skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That paper avoids mentioning BECCS, the most extensively researched plan for carbon sequestration: reducing wood to charcoal, burning the syngas you produce during the process to generate electricity, and then sequestering the charcoal.[1] The Kyoto protocol for limiting global warming to 2C requires massive use of BECCS.

Pros: The output material has a higher carbon content, so you're locking up less water, and it's completely biologically inert, so you can just dump it into an open pit instead of burying it, where wood would otherwise rot and release its carbon back into the air. However, you're in real trouble if your giant pile of charcoal is ignited somehow, which can be harder to put out than you'd think.[2]

Cons: Syngas still has some carbon in it, so you're generating more emissions than if you just buried the wood. Running a biomass power plant has higher operating costs than just shoveling wood into a hole.

BECCS requires a particular set of incentives in order to be economical. You need both very expensive electricity and also a high carbon sequestration subsidy. If solar+battery storage is cheap, direct burial makes more sense.

---

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
You can't install iPhone apps from outside the App Store on an iPhone (unless it's rooted, which most people prefer not to do for reasons of complexity and security).

I'd say the Android app store is a nice balance.

Also, if you want to install some other, less-well maintained app store on your Android, that's also possible (on non-rooted phones, too). Indeed, I've got F-Droid enabled on my Android.

That said, if Google ever pulls the ability to sideload apps on non-rooted phones, I'll not be happy at all.
I don't have to pay to speak either
This all feels like a stretch.
Actually I think it's totally transparent.

Employees means employees. "Footprint" is widely used to mean total effect at all levels removed, not just the immediate one -- e.g. carbon footprint is the carbon used by all suppliers and their suppliers and so on, not just in final assembly.

And it's meaningful too -- if Apple suddenly shut up shop, this is the total number of US workers who could be affected (although not necessarily laid off).

What else would you call it?
And how many candidates spend hours of their valuable time in those take-home assignments, only to get beaten by a purchased solution?

It's wonderful you don't care about the fact that these solutions are purchased. I'm sure your attitude is a great comfort for all the honest professionals who worked hard to find the time to do a 5 hour take-home, only to see their job taken away by dishonest candidates who paid for the solution.

Taken to its logical conclusions, if your attitude is representative, then everyone should just buy take-home solutions and just spend a bit of time understanding them before the onsite. Now we're back to square one, except at least we're not actively screening for dishonesty anymore.
Why he would accept the job on those terms is the more salient question.
Every company in the US has an aversion to firing that leads them to use expensive defensive measures (in the case of the larger ones: severance pay, PIPs, standardized performance reviews, diversity training) for when they feel they have to go though with it.

Whether or not you’re talking about Silicon Valley, you’ve endorsed a much stronger claim, that such measures are pointless because firing is just so easy.

If you’re not ready to defend that claim, then maybe you should walk back on your original. Or at least show some some sign that you recognize things aren’t as easy or simple as your original blithe dismissal implies.

Remember, you didn’t even think the emotional side merited an acknowledgement.
We've observed the same. Even at bigger companies, the procurement team tends to focus on the most expensive/riskiest/sensitive vendors. That means that multi-millions dollar purchases are prioritized over $100k engineering SaaS purchases, for example.

We think that software buying needs to exist as an external function. There are too many products for internal teams to tackle this alone.
If they understand how it works well enough to go through a code review and modify it based on that code review, what's the problem? That just... sounds like what your work is going to be.
I wish more of the companies represented in my index tracker could make 1B investments with 100B returns.

If only it were that easy!
Right. US per capita is ~16 tons, UK is ~7.
So at least ten times that figure.
Agree with the rest of your post.
While I agree that there are no silver bullets and multiple approaches are required, I don't agree that we need to pursue everything that may help.

First, a lot of R&D must be done (for all types of solutions) and the money to fund this can only be spent once. So we need to pre-select some promising ideas (could still be many ideas, but not all ideas).

Second, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. While I am pretty neutral / undecided on nuclear power, some argue that the (potential) problems it brings along are not worth the risk, even if it is a carbon neutral method of power production.

Third, CCS technology disincentiveses investment and R&D into fully renewable energy production (the point made before)

(I would like to emphasize here that I am not arguing about the extent or existence of a climate crisis. I am aware of the literature and agree that immediate action is required to limit carbon emissions)
Why Iceland is green and Greenland is icy?
> severance pay

Unless this is a contracted for benefit, this isn't a separate cost from lawsuit risk, but a mitigation of lawsuit risk: severance pay is paid to people on condition of waiving claims.

> if they're in a protected class

If you start a sentence this way, it's a clear sign you don't know what you are talking about. Except for a few special cases (“age over 40” and “veteran status”), every employment protected class is a dimension on which discrimination against any value is equally restricted, and everyone has some value on each axis (race, sex, etc.)

