skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're ok with using a parabolic mirror(s) as the heat source instead, then it should be doable. eg:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060508061432/http://solstice.cr...

They specifically mention systems that do 5kw, 25kw, etc (in the next pages).

---

That aside, there's a kickstarter project for a 1kw Stirling engine from about 6 years ago:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/672465444/low-cost-ster...

The "updates" tab there seems to have potentially useful info, though the project appears to have stopped updating there.

The project itself still seems to be iterating on new developments, just slowly.

http://volodesigns-sterlingproject.blogspot.com/

More recent video's of their development:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p06HDOlxDMM

Mentions here they're intending on making the design OSS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrXltsm-Ujs
Nord-tech?
Web search saver: Ada '83 spec is 338 pages (https://quicksearch.dla.mil/qsDocDetails.aspx?ident_number=3...)

For C life is easy as you can leave things undefined with the caveat "dragons may fly out of your nose" :)

An alternative example of a small spec language might be Scheme (especially pre-R6RS): https://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/r5rs.pdf
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487825.
Ah, that makes sense then. Thanks for the info.
What you are describing is an automated taxi.

Rich people who want to call a chauffeured luxury car can do so in most major cities. Many of them do use such a service, but many of them also own expensive cars to show off their wealth.
Isn't it the drivers job to take control whenever there is a design flaw? I thought that was the exact job description.

If the car is going over it's speed limit, the driver should react.

I see that some people think Uber should have added systems to control the safety driver. I think that's a fair point, but it doesn't take away the drivers responsibility. They knew the car isn't perfect. It's their job to take over control whenever that happens.
You clearly misunderstood something because that's not a CA law and that isn't how a consultant or contractor would prove their legal entitys existence to a client.
> Looking at the road when sitting in the drivers seat without being absorbed by your phone is not, in any way, a hard task. Truck drivers, train drivers, pilots and other equipment operators exist. Millions of people do it every day. Those that don't, and end up killing someone are held responsible if found out.

Driving a truck is in no way comparable to what this lady was tasked to do. A truck driver is performing an active task (operating a truck), this lady was supposed to be performing a passive task (monitoring a truck's driving). Active and passive tasks are very different beasts.

But you're on to something with your comparison to pilots. Planes are mostly automated. When that automation fails, the pilots often lack the situational awareness to avoid a crash when they have to take over (for an example, see https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...).
Cambridge Five, and yes.

It wasn't until the 70s that there was a proper effort to weed out the communists.

I would bet £10 that Hollis was a mole.
Might be interesting to see if we can get more reusable medical supplies in the future. Autoclave for sterility, replace smaller portions (like needles) to reduce waste. Plastic has its place for its characteristics, but if we can do the same and reuse at the same time, I'm all for it.
Yeah. But the bewilderment isn’t a technical one, it’s a business one.

You’d think 30 years of unprofitable future tech would happen at a university or the military or some skunkworks operation for a massive company.

Though I’m sure quite a bit of their funding is military.
He can desire reeeeaaaallllyyyy hard to be a lady all he wants, but he'll never be one. Reality does not change just because of human desire. The guy deserves to be treated with the same amount of respect as any human being does, but he haves no authority over me to obligate me to say an airplane is a submarine.

On the subject at hand, he was paid to do one job: look at the road and be the safety net between an experimental car and the other people on the road.

If he was listening to a podcast using headphones it could have been avoided, but he was looking down at his phone for the whole duration of the recorded video we have from the incident.

It's negligent homicide just as it would be to any other machine operator, on any other industry, that did not fulfilled his duty to the company that contracted him would.
Real question here is: should the passport number have any expectations of privacy?
It seems like such an easy thing to expose as you literally put it down on every document like hotel check ins etc. AFAIK it's not even a random number and instead it's generated from basic info like birth year/place/gender.

That being said it was a really good blog!
As we are trying to judge someone's character or morality I would consider it along the lines of - if that poor person were in Feeney's shoes would they have done the same? If Feeney were in that poor persons shoes would he have done the same?

