skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Best estimates are that Bitcoin consumes a ton of power, more than Ireland or Israel at this point. Current estimates, and estimating this stuff is very hard, but the range we're looking at is in the 56-73TWh per year.

Handily enough, we know exactly how much electricity Visa used in 2017, and it's about 0.19TWh[0]. Now obviously Visa alone isn't the end of the financial system, bank branches, payment processors, and other actors are involved. Personally, I highly doubt that they add up to another 55-72TWh, but if you can prove that, be my guest.

Of course, at this point we're also missing a very important factor: transaction volume. Comparing financial systems in terms of total energy usage is very misleading, a far better way is to measure energy per transaction. And this is the point where it really falls apart for Bitcoin. As of today, bitcoin is averaging about 180,000 transactions a day. That's about 100 seconds of Visa's average volume[1].

Comparing fees is a terrible way to measure transaction cost in terms of kWh. First of all, Stripe and Paypal employ a lot of people, and people are quite expensive. Second, bitcoin miners are being compensated by the expected rewards of finding a block (or participating in a pool that finds one). This means that the transaction fee and the amount of electricity used simply may not be related at all, since the fee might drop below the electricity cost so long as the expected reward is bigger still.

0. https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil...
1. 150,000,000 transactions per day[2] / 86400
2. https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/.... Theoretical (and heavily advertised) capacity is 24k, but a more prosaic 1.8k/s is more in line with a typical daily load.
This isn't the first such experiment (with tethers in space) but previous ones (such as the Shuttle tether experiments from 1996 onwards: https://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wtether.html ) discovered some unanticipated and terminal problems ... and as they flew aboard a time-limited Shuttle mission there wasn't really any scope for attempting repairs/fixes on orbit. Also, it's arguably obvious with 20/20 hindsight that trying for a 20km long tether on the first experiment was maybe slightly over-ambitious ...
Congrats on getting out of the bay! so many of us think of it, but with family and friends around here, it makes it much harder to leave.
I'm on the peninsula. This summer has been very mild so we've gotten off easy, but I certainly can't count on that most years. Since you can't switch plans frequently, I didn't want to take the risk of switching.
government in the bay area has been broken for a long time. this mess of a housing issue has been in the making for the last 40 years!
We use it extensively for http://nominatim.org/ It's superior when writing loops or even recursive queries that usually require follow-up queries (and thus multiple back-and-forths between your app and the database). Debugging and test-driven development on the other hand is hard. So is versioning functions and updating them. I'd only recommend it if all other options of improving the performance of database queries were tried.

https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim/blob/master/sql/f...
It's really hard to say. I removed him from my YT, because it feels like he is just searching for exercises to fill in click bait titles.

On the other hand, I do buy into the whole "physical therapist" part of his brand. But you can't keep pushing new videos telling people to do the same 5-10 exercises.
At more than 13g I'm not sure that, "a new day will dawn for those who stand long, and the forests will echo with laughter"... after experiencing that.

3.4x10^7/(500)^2 = a m/sec2

For an 8min20sec flip time. 20+g if you really want the 8min.
You realize that the Netherland have also deployed troops to Afghanistan as part of the NATO mission there right? [1][2]

I'm curious if you would say the same hostile things to a Dutch soldier who was only serving his or her own country as they were asked to do.

[1] https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2018/06/15/netherlands...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-10829837
Australia unveils starfish-killing robot to protect Barrier Reef
The tether near the counterweight (in orbit) experiences the greatest stress. This means it needs to be thicker, which means more weight...which means more stress. The ratio at which stress/weight climbs is determined by density and tensile strength. Basically only one material we know of meets these requirements, and manufacturing at scale is far away.

Once you figure out how to make them en masse, now you have to figure out how to secure the strands into a bundle.

Less of a challenge than warp drive, but still...quite hard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_carbon_tube
> I'm curious if you would say the same things to a Dutch military soldier who was only serving his or her own country as they were asked to do.

Count on it.

But being sucked into Iraq was the bigger error.
As long as people talk about a development practice only in terms of a set of services from a proprietary cloud platform, you know, that it's not a mature thing.
yes, this is the dream transaction but you did not mention how much your BTC had fluctuated. The real problem is the lack of stability. The economist is right for now.

