skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> PG&E can’t pay out more in dividends by shortchanging operations and maintenance.

They have before.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-...

edit: obviously this is a lot more nuanced than simply eliminating the O&M line item and diverting that income into dividends. In this instance, they had higher than expected income resulting in a positive cash value which was due to MANY factors, but they simply decided to add it into the dividends rather than into O&M, which they knew was running lean.

edit 2: You're working on the assumption that they are operating at a 100% accurate estimation schedule. You know that this is an impossible task, and so I think we are arguing that the delta between the actual operating costs and the estimated operating costs, when it has been a positive value resulting in unexpected monetary value, has typically been diverted in this case to dividends rather than to maintenance. Even if that value has been 2 to 5% per year, it's still millions of dollars. The fact that it was diverted to compensation rather than maintenance indicates a tendency of the PG&E entity to value it's corporate officers over the public (eg, spending money on maintenance is investing in the public safety, whereas spending money on dividends is the officers cashing out and taking a personal win). This is I think the biggest breakdown of how public utilities operate in this economy. They are largely private companies with a mandated monopoly, so despite being a private or publicly traded company, they _should_ act like a publicly owned or municipally operated company. We (the people) have given them an extremely liberal license to operate, and they should return that favor in kind. When they don't, they've broken the social contract.
As a user, I couldn't care less. My goal is to build my application in debug mode. If the build system's view of the world is incompatible with the actual world, is that a failure of the world or the build system? At the end of the day, I still need to get my debug build working...
Seems new. I still dunno why Apple made it such a secret.

Drove me bonkers when my carrier claimed I sent an SMS but my phone showed I had not.

Edit: others reported that there’s a message that said “Your Carrier May charge for SMS messages used to activate iMessage” that would still send even if you hit “Cancel”.

Seems like a lot of providers don’t charge for this SMS, but for those that do, it can be a costly int’l SMS.
I am not whole opposed to the idea that companies that extract value from content created by their users should be forced to operate as non-profits that operate for the public good.

The biggest drawback I see is that this could lead to large scale lobbying to greatly reduce the limitations placed on sich non-profits.
What's the Spanish Inquisition got to do with this? Are they in your reply because of the word "Spanish", as in "the union between the people of Arragon, Castille and the very same Catalunya, who (re)conquered the Iberian peninsula?"

> governments burn libraries

Not really.

> Catalan separatists are ... pedophiles

Is there really anyone who said so? Or are we a bit hyperbolical today?
The potential energy due to gravity is separate from the potential energy due to embedded chemical energy, which I suspect would be bigger for such a shape, given drag. (Since energy is proportional to velocity-squared.)
I agree that less power is better, but I find TOML pretty cryptic. Like I said, JSON with comments and multi line strings is my ideal. :)
Remember that vim is a charityware and you are encouraged to donate to Uganda children.
I see a lot of legit account but used sporadically.
Jawed, uploader of the first YouTube video, has been hacked
This project is also pretty interesting (also F#) : https://github.com/fsprojects/fsharp-ai-tools/blob/master/RE...
The issue isn't whether or not they'll eventually deorbit and disintegrate on re-entry -- that's a given. The issue is that while they're slowly approaching the Earth, they're a hazard to spacecraft. Slamming into even a gram of mass at orbital velocities could damage a spacecraft.
I will say, it would be helpful to see a call stack.
Australia’s gov considers scanning users' faces before they can watch porn
If someone will ever ask me what a "whataboutism" is, I will point it them to your comment right here.
I must have missed something. What are those two legal referendums that you speak of? Also, wouldn't the reasons for independence be up to the citizens? You say there have none...
We all have our preferences. I find Python to be intuitive. I find Ruby to not be. I am sure someone would spend half a day trying to convince me otherwise, but, it's not worth arguing over in the end. There are more languages than most would care to count. Devs should pick a few that speak to them and move on.
I wonder if any people against the Catalan independence revolution were in favor of the Arab spring movement, which also used mobile apps to coordinate actions against government. And if so what the distinction is.
Optimising design resources for F1 rule changes
So let’s create a policy that benefits maybe the top 200-300 athletes out of the tens of thousands competing at the collegiate level? Yeah that makes sense. They on scholarship are already getting what — $300k to a million in scholarship subsidies, travel, access to upgraded facilities and trainers, supportive schedules, all to develop their professional career both on and off the field. And that’s not enough? I agree that a total ban on income is ridiculous but why not set a reasonable wage scale and let those who need / want to work earn at that scale? Opening up athletes to profit on their likeness while they also take scholarships just had all sorts of issues with it the least of which are the tax issues (why isn’t the scholarship now taxable income?) At a time when most families of non scholarship students struggle to pay for college and many students struggle with loads of student debt, why are on earth are we creating more haves / have nots? Especially when such policies won’t benefit the average athlete and certainly not the regular student body.
Is Apple Building an Entertainment Wearable?
Show HN: Monitor websites for change and get scraped data in a webhook
Is there a reason why you couldn't close some shades and open others to roughly guide the shade on a specific area on Earth? ( besides the fact that you need to have much higher shading capacity if you want to be able to significantly shade just one region)
Hello HN,
Monitoro is a service I built to watch websites for changes, scrape data, and whenever the data changes send it to a webhook of your choice.

