skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uninhabited by humans, not uninhabitable. Natural radiation in natural hot spots like Ramsar Iran are hotter than most parts of Chernobyl today, and no one there shows any increased cancer. Fear of low-dose radiation is the only reason why Chernobyl is still pretty empty today. The animals are doing just fine. They are no more radiation resistant than you or I.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclus...
> - for some program, how long does it take to run that program. Start to finish. No ignoring warmup.

This methodology likely comes from Java, which has long-running server applications. "How long does it run" is often "until someone hits ^C". Here, startup cost can be slow as long as the peak performance is fine. It's accepted that the first minute or two of the server are slow, but that's small compared to the month or so that the server will be running for.

> This tells you how good a VM is.

I think papers like this approach it from the wrong angle. I don't care about the VM's theoretical peak performance. I care about being able to measure and track performance in a reliable way. Put simply, I'm fine with bad codegen as long as I can consistently measure it. Feel free to improve it, but adding to sometimes give me good codegen, unreliably, is much more frustrating than bad codegen. But this seems to be the way the VMs are going, with things like probabilistic profiling.

If I refactor my code and replace for(let i = 0; i < L.length; i++) with for(const i of L), what's the cost? Will performance go up or down? We don't have tools or metrics to handle that right now. How can I ensure my codegen is good won't regress?

I work on a particularly demanding website in my free time ( https://noclip.website/#smg/AstroGalaxy , unfortunately won't run in WebKit due to missing WebGL 2 ), and performance varies drastically from Chrome release to release, and I do extensive testing with node.js to make sure that I'm getting good codegen.
> We envision two possible mechanisms that could explain the
actualization of the variables:
1. The actualizations happens spontaneously as time
passes. This view is compatible with reductionism and it
does not necessarily require any effects of top-down causation. Note that this mechanism resembles, in the context of
quantum mechanics, objective collapse models such as the
“continuous spontaneous localization” (CSL) [23, 25].
2. The actualization happens when a higher level requires
it. This means that when a higher level of description (e.g., the
macroscopic measurement apparatus) requires some physical
quantity pertaining to the lower-level description to acquire a
determined value, then the lower level must get determined. In
quantum mechanics a similar explanation is provided by the
Copenhagen interpretation and, more explicitly, by the model
in Ref. [37].

https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.03697

Seems like a framework for the Simulation Theory.
No, I think the original EOL specification was truthful. What likely happened is that a major customer canceled an order that was the basis for extrapolating such a product lifetime. Unlike other companies, organizations like Samsung and LG live for large contracts in order to be able to justify spinning up assembly lines and build inventory. In other words, there are organizations that exist to supply the industrial markets who will commit to having a stable supply for years because that's the nature of the markets they serve.

Once the key customer cancelled the order they had no way to manufacture these products for the many small companies who were feeding off the edges. During that time I met the CEO of another company who had a multi-million-dollar government contract that was impacted by the same parts we were promised. He was about to be sued by the US government for violating his contract due to Samsung's premature EOL. It is likely that Samsung destroyed dozens of companies when this happened.

BTW, I was dealing the Samsung America's Vice President at the time. In other words, the top guy in the US. The promise came from him and various division top management people. So, yea, it was one of those "you can take it to the bank" promises.

In many ways this was a case of ethics and honor. Having made promises to multiple small to medium companies they should have delivered product at a loss and provided a reasonable runway for everyone to migrate designs. Hardware isn't like software, you can't turn on a dime, even if you want to. Realistically speaking, you need a two year run before new designs. Among other things, your customers don't like it very much if they buy an expensive product and you obsolete it six months later. And then there's the case of having to provide a reasonable EOL for your own products as well as parts, service and support. It can get complicated and messy very quickly.
Show HN: I'm building a new game and posting dev logs on YouTube
Hi good people. Usually when I have a project done I share it here with you and got some good feedback. This time I'm trying something new. I'm building a new game and making dev logs and posting on youtube.

Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOnWT-OAxeA&list=PL3pnEx5_eGm9ewceYuTS7tSNOMe_Y_bP1
Has the link changed? I can't find that quote.

Regardless, when I combine "10 000" and "a very prolonged process which is spread through several generations" we are talking small change. We face extremely tolerable threats that kill more than 10 000 people spread through several generations; like ladders.
Here's a couple (albeit macOS focused) favorites of mine:

- Deliveries: macOS / iOS package tracking https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deliveries-a-package-tracker...

