skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi! You don't seem to like renewables much [1][2]. (You do post about the promise of nuclear energy, including fusion, which for whatever reason seems to be associated with skepticism about renewables [3].) Finally, you called our attention to the need to be skeptical about COVID-19's impacts in mid-April [4]. Cool, cool.

"To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need.
- Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid."

Citations for these sweeping claims?

"If Covid has taught us anything, it is the need for resiliency in the face of rare events." Oh wait, we have a citation for this one.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868290
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21879466
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hairytrog
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22881917
yes. do not help the police
things are different nowadays, that's all. a few things have happened -- pandemic, injustices, etc... -- that is making people take stand and speak up.

i don't know much about the situation but your comment about people not calling out others for years doesn't mean things worth calling out someone for didn't happen...
Isn't it far more self centered to criticize a person's own personal choices from a time period of over two decades ago when they were in their early twenties, had almost no money, friends, or place to call home, escaping an abusive household, and decided that their intention in life was not to rob, beg, or harm anyone, but to escape into the wilderness, and not just any place, but into the most remote place in the US where he would bear the total cost of the consequences of his actions.
He’s still a fully tenured professor at MSU; free to research whatever he wants.
This started as a great comment but I don't understand the non sequitur into casual mysoginy.
Shopify, BlackBerry develop Covid-19 contact tracing app with local governments
> racial bias in police shootings

The science clearly shows there is not much bias, he did not downplay anything.

> lack of segregation is the reason for racial underperformance

Where?

> Interview with an open white supremacist

Lots of people interviewed with Molyneux, this doesn't prove anything.
These are people who are not arguing on any scientific basis, but rather against any evidence that we've collected and against further collection that might prove for or otherwise.

Those in leadership positions for a scientific position should not forge their beliefs on the political zeitgeist, but on sound methods and the data stemming thereof.
Is it me or the math in the article doesn't make sense. The author is accumulating the costs for selling a SINGLE instance of the product on Shopify, Ebay, Amazon, and Walmart. When in reality, you would be paying only for the one you sold your product through, even if you offer your product on multiple platforms.
> If the system as it has settled were so much of a problem for the developers, they would not have time and time again put their weight behind the companies pricing their consoles low.

To loop back around to the iPhone, pretty much every indie developer I know thinks that mobile phone games are priced too low, but nobody can change it because the expectation has been set that a mobile game can't be $30-60. It's just the way the market has evolved.

So markets are complicated. Sometimes they move in smart directions, sometimes multiple factors conflate together and they move in unsustainable directions. The fact that developers still write games for consoles doesn't necessarily mean that developers like the system they're a part of, or that they don't want it to be any better. It just means the expected value of signing those NDAs, using expensive locked down hardware, and paying revenue portions to the console maker still currently work out to be positive.

Games sell like hot-cakes on the Switch right now. Nintendo would honestly need to do some pretty horrible stuff to make a Switch release of almost any semi-popular game not worthwhile economically. But that doesn't mean developers love everything Nintendo does.

So be careful of reading too much into what developers do. We're Capitalists just like everyone else. If the market demands F2P micro-transactions, NDAs, DRM, or region-specific pricing, ultimately most of us will do what the market demands. Revenue splits are no exception.

That being said, I would argue the market for games publishing hasn't settled, and that it's really not shifting towards increasing revenue splits or developer costs. The original process for getting games on the XBox was way harder and way more expensive than it is today. The reason consoles have generally started to shift towards more open terms is because developers eventually got fed up with paying money to release bugfixes, and started shifting focus to consoles that made releasing software easier.

We're seeing the same trends with Steam and the Epic store. 30% was reasonable, until Epic started offering much better terms. Now Valve is starting to move towards 20%. Devs will work with any system that makes them money, but obviously they would prefer to take bigger cuts of each sale. People don't really appreciate that -- if Steam didn't have such a massive market share right now, no developer would rationally choose to release on Steam instead of Epic Store. We all want lower revenue splits.
You are talking like either the movie RoboCop or as if the 1980s crack epidemic were still in swing. A lot has changed since violent crime started declining rapidly in the mid 90s.
I have mixed feelings about control theory (education). On one hand, the maths are fun, on the other hand:

0 - For simple things PIDs work well, but then you don't need an entire course on Control Theory to learn how PIDs work.

1 - Most books focus too much on maths an very little on applications. You'll see the same toy examples repeated
over and over in literature.

2 - For more complex things related to CT that's even worse. I've read some Multi-variable Control Theory books that were 100% maths, 0% on how to apply the goddamn thing you're learning.

3 - Complex CT techniques are often fragile (because you're modeling systems with high order polynomials), so most people just skip to using Machine Learning.

4 - You often need to make too many assumptions about a system to apply CT techniques.

