skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I will be happily become pro-nuclear the moment that all the real-world externalities are actually priced in. How much do you think it cost to have 1,000 square miles in the Ukraine uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years? What if such an accident happens in a densely populated area?

We don't need to speculate here. That's precisely what happened in Fukushima. Evacuation orders were lifted in 2017. Radiation release in populated areas makes cleanup worthwhile. By comparison, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl still exists because the entire town existed to support the power plants. Once the power plants were no longer operational there was no real reason for the town to exist, and thus no incentive for cleanup.

And you're applying a double standard here. Do fossil fuel plants have to price in the estimated damage done due to climate change? That's estimated to

> How much do you think it will cost to keep all that nuclear waste safe for the next half a million years or so?

Million years or so? You realize uranium is a toxic heavy metal? Naturally occurring uranium is toxic. Spent nuclear waste is toxic forever. And it would have been toxic forever even if it was never used as nuclear fuel. In fact, uranium contamination of water is already a concern due to naturally occurring uranium [1]. The risk of uranium water contamination exists regardless of spent nuclear fuel.

Storing it isn't actually all that hard. You bury it in bedrock in an area with no aquifer. The main concern for uranium is water contamination. Putting it in a place with no aquifer eliminates the possibility of contamination even if the containment vessels deteriorate. The scenarios in which waste fuel results in contamination are borderline absurd, typically involving some sort of societal collapse destroying all knowledge of the disposal sites coupled with some future civilization digging up the waste for no discernible reason.

The cost of such a disposal facility is minimal: around $200 million for the Yucca Mountain facility [2]. Disposal isn't very expensive because the amount of waste generated is so small. The entirety of the US's nuclear waste from power generation occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and less than 10 yards high [3].

1. https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

3. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
If you sent someone a (physical) document and asked them to "put it in the banana folder", they would happily put it in the folder labelled "Banana". It would be seen as a mistake to have separate "banana" and "Banana" folders.
I do appreciate those rules because they lead to a higher quality listing.

I had a bugfix update rejected a little while ago for a business app.

Apple wanted a video walkthrough of every screen in the app, explaining what each screen is for and with a breakdown of device permissions needed on each of those screens. That day was a complete write-off. If the app required excessive permissions I could understand there might be some concern, but it doesn't. Any permissions we do need are justified in the info.plist as required, and are very descriptive.

They then rejected it again the next day, as I had apparently failed to mention what we use ARKit for in the video. We don't use ARKit and it is not in the codebase.

Another day goes by and they finally approve, with a friendly disclaimer that they will now require an updated video with every future update.

It just seems like busywork to me.
It's funny you say that, and there are shops that are very careful with this sort of stuff. Unfortunately, I fear that when the big cloud hack comes, it's going to hurt everyone (i.e. those with and without publicly addressable S3 buckets).
Elon's talked about this on stage, where easily could have 1,000 to 100,000 of them with just a tiny amount of C4 - and then have them swarm at one or many targets using AI or other training/data.
This is the correct answer. To add historical perspective, I had friends who would go into Apple stores and point all the demo machines at newgrounds.com to show people that they shouldn’t waste their money on devices that couldn’t even play flash animations as well as a low end laptop.
Could this become like other cheap, easy to manufacture societal disruptions like drugs - solution being: make them illegal.
As of ~5 years ago they have a menu, but you don't have to use it: you can just tell them to order for you.
How to Create an Effective Software Delivery Team – 4 Key Components
I remember working the support queue _before_ this automatic re-routing mitigation system went in and it was a lifesaver. Having to run over to SRE and yell "look! look at grafana showing this big jump in 522s across the board for everything originating in ORD-XX where the next hop is ASYYYY! WHY ARE WE STILL SENDING TRAFFIC OVER THAT ARRRGHH please re-route and make the 522 tickets stop"

it's cool to see something large enough that the auto-healing mechanisms weren't able to handle it on their own, though shoutout to whoever was on the weekend support/SRE shift; that stuff was never fun to deal with when you were one of a few reduced staff on the weekend shifts
While true, I feel it is simply a more competent prison.
What do you mean by profitable? A cartel could raise capital through some erc token that gives the holder the right to some sort of dividend.
> These facts support the main argument of this article: that banks do not have any special powers in relation to money creation.

Nothing in this blog post comes even close to supporting the idea that banks have no special money creating power.

The hidden assumption is that this "iou power" is not regulated or enforced by government control over the money supply.

That you can write a cheque and then not cash it, and that a poker site can commit fraud, do not make banks unspecial.