It started as a scratch-your-own-itch kind of situation where I wanted to monitor the prices for some stuff to buy, until I decided to make a product out of it to help others solve similar issues.

I am available to answer any questions you might have.
The word "violence" has a similar problem in spanish and catalan discourse. It has been used to describe the acts of blocking a street, moving dustbins around, or simply covering your face. The worst perpetrators of this semantic drift turn out to be catalan "extreme" pacifists, who aggressively condemn anybody who does these things in demonstrations. They are mockingly called the "dustbin protection society".
Can't dissolve without a solvent.
Is the startup’s valuation a problem to be researched scientifically?
some variant of netcat (nc) is generally available on most distros.
Gotta point out that the comment pretty clearly indicated that GitHub should cease to operate in Spain. Not operating somewhere doesn’t violate local laws.
> This kind of low interest easy to get loan exists for no other type of asset, and is unique to housing, and is in large part a product of macroeconomic state policy. These types of loans are backed in many countries by government insurance. So they are in effect a kind of macroeconomic planning by the state.

Not quite unique: this kind of loan is available for college tuition too!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s another disaster zone...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pacific-gas-and-electric-camp-f...

> Pacific Gas & Electric knew for years that dozens of its aging power lines posed a wildfire threat yet failed to replace or repair them, it was reported Wednesday. The company also reportedly spent $5 billion on shareholder dividends despite the need for repairs to decades-old equipment.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11737336/judge-pge-paid-out-stock-...

> At a probation hearing related to the utility’s deadly 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, Judge William Alsup said the embattled utility hasn't done enough to prevent wildfires through tree trimming and other maintenance work — even while its shareholders made millions.

> “PG&E pumped out $4.5 billion in dividends and let the tree budget wither,” Alsup said.
I hated C++ and Matlab as an undergraduate. Hell, I hated programming as a whole - and effectively swear never to write a line of code once I was done with my BSc in Physics.

Then, at work, I was introduced to Python. It was so...obvious, for lack of a better world. It was like a language I always knew that never spoke before.

I'm now a software engineer, write Python almost all day, and looking back to the 18-year old version of myself, I would only say "if only you knew".

That, and more, is what people like Guido and those who followed his path enable people like me to do: enjoy the art of programming.

Thanks Guido, and enjoy your well-deserved retirement.
What throws me is that they seem to think this would make their life much easier, and that there's no solution unless someone makes it... but there already is one. There are several. Specifically for their problem. Most of which seem to get the job done just fine. It'd be a big help to them, but they haven't even spent as much time as it took to describe to me what they want, looking for an existing solution. I'd bet they've never even asked anyone else in their line of work if they have a solution. Anyone who has, doesn't have the problem anymore. They don't need me to write an app, they need me to teach them how & when to effing google.

I'm aware of the ability to out-compete existing solutions on quality and UX and such, but most of the time when this happens, there aren't really any clear pain points in the existing solutions that I'm being told about, the person suggesting it is just totally oblivious to their existence, and they sure appear to do exactly the thing they need.

I do like the affiliate link suggestion from the other poster, haha.
A (Haskell DSL) stream language for generating hard Real-Time C code
As someone that compared both a while back (and a biased Nim core developer) I don't think this claim is true. Go is really fast at compilation, but honestly Nim is good enough.
One prediction: We will see large amounts of ice lost from the poles, seems to have been a good prediction.
None of the flaws you list apply to TSX, which essentially gives you the best of both worlds. I really wish SwiftUI had used JSX-style syntax, just because of how nice it looks.
Thank you Guido! At the risk of sounding saccharine, Python has literally made life better for my colleagues and me. In the corporate, financial world where I’ve been working, people often see coding as someone else’s job. Python, and the community that has grown around it, have made programming accessible (socially acceptable?). It has saved months of work for us.

I hope you enjoy whatever you set yourself to next.
FCC: Marin cell sites failed broadly amid fire
The point that any ignition source no matter how small can spark a major wildfire is precisely my point. I don't think you're contesting this, but I want to clarify the agreement.