So, everyone is “in a protected class”. Well, several of them, actually.

> you have to go through a period (often 6 months or more) of documenting their incompetence and leaving a trail of trying to help them improve

No, you don’t, and you can’t really count this “requirement” and lawsuit risk as separate costs, since this is simply a policy companies adopt to mitigate lawsuit risk.
I’m a lawyer, and it made me do a double take too.
Or just blocks them?

Because I'd like to think I'm 'someone competent', and on my own phone I only accept (non-personal) calls that I'm expecting, or can see a reason for.
Well, of course. But exercising can be marketing to everyone. Everyone is potentially in that target market.

The same can't be said for WeWork.

This is an obvious difference that answers the question to why you don't see WeWork everywhere you see gyms. Even my tiny hometown has a 24-hour fitness. Whether everyone uses their Snap Fitness membership is irrelevant, but notice how just about anyone can be guilted in to a gym membership.
And in fact, something called "money.js" - or the successor to money.js - ought to be able to properly round decimals such that floating point error never becomes the developer's concern.
Ca anybody explain to me the problem definition? (not the solution)
> I think this is unfair.

Fair or not, it's how most everything in life works. For good things to happen you, you have to put yourself in a position where good things can find you. That means marketing yourself. It applies to getting your dream job just as much as it applies to getting your dream partner.

Even if you get your dream job, talent and hard work simply isn't good enough. You'll need to be able to sell your ideas to others in the company.
Molecular assemblers are almost taboo to discuss in chemistry and have been for decades. Sort of like the AI winter. Things feel like they are starting to thaw.
You can say that about pretty much any start-up, though in public most founders are all about the mission and changing the world (insert "HBO Silicon Valley" meme here).

We has just been particularly blatant about it.
They handle about 10% of web requests according to this blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer

If we trust that metric, it seems significant to me. Not what I would call small fish.
how long did it take to become popular?
Zero evidence?

Just this past summer, our president has called for 4 US-born legislators to be sent back to the "shithole countries" they came from because he automatically assumed that people of color weren't born in America.

At multiple campaign rallies this summer, he's stood by and smiled as the crowd chanted for violence to be committed against minorities.

And it's not like this is a new thing for him. Back in NY before his political career, he vociferously campaigned for the execution of the Central Park 5...black and Latino teenagers...all of whom were proven to be factually innocent. And to this day he stands by this.
About 6.7% of the world population live in the EU (yes this is horrible estimate of the proportion of people in the world who use google as many people don’t have access to the internet). So google would either have to use something to identify which people are in which realm, risking massive fines if they stuff up, then only apply the safeguards for the GDPR people.

This seems a rather complex thing to do when the cheaper solution would be to just not bother. I don’t trust google but I do expect companies to be lazy and avoid doing heaps of work for no financial benefit.

The benefit that google obtains from our data is in using it to train their ML tech. So after it has been milked for its statistical value as personised data it doesn’t have much worth.
It's paying its workers market wages and returning the rest to investors.

That's how literally every for-profit company works, and Apple's a for-profit company.

Why do you think Apple should be any different?
Cells are extremely complex self-replicating organisms. They are so small and yet they can pull off this trick of mitosis that no machine made by humans ever achieved. Personally I think that the most interesting and hardest part in the evolution of life was the start of it, where you go from random proteins to self replicating structures (cells).

It's easy to think of in-between steps for any post-cellular-life step in the evolutionary process that led to intelligent life but if you have no self-replication you can't have evolution. Most likely at the start proteins just floated around freely in water and did various random things, most of them not really useful. Every now and then some, by chance, some protein would do something useful. Now earth is big and before life, proteins could float around freely without being repurposed by bacteria or other organisms as building material.

But the best protein that's the result of random processes isn't helpful without the ability to clone it in some way. Proteinbiosynthesis [1] is an extremely complex process that involves multiple substeps each needing complex proteins of their own to facilitate it. It also needs an ample supply of ATP that has to come from somewhere and not be wasted by "useless" proteins.

The most simple cell that we can build today has 531 thousand basepairs [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_biosynthesis

[2]: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6253
Years ago people used their ISP’s email service for email and when thru consolidation or choices their ISP changed they got a new email address.

Now I find most people use an email provider and I don’t see a lot of ISP style emails
As someone who mostly eschews Facebook and Twitter I viewed Gamergate as much ado about nothing when it happened. Idiots yelling at idiots about things I didn't care much about. I cannot imagine caring if there is integrity in video game journalism or not.

Pieces like this bring home that beyond idiots yelling at other idiots on the net there are real people whose lives are being disrupted, who have experienced real fear and anguish. Who deserve our sympathy and protection.