I've actually used CT for a few things related to electronics circuits in my life, but overall I think most courses I took in university (Analog CT and Digital CT, Multivariate and Adaptive CT) were complete overkill and way too much theory without practical insights.
Two case studies of the two busiest subway systems in the country (subways being an instance of public infrastructure that we have). Do you want to talk about the public water infrastructure that’s poisoning kids with lead, or the public sewer infrastructure that’s poisoning our rivers?
Ebook pricing never really made sense to me. During college when I was buying textbooks, the ebooks on Amazon were frequently significantly more expensive than a new copy of the physical book. Not sure if that's still the case though.

Robinhood has truly disrupted the brokerage market. But I'm curious about their viability now that a ton of mainstream brokerage have also dropped commissions.
First objection: He has tenure. Getting fired is very hard when you have tenure. As a tenured professor you can scream for years that the sky is neon green and you'll be fine.

Secondly, he doesn't particularly discuss it with respect nor realism. However, let's assume for the sake of discussion that we have the same view on that.

What about the second and third ones?
> You realize that allowing a competing app store, more easily allowing side-loading apps, or not forcing apps to use apple pay for subscriptions wouldn't stop people from using the curated app store.

Yes you would - the big part of curation is to prevent malware, or abuse, of the end user. Allowing these others ruins the consumer experience, that directly impacts Apple and I don't blame them.

> If as you say people would pay good money for curation if both options are available, then Apple's business model (and I'm guessing from your extreme defensiveness, yours) wouldn't suffer because people would keep voluntarily using it. No one is going to make customers side-load apps, or use a competing app store.

People already pay for that experience when they buy the iPhone. If they didn't want that experience, they can get an Android. There are also other OSes out there.

This is developer sour grapes, mad because he can't use Apple's service for free to make him more money. For a glorified crappy email application. It's so "entitled silicon valley" I can't even take it.
It's also possible many of these colleagues had concerns, but weren't previously airing them publicly.

Just searching academics I follow, the one thread that popped up from a year ago was this https://twitter.com/Graham_Coop/status/1132105378668326912

In which it seems many of these criticisms were well known at least a year ago. I hadn't previously followed this, but it seems like this was probably a case of the dam finally bursting.
> What is there to fear but an observation and the data it’s based on?

There is everything to fear. This is one issue for which a definitive answer (if not the correct one) could be catastrophically damaging to relations between humans forever.

In this matter, ignorance is bliss.
Not sure about Unz, but Molyneux is hardly a "white supremacist".
On a similar note, Rob Zhu had a great section in his talk about how GraphQL's typesafety (to make the API more robust) tries to address a similar problem but ends up being very nuanced in practice.

Linking to the right time: https://youtu.be/djKPtyXhaNE?t=1128

TL;DR:

- GraphQL is a descriptive type system not prescriptive. This means that "String" maps to JSON String maps to Javascript utf8 string, but what type that maps to for C++ is not quite clear. Because there are many different ways to represent a string. So which one do we use? As opposed to protobuf client codegen which is prescriptive and unambiguous in what you get.

- Encoding custom scalars can cause some confusion because it's not clear what the spec of the custom scalar is. Although, there's been some recent work to make that a little better.[1]

- Impedance mismatch with nullability and union types because support is not uniform across languages

[1] https://github.com/graphql/graphql-spec/issues/635
I’m imagining a direct-to-consumer artisanal line of GMO veggies
I recall when LessWrong and Yudkowsky was covered by NYT. They came off as looking like a bunch of hyper-rationalist kooks, a bit New Age and cult-like even, but otherwise harmless. The same will likely happen to Alexander.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-co...
Maybe I missed something. Did anyone threaten his tenure? I would distinguish say an admin appointment from a research appointment.
When there's a theory X you want to stamp out, it's way more effective to maintain a false sense of freedom of inquiry, while setting high profile examples of theory X supporters/sympathizers/researchers being destroyed (here, "researchers" stand for people who merely want to explore the possibility). This way you can have a "manufactured consensus" which can be used to take down theory X supporters/sympathizers/researchers: "there's already a scientific consensus that X is outrageous", despite no opposition research being allowed (outspoken people taken down and discredited, other people too afraid to even explore the possibility); and each takedown only strengthens the "consensus" and makes future takedowns easier.

Not picking a side on this particular issue, but we're definitely seeing this kind of tactics unfold on multiple fronts.
When does this madness stop and where will it lead if it doesn’t?
"Could Solar Storms Destroy Civilization? Solar Flares & Coronal Mass Ejections" by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo
> a white supremacist and being a holocaust denier

Are these facts?

