skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While there may be some naivety in this comment, I think it may be a better idea to address the issue or educate the folks that may not consider perils of unchecked capitalism to be a significant risk instead of just downvoting them.
> (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...).

While nuclear certainty can adopt to grid demand quite well, if you have a good reactor.

However it leads to bad utilization of your plant.

For that reason, many of the next generation nuclear companies are designing their system to produce hot solar salt, like a Concentrated Solar Power Plant would.

Moltex Energy for example, hopes to deploy a 1GW reactor that heats up solar salt (ie heat battery), and then us that to drive 3 CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbines) that are mass produced for coal and gas plants to produce 3GW of electricity when prices are high. This is a major improvement over traditional PWR have much less heat and have to use insanely expensive bespoke steam turbines (that are also insanely huge).

This is a good idea not just because it you can sell when prices are high and sell a lot, but also the nuclear island would only make a much smaller part of your total project cost, thus reducing the overall cost risk.
You can exercise indoors. It may not be as fun, but jogging isn't necessary for physical well-being.
The fun thing about that series is how shifting expectations have impacted our perception of Homer.

Here's a barely-graduated-fron-high schooler, with no special training and skills, yet he enjoys a secure, unionized job, home ownership, and is a single-income earner for a family of five plus supporting a parent in a care home.

In 1988 he was a cautionary tale for our kids.
In 2020 he's an unattainable aspiration for our kids' kids.

I wonder if there's room for a "this isn't Homer's time, and it's not Homer's plant" messaging pivot.
Weinberg also promoted passively safe PWRs like the PIUS late in his life. He thought MSRs would be economical only when fuel costs were high enough to justify the extra complexity of dealing with a radioactive fuel salt and maintenance of radioactive primary equipment.

The MSR designs in work today are at a very early stage of development. We cannot and will not know their economics until we have a fleet operating and see what regulations show up as a result of operating history. Just like LWRs experienced in the 1970s. 1965s Oyster Creek was extremely cheap. 1980s reactors, not so much.
"...it will run out of space by 2022, and then they will have to dump radioactive water directly into the Pacific Ocean. It is not known yet how much water would need to be put into the ocean."

Yeah, put the dirt under the rug.
Can you share what's a high dose in this case, how many milligrams of zinc per day ?
Also, with zinc it's important to increase the dose slowly or there might be some adverse effects, like hair loss.
The justice system here did get it wrong originally and then got him for a crime he for sure did commit.

There was no need for the police to frame him. He was a known lifelong criminal and the running joke with LE was that he will get arrested again because he is that stupid.
Maybe, but it makes it impossible for me to test it at the moment as my webcam doesn't capture enough light to get the face detection working apparently.
> Where in reality even after implementing these two (important) parts we still have a long way to go.

That depends on where you're planning to go.

If your destination is zero emissions, that is a long trip indeed!
No, and what you're all observing is the most routine of all phenomena on an internet forum when the topic is divisive. People make diametrically opposite interpretations of the exact same threads based on their pre-existing positions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Corruption works the same everywhere and America isn't an exception. Remember a film with Travolta,where he plays a lawyer trying to get this massive company on a hook for water poisoning. The very people living in the town and drinking the same water were the ones polluting it.Ffs, it's like I go to work, pour poison into a water well just to return home and open a tap to fill up a glass and then pass it on to my children. And all this for probably a few grand more a year.People are cheap
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18643868

https://www.abe.iastate.edu/extension-and-outreach/carbon-mo...

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00050544.htm

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00966665.1955.10...

That's enough; I'm bored now.

There was no cause to be a jerk, either. Do try to behave yourself next time.
And especially compared to the large death toll from the rest of the tsunami, it's even more trajic.

Avoiding nuclear will kill more people with increased extreme weather events (a small portion of global warming's damage) than all nuclear accidents.
> The prior here is the probability that the virus originated from WIV, knowing only that the virus originated in China, and not accounting for the location of the outbreak.

Makes more sense, but as you say, there's really no way of knowing what number is appropriate there. I'm not a statistics expert, but I'd say it's inextricably tied up with what you're trying to calculate the probability of in the first place. The whole point is we don't have a prior for WIV being likely to have a virus escape the lab, or a coronavirus, or this specific virus.

I think you'd need to break it down into priors like: probability any Chinese lab has any virus escape, probability this particular lab has any virus escape, probably this particular lab had any virus escape around this time frame, probability this particular lab had a sample of SARS-CoV-2, and a lot more things.

