly comfortable mid-level engineer type at a big tech company. You'd been doing it, or something like it, for more than a decade, and you have a fair amount of financial freedom, no dependents, and a lot of angst about American and European politics, inequality, and the fact that you're not really helping.

You can give away more of your salary than you do, or try to seek a job (which may not fully utilize your professional skills) in the non-profit sector. Or just read "Enlightenment Now" and convince yourself it's not really all that bad.

What do you do? How do you move the needle in a meaningful way on the social issues you care about?
> Ironically, there's probably no organization on the planet that you should trust more with your personal information than Google

Thank you for the suggestion. We likely have different ideals about what a healthy version of the future looks like.

> ...selling your information to third parties...

Not what I said. Google’s business model is to extract and store as much information about consumers as possible, enrich and correlate it, and then financially exploit it. Currently the best way they’ve found to do that is targeted advertising.

By doing so, they make this extremely revealing data available to every government in every jurisdiction in which they operate, which is pretty much all of them. They work to normalize this surveillance as inevitable and unstoppable.

Additionally, while it would currently run counter to their business model to sell raw data, there’s nothing to legally stop them, if that business model should change.

Just like Facebook, Google are now very close to market saturation. To keep growth up, they’ll need to increase revenue per user. How will they do that? We don’t know. But there’s a relatively high chance that I’ll like it even less than what they’re doing now.

> ... dumb

:)
There are fewer public companies all the time https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-09/where-hav...
I have a feeling that Dart is just D (or at least they are comparable syntax and feature wise).

So is the question: why Dart?

Or is its goal to be a Java-on-Android killer? So always to have some [inspectable] bytecodes as a delivery media and JIT those on a device? But JavaVM is already there for that purpose so is that sacramental question again...
If you are attempting a brute force attack against a particular password, you either need to know a single OTP and complete the attack before it changes ("the goalposts move"), or try every password with every possible OTP, or compromise the OTP secret.
Went to check it out, and it requires you to jump thru Captcha hoops just to use. I'm not going to spend time clicking on pics training some AI.
there is the crucial difference that batteries wear out, so you have to buy new batteries.

storage space for products or bulk matteer does not typically wear out (or not nearly as fast).
Flutter is the groundbreaking thing about Dart. Other than that it's just Java 1.5 without the killer opensource ecosystem that makes Java relevant to this day. Rust, Swift, and Kotlin all blow Dart out of the water and are much better investments unless Google wants to make Dart the only language their new OS for some weird reason.
> [GM has] since repaid those loans...though GM discharged much of its loan through bankruptcy.

What did you mean to say here?

That GM eliminated (not repaid) the loan through bankruptcy?

Or that GM discharged the loan then repaid it anyway?
The article suggests that solar + wind with natgas for peaks is exactly where we're headed. At least in the regions being talked about (mostly Europe + California).

The Forbes article you linked is about New England. New England will probably be the last region to get decent renewable adoption. Solar panels don't work as well because they're far north and get a number of cloudy days, the winds are not that strong outside of the Cape Cod and certain parts of the Maine shoreline, and there are few rivers that are suitable for hydro.
Sounds like a great time to be building Tesla-style battery stations. Get paid to take in energy when it's flooded, get paid to output energy when it's not flooded.
Usually Apple removes deprecated stuff after 5 years.
> In the long run it should pay itself back.

So in financial terms wouldn't this mean a rather weak profit margin? Plus the relatively high-risk that flood energy might not always result in free or negative energy prices gives it a bleak risk-to-profit ratio.

In other words, there would always be something more utilizable to be done with excess energy (e.g. mining bitcoins etc. and buy water with it when you need it).

PS:
But I like the main point you make, to take in more aspects when calculating efficient renewable energy systems. Not a crypto-investor (or even believer).
But now you have one you and 10000 Jeff Bezos' voting on how much tax Amazon should pay. Doesn't seem much better.
I agree with the sibling comment that it won't be the eventual solution because charging will be good enough. That said, the battery thing just isn't a problem with the right market setup.

Battery deterioration over a fleet is predictable enough. You could just buy a "never-ending battery subscription" when you buy a car or something.
Snap is at risk of just being a fad. To be honest many of the people I know that used Snapchat a year ago have just plain forgotten about Snapchat altogether by now, and they never post anything, or look at anyone elses posts.
It's funny that their solution is removing privacy as opposed to combating gathering of data and sales of hypertargeted ads.

