skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many factors driving this:

Domestically

1. Perverse incentives in some provinces still reward coal production.

2. Diminishing incentives for solar and other renewable.

3. Pivot to interior development of interior regions, bureaucrats are adopting the same building + smoke stack strategies that worked on coastal cities. There's was some internal response - many of the proposed coal plants are being eliminated.

4. Keep in mind China is still at 60% urbanization rate. A lot of construction related CO2 is basically for modern housing stock - commonly referred to as "ghost cities" - but they get occupied eventually.

5. Renewable is still central to domestic energy security in response to US security competition. Previously, renewable was a response to air quality complaints, now it has to be balanced with security.

US-SINO trade war

5. Increased pressure for Chinese energy security - China has access to essentially infinite amount of domestic coal. Now that US seems to be withdrawing from Gulf security because US is energy independent from shale, there's more urgency in China to build up coal security at least short term.

6. Reliance on construction to maintain growth. Related to 3&4.

7. Related to #3, economic pressures from trade war might motivate more coal plants to be built. There was also a resurgence in shadow banking after deleveraging campaign was cut short due to trade war.

Globally

8. Exporting infrastructure capacity means more coal plants along Belt & Road.

I'm of mixed feelings, cheap goal -> development. Eliminating poverty and development is more pressing than climate change. There isn't a climate change strategy that can handle uplifting the developing world into developed status. I think that's like 3/4 of the world. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything in the mean time to figure out how to mitigate, but ethically we should be working towards an end goal of X universal consumption baseline. X being much higher than global average now and probably much lower than western levels. If that's beyond global carrying capacity then I guess WW3.

E: typos
Amnesty slams Facebook, Google over 'pervasive surveillance' business model
War obviously.

Kidding aside, it does seem like VR probably has value as a kind of exposure therapy..
It's even odds that a study like this won't be replicated[1], so it's not worth much.

I think the GP's only indefensible claim is "none of this is true," the observations the researchers made could all be statistically valid and people may be "seeking social change" by moral grandstanding.

After all, you have a mess of political tribes vying for influence, and the dominant tribe is the one that broadly gets to set the rules.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psycholo...
On either side of various political disagreements, you commonly find each side regards the other's position as immoral, and the other person thus morally bankrupt. I think this is what's here referred to as dehumanising.

Arguments over abortion rights commonly frame the opposition as condoning infanticide on one side or violating bodily autonomy on the other. Each framing creates a morally bankrupt opposition.

Both those for and against socialism / redistribution of wealth see their opposition as wanting to take unearned wealth.
This is a seriously great idea and looks well executed.

Just to add to the chorus of Firefox requesters. I’m sure you have limited dev resources but the spirit of this concept is very aligned with Firefox and less so Chrome. So it might be worth your time even if chrome has greater market share.

Look forward to seeing where you go with this project.
They may have similar effects, but their intent is very different, which means who gets blamed is very different. "Planned obsolescence" means evil, greedy corporations. "Value engineering" means consumers want "cheaper" not "better", which means we are the evil, greedy ones. But I'm not greedy, so it must be the corporations!
I read a while ago in an article from the APA that soldiers who completed VR simulations of trauma were better able to handle stressful situations.
Depends on shareholders, doesn't it? Those are the people that 'make up' the corp. The rest are pawns that either fall in line or end up recognizing that the only way to win the game is to not play (and thus quit).
Have you tried elite:dangerous?
I'm not sure about the index controllers with a Quest but the game is supported on the Quest via the link cable it seems: https://half-life.com/en/alyx/vr

Basically anything the Rift can do, the Quest can do too.
Agreed. That helped also to make gems such as Black Mesa, a 100% fan made recreation of the first HL using HL2 engine and graphics.
I wonder what would become of this game if they added a proper story, characters interactions, NPCs, subplots etc. (think Mass Effect style).

Here's a full walkthrough for those living under a rock when it came out:*)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brFEN4x9Xao
Maybe more on this website, but how many people test read/write speeds of SD cards, or track their lifespan.
I think Valve has the option to play king-maker here. They seem to have everything but the inclination to dominate the game streaming market. I don't blame them for not wanting to get into it as running giant hardware farms is way outside their forte. But imagine a streaming service coming out that was tied to your steam account, letting you run all those games but keeping the ability to download them and run them on your PC.

I don't really see Sony doing that... I could see MS doing it though as it plays into their cloud ambitions and they seem more open to alliances than the other big cloud players.
They added this view after Google announced Reader would be shutting down. I was one of the people asking for a headline view like Reader had.
Not that I would personally blame you, but the collapse of WeWork hasn't directly affected peoples' jobs, home values, or retirement savings. The implosion of the company has left the rest of the world pretty unscathed.
There is a definition of stock market as a mechanism of wealth transfer from active investors to patient/intelligent investors.

