skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a way, the current smartphone industry is not primarily the successor to the "dumbphone", industry. It's one of the industries it absorbed, but wasn't more important to the current industry than e.g. the MP3 player industry.
It always was.
Also interesting is the Wendelstein 7-X experiment, where they build a stellarator with a unique geometry, compared to the tokamak reactors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
There is value in having the means to generate power independent of environmental factors (sun, wind). A stated goal in the article is also to build small-scale fusion reactors, which would reduce transmission costs. Wind power and non-residential solar power also need similar transmission equipment because you can't have them in the middle of a city. The price of renewable power generation is reaching extremely favourable levels even now, but I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect transmission costs to decrease as far as you seem to expect.

I'm not convinced we'll see a significant amount of fusion power in electricity grids, but for specialised applications, it would make a lot of sense (e.g., powering ships, or a hypothetical Mars colony that would like to keep the lights on during a dust storm). Building such limited numbers will, of course, do nothing to get the price of fusion power down. Maybe subsidies will be able to overcome the cost dilemma posed by this, but there's no clear motivation for providing them if the power sources replaced by fusion would already be majority-renewable.
I don't think the conventional wisdom of building on top of filesystems exists. In distributed systems you always naturally gravitate towards using raw storage devices instead of filesystems, it becomes obvious very early on that filesystems suck too much and only create problems. And it's the same with all the embedded database libraries, you really want to write your own, because none of the existing ones were made to address performance and operational problems that arise even in small distributed systems. But at the same time early on you don't yet know most of the problems and don't want to invest time implementing something you don't yet understand well enough, so you end up building on top of filesystems and embedded databases and making plenty of poor choices and learning on your mistakes.
Yes, I was going to reply to the GP with:

Then there are those who are eager for it to end, but have to wait for biology or fate to catch up.

There should be a clean Quit button.
If we ever get unlimited cheap power we will just use it to dump vastly more waste heat into the atmosphere. Discuss.
Scientists with grant proposals who are actually making substantial progress, just not enough to give us fusion in next 10 years. But that is also because the problem is really hard.
I think I have figured out that I have adult ADHD, the innatentive kind, with problems of directing focus where I want it to be. If you give me something interesting, I can commit and spend a day absorbed in it but it's extremely hard to direct my focus where I need it to be - my head is full of ten things at the same time. Once adrenaline hits and the deadline draws near I can focus well but over the last years this always resulted in a crunch-exhaustion cycle, I've been through hundreds of those with a weekly interval and I think I've burnt out on that a little.

I've discovered this in the past months, where, for the first time, I've only had one single project at work instead of more than two. Before, I blamed this inability to focus on the amount of different issues and projects (that were mostly non-related in terms of subjects) that I had but now...

Now I find it's equally hard to focus on the one thing without getting distracted - and adrenaline helps to get the focus, so my weekly productivity looks just like before with more projects, just fewer peaks.

I've only got an appointment in January for diagnosis but since the DSM-V wasn't updated in terms of adult ADHD, a diagnosis involves answering questionnaires about when you were a kid more than the actual situation now.

Edit: typo
It's hard because of the Sun argument.
Have you tried googling sentences generated?
>Until 80% the carbon optimal mix is Gas + Renewables.

I don't understand what we're arguing about? All I said was that renewables (solar and wind specifically) need natural gas backup. In an ideal world where carbon emissions weren't a problem, that would be a non-issue, but we are trying to completely remove carbon emissions - so how is solar and wind actually helping?

>For the last 20% you need to start producing the Gas from excess energy during times when renewables outstrip demand.

This is hopeful thinking. The most efficient process for creating syngass is from fossil fuels.

Syngas from renewables ... that's not technology that is currently viable, and it may never be viable.

The other issue is that you need to greatly overprovision solar and wind infrastructre to generate a huge amount of excess energy to brige the intermittency gaps. I remember seeing some numbers on that, and they are astronomical.

>A number of authors have mapped out different aspects of the transition towards 100% systems [3].

The big problem with these estimates is that they use 'biomass' to plug in the gaps that wind and solar have. Do you know what that means? It means burning garbage or using huge swaths of land to grow corn or soy or whatever to burn. That is the technology of the future? And even in that situation Germany can't be emission neutral until 2050 (i.e. never)!! This is the insanity I'm talking about. We're willing to destroy the environment we have to grow crops just to burn (not to feed people, and we still need to do that), just so that we don't use nuclear. Jesus.

Why is Germany not following France, and increasing their nuclear infrastructure? Because insanity, that's why. Because of the cult of renewables.

>Also, gas is incredibly much better for carbon footprint than coal

Maybe. Natural gas is certainly efficient, though efficiency in this case is a little bit of a detriment, as more efficiency means more CO2 emissions. Ironically coal's dirty particulate emissions (the ones that kill humans) are actually good for cooling the planet by blocking or sun's rays.