Here's the problem with the US legal system. This regulation (if passed) will likely fail to solve the problem but it will stay on the book and it won't be removed until idk...ever?
> Basically this is a problem because a bunch of existing incumbents are probably going to go bankrupt, or at least have to write down a lot of capital equipment and invest in new technologies.

That's not how it works. In Germany, the government subsidizes farmers to put up Windfarms, then forces the electric companies to buy the electricity at an inflated price, which those companies charge their customers for. As a result, energy prices in Germany are almost doubled for citizens, whereas companies get to have exemptions, of course.

Then they need to sell surplus energy for negative money when production is too high and import (often nuclear) energy from neighboring countries when it's too low. While they did get rid of most (domestic) nuclear energy, essentially the same amount of fossil fuel is still required to maintain the baseline.

It's utter nonsense, but the Germans get to pat themselves on the back for being so green. Well, except for all that coal energy that also needs subsidies because of those poor coal workers...
Yes the problem with that is you kind of need it everywhere all at once, whereas if you have a home with a drive you only need to install it when you buy an electric car and only in one place.
You could also install a virtual hackintosh. It's relatively easy to get going under KVM: https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders/tree/master/ma...

It's also possible to pass through a graphics card.
Negative prices a perfectly possible in the ideal free market. The market of course requires the overall prices be positive, but given the very low ongoing costs of wind/solar it makes sense to build even if prices are sometimes negative - the alternative is to shutdown, but then the wind/solar operator needs to do something with that power, which in itself has costs. So long as the times the times of positive prices balance out you are fine with some negative.

In addition, there is probably some advantage to encouraging other parties to develop uses for cheap power as part of long term planning.

Of course as others point out nothing is every an ideal market.
Counter anecdata: my iMac Pro has never kernel paniced in months of heavy daily use.
Well, if you are writing a python program which needs this functionality, it would probably be better to write it in python instead of:

password = os.popen("head -c 8 /dev/random | base64").read()
They don’t have to. We have crazy people who decide to shoot up schools and public areas with no concern with getting caught or killed.
Are taco copters a greater innovation than the burrito hyperloop?

http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_t...
Sounds like it, but as always the devil is in the details...
Bacteria becoming resistant to hospital disinfectants, warn scientists
"...which would effectively let the electric-auto maker pay off that obligation in stock instead of cash."

How does paying off the obligation with stock work?, whose shares would Tesla assign the bond holder?, if it assigns shares after market closes and when market opens if it's below $360, won't the bond holders sue?
Hey. So I understand correctly that this isn't for someone like me, right? Someone who just wants some knowledge from the startup world, but doesn't want to create his/her own startup. Right? Or can I just come and listen?
more importantly the whole point of the symbolics was the environment. one hi definition mono display and one space keyboard meant one 3600
Agreed, I find that self-hosted ads tend to be the least offensive. Even if this changed, and some self-hosted ads were intrusive or malicious, it would certainly be a simple problem to solve: block site X.com and don't visit site X.com
While certainly possible, it would take the pool of people able to build it down at least an order of magnitude. I can say so with the experience of a guy who build drones and also tried working with some vision stuff for drone indoor positioning. It simply is far harder to do. GPS guidance you can do it in an slow evening.

Most of the measures intended to stop access to explosives, weapons and generally dangerous things are not able to do so 100% but simply make the cost of that access high enough MOST malevolent actors will simply not afford it.
Vulkan is not any better on this regard.

Get ready to play extension and version golf.

http://www.vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php

http://www.vulkan.gpuinfo.org/vulkansupport.php
The Foundry at the Heart of DARPA’s Plan to Let Old Fabs Beat New Ones
Was it posted on Twitter before the official post on the Tesla website?
That may not always be the case. It's not like Castro was a big fan of Guantanamo Bay...
> Why is this/how do they enforce that?

Technically Windows doesn't support Vulkan at all, but the openness of the win32 platform allowed Khronos to define a "backdoor" interface where the application ignores the Windows graphics stack and instead gets a Vulkan context by talking to the graphics driver directly. The UWP sandbox makes this impossible so you're stuck with the native Direct3D APIs.