Most of the people are jumping one over the other to lose money as quickly as possible on some fantastical promise of profits. Human nature is like that. Intelligent people made money out of this sentiment since money had been invented.
I'd love to see you try. It's easy to turn $20 into $40, but as you approach larger numbers it keeps getting harder.
You can both be right, if we take the parent comment to mean “often” when they say always. A lot of political discussions I see are quick to point the finger at the other side without realizing the non-partisan nature of the problem.
This has got to be the most narrowly targeted game ever.

I played through all of HL/HL2/Ep1/Ep2 IIRC, but I can barely even remember the story clearly it was so long ago. And it's such a blur maybe I never finished Ep2.

I was 21 when HL1 came out but I didn't get to play it till I was like 24 maybe when I had gotten out of school and got a nice computer & some money. HL2 came out when I was 27.. still playing games but I don't remember beating it till much later. Probably 2010, by which point I was married and had bought a house.

Now I'm 42 and I have a 7 year old.. so I'm old enough to actually remember this, don't really have the time to play anymore.. and I'd be looking at buying a new PC & VR equipment to play it.. yah no thanks.

That and I remember HL2 and Ep1/Ep2 taking forever. The whole thing was good, unlike time sinks like Oblivion and Skyrim that were full of filler, but it still took forever to play through.

Just seems like a small target of players who are old enough to fondly remember the original + still have time to play long form games + still have gaming equipment + have VR/are willing to buy VR.

Even as an engineer who knows more than a usual amount of gamers including younger players I'm not sure I know anyone who has VR equipment.
If you're 15-20 do you care about this or do you just think it's your Dad's stuff?
The funny thing is that it happens at every single level, no matter how ridiculous or serious the topic is: football teams, battlefield vs call of duty, right vs left, climate change, pro/anti abortion, religions, &c.

Put two people long enough in the same room and they'll find a reason to kill each other. It reminds me of that podcast about tribalism: https://youarenotsosmart.com/transcripts/transcript-tribal-p...
I feel obligated to copy my fave, because I just can’t stop laughing—

“Detective Wilhelm Schmidt’s raspy voice poured through the telephone receiver like a dump truck of gravel unburdening its load—much like the trucks that worked around the clock at Rohrer’s Quarry off of 1-81, transporting payloads of lime, sandstone, crushed rock, and gypsum—though with Detective Schmidt’s heavy German accent, excavation on its own would not suffice, and a second, albeit entirely different industry would need to be invoked to really paint a crystal clear picture of his voice.”
Do you know that Apple releases a lot of open source software and even maintains the open source CUPS print server, which is heavily used in Linux and Unix systems? Furthermore, just about all of their past releases of MacOS, iOS and OS X Server are open sourced as well. There's a great incentive to open source software. It literally invites developers to make your platform better for you, for free. I'm not an Apple fanboy, but you gotta give Apple some credit here where its due.

https://opensource.apple.com/
>Minimalism is something only the truly rich can actually afford to do

Hardly. I know lots of minimalist people that barely make ends meet (and could have loaded their credit cards to get a house full of junk like other people I know, but they didn't) -- you just have to get out of the rat race.

A writer that lives in a bare apartment, doesn't even have a TV set, doesn't need a designer espresso machine, or to stuff the house full of IKEA, is not a "truly rich" person.

Some such people I know make like 20-40K/year (US equivalent, they are in Europe, but I'm pretty certain tons of people like that exist in the US too. E.g., does this person look "truly rich": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmfz_8b5fA ).

And yes, this includes people with kids.

It's also not about having few but hella expensive "quality" things. E.g. you don't need a Macbook to be a minimalist, you can do it with a knackered PC laptop you use for 10 years.
AI has the potential for significant impact on civilization, but to embrace it as being only positive is naive at best.
Try playing death stranding. It’s very calming making “deliveries” while enjoying the great graphics and music.
CO2 is different from AQI problems. One is a silent problem of long term consequence, difficult to get people fired up about because they can’t grasp the threat so easily. The other is “my day really sucks, they should fix this now!” Kind of problem. The problems have different solutions; e.g. the USA has largely solved its AQI problem by using lots of natural gas, but that still contributes to the CO2 problem.
Fastmail – 20 Years Old
Building your own newsletter should sit at the heart of any digital comms. Social media as the layer above with copious video and photography, but always having the call to action to sign up for the newsletter. You should “own” your audience contact details, rather than optimise for followers on proprietary networks that you need to continually pay to reach.

You should also own your own payment gateway, be that for patronage or content subscriptions or ticket selling. Luckily with a little bit of upfront effort this is easy to do with something like Stripe and will set you up for long term financial independence and viability.
Isn't this the same company that phishes its users by asking them for their banking login and 2FA information directly in third party apps? I'm not sure if this is the sort of regulatory barrier breaking worth celebrating.
tbf, those workflow probably can be replaced by a much better alternative. The only downside is people who wouldn’t learn a newer system of interaction with their computer. It’s like 737 Max8 except that mistakes and problems won’t cause lives to be lost.
Better, cheaper, faster, thanks Amazon.

