skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Computers have evolved into commoditized entertainment appliances. Nobody who spends their time watching TV is expected to know how to fix their TV or even how it works: it just does, and everyone's happy.

It's not even a new thing. Granted, when computers were less common, it was of course more likely that someone who owned one also had an interest in it beyond the bare basics. Still, I had friends who didn't know anything more than how to plonk a disk into the drive of their Amiga 500 to start a game, or otherwise learned the bare minimum required to for example load a C64 game from tape. And let's not even talk about the Nintendo crowd. What a bunch of ignoramuses!

Those who are interested in how computers work will learn about it. The rest will treat it as the appliance it's intended to be and go about their lives, spending their time getting proficient in other areas and skills instead.
Only it isn't like that at all.
I'm a diplomat working on international norms for cyber and information warfare. I'm trying to get countries to agree on how to use and not use their capabilities, the influence on global democracy, the connection to armed conflict and the future of interstate relations. In practice, this means meeting a lot of people and spending a lot of time negotiating with other countries in scrappy conference rooms in the UN and elsewhere, sometimes in weird anonymous locations.

On the side, I'm an advisor to an impact investment foundation that is expanding their operations to East Africa. They're setting up an investment fund and accelerator programs to help companies tackle development challenges.

I'm also involved in a startup that is working to develop a new fintech app to create more data and access to credit for small-scale businesses in East Africa. It's a basic PWA app, not released yet, which has some real potential of scaling up and addressing some pretty substantial development challenges. (If anyone is really good with writing a bare-bones PWA based on Gatsby optimised for speed and low-bandwidth environments, please give me a shout).

I've had a weird career. Started out as a programmer in the late 90's, did my own startup in the mid 00's which was a half-baked success, moved to Africa for a few years and worked for the UN, moved back home and had kids, moved back to Africa and worked as a diplomat covering lots of conflicts in the Great Lakes region, moved back home again, worked for the impact foundation for a year and then rejoined diplomacy to do cyber work.
Hydro is not possible in most locations. Diversification is important, but each region must have its own 99.95% reliable power sources.

The national grid cannot provide power beyond a few hundred miles without major losses in power. If you look at Quebec, as an example, they lose between 20-40% of their power in transmission because the hydro dams are so much further north than the population centers.
Do you think we should base all our hope into things that are not even in the labs yet ?

I prefer to use good ol' technologies such as power plants/damns, they are reliable, they can be done locally (most of solar panels are coming from China), they can be repaired and we can handle them country wise easily.

If we want to reduce our CO2 emissions, we move to gaz (coal -> gaz is -20%), we reduce our consumption (building isolation is -30%, sometimes -50%), and we massively reduce cars usage (by developing trains, another good ol' technology that works really well).
>At the risk of sounding like fatalist...

No, you sound like a realist. My wife has been an ardent environmentalist her whole adult life, but she has echoed this sentiment to me, to the extent she would rather people not even recycle. It is, she says, the security theater of environmentalism. Political action is needed.

In fact, I believe the populist movements around the world will soon meet with climate change environmentalism, and we will see a great voluntary contraction, supported by governments, that will indeed make a big dent on the problem. Until then, not using plastic straws and veganism is just theater.
Nate Diaz is one:

""Speaking about his plant-based diet, the athlete said: "I'm going on and off.

"I was a complete vegan for eight years, but I would dabble into some seafood every now and then.

"Now, I dig fish.""

https://www.plantbasednews.org/culture/athlete-on-off-vegan-...
It's actually a bit more like a hybrid of slack and ventrilo, but for fandoms and gaming. I primarily use discord for group chats and playing TTRPGs online. but I'm also in several podcast fan servers (official and unofficial) where a community of folks with common interests congregates.

Creators have really begun to actively use it to manage and engage with their fan-bases, and I bet there are some companies that use it as a slack alternative.

This isn't even mentioning the wide variety of bots and integrations for Discord, or how private text chats can enable/switch to audio or video communication.
As I stated in the immediately following tweet in the thread, I was not presented with those forms at signing time. I had no idea they existed or that my signature would be applied to them.
This - I see comments strawmanning "environmentalists" and "activists" stopping nuclear power in these threads. I find it hard to believe that activism would successfully block almost all nuclear construction for decades in the US and EU.

Environmentalists are against fracking, coal, oil and pipelines, yet these sources have managed to be built pretty much endlessly since the dawn of the movement.