>And sure, it's a simplified analysis, but it's better than just asserting whatever our intuitions say about coincidences.

It certainly can be much better in general, and I'm a huge fan of Bayesianism, but it can also sometimes provide a very misleading impression to others. I'm somewhat tempted to try to do a deep dive into a Bayesian analysis of this, but I'm not really qualified, and it would be a ton of work, and there would be some priors that would be nearly impossible to know (number and density of animals of certain species in the area, what pathogens they may have, what animals and viruses the lab may have collected or been interested in collecting, what and how many animals are hunted in the area, what and how many hunted animals are sold at local wet markets, how such animals are handled or prepared, etc.)

I think to assess this with any serious confidence, we're probably going to need something like leaked/stolen documents or a whistleblower.
there are a really large number of things i can no longer accomplish with ios 13 text selection model that i used to be able to do ... the easiest test case for finding all the flaws is trying to edit a url in safari.

ios 13 wants you to "grab" the text insertion cursor and drag it around -- but what are you supposed to do when the text cursor is not visible? and what are you supposed to do when an entire text region gets auto selected as in the url area ...

i would really love for someone to fix this issue

-- or if anyone knows how to do it ... here's the problem: say you have a long url that ends with a number -- and you want to change that number or select it to copy and paste it elsewhere. how do you do this on iphone in safari after ios 13?
Compared to other families of viruses, coronaviruses recombine unusually often and are unusually likely to produce viable new strains that way. Those traits make them unusually capable of producing zoonoses, which is one of the reasons why they're a subject of particular interest among infectious disease researchers.

Those same traits also produce a high degree of similarity between a lot of genomically differentiable strains of coronavirus, especially since spike proteins tend to be strongly conserved
for their direct effect on virulence - a significant mutation there is likely to be maladaptive, if it changes the protein structure enough for cells to no longer uptake a virion that expresses it. So it's not really a surprise to see that two different strains have similar spike proteins, and doesn't really give much basis for inference about relatedness between them.

Another important point is that coronaviruses are so common specifically in bats, which are both extremely plentiful and unusually accommodating hosts for many kinds of viruses including coronaviruses, very often with multiple strains infecting a single host at once. That gives coronaviruses - which, remember, are already good at recombining to produce new strains, every one being possibly able to jump species - more chances at that kind of recombination than they would have otherwise.

Too, bats shed virus in feces the same way humans do, and bat guano is so effective a fertilizer that wars have started over access to supplies of it. So it's not difficult or unlikely to postulate a chain of events like this:

- a recombination event in a bat produces a virus capable of infecting humans,

- which is then deposited in feces used to fertilize a human food crop,

- which is then harvested and taken to a city market to be sold,

- and all it takes for someone to get sick from there is not washing their hands often enough while they're cooking.

To be clear, I'm not saying this is what happened. Nobody knows that yet. But precisely because nobody knows that yet, it's important to consider the relative likelihoods of various ways that the pathogen might have developed into a form that can infect humans, and then reached the point of actually doing so.

That's what I'm doing here. Each stage of this postulated chain of events relies only on things that are already known to frequently occur, and have been so known since long before SARS-CoV-2 was even known to exist.

The result is unprovable, of course, just as with every other theory of this disease's origin that anyone has advanced so far. But it doesn't rely on any unusually small probabilities, and so it seems a lot likelier to me than the combination of a lab accident of a kind known to have happened only a few times in the last two decades, and a simultaneous superinfection of a single researcher with two different strains of coronavirus.
>You're calling whats happening now, easy?

I'm saying that the response to COVID-19 is easy. You know why? Because all it would have taken is surveillance and proper quarantine. I'm going to say it again: if you give me a normal amount of resources and a normal team I would be able to manage anyone with COVID with reasonable success. Now it starts getting tricky with any serious comorbidities and luckily we have nephrology to manage electrolytes. Shutting this thing down is not challenging. What's challenging is when you have incompetent leadership that ignores expert advice.
I was under the impression that meat eaters generally aren't deficient in Zinc. What do you think ?
Hopefully we get some update on the WHO test that is announced in this document: "20,000 healthcare workers [will receive] chloroquine [and] will be tested daily as currently used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis for three months or until they are diagnosed with COVID-19." [1]

[1]: https://www.who.int/blueprint/priority-diseases/key-action/R...
Probably a given on Mac: iTerm2 Terminal Emulator https://www.iterm2.com/

Less of a given, still Mac: Rectangle Tiling Window Organiser https://rectangleapp.com/

For Linux I would use Xmonad to achieve the same as the two programs above.
Unexpected, but welcome, to see the first part in the series on here right now. I just published the second part [0] today, featuring binary expressions and WHERE filtering. It also updates the REPL to use a prettier table-printing library and a readline implementation.