The forces on a wealthy person giving up almost all of his wealth are also pretty great, but in a different way, when compared to a poor person doing the same.

As #1 in the original list implies, it may be most important to be lifted out of poverty as this is what creates fulfilling civilisation. So one might argue that the poor person should invest what little money they have into their own future first, in a way which will improve their lot, as this will give them the opportunity to help many others (like Feeney did).
What SaaS product is everyone using for forming companies nowadays? Stripe Atlas? Clerky? Gust?
If you really want to recycle you can. In Switzerland 80% of PET bottle are collected and recycled (without deposit). This is paid by manufacturers and distributors who have to collect and pay for the recycling. Current bottles are composed of 50% of recycled PET, and some manufacturer are starting to introduce 100% bottle. Of course, to reach that result you need laws, you cannot expect the free market to do it.
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I agree with you except for

> and they didn't even give that driver amphetamines

Yo, what? IIRC, most *amphetamines are either illegal in the US or like FDA Class 1 substances or something like that, and you just want to throw them at people operating > 1 ton machinery? That seems like it could have an even higher risk for danger.
I needed to hear this today.

Today I was presenting a training session on some advanced modelling techniques to a group of users who usually only meet once a year, and had tested the demo to death over the preceeding months. I'm aware much of the process relies on how tight the string between the two cans is pulled, and do my best to work around it. Just last week our main dev for modelling, who had written the code in the MOD-L language, did a mic drop and left.

Last night a patch was pushed out to users that updated their modelling program, and caused the xml output structure to vary. This morning, at about 3am during some last minute testing I discover that this means nobodies models will run when we import them into the new stuff today, except a backup model I had saved. So, we went from a live demo and potential UAT session, to "look at this shiny thing we built for you, but you can't have".

Shoestring, bubblegum, string joined tin cans, and a legacy of R&D that pretends to be production but is actually just a noose, hangman, and gallows in a peppa pig costume.
It seems more like you hardly ever write parse trees directly in Lisp. Instead you write macros that get expanded into them.

It’s not really parsed until you have a data structure that lets you search for all occurrences of a special form. Using lists for everything ignores important distinctions between levels.
Hernan demonstrates how to put this to work in epidemiology. Quite interesting. Pearl's work should be seen in context though as a effort to create reasoning machines (AI), i.e., in automating reasoning.
Not just the Volvo system, but Uber had tuned the object detector to ignore the sparse lidar returns that the car saw 6 seconds before impact. Meyhofer, the head of ATG, fought to tune the car that way because trees cause similar sparse returns and the car had been stopping for trees while testing. The pressure to tune was there because of an impending demo with Uber CEO Dara and Meyhofer stood to gain tens of millions of dollars from the demo. It’s not just homicide but Uber also defrauded their safety drivers.
The point is inane because ultimately Apple sells luxury consumer goods which are affordable only to the upper and middle classes…

This is so not true.

As someone who works with students from families that are low-income, they have lots of Apple products.

If Apple is a luxury brand—which I disagree with—then it’s the most accessible luxury brand out there.

It certainly is a quality brand. There’s way too much focus on $1000+ flagship phones instead of items like the iPhone SE, which even low-income people can afford at $199 on contract.

The Apple Watch 3 is also $199. These devices are less expensive than a shirt or scarf in a Neman Marcus…
Uber posted a safety driver specifically to make the car safe at regular speeds despite the limitations of the autonomous system. That driver just wasn't doing their job.
> The Gotland-class submarines of the Swedish Navy [...] are the first submarines in the world to feature a Stirling engine air-independent propulsion (AIP) system [...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotland-class_submarine
Doesn't matter, we're talking about students. Some will use pg directly, most can use a gui via an office suite or browser. Databases are eating the world. ;-)
I don't think it's wise to extrapolation the intentions of VCs from a single example, especially when there are tens of thousands of counter examples.
Boston dynamics has been all 3 of those... currently a skunkworks
"Finntech"
FYI it was a bicyclist (singular) but they were walking their bike across a crosswalk at 10pm.