As to clearing and preemptively burning regions ... one of the more terrifying items that I ran across in the past day was that the Kinkaid fire was burning through areas in which a prior burn, 2017's Tubbs fire, had already burned out:

https://sfist.com/2019/10/28/kincade-fire-doubles-in-size-tu...

It's not clear how thorough the Tubbs fire was in those areas, or if spread of the Kinkaid fire was moderated. But the fact that two major wildfires can burn through the same area only two years apart is ... sobering.

What's effectively NIMBY opposition to wider prescribed burns, firebreaks, expanded evacuation routes, evacuee housing/facilities, structure code and inspection requirements, etc., does seem to be a major factor.

But that's still not addressing the fact that fires are simply bigger, hotter, faster, and more unpredictable than they were even just 20 years ago.
Are you ready to receive my limp work ethic?
C# Overriding and Abstract Classes
Well... i don't have ANY social media accounts, and there is absolutely nothing interesting on my github (about 30 repos which i built working for just 1 client of mine, out of 100+, 1-6 years ago). Am i a fake? I am top #1 Upwork developer in EU by revenue though.
I'm an IMAP client and my user has clicked the delete-message button. Accordingly, I've sent a command to make the change and I'm waiting for the response from the server.

Oh no! Before the response came back, my connection to the server died. I don't know if my request arrived and was accepted.

Time passed and I've just now managed to reconnect. I need to know if the delete happened or not.
> imagine a wholly for-profit police force.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
To put this in context we're talking about 4 to 5 mm per year of sea level rise on average globally for the next several decades.

Some areas will be more and some less as sea level rise isn't uniform (for instance isostatic rebound on the west coast of Canada will result in a net sea level drop in some areas).

Mitigation will be key as even if we eliminated carbon emissions completely today there's already committed warming in the system that will result in sea level rise through the century. We're just talking about how many extra mm per year on top of the 3-4mm or so that it is now.
it is strange that you have such a charming notion about the flavours of quarks. If we turn this notion upside down maybe we could then get to the bottom of this or should i say the top?

I'll see myself out
["div", "The", ["a[href=https://www.json.org/]", "JSON format"], "was invented by", ["em", "Douglas Crockford"], "."]
Python as well. The module system and the exception-handling system were mostly lifted from Modula-3, and the class/object system is a hybrid of Modula-3 and C++ (something that's still explicitly stated in Python's documentation to this day [0]).

If you first thought on reading that was "But Python's exception-handling system looks like everyone else's, how can it be lifted from this obscure language?", that's because everyone else lifted it from Modula-3 as well. That's right, C++ also borrowed Modula-3's system, and Java and C# built on top of that. Pretty much the whole mainstream concept of exception handling was invented by Modula-3.

[0] https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/classes.html
In the Loop – October 30, 2019
Are the AirPods Pro Worth It?
I was feeling stuck

~So~ I wrote a poem to help

I still feel stuck though
Since you brought it up I would like to pile on. There are scads of Academic applications that will remain in use for decades and every single one of them has a half baked Windows port that is used 10000% more often in research institutions where security concerns mandate managed OS not fashion OS or hobby OS.

I don't hate python just lazy windows ports.
Scaling Bugs Are Different
The official limit is no activity for 6 months, at that point the moderator status is supposed to be removed. This has been enforced rather inconsistently at times.
Average temperatures are not that much higher yet. The specific prediction is that there will be more heat waves.
The genius of Python is that it treads that fine line between allowing too little or too much control. Between being too strict or too liberal. Between trading speed for clarity and simplicity.

It is the ideal programming language for an increasing set of tasks.
> the IRS had no more an obligation to treat the parties equally than the ATF does when investigating Second Amendment fringe groups or the DEA does when investigating head shops or the FBI does when investigating eco-terrorism

Oooh, that's a bingo!
You’re welcome to your opinion. I disagree that XML is ideal for representing tree structures or anything else for that matter. I’ve used XML a lot (including for UIs and other tree-like data structures), but ever since JSON became popular I haven’t found myself missing it.
You can also just pick a different name, which is something you should probably do anyway in this case.
I'm well to the left of Hacker News, but on this point we disagree. If we get angry with people for not breaking the law, we create an environment where people pretend to be activists to avoid our wrath.

That removes the biggest and most important component of activism: People's authentic willingness to sacrifice in exchange for the greatest good.

People need to make a free and willing choice to engage in civil disobedience.

---

Now that being said, there's another thing on which we might agree. Even if they don't break the law, I am prepared to disapprove of companies that are complicit in wrongdoing.

Complicity is looking the other way or participating. For example, supplying goods and services to ICE is being be complicit in ICE's actions.