But yeah, overall natural gas is much more efficient and less CO2 is emitted per generated Watt, though the gains may be lost if the pipelines are not properly maintained and there is leakage.

The big hope is that natural gas is a bridging fuel, but to what exactly?

>But again, we already have 100% systems on islands today.

What islands? We're talking about a grid for a modern, developed economy with millions (or hundreds of millions) of people and heavy industry, not some dinky little island.

>Of course then we still have to face the hard problems: Industry and agriculture....

Yes. This is why I'm frustred that we're wasting our time with solar and wind and not scaling up our nuclear infrastructre. That's a low hanging fruit.
Building a real time data streaming pipeline with Kafka
Hair follicle stem cell changes cause regeneration failure after chemotherapy
As long as their politics is total control, their brand doesn't matter.
I highly recommend the book Genius of Place, a biography of the man. He had many other remarkable contributions to American history, even in journalism and healthcare.
It should be common in most European countries that have national health systems.

edit: Source: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/emmanuel-kosadinos/blog/310818/no...
Don't forget magnetic mirrors
> At this point it takes the same amount of energy (embodied energy, called grey energy in Germany) to erect a Passivhaus as it will need operating over the next 50 years.

That doesn't mean much since it takes less and less energy to 'operate' the house. For energy-positive housing it by definition takes more energy to build the house than to run it for a single day since the house is a net energy producer. Leave that fact out and use it as a headline and you can guess the reactions.

What is important is the trade-off between effort spent in creating energy-efficient infrastructure - whether it be housing or industry or roads or whatever - versus the expected returns, the projected lifetime, the means to distribute energy and more. Having an energy-positive suburb won't gain much if there are no means to transport the energy to the city centre or industry where it is needed. Insulating against -20° winter temperatures does not make sense on the Canary islands (and no, insulation is not the same as thermal buffering which can be used to lower inside temperatures during hot days, viz. adobe constructions).
Nah, dogg. We'll generate cheap, unlimited power in space and beam it to Earth with microwaves for distribution, bet.
One of the things I dislike about C++ is that any large project will have lots of code converting between a dozen custom and gratuitously different string types.
> MIPS is nearly dead

In the embedded systems space, MIPS is alive and if not kicking, at least twitching a bit. ARM has grabbed a lot of marketshare, but MIPS will likely hang on to some of the very low-clock systems.
The Sun: Am I a joke to you?
This isn't surprising, but I guess the results need to be put into perspective with the use case for distributed file systems and NFS eg. reasonable scaling for static asset serving with excellent modularity, in particular when paired with node-local caches. Of course Ceph etc. won't scale to Google Search and Facebook levels, but it's still damn practical if you're scaling out from a single HTTP server to a load-balanced cluster of those without having to bring in whole new I/O infrastructures. And they help with cloud vendor lock-in as well; for example you can use CephFS on DO, OVH, and other providers.
> I've heard people answer "Grace Hopper", "Ada Lovelace", "Charles Babbage", "Alan Turing", etc. to the same question about the origin of computers.

You forgot Gottfried W. Leibniz.

Another question is its historical impacts: did it have any influence on its further development? A good account of history should document and analyze them from different perspectives. You can have the credit of being the "first" even it doesn't have much influence, and you can have the credit of being influential even it doesn't have much publicity. And often the story is not black-and-white.

For example, we can say Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine was never completed and conclude that it has no influence on its further design. But we you know that the story of Charles Babbage helped Howard Aiken at IBM selling his machine? (Harvard Mark I).
I cut my teeth on making the jump from turbo pascal programs to GUI via the Win32 API. Its "rawness" felt fun, i.e. slinging around "long" pointers to stuff and big event handling switch statement state machines. As long as you didn't misbehave in the message loop, you could just kinda tinker endlessly. As both the UI evolved to many more complicated controls and the toolset was getting more abstract, I'd always find myself asking "dangit! i wish i could just get the UUID for the control that does the fizzywizzybizbang control that i see in Excel here!" Maybe that mindset is akin to a modern UI developer buried in quirksmode.org and their browser console debugger.
My wife surely wouldn’t. The upper deck lav leaked on our heads for half the flight from Sydney to LA. What’s worse than a 16 hour flight? A 16 hour flight where you have to stand in the aisles.
What are the inconveniences of Passivehaus?
You know, we could instead revisit the concept we have of growth. Instead of growing for the sake of it, like a tumor, we could define what kind of growth we want and in what direction, and see if it's compatible with our resources. Do we really need growth or do we need happiness? Once we scientifically solved major health issues does it really make sense to keep growing indefinitely? Couldn't we just put a limit to our population and enjoy our fully automated utopia?
I don't begrudge the research, which I think will yield infinitely more benefit than the goal.

