skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Nullable reference types. Getting rid of null is good, but this proposal became confusing. They mentioned opting in assembly-wide for a while but there was then a conversation about having it just warn in some cases. I need to read the latest literature around this, but it seemed less elegant than Java just adding a monad-like Optional type and not adding loads of special-case operations with question marks everywhere.

Nullable Reference Types (NRTs) is released, so it's important to talk about what exists in an LTS form today rather than something from a draft proposal.

Firstly, there's the surface-level stuff. Reference types can be explicitly be marked as `foo?` to indicate to the compiler that the type is nullable. Mismatches are warnings to ensure backwards compatibility, since billions of lines of perfectly valid code today can't just start emitting errors across an entire codebase.

But the far more interesting side of NRT isn't that, but the compiler analysis that goes into it. It's an incredibly advanced and thorough flow-based typing system that catches numerous complicated scenarios, and a system that can be (and is) improved over time without incurring a risk of a breaking change. This analysis is equally applied to the existing nullable value types, so it's a unified model.

The other interesting side of NRT is that isn't a one-and-done feature. There's a long rollout period where the .NET ecosystem adopts this way of dealing with reference types, and to do so there need to be tools for component authors and application developers to adopt it incrementally and at their own pace. Everything in the design is incredibly deliberate and well thought-out, with numerous past designs (such as a "sidecar" format for annotations and a mechanism for managing updates to that in parallel with a package or framework!). It is imperfect, but perhaps the best that can be done given the constraints a 20 year old language imposes.

That said, I really the world could be different. Since I prefer (and work on) a typed functional language where `null` isn't much of a problem due to a different core language design, the incredible amount of engineering effort that went into NRT for C# feels slightly strange to me. But my only reasonable alternative to not making progress on this problem is, "just use a different language", which most developers do not find reasonable.

Additionally, the pedantic side of me doesn't feel that Java's optional is an any way reminiscent of monadic programming. Java simply lacks numerous features to enable this style of programming in a way that the majority of Java developers would utilize.
The big problem with Fischer Tropsch is the wasted energy. Solid oxide fuel cells can directly turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide with a little bit of electrical current, but that last oxygen atom comes off in the Fischer Tropsch reactor where it is far more likely to bind with hydrogen than it is to another oxygen molecule. This essentially means that half the hydrogen you electrolyze is going to end up back as water again. That's a lot of wasted electricity.

Biomass has potential through Fischer Tropsch though. Not much use on an aircraft carrier, but way more energy efficient to produce syngas with biomass.
It's worth reading the article. "How do you draw black?" is a teaser for a much more insightful and nuanced (and convincing) treatment.

Here's a bit more:

Given additive blending, there’s no way to darken real pixels even the slightest bit. That means that there’s no way to put virtual shadows on real surfaces. Moreover, if a virtual blue pixel happens to be in front of a real green “pixel,” the resulting pixel will be cyan, but if it’s in front of a real red “pixel,” the resulting pixel will be purple. This means that the range of colors it’s possible to make appear at a given pixel is at the mercy of what that pixel happens to be overlaying in the real world, and will vary as the glasses move.
I'm actually OK with this future. I think it's inevitable. But what to me is the choice of whether the cameras watch everyone, or just certain classes of someone.

There was a scifi novel many years ago, forget the name, where everyone's glasses were constantly live feeds. The author posited that crime went down, but also transparency amongst the powerful/elite climbed as well.
This kind of behavior in single celled organisms leads me to believe that there is a fair amount of complex logic handled by individual neurons in the brain, that is currently not being modeled in the state of the art neural networks. The bottom line, I guess is our understanding of biological intelligence has a long way to go and correspondingly AI also has a long way to go before it can hope to simulate intelligence. It also means we may need a lot more computing power to simulate a complex intelligence if each neuron has its own complex set of behaviors that need to be simulated.
Not billing often enough. Send a bill every 2 weeks. If they miss one, stop working. No negotiations.
> when newspapers and TV programs are created for the sole purpose to serve ads it just results in crap

Do you think that they are created to enlighten and entertain you? The model is: get your attention, and mix some ads in with the content. User gets content, advertiser gets customers, publisher makes profit.

