skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cost. Not worth it.

Even with my roof (which is east/west facing) the cost to just install panels would be 20-30k. And my city has a 1:1 buy back...And even assuming i sell them back power it would take a decade to recoup the costs...and by then the panels would be less efficient. And this is with buying 95% panels.

but then during an outage....

So you need something to store it... Short of rednecking a series of deep cycle batteries the Tesla Powerwalls are really the only big option.

And those arent cheap either. To run my house for 2-3 days would be in another 10-30k

I can do all of that with 2x7kw gennys and some ancillaries. With a 14-17kw i could probably run my AC (which have hard start caps on them) Even at 30 bucks a day in gas im still well south of even 10k.

Next step up would probably be a active standby generator with transfer switch and giant Propane tank to fuel it. That would be about 10-15k once permitting and all is done. And that adds complexity and cost. But it would mean i dont have to manually flip breakers and cutover. (as it is, my computers are just set to talk to a NUT server, and shutdown in the event i dont cutover within 10 minutes.)

And during storms supply chains are strained. Its hard to source diesel and LP and sometimes even petrol (in fact i warned a previous company of this, and we almost had to shutdown due to fuel levels). And you have to maintain a contract with LP providers and usually rent a tank from them.

With petrol and my little standby units i can source it myself (3-4 am is the best time during runs on gas), even siphon from one of our cars.

I may spring for a full kit standby one day. But for me, it costs about 2k in generators. Another 1k to have an electrician install the interlock kits. And i can service/manage the gennys myself. swap them out while i do maintenance during extended runs etc.
https://gather.town/ is another. Probably one of the most solid right now.

We're trying to take it the direction of conferences/tech events with https://meetfromhome.io/.
Has anyone published the evidence of Huawei being an "arm of the PRC surveillance state"? I've seen a lot of claims and a lot of out-of-court-settled lawsuits, but nothing really showing that they're using their devices or software infrastructure for surveillance.
This is a great point. It's important to be mindful of the path dependence you are creating for your future self. At any point in time, I think you can roughly bucket problems into three categories:

1. This is a blocking issue now.

2. This is not a block issue now, but postponing will cause more pain than we would save by not doing it now.

3. This is not a blocking issue and doesn't create future pain.

The third bucket are natural to postpone. Finding the balance between the first two is one of the primary challenges of engineering.
There is no chance of Guangdong trying to split off in a Chain reaction; it's as Chinese as Beijing.
I think the problem here is the sheer amount of agencies that need to be dealt with. In other parts of the world, it's not easy but at least you typically just need approval from a single entity (the town council)... The hard part is just waiting; it can take a decade to get approval in some cases.
84 more days till election... fingers & toes crossed
Satellite images show oil spill disaster unfolding in Mauritius
I'm getting things done in 2020
otoh : it seems to me covid models used to dictate public policies proved to be off by at least one ( if not two ) orders of magnitude. Countries that didn't confined ( brazil and sweden) didn't show that much of a difference compared to some others that did (france). The spread and impact of the virus proved to be extremely hard to understand and model correctly.

Which of course, should have people wonder if climate change model couldn't also be off by orders of magnitude ?

Now of course because one thing proves to be hard to model doesn't mean all are.

But looking a the history of public climate catastrophic announcement, how do we know that this time is the time when models of immensely complex phenomenon will be correct ?
> If the software engineer was under a hippocratic oath then he would have to refuse to build the MCAS entirely but not because the idea of an MCAS is inherently unethical, no, he would have to refuse because the company he works at wants to use the MCAS for a non ethical purpose (namely operate and hide the existence of MCAS even when it is unsafe to do so).

One, it's not going to be clear from the request that the MCAS would want to be used in unethical ways.

Since the Hippocratic oath is the argument here, how many software developers want to work in a system closer to physicians? A national cartel controlling membership and licensure - tough luck if you want to hire more developers because there's an artificially limited supply. Mandatory academic training - goodbye self-taught developers. Follow-on training with pay 1/5th or less of your attending physicians - I know residents in specialties where attendings are paid $500k a year to start, and they are making $60k a year. Brutal shift work - residents work 70-80 hours a week easily. Toxic leadership - I've heard horror stories of residents being forced to lie on ACGME forms regarding their hours under penalty of being outright fired from their residency slot, which would make it nearly impossible to get a job as a physician (mainly because you'd have to apply to a different residency program and explain your termination).

