skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, I am a power systems engineer.

Oil and refined petroleum products are not an economical source of power generation, which is why it isn't used anywhere in the developed world except at small scale where lots of fuel storage is required, like the Canadian Arctic. Coal and natural gas are much more appropriate, if they are available.

The biggest advantage to renewables, as I stated in my initial comment, is that they don't have to be transported. Arguments about resource adequacy (not enough sun, not enough water) are largely irrelevant because fossil fuel power is already rationed in developing off grid locations due to the massive cost of transport. Recall that developing countries do not have advanced transportation infrastructure nor a highly developed power grid to transit energy.

Finally, energy security is a major concern for all countries, especially those with limited ability to purchase US$ priced global commodities, and oil is an import in most of the world.

To suggest that, for instance, countries in sub Saharan Africa are better off spending their minimal foreign currency reserves importing diesel and trucking it across the desert on non existent roads rather than using abundant solar energy flies in the face of the facts.
Plastic Water Bottles, Which Enabled a Drinks Boom, Now Threaten Industry
What's the catch once your asperges is diagnosed? What can you do anyways..
The mobile experience for HTML/JS/CSS is awful too.
Are you certain you want to be compared with the Stasi?
The word "assembly" should have clued you in haha. And the "observation" applies to any natively compiled language, garbage collector or otherwise.
That's only true if you can afford an unlimited amount of petroleum products and have the facility to transport and store them. That's often not the case in developing countries.
I think your parent is exaggerating a bit, but this is just generally true of any release with a bug feature in it that people are excited to use. Now that it exists, why would you not want to use it?

For context, Rust 1.31 is sorta like the Go 2 release. It’s a much bigger deal than regular releases.
MIT Figured Out a Way to Shrink Objects to Nanoscale
How I Made My First 1000 Dollar on Clickbank
I believe in you. You sound very smart, and sound like someone that can have a lot going for them. I think it’s super awesome that you can self “diagnose” your struggles. I have two points and I hope they help you gain some clarity or maybe spur some thoughts.

1. You mention the weather changing affects your jogging. What stops you from moving somewhere more south where the weather is better year round for jogging?

2. You seem to be able to self reflect which technically means you know how to “fix@ what’s going on. That’s amazing!! The fact that you can self diagnose and talk about it is leaps and bounds ahead of most people. I guess what I’m getting at is if you can self diagnose I’m willing to bet you can self heal just as easy :)

You sound super smart and I know, you know, how to get things back on track!
Is there a reason why they're so vague about which country it was found in?

It's repeatedly described in the article as "a West-European country", and that it was "close to the border of The Netherlands." That seems to suggest either Belgium or Germany. Is it just to make the location harder for others to find, or because borders are in dispute or have shifted since it was buried?

(Probably unrelated, but I see on Google Maps a forest & bog 20km from the Netherlands border, where the German border appears to be split in two by a Belgian railway line running through it.)
How do you set up the imports with script?

(This would be one of the major design questions with such a thing. Not insurmountable! But given you’re already connecting it to JS functions...)
Neither law nor business operations work like that. For-profit just means owner has the right to reap profits, not that business has sole duty of profit. Non-profit owners do not have the right to reap profits, not that non-profit cannot profit.
I gave a talk in October where I said that some things that original cypherpunks got right were

+ Money and payments as locus of power

+ Naming and identity as locus of power

+ Access to cryptography as locus of power

+ Governments' appetite for electronic surveillance

+ Anonymity enabling otherwise impossible interactions

and some things that they got wrong were

- Vanguardism

- Sybils and models of public discourse

- Adaptability and resources of state actors

- Software vulnerability

- Decentralization is consistently expensive (in many different ways) and few people have agreed that they need it

- Extreme technical fragility of anonymity (deanonymization, correlations, uniqueness of items in high-dimensional datasets, stylometry and behavioral uniqueness)

(This is not meant to suggest that the cypherpunks didn't talk or think about these issues, just that they tended to underestimate how big a challenge they would represent.)
I'm just trying to be the best husband and dad in the world. Having children is not the end of the world. On the contrary, it's a super challenge that lets a ton of our personality to shine through.
It's refreshing to see a comment like this. My default stance on most topics, even those which I am nominally educated in, is to have no opinion. My rule of thumb is to consciously abstain from having an opinion about a thing unless I know I can authoritatively speak at some length about the subject.