EDIT: It's sad that the notion of factualness gets constantly downvoted on HN, on an article about a science. Where will we be two or three years down the road?
Let's create a chain of immutable blocks with back pointers on top of this to create new versions of the data. Maybe even call it a... blockchain.
Are you a grad student at MSU?
Herein lies the problem.

A person can say any number of things we find ok or agreeable.

But make even one tiny slip...

And you’re fucked.
A modest proposal: Legally require sales and lease of computers herein to include laptops, tablets, phones provide owner or lessee with root access to devices including right to modify device software and use services normally associated with sale/lease of device including updates and cloud services without prejudices insofar as how you use it.

This is to say they cannot deny you updates or access to icloud but if you modify your software so as to prevent it from working that is solely on you.

This would make it impossible for Apple to prevent third parties from offering their own app stores which could offer devs their own terms.

It's exceptionally likely that prices would stabilize under 10%.
Throwaway because with headlines like this, you can't be too careful. It's getting scary seeing people keeping quiet in predominantly progressive sectors like media, academia, and tech, out of fear that what they say today will get them fired tomorrow, fear that something they say will draw attention to something from five years ago, or that something they say today will cost them in five years.

There's a class of under-researched things that we know too little about, but for political reasons, no one can research. Anything around genetic traits of races, differences between men and women, research around causes of LGBT orientations and identities that could lead to preventing people from being LGBT.

These aren't even the ethically hard ones like genetic modifications in humans. These are just political suicide.
Nobody is less dead when killed by a person of a different ideology from the nominal ideology of a gathering.

When you push out the police, it's no wonder that people who would like to get away with heinous crimes show up.
What if the causality is primarily the individual or societal belief that someone is some way primarily due to their skin color ?
The couldn't come up with this theory could he ?
Ah, so I did. Not... totally sure how that affects the read, but you might have a point.
The App Store offers discoverability, hosting, reviews/ratings, payment processing, return handling, and (limited) QA in the form of the review process.

If I think about how much time I'd spend building and managing all that stuff on top of building my app, I wouldn't be surprised if 30% was actually a pretty good bargain.

I would love if Apple lowered their percentage, but I don't feel particularly ripped off by it.
We all look at history and view the Church as both stupid and evil for arresting Galileo when he published evidence that Earth revolved around the sun. Why do we look at history that way and how is Steve Hsu different from Galileo?

Don't like his facts/scientific methods/conclusions? Fight them with other facts and methods and conclusions!

When you try and suppress the scientific method (especially in the age of the internet), you give the conspiracy theorists and white supremacists ammunition for a new generation of recruits. "Here are the facts they are hiding from you!"- they'll say. Fight ideas with better ideas, not by firings.
I disagree. A group’s lack of emotional fortitude is inhibiting the search for truth and progress as a species. Life is unfair, full stop. I’m unsure how learning it’s genetic changes the situation. If anything, it gives us a better understanding about how to approach the situation.

The ignorant may keep the bliss. We are not served by putting our heads in the sand for the sake of political correctness.
Who is the party that "lets" him climb mountains?
You can make it work by creating multiple IAM users, for different keys. Just make sure they have billing and full admin access. Still doesn't help for root 2fa, but just give that a random 32 char password and stick that in a safe deposit box or something.
Your replies seem to indicate that criminalization and harsher penalties for drug use decrease rates of use. In fact, there are many studies that indicate the opposite - it is the case that decriminalization does not tend to increase rates of marijuana usage. Where decriminalization has been followed by increased marijuana usage, we can see states with harsher penalties experience greater increases.

If you believe that marijuana use is an absolute bad, and you want to decrease people's use of marijuana, you should do so from a place of knowledge and data. Seek out interventions that actually decrease drug usage. Don't cling to a demonstrably ineffective intervention (harsh legal penalties) just because it feels good, especially if that intervention is expensive and harmful to individuals.

Ninja edit for link to review of decriminalization studies: https://norml.org/aboutmarijuana/item/marijuana-decriminaliz...
we already have it 'dribbblisation of design'
He seems out of step with scientific consensus--but he wasn't removed as faculty, but rather from an admin position.
"This is just internet forum backseat driving."

He didn't even have a map.

He was either incredibly wreckless and/or dumb.

"Man walks into the wilderness without a map, plan, or any preparation and eventually dies" <-- this just isn't a story worth telling.
It sounds like he technically resigned. I'm not sure if I read that as MSU President Samuel Stanley giving Hsu an opportunity to save face, or Stanley being a coward.
> In pretty much every study within group differences are far and away more massive that between group differences.

You are perpetuating what’s known as Lewontin’s fallacy.

This claim is extremely narrowly true: clustering on a 1-dimensional fixation index is insufficient to reliably mechanically classify race. If you don’t know what that means, stop trying to use this claim in your arguments.