I know they're not suggesting bringing the entire medical education & training structure over to tech workers, and everyone here likes to think that they're brilliant and changing lives every day but most of us are just throwing shitcode JS into a computer for 3-4 hours a day for an ad tech company and not much more. The comparison falls apart pretty quickly.
They live on the precipice of ruin not because of their country but because of the choice that they make.

If you are high school educated, do not have children until you are married, and have a any level of job it is nearly impossible to be poor in the US. The above account for only 4% of all recipients of food stamps. The other 96% are people who don't want to work who are continually unemployed, have multiple children outside of wedlock yet want the same quality of life as everyone else. Decisions have consequences and I don't feel I should have to continually pay more so a minority of the population can have nice things regardless of the choices they made!
> What happens if I lose my phone though?

If you are truly security paranoid, you write it off and get a new one. It will hopefully be secure enough that whoever got it won't be able to access it because they lack the passcodes, biometrics and bluetooth 2fa tokens you use to unlock it. If the cost of this scares you, perhaps the NSA/Mossad/whatever should not be in your threat model.
There’s nothing selfish about wishing to be left alone, and not be forced to do things to which one does not consent, and not be forced to buy things which one does not want to buy.

Also, when born into a system that forces you, on threat of violence, to participate in it, there is no peaceful alternative that permits an opt out, so saying that those people benefit (in your view) when they have no other option, is extremely disingenuous. Do people also benefit from the war on drugs being waged against them?

There are lots of legitimate critiques of libertarianism. Neither the false dichotomy nor the ad hominem you offered are among them.

Not everyone agrees that that particular form of stability and security that you seem to think is such a huge benefit is worth the cost: specifically, that every person alive in a certain region must be forced, on threat of violence, to pay and participate in that stability-providing system, even if they vehemently do not consent to such.

Perhaps you value stability and security above all else, and think it’s a good deal. Others that do not, and consider the price (morally, in the legitimization of armed robbery, to say nothing of the dollar figure) too high, are not being selfish by having those values.

Libertarianism is not the opposite of “socially interdependent”. It’s the opposite of “forced at the point of a gun”.
I'm curious, what's the right alternative to having an email and password columns in a "customers" table?
What Steve Jobs Learned from Paramahansa Yogananda (2015)
Our environments are very different places on Earth, but they might be very similar compared to some other sci-fi ideas about life, such as life evolving in charges particles suspended in plasma. :)
Notes App with Double-Clickable Markdown Snippets and Commands
I misunderstood it, will they rename Twitch next?
edited;
Options for packaging your Python code: Wheels, Conda, Docker, and more
Great attention grabbing headline, but it ignores the typical user scenarios where PDFs are created. So how is your typical Office worker who is probably using Word going to create this awesome web page? It's simply not realistic to expect that office workers are going to use HTML, and it's been tried for years and years. Nielsen may as well go after Powerpoint next. Same criticisms and human limitations apply. Yes, better formats exist in the ideal, but ignoring the user's real context and limitations goes against the principles of User Centered Design.
AAA gamedevs (and even C- gamedevs) generally use gaming engines (Unity, Unreal, etc). They don't write direct Vulkan or GL. Practically only the Engine people need to care about Vulkan's complexity.

Besides, while the boilerplate for Hello Triangle is indeed very big, it makes a lot of stuff easier to express on top of it. GL may have a much smaller Hello Triangle, but you have a lot less control over it, way too much stuff happens under the hood. And regardless, if all you want is to animate a web page with fish on an aquarium you really should be using GL instead of Vulkan.
And let's face it, if you're a gig worker you're not doing a 401k match with your $10/mo left over after expenses.
Definitely.

People who think their problems are small or simple write their own libraries, and then every change in requirements gets incorporated into the library or blamed on the victim. By the time the system is profitable you've reimplemented half of a robust library, badly.
I think I probably misinterpreted YC to mean HN.
> 'patriotic' local sales

Biggest winners from recent Amazon and Flipkart sales were OnePlus, Oppo, Xiaomi etc.
As a person who has worked at many startup, I get it, "shipping" features is important.

As an engineer working at many startups, this is a sad and painful reality of working under product driven ideas and "first to market" type things- basically anything that doesn't (usually) involve life or death, or federal regulation is rushed out the door when it can be.

As a user, I absolutely 100% hate this mentality. You skip features you don't consider necessary, do things in ways that make them difficult to return to later and throw it in the "technical debt" pile.
Why? There was a lot of money made on the sale.
Lower compensation than private sector is not specific to the military. It is true of most government positions.