To repurpose a comment in another thread about nuclear fusion: online discussions about autism generally consist of the Wikipedia-educated debating the Youtube-educated. Likewise for topics like ADHD and sociopathy. It would be nice if more people defaulted to, "I'm not really fit to comment" rather than, "I have strong opinions after reading a few pages and talking with friends about this."
Don't forget to also take into account population difference between India and Japan and the difference in land area. Also, don't forget that one of the gravest sins committed by British was to Partition India into two halves on the basis of Religion which caused millions to be displaced and millions more to die in communal clashes. By partitioning India on the basis of Religion resources were distributed unevenly. Even to this day, both halves of the once Undivided India are fighting over water resources. Many in India believe it was a deliberate ploy to keep always keep disharmony in India even after Independence. India never achieved true Independence for a really long time.
It's sorta abstracted in a way, but they are very clear about what's happening behind the scenes; they even show you which banks hold your deposits, which banks are available to hold your deposits, and they even let you request to exclude some banks from holding your deposits. (I don't remember if it was a priority system or an include/exclude system)

There's no hand waving going on.
Computerized lens for everything
Monokai Sublime Text Syntax Colours for VIM
"Great advice if you want a miserable 40 year career as a team player in mind numbing corporate work prevention departments"

This
Inspired by Sublime Text's interpretation of monokai, I created `vim-monokai-tasty`, a colour scheme for VIM. The plugin includes a matching vim-airline theme and matching lightline.vim theme.
Spy numbers stations that may be on air now
> It doesn't make sure that they're worth what you were promised, just that if the broker goes under, whatever they were holding on your behalf gets returned to you.

This could be mitigated substantially by holding short-term treasuries. In theory they could still be worth less than the original principal amount from time to time, but not by very much, and even then they would always be back to at least the original principal amount by the maturity date in e.g. six months.
This is mind numbing article and probably not worth anyone's time. The so called "best" advice is: Stay the hell out of other people's code*.
Previously classified story of Titanic's discovery comes to life
You mean for one module to import another? I guess you can use list them all first?
"Solar is expensive" is no longer true. Wholesale PV panels are less than $1 per watt now; this is 1/10 the price of 15 years ago. PV electricity is cost-comparable to coal-fired electricity in many places, and is on track to be cheaper than coal everywhere very soon [0]. This happened largely because China has been dramatically increasing their PV manufacturing capacity to the point that almost no other country makes solar panels any more, but still, the fact is that today solar is cheap and getting cheaper.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608114/clean-energy-price...
> It wasn’t even a socialist revolution.

Was it not?
Move fast and break things, I suppose.
Some militaries explicitly lack the concept of unlawful orders and surprise surprise - they are the least successful ones. Same thing also applies to businesses. If you do not have a complaint procedure, you acknowledge you are incompetent.
On my phone I just use a throwaway google account, mainly to access the play store for apps. I do have a VNC client (bVNC), very handy if I need something on the PC.

For the PC I try to avoid using anything by MS except the OS itself and the usual simple apps like Notepad, Paint. I do have a Google account but mainly for email; after the Gmail redesign I'm giving Eudora a try(!) love the quaint but effective UI.

Don't have Facebook, very rarely shop on Amazon, don't have any Apple stuff. I haven't starved yet... :¬)

BTW on HN I try and avoid the usual FAANG articles, and pay more attention to the stuff that falls into the cracks, for me that's where the gems lie.

(However HN can be too much of a good thing, so I try and only skim it for articles very first thing in the morning, then read a few of them throughout the day.)
> If you mean ordinary people, then everywhere was poor, so travel authors would not have seen a shocking contrast.

Have you read the memoirs of Hiuen Tsang? India was exceptionally rich before the invasions of both the Moghuls and the British (and other Western powers). It is not to be taken lightly when the British regarded India as the "Jewel in the Crown"[1].

1: https://sites.google.com/site/imperialismindia/home/economic...
The vast majority of point of sale systems are networked, and this is nothing new. There's literally millions of PoS systems out there running off of AS/400 backends, even today.
At least for various fields of CS I would really like big tech to come together and start a non-profit organization that manages journals and conferences with 100% open access. The big barrier in leaving Elsevier is having equally reputable alternatives which can consume the outgoing flow.
As mentioned before I'm treating the machine is completely disposable. I'm backing up all my files to a private NextCloud server, and to syncplicity (online service).
If everything will blow up I can get up to any computer and just getting into my files from there.
How Jerry Brown Got Californians to Raise Their Taxes and Save Their State
You're forgetting about gravity (which isn't carried by photons yet also travels long distances at the speed of light), although yeah, it would probably be a weird universe.
These have been around for purchase for quite some and there isn't a widespread rash of these devices burning out devices. I'm sure it happens, however the same could be said for TVBGones, car hacks, Wifi Pineapples, etc. If you're in the mood to destroy something it's relatively easy to do so. It's just a matter of time. This is why current disposable design trends are so pernicious. A motherboard is relatively inexpensive to replace on work environments where this is likely to be the most used. Access to other people's hardware can be somewhat risky for most people. There's a reason why most crimes of passion are easily caught. If you're intelligent enough to use this effectively, you're generally intelligent enough to find a different, legal way of revenge.
A plausible explanation is that they expected it to apply. "Try new things, but never make a mistake" is essentially equivalent to "never try new things."
Before the JVM there was a Smalltalk VM ;-)
Eht Namuh 973
Same with V8, since they added the liftoff compiler back in august
The idea may well be a good one, but this web page is so poorly conceived, that I doubt the organization that adopted it has the judgement necessary to guide its project to success. The nearly unreadable font is only the most obvious of its shortcomings.
I expect informative new physics data will come out of the failure of quantum computing devices. Actual quantum supremacy would be a nice consolation prize, though.
Recent Nepalese history is very interesting.