I believe that in time there will be a stable crypto but for now, we're just in the beta phase looking at problems and finding solutions.
NIMBYism is a real problem in the bay area, but it doesn't sound like this one case was caused by NIMBYism. The people who would want to nix such a shelter would probably want it nixed whether it was in their proverbial "backyard" or not.
Medium is doing a great job on the web design front already! Reading on my laptop, there was a fixed header taking up about 10-15% of my screen height (in fullscreen), a fixed social networking sidebar on the left and a lovely dialog box attached to the bottom of the screen letting me know I can subscribe to Medium for $5/month. Best part about that bottom bar is that just in case I haven't subscribed when I closed it out, it is more than happy to show up after a few minutes when I've switched back to the tab, as it did while I was composing this commentary.

Really helps the readability of the website, which I especially appreciate on a website devoted entirely to reading. Really makes me wonder why Firefox even bothers with a Reader mode when we have high quality web design like this!

Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete.
Politicians in San Francisco don’t face partisan challengers so the rarely are held to account for their ideas. Just like you’d never get fired buying IBM, in San Francisco, you won’t get fired by going as far left as possible. The two party system provides a healthy sanity check on going too extreme — there is no such sanity check in places like San Francisco. For example, what would happen if a Republican mayor were elected? In New York it worked out pretty well and resulted in low crime and a strong economy; not all Republicans are great and not all Democrats are great, but one thing I could hope we could agree on is that all Democrat (Republican,) all the time has created a paucity of new ideas or new approaches: it’s just more of the same: throw more money at the status quo, grandstand about how compassionate you are and let the limousine-liberal guilt enable existing politicians just continue to waste money and solve nothing.
I too find this useful on an old Blackberry phone, along with NPR[0]. Unfortunately, I've found that the CNN site no longer seems to get updated daily.

[0] https://text.npr.org/
Shepard Tone -- the whole trip
Have you read https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks and tried it yet? Your device is listed!
They're all pain in the ass when it comes to transactions increasing 300$. Prove your identity, give us a call, send us all your documents...etc. I spent several hours trying to send a few thousand dollars to my family.
I don’t follow the logic in this argument. The same patterns work in other cloud platforms.
Interesting comment, but I suspect others disagree and they downvoted it.
> Instead of giving the system whole words, they give the system the word in parts. For example, the word “hello” might be given as 4 word parts “he” “l” “l” “o”. This means we could learn a translation for the word “he” without the system ever having seen the word “he”.

Can anyone add context to this? Can't seem to wrap my head around this part. Doesn't "he" as a part of a word translate differently in different words?
This is a great project!
Sadly SE has a focus on ePub and similar formats. These are impossible from a typographical standpoint. Text in ePub reader apps always comes out with a ragged right or impossible word breaks.

Latex with the microtype package is the only solution that does text justification on the level of a human professional. Can’t SE convert to that and provide PDF for common screen sizes?

It would be so easy if only Project Gutenberg had a standardized master source format. So conversion tools can be built around that. But all efforts in that direction were killed of by trolls in the community.
First, the optics are not wideband. It is only collecting narrow band NIR light. Saturation is not a problem. The CEO of Ouster explains this in a reddit comment [0]:

> We are not sacrificing lidar performance by adding ambient imaging functionality. The lidar subsystem has a short integration time that avoids saturation, and if anything our approach outperforms other lidars.

> As proof, the example videos linked to in the article show raw unedited point cloud data with the lidar operating in extremely sunny environments with plenty of specular reflectors. You can see lens flare in the ambient imagery as any camera would exhibit, but the lidar signal and range data are unaffected. In addition, if you point a velodyne directly at the sun its false positive rate increases significantly while our sensor's FPR does not. No lidar will return the distance to the sun so the only thing that matters is FPR in this scenario.

> We've independently verified the OS-1's range performance with customers under all levels of solar exposure and I guarantee you can't get a smaller, cheaper lidar with even close to this combination of resolution and performance. If you have any doubts, download the raw pcap files from our github page and play them back yourself. We stand behind our data, our pricing, and our spec!

Second, even if you do plan on adding extra cameras, the extrinsic calibration between camera and lidar may become easier if you have good quality ambient light measurement from the lidar. For example Jesse Levinson, cofounder of Zoox, computes extrinsic calibration between camera and Velodyne lidar by assuming that depth discontinuities are correlated with visual features [1]. But obviously the correlation between 850 nm images and visible light images would be way better.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/9c60pe/the...