But it's necessarily the wrong kind of fusion (D-T, unlike the sun's fusion), and it won't be efficient, or clean, or cheap even when it "works".

The whole endeavor is pie-in-the-sky if you ask me, which reminds me, there is already a fusion reactor quite nearby that runs 24/7/365(.25), for the next few billion years. We should find better ways to harness it.
I attended a small primary school (ages 4-11) and witnessed no bullying.

Whilst in secondary school (ages 11-16) I witnessed various attempts at bullying of the psychological kind- very little if anything physical. It only came to my attention recently (thanks to a former teacher) that I had avoided bullying because they had "tried" and I didn't realise and didn't care about them, which is a death knell for psychological bullying.

Whilst in 'sixth form' (16-18) I observed significant bullying of the TV/film kind. A kid who associated with the "high performing idiots" group was thrown into a hedge outside the school practically every day. The staff were aware but never witnessed it, and the student being assaulted never reported his 'friends'. He was also repeatedly the butt of psychological bullying.

In my view this occurred because the school repeatedly failed to disrupt the friendship group that had an unhealthy dynamic. After talking to teachers I found out that a common technique is to ensure the friends aren't in the same classes, and when they are to disrupt their seating. Their friendship should dwindle and they will form relationships with others.

In the sixth form case these students had persisted as they were all high achievers - schools are incentivised not to move children out of "top set" classes, and to let them stay together as they were more disruptive to other students apart.
> This section throws a few numbers out: it claims the UK Bacs system does 580,000,000 transactions a month, or about 223 transactions per second.

Curiously it claims Libra can’t do this, but posts no numbers about Libra’s throughtput. Libra’s throughput target is 1,000 transactions/sec (see Section 8: Performance in the Libra paper) with 10 second latencies on consensus time.

OK but 1,000 transactions/sec is a non-starter. A single large seller or popular event driving a live transaction burst can need thousands. Even two decades ago, a WWE event could need 15K sales per second, or 5K per second for Amazon’s black Friday.

If you’re looking to compete with the order of magnitude of a Visa/MC, you’re needing 15,000 - 25,000 per second.

For a commercially available ‘distributed ledger’ able to handle these characteristics (including service level objectives for operating it in production), take a look at the AWS QLDB we asked AWS to make available a couple years ago.

AWS introduced “managed blockchain” and the very different “QLDB” in the same keynote.

Compare under the covers to see why, despite the hype, they introduced QLDB, which is designed for real work when you know who is running the servers:

https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/

https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/

If you’re a trusted entity or a trusted consortium with legal paper among your members, you probably don’t want the blockchains, you probably want QLDB.
That reminded me of the game ‘deliver us the moon’
DBS of anterior limb of internal capsule for opioid relapse prevention
There aren't very many units out in the wild yet, I just received mine on Friday and I ordered late August.

There's some good and bad here, the hardware is surprisingly good for a $250 open source laptop (cost + shipping + taxes) but it's nowhere near as polished or usable as a comparable $250 Chromebook. The software is squarely beta quality so expect to spend time tracking updates, flashing firmware and doing things like patching u-boot from someone's github repo, etc.

Daily use annoyances: the touchpad is mediocre, battery drain while the machine is asleep is higher than I expected. Lots of things that should be possible (ARM hibernation support) aren't because rockchip based their kernel on 4.4 and the mainline upstreaming effort is slow moving.

Desktop performance is solid though, as is streaming video playback. Basic system performance is great, storage is fast, system is responsive etc.
> German North produces a lot of wind, but there's no feasible way to bring it to the South...

Technically feasible or politically feasible? There's a lot of NIMBYism around building new high-capacity power transmission lines in Germany (e.g., Suedlink, Südostlink).
Well his contribution then was recognizing that it probably was not yellow fever, typhoid or malaria and that is was very deadly. If some other doctor (that happened to be white) with better equipment was the first to really see what was going on... How is that colonial racism or anything? It's just how things were, to the western doctors Muyembe really was just someone that happened to take the blood samples.

But you know what is actually toxic national pride? This:

> "He decided that all of the blood samples collected during this Ebola epidemic will stay in Congo. Anyone who wants to study this outbreak will have to come to his institute. ... But Piot says the decision was obviously made because of how African scientists have been treated. "

Hindering scientific progress that could help his very own people out of spite and revenge!
According to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe..., ?. was only added to C# 6.0, in 2015.

Groovy had ?. in at least 2005. Then there were CoffeeScript, Kotlin, Swift and a bunch of others in the meantime.