Someone machine-gunned the entire royal family except the one guy. He claimed it was one of the dead, who had skipped killing him, and shot himself instead. Everyone reported this as-is, without comment, ever since. I have never seen a hint in print, since, that the new king had shot them all, although everyone must have been thinking it.

All I can conclude is that no one knew when he might need to go to Nepal, so could not risk writing anything that might turn out to endanger himself.
Chronicle, Alphabet’s cybersecurity defense company moonshot
The place where George Washington was buried was in state of despair for several years and government refused to take over his estate and turn it in to national monument. If it wouldn't have been due to local ladies association who ran the campaign to save and preserve it through donations, place would have been even overrun by new developments. Same thing happened to John Adams's estate. It is interesting to see this in US because if you go to Russia or China or South Korea, governments have gone to extra-ordinary length to produce monumental structures to preserve their "father" of the nation.
"Insurance" is the key word here, "insurance" and "promise of a no questions asked unlimited government handout" is not the same thing.

Just like auto insurance, everyone pays premiums to the FDIC which pools the money and claims are paid for using that pool.
> ... pointers were implicitly dereferenced, and so it needed to have a bunch of extra operators to disambiguate things

Funny as it has always annoyed me that static objects and dynamic objects used different syntax (a.b vs a->b) so that if you ever changed one, you'd have to go edit ALL uses. It would IMO have made sense to have a->b work for both (better still "a.b" if the syntax could be worked out).

UPDATE: referring to C if it wasn't clear.
Sabine Hossenfelder also recently commented on the market proposal that Robin Hanson proposed. Interestingly; she's felt over the past decade that it's a much better idea than she originally felt.

>But what if scientists could make larger gains by betting

>smartly than they could make by promoting their own

>research? “Who would bet against their career?” I asked

>Robin when we spoke last week.

>

>“You did,” he pointed out.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/12/dont-ask-what-scien...
C'mon. Never try new things? How about ask before you start promoting them? You think a couple phone calls with SIPC wouldn't have disabused them of the notion?

This is slack laziness and cavalier disrespect for their userbase. I had started toying with Robinhood; I immediately pulled everything I've got back out. They aren't trustworthy custodians.
> Western nations need to decide whether they care more about their values or economic growth.

The decision is obvious. Western nations care more about values if someone else has to sacrifice economic growth.
Could not disagree more. The author most probably freed the company from its dysfunctional stagnation due to some political issue. It is thanks to his ignorance that he resolved an issue, something that had to be done.

In general, staying out of other people code is a bad idea. It promotes lack of transparency and agenda proliferation. This is because the owners of the code start being a "monopoly", can work less hard, provide exaggerated estimates etc. When people know that others can read there code, maybe hack on it, make something faster or simpler -- well they work harder and tend to be more transparent.
Microgrid engineer here, and I completely agree. Developing nations bypassed expensive comms grids in the 90s and went straight to cell phones. The same thing is happening now with energy. Rather than building out an (even more) expensive electrical grid, they're putting in distributed renewables. Result: Everybody has electricity but there's no grid. It's happening because of economics; not ideology.
How is this a paper?

TL;DR:

- Industrial robots are important and also expensive.

- Wouldn't it be cool if they were made from e-scrap? We suggest attaching a solar panel for extra joy!

- <Bunch of buzzwords around learning and community and end-of-life management.>

- Look at those toy robots made from scrap! (And look, there's also a Dalek that can poop!)

- Let's do what every hobbyist in every hackerspace has been doing daily for near a decade now: take an Arduino, a bunch of random leftover components, and make a "robot" with servos and ultrasound range finders.

- Conclusion: (industrial) robots are important and expensive, but our (Arduino kitbashing) robot shows the way for building them in a more responsible fashion. It also shows how a bottom-up approach to e-scrap could work.

Add spelling & formatting errors to the mix. Flagged for extremely low SNR.
> For example: No one ever has told me in school that for all squares, the length of the diagonal equals The Square Root Of Two times the side of the square's, so for a square where the side is 1 meter, the diagonal will be Sq.Rt.o'2 meters (around 1,4 m), And I came to find that by myself doing the exercise of the unsolvable.

