skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Batteries are predicted to cost 62$/kWh (...)

Who predicts that? National Renewable Energy Laboratory[1] summarizes the predictions, and the average of predictions is $200/kWh in 2030, which is already more than triple of your estimate.

> or 62 Billion$ per tWh in 2030 assuming no supply shortages.

It is convenient to assume perfectly elastic supply, yes.

> US annual electricity usage is ~4,000TWh

Why do you consider only electricity? It's only just above a third of US energy use. US uses about 101 quads[2] of energy annually, which is just under 30,000 TWh (BTW, US Energy Information Administration believes that we're using 11000 TWH electricity annually, which is again triple of what your numbers are).

So, by the numbers of US government agencies, we're at (30,000 TWh / 365 days) * 3 days = 246 TWh, which, again, using government estimates, is 246 TWh * 200 dollars/kWh, which is $50 trillion, which is 250% of US GDP. So, assuming that the lifetime of the battery installation is 20 years, it means that 12.5% of US GDP will need to be spent on maintaining battery infrastructure, in perpetuity. That's already 2.5 times larger than current energy sector, and that's only cost of battery construction, we haven't even started talking about generation or grid maintenance!

In comparison, two new US nuclear power plants in Georgia, which are already extremely expensive due to cost overruns (US cannot build stuff, and you should also expect cost overruns for battery plants too), are astimated to cost $23 billion, and planned to have 2.2 GW power, and, unlike renewables, they'll actually produce as much day and night. 30,000 TWh/year is 3500 GW of power, so we'd need about 2000 nuclear plants like the one in Georgia. 2000*$23 billion is $46 trillion, amortized over 50 years is less than trillion a year. But, of course, if we could build reactors as cheaply as, say, South Korea can today, we'd only need spend fifth of the cost, so with $200B/year of construction costs, we could satisfy all our energy use with nuclear, not even needing solar/wind for peaks.

[1] - https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/73222.pdf

[2] - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained//us-energy-facts/
Similar experience here. Did a comparison of a bunch of statistical tools (R, Matlab, Julia, Python, etc.) on small-ish datasets. Used the latest versions in all cases, in Windows 10. All but Julia ran the regressions in <1s, while Julia took 20+ seconds, mostly importing the required libraries and just starting up.

Sure, the usual answer is "well its an initial cost, its faster after that" but not all my code would otherwise take days to run. As long as "using CSV" takes 10 seconds, I'm out.
There is nothing stopping them from doing the same for other uses. Yet, they don’t.
Do you have numbers on that? In a city like NYC I find it hard to believe that there's many delivery trucks with a suboptimal load. With the scale they're dealing with there's no reason that most trucks can't be 100% full, except for poorly written software.
A proliferation of performance assessment tools could be an indication of relatively poor performance.

I guess you can say the more performant systems have performance built in, you don't have to engineer and tweak it as an add-on, because they already are.
While I happen to agree with the conclusion the headline is utter bullshit. While a block on GM rice may have contributed to the problem it's dangerous (and intellectually dishonest) to suggest that it's a cause. It's also worth pointing out that Golden Rice was available in some of these countries and the locals just didn't want to touch it.
It’s not worse. But is it better?

I can think of several instances where the federal govt gave sweet-fuck-all about human rights or what’s best for society.
No mention of using encrypted DNS. Or did I miss it?
“Unit” Types for GraphQL
Currently #1 in "Best Sellers in Computing Industry History" on amazon, which is somewhat of a weird category :)
Also, just because copyright is up, one still needs physical access to the media to copy it. I'm not sure how that is (or should be) handled with film.
Plenty of stuff still uses it, unfortunately. Performance is pretty janky, I just moved a Mediawiki install from Apache+mod_php to Nginx+php-fpm as part of getting the site(s) on kubernetes and it’s tremendously better to work with and uses less memory due to not needing mpm_prefork.
We are not talking about general "advertising" concept -- we are talking specifically about System1, which is ad arbitrage and "unlocks consumer intent across channels including social, native, email, search"

There is nothing wrong with non-tracking advertizing -- looking solely at the content of the page ad is embedded it, or at the search term for the search engine is enough to let people know about new products, and has no negative social implications.
https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging

This python code was part of the imaging, analysis, and simulation software for radio interferometry that led to the historical first 'image' of a black hole.
The page's title itself says "real-time".
Part 2 says (emphasis added):

> Purism has long since spent all of the initial crowdfunding income and is depending on new Librem 5 pre-orders for most of their revenue.

Is it possible that a healthy laptop business is subsidizing phone development? Presumably not if Purism is turning to Kickfurther, but it seems like a possibility that ought be analyzed.
Automated build and release pipeline for sideloaded UWP apps
Well, for what it's worth, I think the best practice was always to test the existence of the PHP script, either with `try_files`, or with `if`, so, if you do that, then you aren't vulnerable, according to the exploit.