Plus let’s be realistic any actual good stuff isn’t going to be worth attempting to copy, say an iPhone or some Burton snowboarding boots.

Amazon computer mice? HDMI cables? Socks? We are just watching commodities being realized for what they are.
Personally, my shortened version would be "Slack is terrible."

Slack really is just such a frustrating tool to use (or rather be forced to use).
Does that sort of regulatory capture accomplish the same effect though? If you're a competitor in the space, you'd either a) not have any access to an ingredient you want, or b) would have to go through the trouble of finding a new company to import it AND get them licensed (which I assume is likely a difficult thing to do).

To an extent, the barrier to entry could end up so high that it's effectively _as if _ Coca-Cola has a legal stranglehold.
The reason the rocket is so expensive is that it has to lift a lot of weight, mostly fuel. I charge that to the fuel's account.
Why are your hands displayed as hands if you’re holding “game-pads”? Or are there actual gloves?
>What makes SQL Server so much better than, say, PostgreSQL or MariaDB?

Tooling
Secret Diary Of An Entrepreneur [2016]
I remember everyone saying Blizzard would release map making tools for Overwatch like they did for Starcraft and Valve did for TF2/CSGO.
Seems like a great way to add longevity to the game and the community content can even help fund the game.
I own a pair of all birds. I think I paid around $100 for them. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual cost of the shoe was around $8.

Amazon is a margin-eating business("your margin is my opportunity"). You can't expect margins like that to just go on unmolested from anyone. I'm honestly surprised Amazon hasn't done more of this - e.g. in the makeup industry which has notoriously high margins.
Ask HN: Whats your pen and paper setup?
Following up on this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581229), What's your pen and paper setup? I love hearing about it and getting ideas.

Right now I'm on LEUCHTTURM1917 dotted grid hard back, TWISBI ECO fountain pen, with Noodler's Baystate Blue.

I've tried a couple different "systems", but I just keep coming back to keeping everything in one book, one topic per page, and having a to-do list that I re-write when it gets a couple pages in.

Professionally I've tried using pen and paper, but the main obstacle is that at any given point in time I have maybe 10-12 different projects, and the projects take months to complete. If I have it in a notebook, the projects get buried and it's hard to pull up the info. But for my personal stuff, I love kicking back at the end of the day with a fountain pen, notebook, glass of wine, and get organized.

What's your setup?
Is that the bar?
On the other hand, a $14 empty bottle for hand soap, or $180 for a cheese knife... I mean, come on.

There is mindfulness about what you own, and then there is selling overpriced junk using your brand just like everyone else. Sure, you can be mindful and enjoy your MK $220 fruit bowl, but really what you are buying is the brand, not the bowl.

I think there is an implicit "don't buy things just because you want other people to see you bought it", which is contradictory with the idea of selling overpriced knickknacks that only serve to show other people that you bought into some kitchy fad.
You're comparing work boots to what are effectively wool slippers with rubber soles - of course there's a difference in quality because they're not even the same market segment.

I agree with you they're overpriced, but not for the reasons you stated.
That looks like a run-on sentence as well. After "streets" should either be a period, or at least a semi-colon. Maybe its missing a couple of colons in the second half as well. Well done!
You can't easily know where your elbows are correctly. In games where they try to fake it, it feels dysphoric to have the elbows in the wrong place.
You can't develop PTSD from VR because VR isn't real. Even if you get scared it's not the same kind of fear as being in a situation where you can actually get hurt, or die, or you actually kill another human being.
The Orange Box came out and was a big hit when I was still a kid, now in my 20s I certainly remember the series fondly. Not that I have a lot of spare time either.
The big problem with China’s renewable energy investments is that they are largely out west while the problems are largely out east. They are planning a super grid to solve this, but it isn’t there yet and its not clear when it will be.
Only hand position is tracked by the controller.

And trying to use ik / kinematics to infer the player's pose by just using head and hand positions creates a very jarring effect when it is inaccurate.

It turns out to be much more immersive with the floating hands than you would at first think.
well, he will never work in this town again :/
I agree that would be an easy move for Google to make.

I would imagine that there would then be an incentive for potential donors to, rather then giving cash, pay for messages that fly under the radar but are designed to support a particular campaign.
> Has anyone actually done that, or are you speculating?

There are videos on YouTube of people using Xbox game streaming, but it requires setting up a VPN at home which presumably few people do.

Edit: with the Stadia launch, I'm currently working on setting up a Raspberry PI as a VPN server to try this myself.
FWIW, the exclusivity agreements only work because they interact in a virtuous cycle with the incredible amount of effort Coca-Cola has put into building their brand with consumers. Nobody signs exclusivity agreements with PC Cola[0].