Here’s what it doesn’t mean: it doesn’t mean that there aren’t significant population-level phenotypic differences between ethnic groups. These differences can include intelligence (and 30 years of twin studies suggests they probably do).
> I've watched several of Molyneux's programs and he is hardly a racist. Conservative and white, yes.

From his Wikipedia page:

Stefan Basil Molyneux (/stəˈfæn ˈmɒlɪnjuː/; born September 24, 1966) is a Canadian far-right, white nationalist[2] podcaster and YouTuber who is known for his promotion of scientific racism and white supremacist views.

Molyneux is described as a leading figure of the alt-right movement by Politico and The Washington Post, and as a far-right activist.[8][9][10][11] Tom Clements in The Independent described Molyneux as having "a perverse fixation on race and IQ".[12]

The Freedomain internet community which Molyneux leads has been described as a cult, and Molyneux has been described as a cult leader, using cult indoctrination techniques on his followers.

Molyneux is a proponent of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theo...
They should have translators on call for any of the official spoken languages in the EU.

However, considering it's a department that deals with complicated legal issues, my experience living in Germany tells me there's a decent chance the person answering the phone knows formal English better than the person that called.

If they didn't listen they didn't want to listen.
Is your duopoly DSL (Bell, Telus, SaskTel, TekSavvy^) and Cable (Shaw, Rogers, Cogeco, Videotron, TekSavvy^)? Or some subset of the mobile (Telus, Rogers, Bell, Shaw/Freedom, Fido^, Chatr^, Koodo^, Virgin^, 7-11^, PC^, PetroCanada^) providers? Either way, this is a bit disingenuous. Totally agree we pay too much, but 6GB with a $1G phone subsidy for $70cad (52usd) is competitive.

Yes we get hosed on roaming (even you Rogers). But, it turns out a local sim is inexpensive, unlocking is guaranteed free even even under that contract (for more than a year now)

It was terrible, it's currently improving. It doesn't compare to a £15 sim in London with 15GB of data and unlimited chat/text in 2017. Nor do the plans for Canada's shorts[0]

[0] : https://www.google.com/search?q=canada's+shorts
> you have to have an Apple Developer account to sign Safari extensions, for instance, or to sign non-App Store Mac apps, neither of which require a paid Apple Developer account.

Their documentation suggests otherwise[1] (scroll down to “Benefits and Resources”). “Safari Extensions distribution” and “Software distribution outside the Mac App Store” are listed on the column of the 99 USD fee.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/
To make it fair for both parties, Apple's App Store needs to adopt a hybrid/affiliate model. The App Store still provides lots of value in terms of discoverability and marketing. Many users find apps to download while browsing the App Store. The App Store will also feature apps while continually optimizing its algorithms to ensure the right apps are shown to the user in order to increase conversion rates, thereby benefiting the developer. Ranking highly on the App Store is very lucrative just like on Google. So this notion of developers not needing the App Store doesn't jive with me, especially for smaller developers who don't have the brand awareness that Basecamp does.

For that, Apple deserves to be paid for it but only if new users are referred from the App Store–an affiliate commission. That 30% is more than worth the extra marketing and customers you wouldn't otherwise have gotten. For anyone that isn't referred, the fee shouldn't apply.
Wasn't he thrown out of a Go tournament for running a bot? Seems like I read something to that effect.
The Nova Scotia shooter case has hallmarks of an undercover operation?
No. I’m faculty though and some of my best friends and colleagues are or were faculty there. I also research quantitative genetics. Been hearing the back story for years; many fear him and he threatened retaliation against some of my friends who were junior faculty.
Check out Robin Hanson's Twitter. His hobby horse recently has been finding _any_ evidence that total employment is affected by recent automation and he's not really finding any.
> I don't like that option, because the curated App Store is a big reason why I bought an iPhone.

You can have a curated app store but still...not gatekeep what software the user can install. Installs via web pages, app store listings that are deprioritized or hidden from the default search view. I'd go so far as they should be legally compelled to do that at a bare minimum.

There are myriad apps that users wanted, but Apple nixed them. Whether it's shady rentseeking like the Hey instance or content they find objectionable. How many times have social media sites like Tumblr or Reddit had to deal with their pearl-clutching over nudity? Screw them, they have no right. I can't even imagine how miserable desktop computing would be if that were the paradigm over the last 30 years.
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan
To be totally clear, being interviewed by someone implies absolutely nothing about agreement. For example, here's Noam Chomsky being interviewed by Molyneux:

https://youtu.be/MautscPF5wE

Even more shockingly, you can interview with someone because they actually share some interest in what you research or do, and still not be in agreement with the interviewer's platform, as is the case in the linked interview.

Edit: removed section on 'misleading narratives' as, truthfully, I don't know enough about this specific case to comment much on it other than it has the hallmarks of a political hit job.