E.g., if you follow the "PHP FastCGI Example" from nginx.com, then nginx would protect you from this vulnerability in PHP-FPM:

* http://web.archive.org/web/20150928021324/https://www.nginx....

Here's the current version of the page, which seems to have the same info as the archived one above:

* https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/p...

(I think it used to be at another URL prior to the involvement of the marketing department in 2015; not sure if it's worth finding at this point, because the bug is not even in nginx in the first place.)
Ask HN: Advice for creating a startup on current employer's roadmap?
Posting on a throwaway for sensitivity reasons. Hypothetical scenario:

I currently work in SF as an engineer for a couple-hundred (300-1000) person >1b dollar startup. I know based on internal discussions and product roadmap of a product the company wants to build in the next 9-18 months. I don't see any companies that currently exist in this space, and do believe that there is an emerging opportunity based on knowledge of the competitive landscape. Like most companies of our size we evaluate purchases/partnership opportunities if there are existing companies that can accelerate our roadmap for launching this product (I am not only aiming for an acquisition but would be open to it).

My questions are:

1) Should I build the essential parts of this product and launch it myself? I'm thinking of legal risks here as I'm not sure if I can build things on my own that intersect with my employer (or if they can enforce such a thing in California). I know starting a company is more than just creating a product but I still think even with that overhead I can beat my current employer to market.

2) How common is this pattern for launching startups? I know companies are born out of domain/industry knowledge but this is specifically informed by my current employer's roadmap & product hypothesis. I'm wondering if this will damage relationships even though in my head it seems pretty logical? If anyone has stories (either personal, second-hand or public) that would be much appreciated.

3) One of my coworkers is bought into doing this with me, but wants to tell the company to give us time/resources (e.g. give us a sabbatical since we've both been there for a few years) to build it in-house. I think this limits our ability to keep good relationships if we leave and do it ourselves if they say no. Do others think this is reasonable?

Thanks
Owning stock has nothing to do with voting with your wallet. Boycotts make sense; divestments are idiotic.
Who said anything about "no ads ever"? The choice is between "fixed ads, like paper magazines and physical posters" and "tracking ads which follow you across the web, no matter where you go".
Fair enough. I seem to be misinformed.

We also don't talk about how Churchill killed millions of Indians in Bengal famines. It is well documented. He diverted everything to the war and when asked about starving Indians, he reportedly asked, "Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?"
Firefox w/ uBlock Origin
Listen to a Glacier, Forecast a Flood (2014)
It isn't a canonical term.

Just mix determinist beliefs, sloppy models, and a dangerous overestimation of one's own intelligence--then things are pretty much guaranteed to end the same way old Julien did.
3/4 of the time it's not even a live chat and not much better than email. Sometimes they have a chat bot that doesn't understand what you're asking them and it becomes more frustrating.
Talk is cheap, and so is saving some lives. Are you part of the solution? Please help if you can...

[1] Feed My Starving Children

[1] https://www.fmsc.org/
I thought Unity was free, basically, for projects that bring in less than 100K a year.
Try The Netherlands. Great infrastructure, relaxed people, OK'ish weather, many many innovative IT companies, beautiful nature as well as cities.
Not being obsessed != not caring.

People who are obsessed do bring it whenever it is relevant or not.
What about the code did you find so striking? Any part in particular you recommend checking out?
Server-X: A Pluggable Platform for Local Front End Development
At first, incomprehensible. Given time, the internal consistency shines through. Worth spending a few hours reading and contemplating:

https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
How to Use Nexmo Verify API and Message API in React Native
Thoughtful reply!

The very first paragraph of his article says:

> To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

So, I would argue that creating a successful YouTube channel is almost the opposite of taking the "make 1000 true fans" path to success. YouTube promotes content in ways that causes a massive block of users -- millions, often -- to be casually exposed to a given video or channel. And hopefully some of them subscribe, watch ads, and maybe sign up for the creator's Patreon or something. But this isn't what Kelly describes.

Blasting your work out to millions in the hopes that thousands become "true fans" is a very well-known and well-worn path to success. And, frankly, still a hard one. Unless you happen to get YouTube's algorithm or HBO or Capitol Records to pick you up and give your work a massive promotional boost. And even then I suspect it's tough.
Because Android, even with all those apps is still severely limited to what you can do compared with an actual Linux distribution.

Then the next problem is that Android itself is a mess to work with, it's not designed with an open-source community in mind, the barrier is high to make it work for this kind of use case.
Hmm, I'm with the GP. I've lived through the transition from mostly restrained and controlled (and often very naive) UK advertising in the sixties and seventies, through to today when advertising ate everything. Available in-yer-face on every surface, tracking every move and psychologically trying to manipulate. We can trust nothing whatsoever. I didn't much mind how it was, I detest how it is now.