- Screenotate: OCR all of your screenshots with metadata like program/webpage https://screenotate.com

- The Tagger: lightweight macOS utility to tag music / fetch metadata from discogs https://deadbeatsw.com/thetagger/

- youtube-dl: Download any video / song online https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/

It was fun thinking of these, I actually put together a blog post a while back listing my favorite software. Would love to revisit it soon: https://lukemil.es/blog/software-i-like
> but really if we are not willing to switch to Fission, a technology we already have, why would be do it for Fusion.

I thought the extremely compelling rationale for Fusion was (assuming it can be done) not just orders of magnitude more energy, but also extremely little safety risk and on top of that, your "waste" is pure helium. Am I misinformed? This seems like of course we'd be willing to put the effort into that.
I think we should encourage it because in a controlled environment it's 'very low risk' and it's a way to 'get out'.

Obviously, no restrooms, no concessions, not getting out and running around. That would make it risky.

Also probably 1-inch max open windows.

With cars 1.5m apart, minimum.

This would keep things kosher I think.

We need to figure out how to have some fun or we're gonna go nutty.
I only hear "too cheap to meter" from wind and solar people these days.
Hardware is usually orders of magnitude more reliable than software, so what makes you think that they aren't already using those techniques or something better?
Many parts of the world will not be serviceable by solar. Too much darkness over extended periods. Storage is also still a huge issue that has its own particular environmental consequences. If nuclear could be made safe and affordable, it would make energy widely available everywhere. Why wouldn't we want to try and make that viable? I doubt there is anything that raises standards of living quicker than abundant energy.

Old style reactors are "suuuuuuuper expensive", but several modern designs may be much less expensive. Older designs were inherently unstable and needed many layers of safety systems to "guarantee" safety. This of course also needed many layers of regulation and validation to make sure it would actually work. The rest of your concerns about completing builds hinge on these same factors.

A modern design that is inherently stable and safe should require a much simpler overall system design. We just have to have the courage to let go of our preconceived ideas about nuclear and allow decisions to be driven by data rather than emotion. Time will tell if we can do that.
What is there, other than energy (and storage/use of it, such as on ships)?

My understanding is the VAST majority of climate-change contributions are from energy production and transportation.

There are other environmental concerns, but plastic in the ocean isn't raising global temperatures.
The paywall here is infuriating
Thank you so much for this very helpful list. I'll integrate its suggestions into 3mux.
To be fair, they're mostly digital reactors these days, not paper ones.
Hasura [https://hasura.io]
Graphql API and Subscription for any Postgres DB

Keycloak [https://www.keycloak.org]
OpenID Auth Server

nREPL + Cider [https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider]
Clojure's Network Repl and Emacs integration for live coding Clojure

Company Mode [https://company-mode.github.io]
Emacs autocomplete mode
Yes I have and I reference it in my first post. The problem is this deletion strain was isolated from patients in hospital so it is still to dangerous to use. It does prove that there are deletion strains out in the world and if there is one there is likely to be more.
I've worked with both over the last few years. Git LFS is really not p2p like git-annex is. And it is less flexible. But maybe more stable, and git works with it out of the box.

You really have to pay for specialized LFS hosting, and you can't remove hosted LFS objects. And while it is possible to only download some LFS objects, it is not easy or intuitive. Once a repo gets to be beyond a certain size, it an be really impractical.

Git annex lets you fairly easily get only the objects you want. And it is strongly p2p. You can just set up another repo as a remote, and git-annex-copy whatever files you want to directly over ssh. Or, you can use Google Drive or DropBox or any number of other hosting services that git-annex knows, and stash your files there. Sibling repos will be updated about where they can find the objects. And it is really easy to push your binaries to as many backends as you want.

Finally, you can find massive multi terabyte repos of medical image data[1]. There's no way that LFS could handle these terabyte repos. It is really easy to fork one of these data repos, change it, put your changed files into your own backend, and then reshare it.

[1]: http://datasets.datalad.org/
Karabiner, Keyboard Maestro & Alfred for me. Probably more than 1000 hours at this point. Need to update my macOS repo with more tools I use now.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os
I learned a great deal from reading a novel: Pillars of the Earth. This book is about construction of a medieval cathedral and spans generations.

I really enjoyed the book when I read it as a young person. Now that I'm older, I have some issues with the writing (detailed portrayals of violence). Just realize it is R rated stuff - similar to GoT. On the plus side, you will definitely learn about architecture :)
What we need it a viable battery to make wind and solar viable for 24 power delivery. How about a rechargeable nuclear battery?

What if during times when there is an excess of power being generated, the excess is used to accelerate protons into a block of some material that (a) captures the protons well and (b) has a half life on the order of 24 hours. Generate the isotopes, when then decay and generate heat over the course of a day or two. Obviously, the isotopes don't wait for night to decay, so it would be generating heat continuously. In effect, it would be a big capacitor.