Typical offsetting factors that rational agents weigh include pensions, education subsidies and other benefits, job stability, and perceived upward mobility.
For some file extensions yes, for others no or not anymore (eg .js)
How about something that requires hard work, sacrifice, and effort to attain. For example, is most social circles, having a faster car is a source of pride and admiration. Driving a fast car requires money and the ability to press a gas pedal. Wouldn’t it be better if training to be fast runner or fast cyclist was instead the thing being judged?
Ah, yea. I was confusing dynamic dispatch for multiple dispatch.

My bad!
I find this topic and discussion super relevant in 2020. I Just tried to share some of my companies articles to a subreddit and because my blog posts are connected to a company they are reluctant to accept it. On the other hand YouTube and Blog influencers which have their own agenda are not considered when they are trading their influence there and many times have sponsors.

The main point is when your rules are contradictory or not have a precise threshold. It reminds me of Wikipedia notability rules.
Perhaps that troubles some people more than others, it's just that for me a purchase is a simple, binary choice -I either agree with what they're asking for, based on the best information that I have about it, or not and I don't. Depending on the asking price, I will spend some time to research, in order to minimise my chances of being disappointed, but that's straightforward enough.

Whereas when I'm faced with a donation button that leads to an empty box waiting to be filled, or even to a number of presets, my mind goes in too many directions:

"Is this particular project more worthy of donations than dozens of other free software projects I am using every day? What am I using every day, let me think, Linux, FreeBSD, Xorg, GNU, vim -jesus that'll be a long list, I can't donate to all of them. Well maybe I could just give a few quid to all, but donating a few quid to some of these projects would be a joke -the big ones receive a lot of funding regardless. And it would be too much effort just to find the details on how to donate anyway." So now I have to factor in not just how much value I would attribute to each project which is hard enough as it is, but also how much difference it could make -how much the project is in need of funding.

It just feels too arbitrary and exhausting to deal with all this, so in the end I don't bother. Obviously some people don't overanalyse things and just act spontaneously -sometimes I do too, but rarely. I don't think I'm the only one that has this mental block.

On the other hand if a project says "you like this project? If so, please click here to donate $x" -then that's awesome, I like the software, it's asking for $x, $x is a reasonable amount, so I just do it and move on. Or I don't, if I don't think $x is reasonable (I don't think that's happened, normally free software authors are very modest in what they're asking when they do that). Giving me a single choice taps to the spontaneous part of me, asking me to pick an amount myself triggers my analysing part.

The ideal for me would be if there was a platform that asks you to put a total amount you're willing to spend every month, then asks you to select the projects you're using and a rating of how much you appreciate each, then it factors that along with some objective development activity measures to distribute the amount between the projects, perhaps with an increased weight to smaller projects. I think someone actually posted a similar idea here recently.
> I'm also curious how the person knew that power wasn't cut when he was away?

Most homes have something with a mains-powered, non-battery-backed clock. You get home and the microwave or the oven is flashing 12:00 and you know there was a power cut.

> So other than buying the wrong type of UPS

This isn't a failure of 'type' of the UPS - it's a design fault deliberately left in by the device manufacturer for market segmentation.

It would be trivial for them to keep the power outputs on if the battery failed but the mains remained on. Leaving it out is a business decision, hobbling their home product so it doesn't steal market share from their small-business product.
I'm glad you are so sure.

Maybe the new national security law of HK is less than the Platonic ideal of a perfect law. Is it also fair to say that you think the National Security Law of the US is bad too? Since chloerei stated that it "is broader and stricter than China" and you didn't refute it. Can you elaborate on that? Since it's your own country and you should be much better informed to comment on that than on the HK law.
> We now have our own "Great Firewall"

I don’t see anything about content filtering. Just transport integrity.

The closest we come to that is the prohibition on apps, but that’s still an ocean away from censoring text messages mentioning the Tiananmen massacre.
And explains XmlHttpRequest, also from Microsoft.
The "Fiction, culture, and history" section includes a bunch of works written in various languages, but apparently they're using the English translation. Surely the original is more representative of human cultures as a whole than its translation into English (which is more representative of anglophone cultures).
The election may already be "decided" through fraudulent means with the USPS being captured.

Trump's USPS' Postmaster General replacement, along with who recently fired 23 USPS executives:

"Lawmakers Demand Removal of Postmaster General DeJoy Over 'Nefarious' Efforts to Destroy the Postal Service and 'Aid Trump Reelection'" - https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/i71z41/lawmakers_...
I think the relevant phrase is "so you must define what the behavior is in your implementation".

With simple compilers, you could more or less define what happens with undefined behavior. For example, on platform X, if you dereference NULL, you get a segfault. On platform Y, you get a zero value.