Probably a very minority view on HN, but I'd like to outlaw and treat as hostile all forms of advertising, except:

+ Yellow Pages style classified magazines and sites - Like old-school Yellow Pages, or the classifieds in the back of old magazines. When I want a new product, I can open the site or book and look for one. Easy.

+ Flat, silent and static magazine and newspaper style ads, locally served.

+ Branding on the packaging.

+ Shop signage akin to say the sixties or earlier - sign on frontage only. Illumination only whilst store open, and it's after lighting up time. No 20m KFC neon topped poles outside. No floodlights 24/7.

Nowt else. I'm fucking sick of the advertising arms race.
Interesting... would you mind giving me an example of the type of data you are referring to? Or perhaps an example use case / real world example?
By diminishing marginal utility of wealth, I presume you mean there is less incentive to spend money, the more of it you have. Because wealth is increasingly concentrated, less of it gets spent. Monetary velocity never recovered since the financial crisis. In fact, from 2011 onwards, monetary velocity has been at its lowest levels ever recorded.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
"Not turning everything into a Trump issue" is not the same thing as "the privilege of folks who can get away with 'not caring' about the commander in chief".

Is me setting my alarm for 630am "a Trump issue"? If I think it is not, am I "privileged" and "don't care about the commander in chief"? If it is, why am I "so obsessed with Trump and//or the commander in chief?

Yes, my example is ridiculous -- and you see my point. Not everything is "Trump" or "who the president is", being able to tell the difference doesn't necessarily make someone privileged or not.
The algorithm isn't really racially biased. It was based on historical cost data and didn't look at the color of the patient's skin.

It just so happens that African Americans are on average, poorer than non-African Americans and so they are negatively affected more often.
If you very obviously branded your bike so that it was completely and indistinguishably yours, do you think the police would bother to hunt down the person who stole your bike?

Because from my experience and knowledge, the answer to that would be a firm 'No'.
I think it is entirely fair to blame arbitragers. They are the only ones who can control the advertisement implementation (as website owners no longer have direct relationships with ad providers), and they clearly fail to do so.
I didn’t imply anything about Ruthless Records bankrolling the black eyed peas, but good job calling me on my non-existent bullshit.

Ruthless Records didn’t “famously tank”, they simply changed hands, and the new ownership dropped Atban Klann from their label cause they didn’t share Eazy-E’s enthusiasm for their work. Ruthless Records is still around.

And will.i.am couldn’t have created the Black Eyed Peas from the ashes of Atban Klann, because Atban Klann never dissolved, they (as in a group comprised of more than just will.i.am) merely changed their name and continued to recruit new members and put on shows until they were picked up by Interscope a year later.
Humans have been genetically modifying their food since the beginning of agriculture. Fear based on the particular modification technique used is completely irrational.
Who cares? Real economic growth is much higher in the continual inflation era than it was before. Inflation is a nothing problem, especially now that inflation is only about 2% a year.
In just the last week or so, in two separate incidents, an Asian woman student at a college was denounced as a white supremacist publicly by a student group, and a minority owned and run business was called white supremacist by a member of congress.

Also published in the New York Times was a piece about how two kids of one minority beating up another minority kid was the fault of white people, because they were acting out of whiteness. I quote:

"Instead of asking what the boys’ reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way."

Basically, in America at least, if you express an opinion that isn't ideologically pure enough, that makes you a white supremacist. Our public discourse is so completely twisted by redefining words that I don't have much hope at all for bringing people together in good faith discussion. All that is left is to attack.
I noticed that, too. Including a `go get` instruction to get it, no less.
If the suggestion is that it's better that at least rich people might be safe...

No, it's better that everyone has that.
"Everyone who isn't suffering from my delusion has the privilege of not having the same opinions as me."

It is a privilege and an honor to not think that everyone has to care about the same things I do or else they're guilty of some form of original sin.

That would be a screwed up form of narcissistic mania.

How are you doing?
I'm not sure where your information comes from because it sounds very suspect to me. Sure XHTML was a thing in nerdy circles, I know because I was one of them, but we were hardly the majority.

The vast majority of sites were "HTML 4.01" others were at best "XHTML 1.0 Transitional" (which in practice meant the same thing). Those using pure XHTML were relatively few. And of those who did, no major site served it as such because it would have locked out IE users, IIRC.
Really solid talk. This really hit me.

I don't know about anyone else, but a sign that I'm burned out is when I start having trouble composing sentences/finding words for things
Interesting parting shot: https://www.chairmanmom.com/about
The "Coca-Cola was found ... to be the most polluting brand" point seems ridiculous.

It's not the only point in the article, but is the only one I'm commenting on here.