This is just a libertarian is/aught fallacy dressed up in a lot of words.
Radiation's Material Healing Powers – Rare, but Just Where We Need Them
Even if there was no reserve requirements, or other regulation to limit money creation by banks, a regular bank still would not have powers similar to the central bank.

Imagine a fraudulent banker who keeps adding billions to his own account. Suppose no-one notices. The banker starts to buy mansions and islands with this made-up money. Every time his bank transfers money to other banks (to buy those mansions), the bank loses some reserves. At some point the bank has no reserves left. Even if the reserve requirement was 0, having no reserves would mean that you could no longer transfer money to other banks.
Special relativity can help AI predict the future
It's like being in 1995 and predicting that Windows botnets will be created. The coming disaster is inevitable.

State-sponsored hackers are not going to ignore the opportunity. They probably have the capability already, in dozens of countries, and are just waiting for orders from the leaders. If war is starting, the order will be given. Sanctions could be enough to trigger it.
Under "capitalism", the aim of menu design is to maximise profits for the restaurant owner.

Imagine a system that maximises the health and happiness of patrons, the enjoyment and satisfaction of work by employees, and the sustainability of the business.

The people who build it will need more than menu design.
Thanks. Finally a voice of reason drowned by the cacophony of "I roamed the internet as a baby and look at me now!" bozos. Facebook, YouTube and whatever SnapCrap of the week is in vogue these days employ hordes of PhD's whose sole job is to ensure you get addicted to their pulp feed as much as humanly possible. Stories of internet addiction among kids involving serious sleep deprivation and complete social withdrawal are everywhere to be found. Yet the people who grew up with Geocities as the biggest site on the web think they understand the magnetic pull of the modern sites highly tuned for stickyness.
Allied bombing is a thing that happened, but sometimes it seems like people really strain to relate anything to something shameful associated with Americans.

In this particular context, if you're thinking of WWII, it's kind of odd for a person not to think of and compare the concept to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
The problem is failed shot causes catastrophic result.
When the technology improves sufficiently maybe there will be a drone the size of a dragonfly that land on targets and inject them with ricin or another poison. That requires a lot better targeting than a plastic container loaded with explosives and ball bearings, which just has to get close to the target. Still, it would make a great assassination tool.
On the bright side, you don't need to bomb everyone. Future wars could be more efficient.
> With hidden filenames on mobile, desktop GUIs, terminal CLI completion, and shells with insensitive matching like fish (bash via option), the benefits of insensitive fs are not as high as they used to be.

We've got better at working around case sensitivity, sure. I don't see that as a good reason not to fix the problem properly.
No I mean in a Pareto efficiency sense.
> and 38 times fewer than gas.

Chernobyl came close to be 10 or 100X worse. In which case, nat gas and fission are even up.
You can disagree with it, but sustainable wood harvesting is a top-level policy of the BLM, throughout its history and most recently in the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Both BLM and USFS are charged with "maintenance in perpetuity of a high-level annual or regular periodic output of the various renewable resources of the public lands consistent with multiple use."
The language used to describe fractional reserve is pretty misleading. Banks don't increase the total supply of money, all fraction reserve does is keep more of it in circulation. If a bank takes a $1,000,000 deposit one customer, and lends $850,000 of it to other customers, there isn't $1,850,000 worth of money all of a sudden. There is $850,000 worth of debt held by customers, and another customer with a $1,000,000 balance, which on the banks books will be represented by $150,000 or cash reserves and that $850,000 of debt.

The thing that seems to confuse people is the abstraction mechanism by which the $1,000,000 depositor doesn't see any of the $850,000 debt, and the by which they can withdraw the $1,000,000 without being involved in any debt transactions themselves. Fractional reserve banking doesn't create money out of thin air, it's just a system that allows for deposits to be put to productive use. The alternative is that deposits are entirely withdraw from the economy completely until the depositor wants to use them, which would be the economic equivalent of hoarding all your money under the mattress.

The rest of it also doesn't really "go to the bank", it's money that they must have on hand to service withdrawals, and absorb defaults and other losses.
> These numbers are quite meaningless without the counterfactuals how many deaths were there by comparison?

Parent probably should have quoted the figures, but they're frequently cited (so somewhat assumed, I guess) in such discussions, and very easy to find on the net.

From [0] I see:

"1.13 deaths per 100 million miles traveled."

Naive scaling to 3 billion, that'd be ~34 deaths in non-Tesla Autopilot driving.

Parent is correct that humans are poor at risk management.

Another common refrain when talking about auto-driving technology is that it doesn't need to be perfect -- just better than humans. And that's a much lower bar.