[1] http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss09/p29.pdf
On the other hand, Apple's design mistakes have proven extraordinarily disappointing and costly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8). That type of performance with a 40 times more expensive product could decimate their offshore savings in years.
This may be true but does it matter. Satoshi wanted to be anonymous and he/she got his/their way. Good for him! To the rest of us, knowing, makes no difference.
sure, it may take some time, that doesn't mean we shouldn't start. It will take a lot of time and effort to reverse global warming, but it still must be done and as soon as possible. Same for replenishing the housing supply.
whew boy, I love this
If you're optimizing for investment, I wonder how much of potential funding is tied to your ability to communicate that you have thought the scaling problem out. If your investors are more technical, service oriented architecture and orchestration tools (like k8s) may serve as signifiers that you have some sense of what you're doing.
Talent concentrates, especially when incentivized by much higher compensation. One recent HN trending article even attributed wage competition with FANG as a cause of startup stagnation in the Valley.

People don't work for "charity," especially in a high cost-of-living area, so the choice between FANG and others is a no-brainer when it means the difference between having roommates and not living in a converted living room -- or commuting two hours a day and living downtown.

This means that the FANG companies' applicant pools become highly competitive, allowing them to be very selective about hiring the best talent.

Similar dynamics happen with universities (Ivy League vs others), VC investors/accelerators (YC vs others), immigration (US vs others), and many other societal gateways.

Sure, there are always outliers and exceptions (and they are, by definition, outliers and exceptions), so I'm speaking in the broadly general case.
Who Uses In-App Analytic Services?
Vinod Khosla – Every Generation Gets the Beach Villain It Deserves
Solid state LIDAR certainly has issues - but someone is going to solve those and this is what will get into automotive, definitely not $10k units with moving parts.

There was an announcement on a cooperation between BMW and Innoviz (an Israeli maker of solid state LIDARs) with Magna being their OEM sponsor.

I'm not sure calibration is that big of a deal for this application. Sensors are going to be calibrated and tested in the factory or at a module level regardless, and the accuracy requirements in automotive are much lower than consumer products using similar technology.

You can't overcome not having colors (traffic lights, anyone?), limited ranging distance or sensor saturation due to ambient conditions.
What I find a big shortcoming from CMake is that it does not have support for building for multiple architectures at once.

https://cmake.org/pipermail/cmake-developers/2014-September/...

Quote: "The fundamental problem with supporting multiple architectures is
that pretty much all of CMake is designed to support one architecture
at a time. Modules/*, CMakeCache.txt, etc. are all built around only
finding, using, and building one artifact per library (OS X universal
binaries work with multiple architectures because they are still only
one file). I think even your "toolchain scope" approach would end
up being used in practice to wrap the entire CMakeLists.txt file."
Darling: macOS translation layer for Linux
Agreed 100%, this is all that matters I’d go as far to say. It’s also is a key lesson in the disposable code shift that serverless is enabling as well.
Given your other remarks here, this is a completely disingenuous justification for personally attacking the person.

If I believed that you, in all seriousness, wondered if they ever thought deeply about such things, I wouldn't have said anything. The only thing "have you heard of 9/11" says to me is that the individual feels attacked by you. Given all the words you have written here, I think it is reasonable for them to interpret your question as an attack and not some good faith attempt to start some deeply philosophical discussion.

And it's an ugly thing to do, regardless of the justification you want to come up with after the fact while clearly signaling your belief that being a soldier makes you de facto evil. I don't agree with that position and I don't think it is appropriate for anyone to go around picking fights with soldiers on HN because they hold such beliefs.
"Many of the plights of the protagonists just didn't stir me at all when I was in school, either because I didn't understand the historical context well enough, or because I didn't yet have enough empathy to feel their pain and loss (it's always pain and loss in the classics...)"

This suggest that the difference had more to do with life experiences and generally amount of knowledge then with having it assigned.
Young my ass. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Washington_(state...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celilo_Falls

I don't say that with particular malice but the human history of north America has been pretty intentionally lost, that's not the same as youth though.
Previous discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12854895 (265 comments)
Again, there is no hard requirement that all packets in a flow take the same route. Keeping the TCP state machine POP-local when running anycast TCP is exposing a buggy TCP implementation to the Internet. I understand that it is desirable to do so, especially under calm routing conditions where it tends to work, but it is not correct.