The $3 you pay for a newspaper barely covers distribution costs. And they have to be created from scratch and actually printed every day.

High frequency publishing and advertising have always co existed. And the internet is just the latest iteration of high frequency publication.
Tackling your problem areas, and yes, the challenges are extreme:

Flight: Correct. Without some immense change in fuels, behaviours, or craft designs, air travel as we know it will be dead in a low-carbon economy. Battery-powered electric craft might fit a short-hop niche (they do better than I'd thought), but with ~100-300 miles range and low speeds. Ground rail is likely better. Ultralight drones could address numerous informational uses. Passenger and cargo, not so much. Airships can get off the ground, but frequently crash into it again.

Shipping: Not quite so bleak as all that. There was wind, and ships have far more flexible fuel options than aircraft. A hybrid wind-power system (best of efficiency and discretionary power), and alternative fuels (alcohol, biodiesel, pelletised solid fuels, e.g., wood scraps) are at least viable.

Heat and A/C: Here, as well as much urban / national transport, a radical rethinking of the built environment could offer tremendous gains. This would likely mean both land-use changes (greater density), passive designs, and district heating and cooling through thermal energy storage (both heat and cold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage) offer at least some options. Humidity/moisture control might be a larger challenge.

Industry: Here specifics matter a great deal. Sourcing, raw-material processing, heating and cooling, refining, machining, treatments, etc., all have highly-specific demands. Interestingly, processing of petroleum itself consumes huge amounts of energy.

Concrete/Steel/Construction: I'll generalise and say materials. The (possibly) bright spot is that the reason we rely on concrete, steel (and other materials such as aluminium) to the extent we do is because abundant cheap energy changed economics of materials sourcing. With higher energy costs (and concerns over CO2 emissions), we'll likely shift back to other alternatives, including stone, brick, possibly ceramics, wood, and potentially new/novel materials. Not to say the picture is rosy, but recognising that changing costs change the entire landscape is key.

Agriculture: Most energy use is in nitrogen fixation (relying on natural gas, and the reason why some small, gas-rich countries, such as Trinidad and Tobago, have such huge CO2 emissions). There are some alternative nitrogen-fixation methods, and reliance on, say, solar thermal rather than natural gas might be successful. After chemicals, power inputs tend to be of planting and harvesting equipment, water pumping (a huge demand), transport, and cold-chain. Comparatively those are relatively small.

Heating/cooling is likely the biggest demand after transport. There's ample low-hanging fruit, though most involve behavioural changes and a tremendous asset reallocation. Both are socially and politically exceedingly difficult.

For those interested in the topic, Vaclav Smil has published numerous books looking at virtually all aspects of energy utilisation, including its history (Energy and Civilization), materials, transitions, and more. Very highly recommended:

https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3As...
Yes, it is coming from the ROM.

Well spotted, it looks like you are right. A quick glance here
https://computerarcheology.com/Arcade/SpaceInvaders/Code.htm...

and here

https://www.fontzip.com/apple-ii-screen-typeface

Shows a distinct similarity.
RocketLab launches 10th Electron mission with successful rocket booster re-entry
Base load generation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load

Or put another way the wind doesn't always blow at the same rate.
Best line on Internet I read today. :)
BTW, could you provide any ref re Chemical industry in Singapore.
1) I thought that getting clients would be relatively easy, but getting new ones is more about trust than anything else. I moved back to my home town after spending two years away and noticed that my professional network there was quite poor so it took awhile to find a gig (~2 months and it's not in my home town).