In America we are normalizing dehumanizing other people in our public dialog with people like our President leading the charge. You make a sarcastic tweet about someone dehumanizing them, move on, and have lunch.

Not only does that person experience your shitty words in a more personal light but after you throw an apple, someone else throws a brick and pretty soon bullets are flying.

A thought leader describes someone as a worthless piece of trash and others are eager to make that person feel that way with threats of violence, threats of rape, harassment.

We especially those whose words influence others need to stop deriving self importance by attacking the worth of others. We need to elevate the level of dialogue in America and shove the trolls back in their caves when they open their mouths to spew vile crap.
When Matt Levine says that, he's talking about things done by the company itself and its employees and board members. Different set of rules.
It’s a faulty premise. Or, at least we should include ability to network and/or make friends in high places in the definition of “merit”. Does anyone seriously believe that Facebook achieved its early success because Mark Zuckerberg was that excellent of a developer? The very name of it and the apparent utility and appeal, came from Harvard having a print Facebook. Not to mention an elite, influential userbase. Zuckerberg was obviously a talented and inventive developer, but at a large public university, he might have instead created the next Hot or Not competitor.
When a tree grows, it captures carbon. If after N years it is cut, in most cases that carbon is NOT going to go back to the atmosphere. Most CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels (oil, etc), NOT from voluntary wood burning.
You can also add DocuSign (last year) to that list. They're heading toward a billion in annual sales and they offer a straight-forward and useful service.
What do you mean by "expected" stock ? Is stock in some way similar to a baby that might get born on a given date or is stock assigned by lottery or whims of a deity?

Did they have a contract that promises them stock? If yes, then they should demand that in court; if not, then they shouldn't have been "expecting" it - especially if we're talking about seasoned investors, which shouldn't be "expecting" anything other than what they themselves explicitly wrote in the investment paperwork. If they have a contract that promises them stock when pigs fly, then they shouldn't have been expecting that stock - they probably shouldn't have also accepted the disadvantageous contract, but that's a different issue.
cloudfare has way too much power over the internet at large. there have been days where twitter and other major sites all go down at once because (i suspect) some one tripped over a cable at cloudfare

Their S-1 looks financially strong and it's a great company. But it's rapidly becoming a single point of failure.
Ahh thank you. I thought paternal was just related to fatherly, from Latin. I did not realize it had a broader meaning.
That’s what it’s original intent was, but an IPO is now a way for all the investors to earn a return on their private investment and cash out at any time moving forward.

In all fairness, private investment was much lower when this was the case. Companies used to do an IPO much earlier when they needed funding instead of raising hundreds of millions in private investment money.
A contrary take:

> Taken all together, the greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year, compared to the early 2000s – a 5% increase.

The article links to a nature.com study that says about about 1/3 of this greening is due to direct human activity, particularly in India and China.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-an...
There are plastics that biodegrade completely in 6 months. Look at Nodax PHA.
I suppose I misunderstood the diagnosis part. My understanding was that it was an API to trigger a kernel panic.

> Today, we are announcing a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API allowing you to remotely trigger the generation of a kernel panic on EC2 instances.

Which can be done with the commands I mentioned in my parent comment.
I think that's a little unreasonable -- it's their laptop, and their work email account, not yours.
Mozilla has also recently introduced a 24-hour timeout for new extension submissions to AMO without telling anyone. (I only heard about it after filing a complaint to AMO moderators after my addon has been queued for almost a day.)

What's particularly annoying about the AMO case is that you can't even sideload addons on Firefox but that's a different issue.
Express it as an overhead on ticket price. You're using terrapass, so I plugged some numbers in and it out to about 20-30% based on what I can remember paying for typical domestic economy seats. If you fly on more expensive flights, it's even cheaper.

That sounds tolerable to me as a price of saving the planet. Certainly it's not an economy-busting impossibility given that it's in the range that can be reasonably borne by normal middle class individuals.
Ural A321 at Moscow, bird strike into both engines forces landing in corn field
Why are they almost taboo?
Strange that it's not on the website there. I don't know if the investment really happened either, but there are a couple links on a16z which seem to suggest they did invest in TopTal. Some articles reference a seed round.

(these links are all empty apart from a logo and a date ranging from 2013 to 2016)

https://a16z.com/toptal-2/

https://a16z.com/toptal-logo-3/

https://a16z.com/toptal-logo/

https://a16z.com/toptal/
Yeah this seems strange. How could they go from no reviews whatsoever to being so efficient they can review all app submissions in just 3 days. The Play Store gets more app submissions per day today than the App Store did back when it took Apple weeks to review each submission. Google doesn't even provide human customer service for most of their products, so how are they suddenly so efficient at this?
Thank you!!! Demo day pitch is next week, so that gives us a nice confidence boost!
The vast majority of people don’t think about or understand advertising and marketing - if they did it wouldn’t work as well as it does.