Problem is these behaviors are hard to define once you start thinking about the edge cases. You can dereference NULL with an offset, and once you do that, you might skip over any guard pages and overwrite a function pointer with garbage and then jump to some random location in memory, and once you do that, all bets are off. I mean, really, really off.

So that leaves you with three options.

1. Abandon the idea of defining behavior in these cases.

2. Insert bounds checks.

3. Refine the idea of undefined behavior into two separate concepts--"bounded" and "critical" undefined behavior.

C has taken all three options at the same time, in a sense. The main standard takes option #1, the Address Sanitizer gives you #2 (more or less), and annex L gives you #3.

Annex L, option #3 above, is in many senses the sane option--but it requires a fairly large amount of work on the part of the compiler writers, and to my knowledge neither GCC nor Clang have implemented it.

I would also like to add that some of the places where we see undefined behavior were inserted into the standard for real-world cases for unusual platforms. For example, the weird rules for pointer comparisons make sense when you think about segmented memory. Relational comparisons (<, >, <=, >=, but NOT == or !=) on pointers are generally used for traversing arrays, and if you have two pointers into the same array, it would be reasonable to assume that they have the same segment (depending on your memory model)... SO, you omit the segment comparison in this case.
But is there evidence that enough consumers care about privacy, so that we can have confidence that this approach will pay off for Apple? Because, if not enough consumers care that their privacy orientation is rewarded from a purely financial point of view, I have little faith that Apple will stick to it purely as a matter of principle. Do you?
Are-we-facing-a-Bitcoin-and-ethereum-bullrun
Where do you draw the line though? Does everyone employed in any capacity at any kind of business have to take an oath?

It seems to me that if everyone has to promise to do no evil, the meaning of such oaths would become diluted.
Have you ever visited https://arxiv.org/?
Inventions don't take engineers. Making the idea into reality takes engineers.
MasterWiki – Classes stolen from MasterClass, republished as wikiHow articles
In case it's not obvious after you read the text in that page, the word "Clean" in the context of that text actually means:

* balkanized/siloed instead of globally standardized;

* permissioned instead of permissionless; and

* monitored via backdoors instead of optionally secure.

I'm reminded of this passage from George Orwell's classic piece, "Politics and the English Language" (http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/72/30.pdf):

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question−begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine−gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."

--

EDITS: Simplified language, and removed quotes from OP as well as several paragraphs from the Orwell quote to make my comment shorter and easier to digest.
That's not really a proper way to deal with it. Proper UPS for a home server or any standalone server or appliance has to hook up either after ATX power supply in parallel and provide all the ATX voltages or hook up directly into a power supply to save a bit on extra converters. This way UPS failure won't affect anything and such UPS will be much more efficient.

It's just that consumer home UPSes are almost scam level products designed to profit from naive people. They are both not improving things for an average user and killing batteries after like a year of operation (lead acid batteries can last for like a decade when not subjected to those UPS chargers).
wtf are you talking about?
Show HN: Mobile app for truck drivers to manage their income/expenses
I created a mobile app for truck drivers to keep record their expenses/income. It's not only for truck drivers, you can use this for any kind of trips to keep record the transactions, but mainly focused truck drivers.

You can download it from here
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mkumaran.o...
I'd add that the collection of telecom companies at the bottom of the page is grossly misleading. It makes them appear as signatories or as if they're following America's lead.
This reminded me of James Hamilton's (the AWS datacentre guru) writeup of the power outage at the 2013 SuperBowl. Specifically how the default configuration of backup generators is often to protect themselves, even if that means shutting down the things they are meant to keep running. In my own experience running a reasonably sized datacentre I was often surprised at how UPSs and generators reacted to adverse conditions. One thing with power that you don't want is to be surprised. But it's difficult to test this equipment so it's mostly a learn as you go experience.

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2013/02/the-power-failure-...
EPA to Rescind Methane Regulations for Oil and Gas
> I can totally relate to those rabbit-hole kind of problems

Exactly the mechanism that this question aims to address!
>> This process is usually handled by "agents" who knows how much these govt employees expect and provide "easy" services to whoever wants to get shit done

That's probably why some people would block the application and even refuse bribes; they probably already have exclusive deals with agents who pay them regular bribes and will not even bother to risk accepting bribes through unproven channels. They literally monopolized the regulatory pipelines and have setup an entire supply chain around it.
Do we ideally want an educated, self-aware population who have a better chance of self-regulating - or the opposite? Similarly do we want discourse to be more lazy and simplified or to be more detailed When is it coddling, when is it laziness?