2) When looking for opportunities (any kind really), the 80/20 rule applies. Try to focus on the 20% that produce 80% of the results. In our case we started by cold contacting, with quite poor results. Instead, we've been pretty successful using local freelancing networks/sites ran by larger consultancies to outsource the work they don't have the resources to do. Granted that's just subcontracting but it's a decent way to start out. I'd imagine the way the 80/20 rule applies when building direct client relationships is to focus on large-ish corporatios with decent financials that are already using contractors.
Happy ex customer of Freshbooks (ex because I am no longer consulting). I will say if you are disciplined and want to save every penny, you can get by with Excel and word for invoicing, but once you get your first client or two, Freshbooks is real nice to have. Easier, invoices look better, you get reporting.

And the Weinberg book is top notch. Anyone who wants to solve problems in business should read it.
That's not true in my experience. I'd put San Francisco transit above Seattle, San Jose, and Los Angeles and below Portland.
Why at the cost of the other two parties? The publisher profits and the consumer gets subsidised content
Try run an aluminium smelter or a 50m cement kiln on intermittent power.
Wouldn’t that be the most amazing and scary hardware security startup, I briefly looked into adding that capability to my security system but didn’t find anything. I know mall some clothing stores have had that tech for years, for marketing purposes.
Make suitable insurance for the case of bankruptcy a prerequisite then.
> I am going to have to learn French from scratch in about a month and I'm finding the prospect daunting.

I'm intrigued by the fact that you can see this requirement coming up. What's imposing it on you? What defines "success" in learning French?

If you're interested in the experimental views of a random person on the internet, babies learn language in the following sequence:

1. Listen to the language with no understanding or context. By the time you're born, you will be able to tell the difference between your language(s), and a foreign language.

2. Practice producing sounds that could be part of the target language. If you're learning French, then at this stage you're pronouncing nonsense syllables, but at least they're nonsense French syllables.

3. Be exposed to many example sentences for which you already know the meaning. (This is actually an ongoing process which never terminates -- seeing an unfamiliar word used in a sentence for which you know the meaning is how you learn new words.)

4. Learn some single words. ("Mom". "Moon". "Jump".)

5. Use your words to communicate with the people around you. Look how they smile!

6. With your growing understanding of sentence structure, move on to sentences.

---

As an adult learner, you can collapse the phases (as do babies, really) and take advantage of formal instruction to learn things much faster than a baby can. I strongly recommend using formal instruction to go from "nothing" to "beginner" level. But stages 2, 3, and 6 remain crucially important for pronunciation, understanding, and production, and you should probably focus some time on each of them.

You may not need certain abilities. Foreign learners frequently never achieve native-like pronunciation, because strange pronunciation is only a minor barrier to communication. And many people learn a language to the point that they can understand it but can't really produce it themselves.

And a word of warning from personal experience -- I can converse well enough over text messages in Chinese for Chinese speakers to feel basically comfortable. All of my practice is in text -- in person, I still can't speak at all. You'll only develop skills that you use.
Why is it more likely that the operator heard a bunch of arcane terms that weren't actually said?
"you should be calling for the people in CA to be personally culpable"

I am all for it. But let's follow first come first served and start punishing the earlier perpetrators first.

What you call "whataboutism" is simply people's natural feel for justice. When you advocate punishment make sure it applies EQUALLY TO EVERY ENTITY GUILTY. If not then people will start pointing fingers and quite rightfully. It is not them being "whataboutists". It is you behaving like/protecting a hypocrite.
The specific energy (mass energy density) of pure hydrogen is 3x higher than the next best hydrocarbon fuel. It doesn't have the best volumetric energy density, but it could be good enough as liquid hydrogen. The big pushback with liquid hydrogen is that everybody thinks you need to have cryogenic storage. That's a lie. Mildly insulated tanks would work extremely well, as the fuel consumption rates of aircraft would easily exceed the evaporation rates of the fuel. It might be problematic if they sit on the runway for hours waiting for takeoff, but as long as the plane is flying, liquid hydrogen is a pretty damn good fuel.
You can do it, or explain it but you can't do both: proof see above
This is not a solution. CO2 emissions in the upper atmosphere are problematic regardless of how you make the fuel. We need a different propulsion system for aviation, period.