I am not going to be angry with someone who complies with a court order to supply, say, employee information to ICE. But I will be angry with a company--cough, Microsoft, cough--who provides billions of dollars in services to ICE.
First, no rescue is needed. I said that not tracking complexity is a matter of choice, and you mistakenly thought it amounts to deciding halting; I pointed out the well-known fact that it isn't. Second, you don't need a non-Turing-complete language in order to track computational complexity in the type system, just as you don't need a language that cannot perform IO in order to track IO in the type system.

As to JavaScript, there are much more commonplace things that it doesn't track in the type system, either, and they're all a matter of choice. There is no theory that says what should or shouldn't be tracked, and no definitive empirical results that can settle all those questions, either. At the end of the day, what you choose to track is a matter of preference.
Common Law is rarely simplified.
>It's the whole architecture: a two-stage, rapidly reusable rocket with as much cargo capacity as anything to ever fly. And just as important for interplanetary flight: The upper stage is refuelable and is integrated with the passenger compartment and has a large delta-v capability as well as aerobraking/capture/entry.

I don't know much about SpaceX, but I do follow Tesla closely: how much of this is reality versus "things we'd like to be able to do in the future"?
> It strikes me as completely insane that it's more complicated to write a browser rendering engine than a whole OS.

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: “Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?”

“An operating system,” replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief.

“Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system,” he said.

“Not so,” said the programmer, “when designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to tax laws.

By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outward appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design.”

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. “That is all good and well,” he said, “but which is easier to debug?”

The programmer made no reply.

— The Tao of Programming, Geoffrey James, 1987
A judge is required to act according to the law. Not following because they disagree with it is not an option on any modern democracy.
What you ask for already exists: it's called the tree hash (which can be obtained by doing `git log -n1 --pretty="%T"`). The tree hash is unaffected by history, so if you for instance revert a commit, the tree hash will also revert. IIRC Julia uses tree hashes rather than commit hashes to track its packages.
A: Big compliance issues!

Most employers that I’ve work with that utilize unpaid interns do so through a college to ensure a linkage to the interns development.

Outside of that, it’s cheaper to pay minimum wage than to deal with the overhead of making sure your managers follow the rules.
Umm...many cities (SF, NYC, most of California, ...) have plenty of prohibitions on building condos that go far beyond “there’s a natural park there” and “the owner doesn’t want random people building condos on his property”.

Zoning laws basically prevent construction of condos even by the owners of the property in like 90% of the Bay Area, if not more...
The tech term pulled into the mainstream:

> For decades, corporate executives, as well as city, county, state, and federal officials, not to mention voters, have decided against doing the routine maintenance and deeper upgrades to ensure that electrical systems, roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure can function properly under a range of conditions. Kicking the can down the road like this is often seen as the profit-maximizing or politically expedient option. But it’s really borrowing against the future, without putting that debt on the books.

> In software development, engineers have long noted that taking the easy way out of coding problems builds up what they call “technical debt,” as the tech journalist Quinn Norton has written.

Norton's article:

* https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/10/18/a-world-we-built-to-bu...
The bigger issue is the large amount of co2 that the ocean will quickly release back into the atmosphere as temperature and partial-pressure drop.

It would be better if we could come up with a way to neutralize / sequester the co2 already in the ocean.
The title is useless for recognizing it, but this is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21392007
Rails 6 Adds ActiveStorage:Blob#open
My understanding was that the main reason power has to be turned off because there could be 1) vegetation contact with the power lines in windy conditions 2) power lines blowing away in the wind. California has been windy since before the invention of electricity, so what's changed? They can't build power lines to handle some wind that happens every other year since the beginning of human settlement? If they are failing to trim and remove dying trees around power lines, that is a direct maintenance failure. Besides PG&E, at the forestry management level, not clearing brush or doing controlled burns is direct maintenance failure.
Not all Open Source companies are nonprofit.

See Redhat Linux, Gitlab, Chromium, Docker. If a volunteer helps triage issues for these projects, is it a violation of labor laws?

If only nonprofit Open Source companies can use the benefits of Open Source development -- community involvement, community moderation and support, 3rd-party patches, etc... that's a really big reduction in who can participate in Open Source, particularly during a time when we're increasingly worried about Open Source funding and sustainability.

Gitlab even organizes events around community contributions.[0] If the effect of a law is to make it harder for a community to get directly involved with a product, that's likely a negative consequence. I really like that I can get involved with Gitlab. I don't feel like Gitlab is exploiting me.

[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/community/issue-bash/
Almost all comments in the comments section here are anecdotal. People are singling out this one because it goes against what most other cyclists are saying.
How can we make it more helpful?
Why is JSX so much more verbose? The end tags?