Just how inefficient would it be?

(Yes, I know very little about nuclear, and I expect it is terribly inefficient, but I'm curious to hear just how bad)
Have anyone replaced *sh with powershell on linux for scripting?
GitHub Apps has per repo authorizations...
I should have mentioned, my father is German (from Mainz originally) and table manners were ... important ... around our dinner table. The experience at the Ethiopian restaurant certainly wasn't my first experience with the differences in German attitudes about dining. Eating with my father or my Oma and Opa was quite markedly different from eating with my Canadian farmer grandfather :-)

But leaving food on the plate wasn't acceptable in my house not because my father was German, but from my mother, too, because they grew up (or parents grew up) in a time when there often wasn't enough to go around and wasting food was a ridiculous and rude indulgence.

About the knife and fork thing, I believe that might partially be the difference between continental and Anglo-American style of handling the fork. [1]

[1] https://theetiquetteconsultant.com/blog/2018/1/26/styles-of-...
I'm a little concerned that the author is basing their approach on on Pijul given that its data loss issues are exactly what you wouldn't want for the "reliable" part of their priorities, but hopefully that's just an issue with Pijul's implementation of the ideas. It seems plausible that there aren't any major pitfalls in the theory itself instead of the code.
Yes, I read that 53% of voters voted for Democratic legislative candidates but Democrats only hold 36% of seats in the legislature.

Republicans have discovered how to "hack" democracy. I think it's pretty clear both sides have engaged in some pretty egregious gerrymandering in different parts of the country, but only Republicans have become so hostile to allowing people to actually vote. And while both parties' positions on voter laws may be due to self-interest (marginal voters are more likely to vote Democratic, so barriers to voting are more likely to negatively affect Democrats) it doesn't really matter - the Republican position of things like shortening early voting, closing tons of polling places in spots like university towns, forcing a vote during a pandemic is bad for democracy.
Everywhere I've lived in the US that has nuclear power in the mix (Pittsburgh and Georgia) has a surcharge on rates because of the cost of the plant, and we end up paying a higher rate than other areas that don't have nuclear. Are there localities in the US where nuclear has beaten the cost-benefit curve?
In addition to "nuclear is fine", I would add that fusion is not as clean as the public imagines. It is being promoted as power generation without nuclear waste, but in reality you are going to get at least mildly radioactive fusion chamber cladding, which will have to be replaced yearly or so. So there will be a huge pile of radioactive waste generated over the lifetime of fusion power plant. This is in addition to a little problem of fusion power being 25 years away for the last 60 years or so.
It's also worth pointing this factoid out:

The Oroville Dam near-failure necessitated the evacuation of more people than the Fukushima failure.

In actual fact, hydroelectric power has been far deadlier and more destructive than nuclear power (especially when scaled to a per-MW basis), yet it's the latter that's seen as too dangerous.
Economics of nuclear will only be found with serial mass production, as in Korean APR-1400s, Japanese ABWRs, Russian VVERs, etc. One-off builds with inexperienced construction/management teams are guaranteed to be expensive.

We can still build many tens of GW of carbon-free nuclear per year if we ramp up a serial production capability, e.g. in a shipyard.

Batteries, wind, solar have high costs at deep decarbonization. The low prices you see today are almost entirely when wind is blowing and sun is shining. Intermittency adds $30-$50/MWh at deep decarb, according to numerous EIA, NREL, OECD/NEA studies.
That would be great but it’s hard because the trick, at least in JS VMs, is to have the JIT specialize based on the heap.

So you’d need a heap snapshot or some way to link the generated code to a different heap.

Maybe not impossible, just hard enough that it’s not widespread.
If someome asks you to keep a secret, that secret is a lie. -Jack Dahl
https://chocolatey.org/ - The Package Manager for Windows, similar to yum / apt

It has tons of software packages.
Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse.

The rationale behind it is simple physics. Enriched nuclear fuel is the most energy-dense material we can access, so unless a new fundamental law is discovered, nuclear energy will have the best EROI, e.g. require the least energy overall to be produced (also note that most of the energy deployed is for security reasons).

EDIT: another option for solar+storage to tend towards 0 residual carbon footprint is a life duration 10 or 100 times longer. Something to consider.
This is perfect timing as I've just moved to Sailfish in my journey away from Google. Moving past Gmail is next, and contacts was something I wanted to self host.
I have been using Spectacle (https://www.spectacleapp.com/) for years wishing it had mouse driven window snapping. I even once tried to implement it myself but gave up. I just tried Rectangle by your suggestion and it is absolutely amazing. Thank you.
I'd argue that's in part because of the protection racket that's partially at the heart of the moral hazard: the poor regulation of healthcare services, at least in the US.