The repo [1] has some additional bare notes on architecture and links to similar, more mature projects (primarily go-mysql-server and ramsql).

[0] https://notes.eatonphil.com/database-basics-expressions-and-...

[1] https://github.com/eatonphil/gosql
Last I looked, about half of the HN community is in the US. Since that includes many expats, presumably less than half of HN users are American. An overwhelming majority are from Western countries though.
Beware Trivial Inconveniences
In that benchmark, was Julia tested against CuDNN accelerated neural network CUDA code? If not, is it possible (and beneficial) to call CuDNN functions from Julia?
I agree with what you wrote, this is not a problem with the COBOL language, except in the narrow sense that it’s not taught anymore and probably 95% of programmers working today have never seen COBOL. A professional programmer with some experience can learn COBOL in a few weeks. It’s not Linear A.

The cost of fixing technical debt has to outweigh the cost and risks of replacing legacy systems. Most ground-up rewrites fail, and that’s even more of a problem in the government sector. A working system with problems is still better than an imaginary system that will probably never go live. Google IRS, California DMV, Oregon utilities, etc. etc. for examples of how these rewrites actually work out.
If we can just get some carbon tax, I think these projects will be be forced into existence whether people like it or not, which in turn will allow a higher carbon tax.

Let's do everything to kick this virtuous cycle off.
I threw out 1% as a seemingly reasonable prior probability that the outbreak came from the WIV, given an implicit assumption that the virus originated in China. Obviously I didn't put much thought into the exact number, but 1% seems within the realm of reason to me, given that the WIV is the only BSL-4 facility in China.

It doesn't make sense to apply the same prior to "the CIA planted COVID-19 in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market", because there are many such markets in China, and only one BSL-4 facility. You might think 1% is a reasonable prior for "the CIA planted COVID-19 in some market in China", but then it wouldn't make sense to adjust the probability based on the outbreak location as I did.

What you're doing is like starting with a prior probability of 10% that a random individual lives in Maui, and 10% that a random individual lives in Kawaii. Then you learn that an individual lives in Hawaii, and you try to adjust both probabilities based on Hawaii's population in relation to the world population. Bayes' theorem gives ~99.8% each for P(Maui | Hawii) and P(Kawaii | Hawaii). The results are obviously impossible, but the argument wasn't structurally wrong, you just started with bad priors. You should have started with P(Kawaii) ~= 0.001%, giving P(Kawaii | Hawaii) ~= 5%, which is correct.
I was kinda thinking the exact same thing with regards to J.

Btw Scott, I've been meaning to ask you about what tools you're using for your work for awhile, but don't see an email address anywhere on your blog.

It seems like you've tried Lush, Clojure, Lua (Torch 7), J, R, and a bunch of other technologies. I've had the chance to try some of these for hobby purposes, but nothing for work yet, so I would trust your evaluation more than mine. Have you given up on array languages all together?
It's anti-CCP sentiment, no one here is hating on HK, or Taiwan, or the ethnically Chinese diaspora, or even the average people in China. The HK protests were just last year and are still going. The 996 movement got a lot of notice and support here. Multiple articles have been posted here about pollution and the Uyghur re-education camps. Anyone well informed and educated are hyper aware of whats been going on in China from the environmental pollution, to Internet censorship, to civil liberties and human rights violations and they treatment of ethnic and religious minorities. You can't be principled and oppose these things in your own country, rail against an administration that does these things, and then give another country a free pass.

They're currently kicking black people out in the streets out of their homes and giving them no where to go because of a ban on foreigners, even though those foreigners never left the country during the pandemic and are no more risk at spreading the disease than anyone else. It's racism, pure and simple.

https://www.france24.com/en/20200411-if-you-re-black-you-can...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3079497/us-w...

I mean, many of the things we're seeing in China currently are the kind of things that were happening in Germany in the 30's that were warning signs.