[0]: http://www.presidentschoice.ca/en_CA/products/productlisting...
Yes, I see that. However, after reading the last paragraph of this news article on the same subject (https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a29861192/fifth-for...), I'm intrigued, and I think this definitely warrants more investigation:

Science Alert points out that scientists on other teams have already been looking for a particle that fits the description of the X17 particle, like how the Atomki team gave a description to a criminal sketch artist who is now trying to matchmake the sketch with a logical explanation. The more scientists who are on the hunt for the fifth force, the more likely their research will all eventually cohere into one explanation.
The Raku Beginner Tutorial
Not to mention Versailles was built with taxpayers money.
any pointers of who you might be referring to?
That's not a counter at all, you are almost agreeing.
I would not say a steady flow, there were two to three students two months per summer these last three years, but they helped a lot anyway indeed :-)

And it was fun to work with them. The first "cohort" of three students called themselves the Aude Team and they put that in their internship report.
>"modern laptops are good enough."

Good enough for what? I am not sure I understand what you are claiming or how it disagrees with an OP. The point is, for many users the computer is just where they run a browser.

It does not matter whether they have desktop or laptop, and how powerful they are.
A Place for Polymaths
Simply, that's an extremely difficult criminal enterprise to pull of especially on an ongoing basis and for what gains? I would only see to do so for spite and active defiance of the law. Is that worth hefty fines, investigations, possible charges and jail time?

A break up usually means many of these people are laid off or move on. Every separate company would have its own books that would either need to be public if they remain public entities or have audited financials that match expenses to revenue and investments. Not an easy thing to hide QTR over QTR. Furthermore, depending on how the companies are broken up, they will be acquired by other companies or PE rather than be stand-alone enterprises. Lastly, whistleblowers.

TL;DR
It's not worth it for spite and any significant gains or advantages that are imagined, are probably significant enough to be noticed by the government or some enterprising analyst.
Website says they support teleportation based movement, shift based movement, and continuous movement with the controllers.

https://half-life.com/en/alyx/vr
I think you underestimate how popular Half-Life was. The #1 game played on steam right now is a former HL mod, Counter Strike. I don't think the market for HL is small at all.

VR, though, is a different story. That absolutely limits the market. That being said, I'd wager that a majority of people who play VR games on PC will likely buy this game, as it's probably the first true AAA title developed specifically for VR.
The controllers are in your hands, and they can be tracked as precisely and reliably as your head position. The position of your arms could be concluded from full-body tracking data, but that is imprecise, only supported by some devices, jittery, and has some weird edge cases, because it's based on depth sensing.
> When Valve puts their full muscle and creative energy behind something as a flagship, lead-off hitter, they've yet to disappoint.

Genuine question: when would you say is the last time they did that? I don't really think of Dota 2 or CS:GO or whatever to be "flagships." I'd have to go back to, Portal 2, I guess, but I'm not sure even that I would call a "flagship," just a really good game. Certainly the Orange Box as a whole... but that was 12 years ago. Even Portal 2 is 8 years ago.
http://wiki.c2.com/?TeaspoonsVsTablespoons
Catalina 10.15 has been my worst ever. MS Word documents now totally @#$% disappear on saving. Fortunately doing a hard shutdown usually causes them to reappear.... in the Trash, along with three dozen zero-byte recovery folders.

1/10. Would not upgrade again.
citations please? All the reviews I read said it worked great on home networks.
So the worst case scenario is all the marketing departments burn down?
Neil Young quits Facebook because of its “obvious commitments” to right politics
Do the items in this store come with a guarantee they'll make you happy?

If they don't, how can anyone be sure they won't end up in the "Random crap I bought for no good reason and never really wanted or needed" pile?
Fair enough. That's why I threw the "on this" bit in.
Nature's recipe for making leaves
Or to put it another way it desensitizes people to violence.
This game is a lot more cartoony and blue/orange than Half-Life 2, which had a very distinctive low-saturation photorealistic style. However, it's less cartoony than half-life 1. It's fitting that a game set between them chronologically would mix their art styles.
It's not between sticking around or quitting. They could have gone out and found a new job. One that presumably pays more than unemployment and quite possibly given the current stage of the economic cycle, more than their current job.
Looks like you've got it backward - as long as your $16b doesn't turn into $8b (negative fifty percent), you're doing better than this guy. If you put the $16b in any kind of mutual find, you're going to get a positive return, even if it's a single digit percentage, and it'll be much better than this guy.
The EU is its members. Every EU country voted to phase out incandescent bulbs, so that includes yours. This was not something imposed on your country against its will.
I've decided to limit myself to one bookcase full of books, for similar reasons. Similarly, I'm trying to get rid of any technology that I can readily go buy another one at a reasonably cost anywhere.