GE, Westinghouse and others in nuclear industry are hardly unfamiliar with lobbying and getting things done in almost any other industry. There is a lot of money to be made if nuclear was as cheap as some claim.

Instead the nuclear power plant operators in North America and the EU lobby for new government subsidies instead:

https://energynews.us/2019/04/24/midwest/ohio-nuclear-subsid...

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/05/30/ontari...

https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-nuclear-energy-idUSL6...

A plant expansion under construction in Georgia is expected to cost $27 billion for construction alone! Imagine how much wind/solar/storage that could buy, at a much faster speed.

https://www.ajc.com/business/after-wrangling-over-georgia-nu...
There would be no spontaneous chain reaction, the waste is depleted below the radioactivity of naturally occurring sources. You can't practically store it that way though because no-one really likes moving waste any distance for fear of spillage.
I've been to your airfield in Rwanda! It's such a great company.
Seems to me there's an obvious flaw in the efficient market hypothesis. It states that, essentially, you can find no sustainable edge because the market rapidly reacts to information. Meaning, if there is some information relevant to expected investment performance, investors will immediately act on it, extinguishing the information advantage.

But what if the opportunity is some kind of abstract pattern that doesn't make any sense to humans? You can hardly say that people would efficiently react to patterns that are entirely uninterpretable to them. So it leaves the door open for these sort of statistical artifacts - abstract side-effects or unintuitive properties of the overall system - to provide a sustainable source of alpha.
I'm building a Python package to get the latest news from most popular news publishers without any external API use.

So, for example, the input is 'nytimes.com' and the output will be the last headlines.

Plan to release it in a few weeks.
Towards a Human-Like Open-Domain Chatbot
Generation isn't the bottleneck - it's the storage.

Solar produces dramatically less power in the winter, and having season long storage is not practical.

As an example, the largest plant in Arizona produces only 10% in January compared to June.
The Failure of the iPad
Zero to Sold: The Bootstrapper's Compendium
Not OP, but I finish every shower with 2-3 minutes of as cold as the faucet will go. I've been doing this every day for about a year. In the winter my water temp is in the mid-40 degrees F. I love this habit. It's always difficult, but I always feel great after doing it.
Yep, AllowedIPs should really be called IPs (or PeerIPs).
Localhost to Remote in Two Commands with Localtunnel
Improv for Ideas
Nuclear has shown no particular inclination to come down in price whereas renewables have.

It's just not cost effective without both massive implicit and explicit government subsidies.

Renewables are cost effective now and will only become more so.
This is fake news put out by none other a paid mouthpiece for the meat industry.

Take daily a lecithin cap, a simple multivitamin, and a fish oil cap and you get all the things the author claims you are lacking as a vegetarian.
I agree, I would have signed up for a $1 tier or perhaps $2 but $15 is far too high for the minimum tier. I support the Zig author for $1/mo and hope others would do the same for my open source projects in the future.
I feel that if anyone took hydrogen seriously, they'd start talking about anhydrous ammonia. This compound actually contains more hydrogen by volume and pressure than elemental hydrogen does. It doesn't have the embrittlement issues that elemental hydrogen has. Ammonia liquefies at a much higher temperature and has a much higher heat of vaporization, which makes it easier to handle. It is a hazardous fuel, but not really more so than gasoline and definitely less so than elemental hydrogen. Anyway, there is already a well-developed infrastructure for handling anhydrous ammonia, because it is regularly used in agriculture. Any cheap and environmentally friendly process that produces hydrogen also produces ammonia, because ammonia is just hydrogen plus nitrogen.

Because I very rarely see mention of ammonia as a fuel, I conclude that no one is seriously attempting to develop hydrogen fuel cells.
<sigh> Again, if you read the thread, you would also know that I could not possibly have agreed to these terms, because I didn't know they existed.
I simulate water distribution networks.

I create computer models of water networks and calibrate them so utilities can do what-if and growth scenario planning. (e.g. what happens if this pipe burst? how would the network cope with 20k new houses in 40+ years)

I'm also developing software to help water engineers build and run models, some of it opensource and some of it commercial.

I'm currently pushing most of my effort into an opensource javascript library to simulate water networks.
One word: Fukushima.

No, do you know how much CO2 is released just by trying to build those plants.