That's actually the Pythagorean theorem. How did you arrive at that by doing the "unsolvable"?
Sounds like you didn't read the article :)
There are lots more small banks in the US than Canada- and a number that are pretty tiny. After the 2008 crisis there were a lot of small banks that folded:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_U...

The FDIC apparently has a $67 billion "Deposit Insurance Fund" that holds money that it pays out the insurance from; that fund is raised from insurance premiums paid by banks. During and after the 2008 crisis the DIF got squeezed pretty hard and so they used a power to require prepayment of premiums (from healthier banks).
> Which vendors fit this criteria for you?

None. Hence, personally, I dislike auto updates.
This report focuses so much on gate-based computation and says nothing about measurement-based schemes other than "they have attracted substantial interest". This is a massive omission and frankly undermines the entire report. This is disappointing given the prominence of the authors.
> This sounds needlessly circuitous. Money is fungible, so how is this different from saying the British overtaxing them?

Because the British never spent their own hard earned money. It isn't fungible when you take someone's money from one hand and return back a small amount with the other hand without doing any measurable amount of work to have earned the money in the first place. How hard is that to understand?

As a counter, would you be okay with your Government taking a portion of your money as tax and using only a small portion of it for your benefit and keeping the rest to be distributed amongst the elected representatives? Obviously not. This has nothing to do with overtaxation because I am sure people wouldn't have resisted if that money was reused for common good. But it wasn't the case. The money was used to fill up British coffers to be used in fighting World Wars (for which by the way, Indian soldiers were forced to take part in with not much recognition).

By the way, the Empire taxed everything. They did not even spare Salt! That should put some perspective.
In a really really bad situation, there's always the risk that the insurer also runs out of money. The FDIC would run out of money if its pool of money collected from premiums ran out. It's never happened, though they had to finesse it a bit during the 2008 crisis (they required banks to prepay premiums, which recapitalized it in the short term).

If the FDIC fund ran out of money the insurance would have to be backed by... the US Treasury, basically? The government would have to open up a money spigot somewhere: either borrow it or print it. It looks like the FDIC has a $100 billion line of credit with the Treasury, so it could use that, but that is just moving money around inside the government.
This is an extremely interesting product they’re providing. My company would definitely be able to utilize this to great effect. Is this currently available to anyone for use?
Glad to see this but it doesn’t eliminate the issues surrounding how many less sophisticated encryption algorithms have been used.

The millennium bug got fixed only because we put money into solving it. That kind of emphasis needs to be put behind addressing the forthcoming encryption crisis.
Did anyone really read this till the end? If your conclusion is that the best programming advice the author ever got was to “stay the hell out of other people’s code” please try to read it again... that was exactly the opposite of what he meant. Best advice I ever got: always read things ten times before responding.

> “Actually it was terrible advice, advice that I've gone out of my way to ignore in the years since. But those words were valuable nevertheless, and I've gone back to them time and again.

Every time some annoying new-hire comes to me with a dumb idea that is obviously not going to work, Stay the Hell out of other people's code plays back in my head and I listen harder.

Every time some other engineer has an opinion about my code, I remember what I thought of the idea that you should mind your own technical business and I try to disengage my ego.”
I personally think that mental illness is the #1 challenge of western societies.

It's not just about personality disorders, mood disorders, psychosis, and other illnesses, but also milder conditions that have a very high, hidden cost and not only affect the lives of those who suffer from it, but everyone around them.

If you live in a big city, you will meet people with mental conditions and knowing how to react can make a world of difference for them and you.
> The problems with PG&E were caused by the government giving it a monopoly. Making it non-profit won't help. The only thing that will help is competition.

Admittedly, I don't know PG&E's history, but as a utility company that offers natural gas and electricity, I know many would call it a natural monopoly.

As such, how does competition work in a natural monopoly?

Certain things like roadways are owned by the state because it's impossible to profit from them. Perhaps the safe delivery of electricity and natural gas to consumers should be managed by the state.

And if anything PG&E and potential competitors would compete on the production of electricity / natural gas, which the state buys and safely delivers to the people.
I find the fact that we're talking about 4 or 0-6 months to be very compelling evidence.

What sort of a person kills themselves over 4 months in prison?
This is a good overview: https://blog.fastforwardlabs.com/2018/05/02/progress-in-text...
Great comment. They don’t dissolve it into water and gargle either.
It's funny how nonphysicists (this author) and non-productive physicists (Hossenfelder) beat this drum most loudly. How about we do this: let the people who are obviously smartest make their own decision about what is most promising to work on, and have enough modesty to realize that their decision is better informed than our efforts to advise.
Their invasion of Afghanistan was another big factor in bankrupting the USSR. Of course the US helped by paying Osama bin Laden to fight them and keep dragging the war out.