The generally accepted "impact" multiplier for aviation emissions is 2.6, so let's say the fuel was "carbon neutral" - wouldn't it then be 1.6? Not 0.

Edit:

Unless we're talking about straight hydrogen-fueled engines, is that where this article is aimed? Biofuels and Synfuels are still carbon-based AIUI, but TFA is a bit ambiguous here.
I went to a magic leap developer event and tried the headset first hand. It was truly magical. It made me giggle. Now, at the current price point it’s too high for me to buy as a toy and I haven’t really been struck with any killer app ideas to buy it as a dev kit, but I really think it’s an extremely cool piece of kit.
As always, Matt Levine commentary on this is very lucid. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-06/green-...

> I wrote about it back in 2015, when it was proposed, and it hasn’t changed materially in the four and a half years between then and when it was passed by the House yesterday. What I said then was that this bill is more or less an effort to codify existing insider trading law: “It just keeps as much of current law as possible consistent with throwing out the controversial Newman conclusion,” I wrote, and since then the court decision in U.S. v. Newman has been pretty much reversed anyway, which means that this mostly keeps the law the same as it currently is.

> Now some people think that current U.S. insider trading law is too strict, and lots of other people think that it is too lenient, and if you think either of those things then you will probably have objections to this bill. In particular, many many many many people think that U.S. law should have a “parity of information” standard in which anyone who has material nonpublic information, no matter how they obtained it, should not be allowed to trade. If you want a parity-of-information standard, you will be disappointed in this bill, which maintains the current U.S. rule that trading on material nonpublic information is only illegal if “such information has been obtained wrongfully.” “Wrongfully” includes getting information by theft, bribery, computer hacking, or through “a breach of any fiduciary duty, a breach of a confidentiality agreement, a breach of contract, or a breach of any other personal or other relationship of trust and confidence.”

> [...]

> The real point here is:

> 1. the current law is what it is, but

> 2. it is uncertain and shifting and judge-made and not written down in any one place, so

> 3. just writing it down is an improvement.
A pre-Facebook project by Mark Zuckerberg that ended up on Slashdot in 2003
We could have never developed nuclear without the sun getting us started though...
More like desperate to fill demand for chips for unsavvy customer who don't know amd exists yet, so pulling whatever old wagers they had in the garage. 2core 3.2GHz is fine for mass market PCs.
Agreed! And send the initial bill after the first week to familiarize the client with your invoicing process. (They typically appreciate this.)
That's true, it can be really annoying, especially when you don't know the cause. On the plus side, it means I've now picked up a new skill that I didn't originally need or want.

I've also found, like, 3 date bugs in an application where I was assuming that that the server and the client would be in the same time zone.
Haha. I made an app to track comments to upvote ratio. Its usual a better interesting story indicator than anything else.
Gen X and Boomer hippies also enjoyed some van life. It's not new. Millennials didn't invent wanderlust.
The fact that you can see these malicious scripts being served directly from a Baidu domain is a good reminder that effectively all major Chinese tech companies are totally at the whim of the Chinese government.

It makes using any product / service from a Chinese based company basically never worth it just because of the security concerns.
The powerful/elite can simply avoid public places and deal behind closed doors. Seems unlikely that it will increase transparency amongst that group.
Er, if you want pure android why don't you buy a pixel?
I have been using Brave on macOS for more than 3 years now. I used Brave on Android for a while and I am currently using Brave on iOS as my daily driver. I don't use their BAT system or anything associated with that. I like their default vanilla experience and the fact that I can install Chrome plugins on Brave. I still use uBlock origin on top of their default blockers. I use the built-in Tor experience time-to-time as well.