We STILL do not have anywhere to store the wastes.
Now that you mention it, POS signature pads are often the same way. They generally give you a terse summary such as "I agree to pay [grand total]" above the input box, and then they print a verbose receipt with your signature at the bottom. Although in this case, I guess your signature is really just saying that you agree to pay the grand total, not that you agree with every fine detail of the receipt.
Is nuclear power so very expensive right now? My understanding is that one of the main drivers behind the huge up front costs of nuclear power is that the builder had to take out a loan to cover the cost of construction before the wheels of regulatory approval started turning. After several years approval would be granted and then construction would still take quite a bit more time. And over all this time that initial loan was accumulating interest - often doubling or more the total capital cost of building a new plant.

But these days interest rates are pretty low and I wonder how much this has affected the price of building new nuclear power plants.
> Hard to imaging some people using bow drill but not using bow for hunt.

I don't think so. A bow drill has laxer construction requirements. I think the real hurdle is having the idea in the first place.
I have been in the crypto space for several years now, I like living a bit on the edge myself :)

I’ll message you if I come to SF, I don’t travel as much as I used to, too many responsibilities at home now a days. Glad your business is safe!

Tip - most of the major traders I know are incorporated offshore now, just makes things easier.
Defunct satellites orbiting Earth at risk of colliding
Cofnas' is not someone who has any claim of being someone you should listen to when critiquing the AND. He is well known for peddling pseudo-science and twisting results of studies to make points the studies do not support.

Not only that, he is against vegetarianism on the base of it being a thing liberals do.
Not to nitpick, but the 6s was released in the autumn of 2015, so it's over 4 but not 5 years old. Don't get me wrong though, I'm also still really happy with my iPhone 7. I think I'd like the new cameras a lot, but that's not worth the price of upgrading for me. I think I'll get a new battery soon, then I should be good for another two years.
I don't see a problem of creating ML models for improving the same company's services, which I can't really even imagine to require much explicit customers' consent. If it's for the same company, the same way all clearance would go to researchers as it went to statisticians doing evaluations for companies in the past. If it's about optimizing your business, do you even need ML? Asking questions about statistical data has been done long before the current age of big-data statistical self-betrayal.

The way I see it is that people start to try building their businesses around the ideas of ML, basically ML as a service, the catch there is just that their ordering businesses data, which is really their customers' data will end up in the big mess of aggregated, weakly correlated data, from which they then try to derive their models that are supposed to make their money. At no point there, I as the customer of company A, can be sure if I'm correctly or incorrectly being correlated in those models. The need to delete me from these evaluations arises from my wish to protect not just my individuality from Brazil-like misinterpretations, but also to protect the companies asking the questions for their businesses, too.

I don't know about you, but to me this casts doubt on the utility of non-specific ML as an arbitrary interpretation of unspecific data that is as useless to me as it is to my competitors, seems just Jack shit, really. You wanna solve a problem? Go solve it by bringing the consumer and the producer closer together, that counts for any business out there, especially insurance and policy, and stop ramming another PC-driven layer of middle management ML between them.
Hashing Passwords – Python Cryptography Examples
5200h is 52km2

France is 551,695 km2

So 1/10,000th of france would be needed for 1GW

A 1GW reactor produces 9 billion kwh a year

France's entire electric requirement is 450 billion, so needs about 50GW, or 0.5% of France's surface area.

Based on those figures, space isn't a problem.
For people not US citizens or who have never dealt with the federal government it may be confusing. When the US federal government asks you a question about money and you lie, you are literally putting everything (career, freedom, family, life) in serious jeopardy. "Jeopardy" may not be the right word, it's basically just a matter of time before your conclusion is reached.
> implying people would stop sending bomb threats if Proton mail was blocked
The nasdaq 100 leveraged x3 on a daily basis returned like 50%+ YoY during the last decade. And that’s an index. Buffet himself said he could return 50% YoY consistently with a small(ish) amount of money. (He manages like half a trillion)

there’s no reason why with $10B trading all asset classes one can’t return 70% YoY. You must note that the fund is capped, the execution costs are incredibly low and that over the last decade it returned less than 70% YoY.
GP was talking about common lisp. Even CLISP requires ~4MB for the heap.
That expectation seemed so natural back then that nobody really talked about it much. It wasn't a radical prediction theory, like the paperless office (nope) or global warming (ouch), it was an everyday observation: young people, if they had access to computers, were universally way ahead of older people with access to computers. It was am absolute no-brainer to extrapolate from this that all young people would become super fluent at computing once they all had access. It would have been a radical prediction to expect that this would not happen, like it did (due to ever-increasing simplifications). But nobody made that prediction, at least not in a notable way.