[0] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Yeah, a jupyter-style solution is much more accessible IMO
>in my experience QAnon is the political arm of 4Chan

This is a spurious claim to make. Do you have any evidence of this? 4chan and 8kun have different owners who both hate each other.

Spreading gossip about problems as big as this does nothing good.
That pro-climate folks think it'll help everyone else too is irrelevant to the example. Certainly, climate policy aims for outcomes they want for themselves.

The example assumes nothing about the outcome of any such policy other than it surely makes it harder for a coal miner to put food on the table in the near term.

That is, pro-climate folks seek outcomes that are at least short-term detrimental to others. This is a direct contradiction to the earlier claim that one party in the US has a monopoly on such behavior.

> Calling this 'throwing the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus to help themselves' is disingenuous.

Uhh, no.

Source: Extended family that was well-paid within the mining industry until regulatory changes during the prior presidential administration caused a sharp contraction in that industry.
I've been worrying about this for years.

What's next is micro-chemical attacks. Drones that can cloud an individual or small group of people. They'll think it was just dust or something, the thing zips off into the sky, and the linings of their lungs starts dissolving and they die.
That's very uncalled for, it is a surprising outcome for this company to be rushed to market.
This is GOLD, my friend!
I remember learning this in both high school physics and high school chemistry for unit conversions.
This is more or less the structure I followed with this testing framework: https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory

The whole idea being that you don't want the story to be turing complete (there are no loops or conditionals with a story), but the code that executes it needs to be turing complete.
Someone should write a book set in a science fiction dystopia where you have to apply for a specific permit to construct any device or write any software (lest you make a drone or a singularity AI), and where machine tools are carefully controlled and limited to regularly inspected industrial facilities.
You can really see how government intelligence agencies just go around hacking and dumping repositories of other governments and companies keeping what they find in their back pocket.
> On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.

Well that's not true:

"An American nuclear-powered submarine leaked radiation for more than two years, releasing the bulk of the material in its home port of Guam and at Pearl Harbor, Japanese and U.S. officials said Thursday."[1]

There was also the A4 that fell off an aircraft carrier with 3 nuclear bombs on board, which were never recovered[2].

Both the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion sunk and haven't had their nuclear reactors or weapons recovered. They do appear to remain intact though.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nuclear-subs-radia...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Philippine_Sea_A-4_incide...
I think the book should be renamed to "Getting Organized: For the Hyper-Conscientious".
Because if you actually manage to power through all the padding to get to the content (I did once but failed my second attempt), you'll find a system that requires a level of conscientiousness that's higher than if you had just done the work.
The system looks great, it's just for a very specific type of person.
Is it unreasonable for small drones to be tracked? It's way too easy to get footage of private property or through otherwise obscured windows with drones.

Regulation doesn't have to be unreasonable.
It's way easier to scale a shared app/db, anyone who tells you different hasn't had to do devops.

Rule No. 1, never shard by account_id, Pareto is just waiting you kick you in the ass. Always shard by whatever gives the best distribution of workload.

There are more rules of course.
How far back are you going? IIRC the state sodomy law was repealed in the 70s and it certainly wasn't enforced thoroughly
Here's Jason Hughes' annotated vulnerability writeup, which the article is about: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yXni1GoD93q8mX-yom7JLBn0...
I remember someone flying one full of meth into the side of the Tijuana Costco.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/border-baja-califo...

I always thought drones would bring down the violence in Mexico, since it would be easier to keep your distribution network under the radar.

If you don't have to recruit hundreds of people to actually drive the drugs across the border, and can fly it over the fence in the middle of the night, what would be the reason for anybody to be shooting anybody.

Whoever's turf you were operating in wouldn't even know you were operating on their turf because your whole operation could be just two white-collar-type guys keeping a really low-key presence. The rise of the narco-technocrats.

But, I guess it didn't go that way.
During colonialism, you could buy stocks in companies erecting colonial empires, like the dutch east india company, or the british east india company. They had ships, troops, and actually did engage in trafficking if you can call that, by avoiding the silk road and its large dangers/taxes.
It's stupid to use a benchmark on a fancy premium vehicle versus the entire market.

Joe Schmuck who didn't replace his tires and was driving home after a 12 hour shift when his brakes failed and he died counts as much as a guy in a luxury vehicle that drives under a semi.
That's like saying aerospace engineers don't deserve credit for building rockets because they don't physically build them.

Doing what Musk does is a skill, and a pretty scare one at that.
The second to last paragraph states that the author gave a version of the document as a talk at a conference in 1997. So it appears that your memory is spot-on.
Solar and wind are only viable with storage. Storage at immense scales that are not remotely possible with our current technology. What are we going to do to fulfill electricity demand at night, which is actually when peak consumption occurs?