Just calling out things that are well documented in the news is enough to get down voted mysteriously, maybe the wǔmáo's have become aware of this community.
The 2002–2004 SARS outbreak was nowhere near as consequential as this one. It's an entirely different situation.
This is a really cool idea I've been thinking about as well. Schools/churches/clubs/etc. looking for an online equivalent to informal meeting spaces need something like this. Zoom/Hangouts/etc. break down with lots of people. The map is creative, but another metaphor I've thought of was just tables. Show a handful of tables in a room, maybe with avatars on them? I also had an issue where I couldn't easily pick which camera to use.
There are a couple of problems with that design. Firstly, if the program crashes for any reason, you don’t have a shell to fall back on, unless you run the debugger as your shell, like ITS did back in the 1960s. Secondly, you can’t have more than one job running at the same time, or even any suspended jobs. And even ITS (again) has subjobs.
I suspect that part of the issue is that when devs are writing and testing their code, they rarely keep the VM running for long enough to reach peak performance. So the performance still feels slow to developers, and performance issues still block the develop/reload/test cycle.
InvisionApp Co-Founder: Rediscovering My Love of ColdFusion and CFML in 2020
While neither the most racially diverse nor tolerant of places, the upper Midwest still had a strong Northern/Union identity when I was growing up there a few decades ago. Folks are socially and fiscally conservative, but that cultural identity coming out of the Civil War, the Grange, then the New Deal, and strong union membership post-WWII distinguish the region as purple, in contrast to the solid red of the South (which was formerly solid blue decades ago, in the Dixiecrat era, as no one wanted to vote for the party of Lincoln).
We've banned this account for doing nationalistic flamewar on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It’s such a great format; very educational. It never devolves into ad hominem attacks either. It’s fun to listen to experts debate.
I had a similar take, but most around me didn't. Most around me took away that nuclear is dangerous and shouldn't be used. Never mind that every country (USSR included) knew that a positive void reactor was a dumb idea.

But as to the fear, most people I know thought the three men that went into the reactor died of horrible deaths. Despite the show even mentioning that they survived (I believe only one is dead now and died of a heart attack at old age. Could be radiation related, could be old, probably both, but it wasn't an abnormal death IIRC).

There's even a lot of misinformation about how many people Chernobyl killed. We say "thousands of deaths" but it is hard to put that in perspective. If we say a thousand people dead in front of us, that's a lot. But if we're talking <30k deaths from 1986 - 2065, that's not that many people[0]. That total number is less than the average flu kills in just the US PER YEAR. It is about 380 people/year. A lot, but this pales in comparison to what our usage of coal does in a single country per year. As in some estimates of coal pollution kill more people in the US per year than all will from the worst nuclear disaster in the history of mankind ever will [1].

It is hard to compare our energy sources because we do not do them one to one. Nuclear's deaths have been caused from 3 disasters, one of which killed nobody, and one of which accounts for 99%[2] of those deaths. I think the thing about nuclear is that when things go wrong it is temporally and geographically localized. This is easy to see the damage. But it is hard to say that coal in the US kills more a year than all the world's nuclear power plants combined. If you bring stats in you generally get called inhumane, even if you are trying to use stats to save lives. It is a complicated and tricky subject. It is just hard to compare because the coal deaths are not temporally and geographically localized. Our brains weren't designed to easily reason about information like that, whereas they were designed to reason about the former.

You're definitely right about a lot of what you've said. But my inclination is that while people did take a political message from the Chernobyl show (which I did love), they also took away an anti-nuclear sentiment. I think this is unfortunate because I believe there is overwhelming evidence that the technology directly saves hundreds of thousands of human lives and significantly help our environment.

[0] https://science.time.com/2011/04/22/how-many-did-chernobyl-k...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...

[2] I'm not joking. 99% is concervative. Fukushima has only a single recorded radiation death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
A lot of the problem stems from the databases. COBOL, and these legacy systems, pre-date relational databases. They work with proprietary and custom file formats, which COBOL was designed to work well with. Regardless of technical debt or scaling problems, the data in these systems has tremendous value, and converting it to a modern relational structure is a bigger job than fixing some bugs in COBOL code.
That statement about thousands of lives is not substantiated.

“The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident caused the deaths, within a few days or weeks, of 30 workers and radiation injuries to hundreds of others. The accident caused the immediate evacuation of about 116 000 people and the permanent relocation of about 220 000 people. The accident caused social and psychological disruption, but apart from the 1800 thyroid cancers that have been reported in inidividuals exposed in childhood, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 14 years after the accident. No increase in overall cancer incidence or mortality has been observed that could be attributed to radiation exposure. The risk of leukaemia does not appear to be raised, even among the hundreds of thousands of recovery workers sent to clean up the environmental contamination. Neither is there any scientific evidence of other non-malignant disorders associated with radiation exposure“ from the Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...