Not that it matters :)
Looking through the history of technology the same could have been said at one time for the automobile, aviation, genetic engineering, etc. The timescale during which nuclear fusion has been pursued is relatively short and declaring it a dead end at this early stage is premature.
The viable technological path is using less energy.

It's not just about CO2: a high energy society is a society that will hit other ecological limits.

I would add that centralized power production is an issue by itself, as it seems difficult now to avoid social and political instability. So unless we develop small scale fusion, which does not seem ideal (lots of disseminated nuclear waste in the form of activated reactor materials), fusion is not ideal.
Good to hear. And +1 on the free tier thresholds. They have the same sort of free tier for their Cloud functions, which are very generous.
We have a ways to go before it would be much of a concern.

Solar heating is on the order of 5000 times our current energy utilization (there's a similar amount of cooling).

Which isn't to say it can never be a problem, just that we are a blip right now as far as direct heat added to the Earth's energy budget.
As long as it's not #BC4077
But also unlimited cheap power to reduce the heat in the atmosphere, through some kind of worldwide air conditioning. Maybe with unlimited power we can finally control our weather through heating, cooling and redirecting ocean currents and whatnot.
Maybe time to get out but if you got in below 10k usd/btc before the late 2017 spike or even after, then you're still profitable today.
Waste heat is a pretty minor issue. It’s an extremely tiny effect compared to atmospherically captured solar heat.
Man pleads guilty to controlling ex-girlfriend’s car with his computer
Putting a limit on population would imply a dystopia to most.
Right click should bring a menu with options, not change state.

3rd mouse should be a shortcut to something that can already be done
Fusion might be "unlimited", but it's not cheap. Building reactors is expensive and they have a finite lifetime.
I agree; a mix of both is necessary.

I remember in particular a piece Malcolm Gladwell wrote on football and head injuries. ( https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/19/offensive-play )

I am willing to believe that football causes head injuries for other reasons. I am generally against this. So I let a few people know about the piece. I'd also give them a warning: Malcolm Gladwell generally doesn't know what he's talking about, and it's a bad idea to pay attention to what he says. That said, this is an interesting piece by Malcolm Gladwell.

I know this is the wrong thing to do. You can use Malcolm Gladwell's piece to make arguments against football because every argument is more persuasive when Malcolm Gladwell makes it. That's his only skill, but it is very highly developed. The problem is that that's a terrible reason to believe an argument. The Malcolm-Gladwell-sounds-convincing argument can prove anything at all, as long as Malcolm Gladwell wants it to. The correct thing to do as the person being argued at is to completely dismiss whatever he says, because it will sound convincing regardless of whether it's true.
a drop here, a drop there ...
Renewables don't really add much heat in to the atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels do. Fusion nuclear is a renewable energy source.
> Maintaining a constant Value of the dollar as you yourself suggested requires active management

I don't think that it requires any management. If the value of a currency increases, then the ratio of currency to goods decreases. If a currency became so valuable that people can't trade with it, they'd trade with something else.
Anyone that would be interested in invading Switzerland has to go through an aweful lot of other countries first. Or do you really believe Switzerland needs to be ready to defend against France, Germany, Italy, Austria or Lichtenstein?

There simply is currently no conceivable threat scenario that needs to be countered.
Even if you just bounce it back to space, that would generate heat on Earth. Whatever we do with that energy will generate entropy. Our economy already produces too much entropy (in the form of pollution and ecosystem destruction, on top of bare heat) for the biosphere to cope with.
Airbus is no better. Investigation report about an incident in 2018 was just released: https://avherald.com/h?article=4b57c3dd/0000&opt=0

What happened there: wrong kind of oil was used in elevator and it went unnoticed because maintenance guides did not require any inspections of affected parts. Wrong oil caused delays in sensor triggering, which led to primary computers shutting down, believing that there was a problem with elevator.

Backup computers didn't detect gear compression correctly when the aicraft bounced on the runway (one computer believed it was on the ground, the other that it was airborne) and also shut down and locked the elevator in neutral (zero) position as a safety measure.

This happened during a touch-and-go landing on a training flight. The A320 touched down, bounced, elevator got locked, the aircraft climbed a bit, then fell down on the runway scraping and damaging engines (due to loss of control), then took off again (not enough runway left for stopping) and was now flying with no elevator and with engines about to shut down. It's a miracle that pilots managed to turn around and land safely.

In 1993, Lufthansa A320 crashed under similar conditions: landed in poor conditions, computers didn't think it was on the ground and didn't allow braking until it was too late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Flight_2904
Duncan Campbell (@dcampbell_iptv) started posting links to documents: https://twitter.com/dcampbell_iptv

UPD Reuters story: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-antitrust/facebo...

Computer Weekly story: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252473540/Lawmakers-stud...