Amazon has tons of little “ha ha tricked you” ways of making more money these days.

Next time you but an N-pack of anything on Amazon - more often than not the pack costs more per unit.. thats not how economy of scale is supposed to work right?
I can check it out, but I think they're doing this to both.
My companies do something a bit different: we ask people to pick any issue from any opensource project in our tech stack and try to land a patch closing it.

We think this is better then wasting the candidate's time on a toy project - at least the can write off their time on the opensource-karma account.

Also, we can check not only their code but also their communication style and other skills that matter in the real world (projects on our tech stack have a high threshold for documentation, unit tests and other stuff that matters).

We call it "social code challenge" and it is working wonderfully for our recruiting process.
As face-recognition technology spreads, so do ideas for subverting it
This is simply not true. Employers have been hiring like crazy all across the country for the past few years.

And severance pay is not a thing for most employees, just the ones, like programmers, that have fairly cushy white collar jobs.

You need to stop seeing everything through a rose-tinted SV lens and look at it the way the rest of the country does. I'm ready to defend my claims. Are you?
> The feeling of everyone studying the natural world now is one of overwhelming loss

I am beginning to have my doubts about the reasoning behind these feelings.

It is not that I deny that there are problems which have happened, are happening, and certainly will happen.

I'm starting to think most people thinking, talking, and feeling about it are being driven and biased by a shared sort of doomsday cult not in major but only subtle ways. "Everyone" just "knows" it.

There is loss, there is reason for concern, there is change in progress, and lots of reasons to feel about it. The feelings though don't seem like they are driven by fact, reason, analysis, and – well – science, but driven by shared feelings and ambiguous knowledge that things are bad.
Simple rule of FAQs: if you don't know, say you don't know, and stop. Don't then go on to tease about how people could look up the component costs if they really want to, because are you also going to let them guess as your production overhead and the profit margin? No. Just say "we don't know". Or, at this point, after limited runs, give a real indication.
" ... like CygnusEd with its hand written assembler scrolling that remains, 30 years later, my benchmark for "fast and smooth enough" editor scrolling. Essentially nothing has yet matched it ..."

Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L41oIvre9K0

For those who never used CED on an Amiga, this is how it ran on now 30 years old hardware clocked at 8 MHz.
Specialized cutaneous Schwann cells initiate pain sensation
> Cons: Syngas still has some carbon in it, so you're generating more emissions than if you just buried the wood.

It's a crop, though. That carbon you put into the atmosphere got sucked out by the tree you baked to begin with. Use renewable biomass (a "farm" in the jargon) and this problem goes away.
A Re-Implementation of TeX in Rust
The way you explain it makes it seem like we shouldn't trust any Chinese companies to be separate from the party so not sure what you were going for but it's had the opposite effect.
Great update, thank you!
It's literally economics 101: externalities, but for some crazy reason in the US it's seen as a leftist anti-capitalist issue.
Speaking with a friend in a coffee shop yesterday, they mentioned this axiom:

If you want expertise to engage, post something with a mistake and there will be no shortage of keyboard warriors telling you how stupid and wrong you are, with a small amount of helpful information.

It seems a modern taking the shit with the sugar.
Depends but it's been between 30-50%. They add that on top of the rate I request.
Skateboards don't stay skateboards forever. Eventually they'll be thrown out, where they'll degrade & eventually decompose, re-releasing the stored CO2.
Another case of class action lawyers hoping to get at Apple's savings?
Furthermore, technically speaking the Sergeant-at-Arms can exercise his authority to arrest the party in question.

It doesn't seem to happen nowadays, but the authority is there. Interestingly, the normal judiciary protections do not seem to necessarily apply. Legislative procedures is becoming an increasingly interesting area of research for me.
no, this is too simplistic. extracting carbon from the ground is neither free nor reversable so this analogy isn't appropriate here. even if one could turn it back into whatever it's original form was (impossible to do without additional energy due to thermodyamics/entropy), the site of extraction is way worse for the wear.
I think we may be talking past each other. You can certainly use the scientific method to help you maximize utility, but it can’t tell you that maximizing utility is Good.
It does, a lot - https://imgur.com/o4cE1id

For reference, I'm on Chrome, Win 10. The above image is at 125% zoom in Chrome, magnified 16x to see the pixels. I don't mind testing though, this helps me a lot - now I know what property to change or suggest if I see another site that does this to me.
Am I mistaken in thinking that afforestation is technically a carbon sequestration strategy?
HN doesn't feel like a good place to drag gamergate into