To me, Brave is what Firefox should have been. Good UI, good defaults, fast enough, support for Chrome plugins, etc. I am slightly concerned about their future direction though (if they enforce the BAT system down users' throats).
Dunno, the answer is generally if you don't want crapware, buy a pixel.
If a nuclear expert is working in the middle east they will seriously have "get assassinated by Mossad" on their list of concerns. And that isn't hyperbole, it is just reasonably unlikely.

Planning a politically fraught project literally sandwiched between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a level of risk that needs very cautious consideration. It wouldn't be at all surprising if a major power just quietly says "No, you can't encourage that sort of expertise in this region". There are a whole bunch of "they wouldn't do that it is illegal" style possibilities that would not happen in the UK that could reasonably eventuate in the Middle East. Including invasions related to oil shipping.

Finding an oasis in the desert does not mean one is safe from dust storms.
Machine learning reveals how much of a Shakespeare play was written by others
How does nuclear compare to windmills with flywheels?
So, like van life?
How did they go? Was it sufficient?
I don't know the chemistry all that well (other than the net overall balance). But if there are alternative pathways ... that could be useful. I do believe that there are catalysts (generally iron, thankfully not very exotic) involved.

There's also the Sabatier process, which yields methane rather than liquid fuels. I believe that can be further processed to arrive at longer-chain hydrocarbons. HC6-HC10 chains are roughly petrol/gasoline, HC12 is about kerosene, and HC16 or so roughly diesel, as I understand. Methane is CH4.

The problem with biomass is that our present energy demands are immense. A sufficient amount for military aviation needs, possibly. Enough to sustain present levels of commercial and private aviation: no.

HANPP / the photosynthetic ceiling is a real bitch.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...

Boeing claimed a major "breakthrough" some years back. It ... doesn't add up:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings...

When I'd first started looking at fuel concerns, I'd thought biofuels offered a viable path out. I'm utterly convinced they don't. At least not for a world with 1-7 billion drivers.

Maybe with 100 million cars. Henry Ford suggested alcohol, from grains, as a fuel circa 1900. At the time, 20% of US grain production was dedicated to transport, though utilising a somewhat different prime mover: horses.
Apologies. I should have clarified. United States of America.

I don't believe it's dysfunctional for this particular reason. There are for sure trade-offs between simplification & trying to optimize for the best outcome. A simpler tax code would be nice but then people on all sides of the political aisle would start saying we should really give X a break for Y reasons and that's how it seems to get complicated.

There is literally a 20% tax break for most small businesses this year in the US.

Healthcare can be cut in half if you are below certain requirements but make a $1 more & you pay the whole bill. This one I agree seems silly. Though it's maybe to simplified & should be more complex with a sliding scale.

A popular move for freelancers is to start an S-Corp LLC where you pay yourself a fair wage compared to others in the industry. This money gets taxed hard. Harder personally for you than if you worked for someone else. You can pay yourself dividends though with any extra money your earn as long as it's less than your wage income. This money gets taxed much less.

How you invest your money is also taxed all sorts of different ways.

Note - I'm not a tax professional & the above is just my understanding. Someone who is a professional or has more experience would give better advice hence my original post.
What a bunch of hand wavy bullshit. TLDs are like property. No one will buy into a system where they lose their valuable property. Facebook, Google, etc. aren’t interested in a decentralized, Wild West internet. The only way they get onboard with an alternative is if they control it and that’s way worse than the current system.

Today they sell .org claiming it’s not forever. Tomorrow they’ll be doing an IPO claiming it’ll be around for eternity.
Global measles cases surge amid stagnating vaccinations
Fischer Tropsch is typically what people are talking about when they talk about synthetic fuels, and when that is the case, extra heat doesn't help, apart from starting the reaction. You need enough heat to get it to about 250-300C, but once the reaction has started, you need to aggressively remove heat from the reactor, as the reaction is highly exothermic.