It's basically, "the majority of plastic waste comes from the company that sells the majority of the products" (or if they aren't selling the majority of the products, the article doesn't argue they have an outsize contribution), and it is implying that somehow Coca-Cola is where the blame for this pollution lies.

But what evidence are we given that they're worse than other companies, that it's not just because they sell the most popular products? The article doesn't give any (it does not say why they are comparatively worse). And nor does the article argue why the fault should be with the product producers. Are they the ones dumping the used containers in the ocean? What about the government policies regarding recycling or waste management? Or consumer behavior regarding waste?

I'm sure some people are going to see this comment as somehow just trying to defend a big corporation, but that is not my goal at all. I'm interested in the quality of the discussions surrounding these issues, and I'm trying to point out that the article's discussion doesn't meet very high standards.
Any of Norvig's notebooks, http://www.norvig.com/ipython/README.html, especially his Concrete Introduction to Probability https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Probabil....
It's probably going to be more dangerous to the amature chemist than thier intended victim.
‘Why We Wear Red on Thursdays’
Widget-Maker – A Flutter UI Builder
Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
Just curious about scripts and things you guys have automated
Probably not true. But it's fun to imagine that even Brian Kernighan were not able to find a publisher, and needed to resort to self-publishing.
It's almost as if the more "best seller" lists there are, the more authors will make efforts to get onto them :)
That is silly. Imagine that the genes were transferred via some toxic mould that transfers DNA but that was extremely hard to remove after the procedure. Of course the procedure matters
I think there is a need for some boycott aggregator where reputable organisations would register their boycotts and users would subscribe by organisations and causes, and can check products they are about to buy by scanning barcode...
I think you are projecting on to the story. The other way to read this is that with privacy such a rare feature of mobile phones, it's almost inevitable that criminals would end up becoming purveyors of privacy conscious phones.

I think you could argue that the great charge against privacy is causing this problem.
One of the unfortunate things about the GM foods debate is how rarely the details of a particular crop are considered. What method was used to engineer it? What gene was added in or modified? What is the IP approach used by the inventor? What are the results of field trials? For all the strong opinions I’ve seen, nobody mentions these specifics. It’s like deciding someone is guilty or innocent of a crime when all you know is that they’ve been charged.
It wasn't my intention to imply you were that type of person, rather that he might have been one of the ultra competitive types.
For me, the answer is - The code that never existed.

Not to sound cheeky but eliminating code, is a beautiful thing. Less code is easier to maintain, understand, and faster to run. So the less code you can achieve, the better overall the software will be.
Anyone able to comment on his recent non-programming-language books? For example, how's "Understanding The Digital World"?

http://kernighan.com/udw.html
1)no such thing as an unauthorized copy once copyright expires.

2) even before copyright expires, first sale doctrine applies to any re-sold copy (the disc bought), but not copies of that copy.

3) this doesn't solve the problem of have having access to the high quality masters.
Occasionally the new feature's debt is never paid. I'm cleaning up a location which has had this happen 30+ times over 20 years. It resulted in 15+ sightly different ways of doing the same thing. Much of this without a function call in sight. I've been splitting functions out of it slowly reducing the 80+ variables into discrete behaviors. It's now unit testable.

I'm often asked why can't I add something quickly, pointing to this file is more than enough reason for all but the most important projects to agree to wait.

What should I call this if not Technical Debt?
I don’t think readability is the goal here. This is more of an experiment - a mental exercise, even - than anything.
If you want performance then yeah. If you are after hypothetical performance in future which may not even materialise, then the choice is yours. Everyone knows where the sensible ground is. Which, unfortunately, is CUDA only
Kasparov: Chess, Deep Blue, AI, and Putin – Artificial Intelligence Podcast
John Carmack's Fast Inverse Square Root: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv.... The first time I really and truly felt that people approach problems differently from how I, by default, go about them.
http://archive.is/Y4dnR
You're quite literally advocating for selective law enforcement based on the income of the individual in question. If the victim is too poor or the thief is too rich, then the law doesn't get enforced.

In this scenario then, only the corporations can enforce the law or prompt the police to act. Do you not see why that might be a problem?
As a student in 2001, Tim Sweeney's template recursive inheritance was next level for me:https://www.flipcode.com/archives/Vector_Math_Quaternions.sh...

About 10 years later you would find this stuff everywhere in boost but for the time this was spectacularly elegant for C++
HF is a weak acid and less dangerous than hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid. If you really want bad news make piranha solution.
Oh hi again. Your point still comes back to "I'm wealthy enough to afford this, why do I have to help others. Also I want the benefits of a society"

I don't have any further commentary.
I can report that this is not true in this case - Brian wrote his book over the summer and, I think, wanted to get it out for the Unix 50 event at Bell Labs this past week.
This is a common issue that people encounter. I am glad that compilation latency is now the top priority in terms of Julia-compiler work. Hoping to see something interesting from there