I agree that Arista shouldn't be mangling TTL here. However, TTL mangling shouldn't break TCP because TTLs can already change under normal operation, e.g. when routes change, which happens all the time on the Internet. In a non-anycast situation, TCP connections would stay open under these conditions.
thanx this is handy to leave laying around somewhere
It will increase liquidity though and thus assist in creating a more efficient market.
The end of this cable would be 36000km up, compared to the ISS's 400km. The first space elevator would primarily be used to shift stuff, rather than people at first - there's no point having convenient transit for people if they've got nowhere to go at the other end.
Also completely pointless - playing David Bowie to a space suit in a convertible that's fired into interplanetary space.
Then tell them to pay for an independent security review. That their nodes work as they say they do, they actually delete logs, etc. It would be worth more for their positive publicity than only paying loads for marketing - as they are doing...
^/s
TCP/IP performs a handshake to establish connections so there will always be some per-connection overhead required for this, no matter the service on the other end.

Beyond that, MySQL for example pre-allocates a fixed amount of memory for read, join and sort buffers per connection to efficiently handle different types of queries, though the buffer sizes are all tunable to optimize performance. There is also some OS-scheduler overhead involved in creating and running a separate thread per connection. A thread-cache optimizes the case where lots of short-lived connections are being created. (I dont have direct experience with PostgreSQL but I read that it forks a separate process per connection, which would presumably incur a significantly higher overhead than threads.)

Beyond this, any more specific discussion requires quantifying connection 'weight' to dispel/confirm your superstition that 'all the predominant RDBMSes are heavyweight'. In an apples-to-apples benchmark, it's quite possible that the connection-weight of some RDBMSes might actually be lighter than other database engines. I dont know myself, but would be interested if anyone has any such data to share on this.
My friend's mom started this http://www.foodallergybooks.com/. My friend has fatal food allergies (nuts and others) and has to carry around an epi-pen and has an extremely limited diet. Not sure if this is the best resource, but you can contact her to ask any questions you may have.
By having the contracts transparent there will be much less need for public sector.

Economist in general.

;)
The supply of cash notes in Venezuela wasn’t / isn’t the problem. It’s that no-one has faith in the value of those notes.

> which is the better money, cryptocurrencies or gold-backed notes goes into this

This is a false dichotomy.
Beauty... isn't the usual concept associated with String Theory.
As an low-ranking official in the Democratic Party, I'm happy to inform you that literally no one in the party is talking about Hillary Clinton running again.
This is one day where you REALLY don't want the elevator to jam on the way to the office.
I didn’t mind being an undergrad. But that was largely because of my friends and being an adult away from home for the first time. My friends and I built robots in our dorm room with our own money because the university didn’t have a program and wasn’t willing to accommodate us in any way. I enjoyed learning in class but it was always so rushed and stressful - you were always working up to an exam, then making it past and preparing for the next one. There was never any time to breathe.

Grad school was far, far better. Completely different league.
Just a tip, if you want people to use your service, please have a few pages telling them what they get before they have to sign up. Signing up is a pain...
It’s impossible to read any article regarding web design on Medium without having to seriously question whether it’s intended to be satire or not.
The only other open question is whether it shall be painted in the same colour as the bike-shed.
Frauen Handtaschen Für 2018 Vintage Kleine
GARCH, like I said, is a short memory process and is inherently inadequate for (longer) out of sample predictions. Doing this is possible, but not really correct. Taleb is basically right, of course what he says is probably inflammatory and half wrong, as usual.

Don't forget that most econometrics models are also concerned with identification and causality, less with prediction.
Google was reported to be looking into this a few years ago. And determined that there was no material strong enough at the time.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/180682-google-x-admits-i...

That aside, how might adversaries disrupt such an expensive and precarious venture? Seems a very hard to defend machine.
The centralization of the tech industry in Silicon Valley never made any sense to begin with.

To say that all the top talent was/is in Silicon Valley is a gross overstatement.
There has always been much more talent outside of SV than inside SV; simply because the world is a very big place.

People who live in Silicon Valley don't have access to much more knowledge than people who live in remote places around the world; thanks to the internet, knowledge is decentralized.

There are only two things that people in Silicon Valley had better access to than everyone else; 1. Venture capital and 2. Tech media coverage - These two things helped SV to better capitalize on their innovations but now is the point where reality starts to catch up with the hype.
I generally am picky on my try/catch implementations... I use it way more often on the backend (PHP/laravel) than front. Though I will tap into then/catch on async functions which I guess is built-in try/catches.

On the backend I mostly do try/catch when I have a bunch of things tied together in a db transaction... If any part of the commit fails or anything errors at all the whole thing will rollback. Esp. handy when doing multiple relationship attaching in one go.

Also it comes in handy when dealing with API's and things, but for most scenarios it's not needed too often. But I also don't test every little thing, I believe moderation in all things including try, catch, testing. lol.
but if they tell you you will get very little before you sign up, how are they going to snarf your data for nothing?