What this should be laying bare is the failure of federal regulation, how this got in the way at a critical moment, and when it was too late, things only got better when they got out of the way. Or what about a healthcare system oriented toward protecting the hospitals, those at the top of a hierarchy, the rent seeking, and so forth, rather than oriented toward public health? What about an artificial reduction in the number of providers to increase their salaries, a lack of competition in provider models and delivery of services?

There was a Slate article about how one side-effect of the pandemic is how much it has exposed bullshit everywhere, how easily so many rules are set aside when the cards are on the table. Some of this is happening now with healthcare, but few are asking what else could have been different, other than single payer care.

To me this all feels like some kind of abuser-victim relationship, where people are subject to some broken system, and then when things go wrong and are failed, they're made to be dependent on their broken system and start cheering it on.

I realize this all sounds bleak but to me there are so many things that could have been avoided, from the highest levels of the government all the way down, and there seems to be little introspection about this. Instead we just blame the virus, rather than what caused our systems to be so vulnerable in the first place.
And use this article to figure out whether BSD is better than Linux for you or your project, right?
This could very well be a hardware or deeper issue. I had a similar but more specific issue with my 2018 mbp, and managed to isolate the issue after quite a bit of trial and error. They replaced it with a 2019 model brand new. I think for me it was specific to letting the battery drain completely, then closing it and plugging it into power and waiting a while. I'd open to a computer that had kernal panicked. It could be related to deep sleep/hibernate, where the contents of ram is written to the ssd and then restored on wake. You can test this probably by setting a hibernate timer and then testing what happens if it sleeps for just under and just over that time.
Yeah I was surprised by that description too. Wasn't the topic the biggest political event of the 20th century?
As a longtime user of both FreeBSD and various Linux distros, I agree with a lot of points regarding the coherence and ergonomics of FreeBSD’s design. However, I don’t generally run FreeBSD anymore, despite enjoying using it more, simply for the reason of security. I don’t feel (and maybe this is just a feeling) that security is a first class citizen on FreeBSD the way it is in Linux distros like Fedora or Ubuntu. Things can be slow to be patched and the defaults aren’t always particularly secure. I really miss ZFS though. Btrfs just isn’t as nice to work with.
Evidence suggests that Covid-19 was here in November
Anger is growing at China over Covid-19 and its apparent cover-up attempt
PS: youtube-dl is not macos-specific, there is a windows build and many linux distros like ubuntu have packages
What do you mean by do something?
They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't. I wish we just were not wasting so much money and effort on this. Solar and wind are already far cheaper, we need to be researching energy storage solutions to make the already cheap solar and wind energy more reliable and not looking for another dangerous boondoggle to make energy for, if we are lucky, ten times the price of solar. Even before the corona-virus hit, this past summer solar cell prices were 15 cents per watt. This is about half of what it was last year. Offshore wind prices are difficult to pin down in a per watt metric, but power companies are saying they are even cheaper than solar and the cheapest option. This is where our efforts should be pointed. We already have the cheap and safe energy we just need to make it more usable and reliable on the grid.

This is all institutional inertia. I know there are a lot of very smart people that studied fission and wanted to dedicate their careers to it and now they are really pissed off that the field is declining rapidly. I know they will all write angry posts in response and down vote me rapidly. I am sorry, I feel bad for you all but I do not wish to risk my life just so you have careers doing something unnecessary and dangerous. You are all very smart I am sure you can re-target your expertise towards power electronics, solid state physics or many of the other fields of physics that are hot right now.

And there is a lot of institutional inertia as well. During the cold war there was an endless stream of tax payer money pointed at anything and everything nuclear and now a lot of the institutions that benefited from it are fighting tooth and nail for relevance. I have the same thing to say to them -- there are other very needed and useful fields where you can direct your efforts.
I know that the warmup skipping comes from Java. It was a mistake there. Saying that it’s because Java is for servers is a lame excuse and may be getting it backwards - maybe Java only succeeded on servers because all the tuning ignored warmup.

I hear ya that having tools would be great - but the best speedups do come about from probabilistic methods so it would be weird to rely on whatever a profiler told you.
For desktop workflows I've started a spreadsheet documenting various utilities and os defaults I've depended on across mac/win/linux: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3...

Intent was to explore if I still could be as productive doing a variety of things (general administrivia, writing, design, code) outside of MacOS. So it's organized less around a specific app but rather a workflow/concept.

Ideally I'd love to see a git-backed static website around this so people could fork/collect/share their workflows across environments visually.
If all the stored water was dumped in a single year, the population's estimated radiation dose is around 0.02% of yearly background radiation. It's really not a problem.

See https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...