People are generally very bad at predicting stagnation or even a reversal of trends. If you asked anyone to describe a 2020 communications device in early 2000, when cellphones had just recently evolved from bricks to the miniscule 8210, the prediction would have been a device the size of a keychain fob, not the pocket TVs we actually have.
Did you intuit this?
A cold show temporarily jacks your heart rate up just enough to get you out the door. It doesn’t make people less sick, just less likely to take a sick day. The article even says subjects that were sick just felt slightly more energetic and not less sick. I’ve still seen no evidence that cold showers have any real health benefits.
Nuclear waste is not "dumped". It is stored under the strictest safety regulations possible. It is the only energy source where 100% of the waste is captured and securely managed. Yes, even renewables create unmanaged waste.

Nobody has EVER died from nuclear waste, whereas millions (www.who.int/airpollution/en/) of people a year are estimated to die from the effects of fossil fuel waste.
I've been considering leaving Gmail for a privacy focused email service but it seems so difficult to switch. So many accounts and services have my Gmail registered, I don't think I could collect them all. Can anybody using ProtonMail (or any other privacy focused email) recommend it? I feel like choosing an email provider these days is as serious as choosing a bank.
Without disputing that assertion, you might not have chosen the most unbiased source to back it up.
Energy can be stored as electricity... or thermally (most of our electricity is used to create heat or cold, that we can cheaply store for days and even months)

Reversible damns are for small amount of energy and short term... but most classical damns do store much more energy - that is an energy you can decide to use now, or in two weeks, or sometime in few months. They store energy, just can't store already produced electricity

Energy efficiency and demand-response have HUGE potential to reduce energy consumption, and to make energy consumption "programmable"

A good mix of different renewable energy (hydro, biomass, onshore wind, off-shore wind, solar) make it impossible to have a "no wind, no sun" case, even if there will be fluctuation in what level of electricity you can produce
Generally speaking, the type of person who uses ProtonMail is also the type of person who will trivially bypass this block.
We have managed to make people mostly chill about hydro despite it having killed way more people than nuclear and where disasters cause way more material damage.
You'd have to say the same about Android tablets and Windows tablets too. These tick more of the boxes but they have not really connected w/ the market.
> the form the tweet posted explicitly said ...

> the form says he authorized ...

You seem to be repeatedly missing the point: he claims to have never seen nor signed this form. The "signature" is decidedly pixellized. The claim is that the insurance company put his name on this form without showing it to him, which both defeats the point of the form and is a crime (forgery) in the US.
Heat means more energy which means more movement of particles. More movement of particles, especially where soap has decreased surface tension of water, means water touches and helps carry away more dirt and other removable particles.
Isn’t the technology improving? We could have smaller plants?

Fourth generation plants, for example, increase efficiency, safety, etc

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/xue2/

“ The main advantages Generation IV seeks to provide is reducing the amount of time the waste remains radioactive for (on the magnitude of ten, reducing from millenias to centuries), improving the energy yield for the nuclear fuel, increasing the variety of fuels that can be used to power the reactor, and allowing for reactors to use already present nuclear waste in its operations.”
Solar is getting so cheap that the first thing one would do is over-install and curtail it. In some places, the solar gets installed at near-vertical angles to maximize output in winter. The next is diurnal storage. The final 20% or so is seasonal and rare long outages due to weather.

Dispatchable demand is also a big possibility, especially if it can exploit the times the curtailed output is almost free.

There was a study in Minnesota that solar and wind could get to 70% of the market there before storage would make sense. The crossover point depends on economic details.
I've had that feeling too, but I wonder if it's because the good old Internet of enthusiasts enthusiastically posting about the things that enthuse them has given way to the faceless content farms to such an extent that even Google isn't able to filter the signal out from the noise. I.e., I wonder if it is not so much their fault for being less good than they used to be as it is their fault for not being so much better than they used to be.
You can log in to iCloud quite happily on a Windows box - and from there, collaborate on a Pages, Numbers or Keynote document.

Or try https://beta.music.apple.com/us/browse
Clickbait title. The article is about alternative protein sources such as crickets or seaweed. The conclusion is a fairer description of the content:

"So whether it comes from a cricket or a lab or off the coast of Indonesia, tomorrow's protein alternatives will be a win for both consumers and the environment, though likely neither are as excited about those prospects as the cows."
Can remote work help close the gender gap in the modern workplace?