With solar and wind, the answer is that we keep burning fossil fuels. California and Germany still get 50-60% of their electricity from fossil fuels despite large investments in solar and wind power. Hypothetically it's possible to get below that with energy storage. But the amount of capacity it would require to make that possible is immense. We'd need 12 hours of storage to get to 80% renewables and 3 weeks of storage to get to 100% renewables [1]. By comparison the US has ~5 minutes of storage currently, most of it in the form of hydroelectric storage which is geographically limited.

By comparison, France has been using nuclear power as its primary energy source for close to half a century at this point. Its carbon intensity is far lower than Germany's despite lower energy costs.

The cynical reality is that you're right: solar and wind make sense from a political perspective. Low cost, rapid installation time. The fact that it's a dead end won't surface until well after the current generation of politicians' terms are up.

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
Makes sense! Thanks!
Woah, do compilers really have function name length limits? Which languages?
We could quibble about the definition of "special power" all day. Sure, a bank is in a better position to create money than a poker site. And a poker site is in a better position than an individual person. But these are not fundamental differences, these are differences of degree. Fundamental difference is having a literal money printer, versus not having one (central bank's ability vs regular bank). When you issue IOUs with the backing of a literal money printer (as a central bank), those IOUs are fundamentally different from the IOUs issued by me/poker site/bank.
This is actually kind of funny (and true) as I was the one that implemented sensible HTTP timeouts in the standard library after a server I wrote oddly kept eternally open-connections[1].

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/213
Good to see that they're not happy, it's our time to be happy.
> Banks don't increase the total supply of money, all fraction reserve does is keep more of it in circulation.

It doesn't increase currency (M0).

But is there 'money' in your bank account? They increase money by a slightly broader definition (accounts + currency).

Even if you've got a narrower definition (and just want the physical paper to be defined as money, not entries in a database) then they don't increase the amount, but they greatly amplify its effect by increasing the velocity of circulation (which you did mention). One little bit of money is being thrown around between owners much faster, which effectively magnifies its impact.
Would love to know more about your unpopular opinions. Too many people think the same way about money.
The Plague Fighter: Dr Wu Lien-Teh and His Work
When I was growing up, my parents adhered to Douglas Adams' rules of technology (and I think many still do today):

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
You would think a site named "Image Sensor World" would know what CIS stands for and not write "...hoping to win 60% of the global Market Share of CIS Image Sensors by...".
But there is a sweet spot. Musk seems to be good at finding it.
I wonder if we can repurpose mm-wave 60GHz panel antennas and SDRs for cheap short-range radars. Then combine with a commercial infrared camera for multi-mode target acquisition. Put those on a mount with servos to control a PKM or M240 machinegun, and mount the whole setup on the roofs of buildings. Critical infrastructure anti-drone air defense guns at fairly low cost.
Killbots is a scifi short based on this. Don't watch if you're squirmish though.
I thought it was well known that infrastructure has been a target of state hacking?
This could be because politics sucks and pay is low, so successful lawyer/doctor Asians do not want to participate in it.
The big problem is that contexts are mostly mandatory if you want to be able to reason about the number of goroutines that are going to be around concurrently, but that the language syntax favors forgetting about them. For example, something like:

go func() { ch <- foo } ()

Can easily block forever if you are no longer reading ch. Instead, you pretty much have to guard all channel reads and writes with:

select {
case <-ctx.Done():
return ctx.Err()
case ch <- foo:
}

To some extent, this is all perfectly fair. Any programmer should see the first example and think "what causes this to return?" and won't be surprised when their program crashes every 2 weeks because it runs out of memory. But... it surprises everyone. I bet it might be the number one problem with Go, actually.

The side effect of not planning to abort operations that will never complete is that people are super okay with using locking machinery that can't be aborted. You will see all sorts of things like WaitGroups or Mutexes inside operations that have an externally-limited lifespan, and then you get the same problem of running out of memory because you have a billion things waiting on some lock; waiting for their turn to do a computation and then discard the result because the caller disappeared long ago. Feels bad. (My number one Go pet peeve, btw, is mixing different types of locking machinery. Everyone should use channels pretty much 99.9% of the time, but should never lock a mutex before doing a channel write, or something... which I've seen.)

I assume the expectation is that "something else" is supposed to make this all work. That's how it works in UNIX land. How does cat know to exit after printing 10 lines in a pipeline like "cat ... | head"? Easy; the OS kills it when head closes stdin. Unfortunately, nothing is sitting around killing your goroutines when someone presses the "stop" button in their browser. That is up to the application developer, i.e. you.
I wonder if it will get to the personal device level..