Not to victim blame but if they were not wearing lights or a reflective vest I think a human could have made the same tragic error.

As you point out the system actually DID detect them.
I agree with you, but I just have to say that if you're having to change a bunch of 255s to 65535 everywhere, you've done things poorly. Ada has a bunch of nice features to refer to these sorts of limits by names or methods that won't need to be changed. For those not familiar with Ada, one way might be MyInteger'Last, which will give the largest valid value for the type.

I may or may not be a little crazy about Ada...
Fintech can be summed up as "companies doing illegal things to lose money". It's seriously the thing that made me realize there is something very, very wrong with tech today.

For most of history the reason to do illegal things was because it was profitable but I have personally witnessed self described "fintech" companies do illegal (or at the very least questionably legal) things that anyone with a brain would say "wait, that will clearly lose more money than it makes"

Of course the trouble is that no regulatory bodies can actually enforce the majority of the regulations they are supposed to. If the government had the staff to enforce the regulations they are responsible for half of the CEOs doing fintech work would be in prison.

"bubble" doesn't even come close to describing the situation we're in.
Just FYI, handshake deals can be valid contracts if certain requirements are met. For one thing, there needs to be enough specificity around the material deal points. Even if you have a written contract but you haven't agreed on the material deal points (for fundraising, this would be things like valuation, type of shares, number of shares/percent of company) then you don't have a valid contract.

There are some things that are on the fence in terms of materiality. For example, is the valuation pre- or post-money? Is there an option pool set aside?

Lastly, there are some types of agreements that cannot be done just on a handshake — there has to be a written agreement in order to be enforceable. IIRC from my law school days, this includes the sale of real estate and a contract that, by its terms, cannot be completed in a year. The latter excludes things that are known to take more than a year, like building a skyscraper. It would include "pet-sit my dog for 13 months while I'm vacationing", for example.
"To maintain our standard of living" is not even close to the reason we need to tax billionaires.

Let me put it to you this way: I couldn't give 2 shits how many mansions, yachts, and Ferraris anybody has, but, when there are people[0] who literally have the ability to spend an amount of money greater than the entire GDP of a small country[1] to influence my country's elections, then I have a problem with that. Put another way, it's not the amount of money that certain people have accumulated that bothers me. It's the amount of undue influence those people get because of it that's the problem. It's not 1 person = 1 vote. It's more like $1M = 1 vote, when you take that $1M and apply it in the right places (such as directly into the pockets of politicians by way of lobbyists).

Find a way to fix that problem, and then we can talk about allowing billionaires to exist. Until then, America isn't a republic: it's a de facto oligarchy. And that, I have a real problem with.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg_2020_preside...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Federated_State...
Perhaps you missed my earlier comment.

> Except signed overflow invoking Undefined Behaviour in any C compiler, whereas unsigned overflow does not.

We aren't talking about unsigned integer types. We're talking about the behaviour of signed integer types.
Yep, I really loved Witcher 3. What they achieved is combining an game that allows you to explore area without much limitation with a great storytelling.

I'm a little bit of nervous, because this story is very different. What I really liked about Witcher 3 that it created atmosphere of folklore, and while it is fascinating, it's also dark. Especially when you go to Velen. People there are also complex, for example Bloody Barron, you know the guy is a son of a bitch, but you also feel sorry for him after learning more about him.
I did Ada at Uni.

I think it's an ok language but its Pascal roots show. In an alternate universe where Pascal won instead of C (which it nearly did!) it might have ended up where C++ is.

Pascal being the choice for Systems programming instead of C nearly happened. One of the first things Ken Thompson and Bill Joy wrote for BSD was Pascal, and the Apple Lisa system was mostly written in Pascal.
Permutations can be written as the "product" of "cycles", as described here [1].

If you choose an element belonging to a given cycle, then generate new elements by repeatedly applying the permutation, all the elements you generate will belong only to that cycle.

So, if your permutation can be written as the product of more than one cycle, and you choose a random starting element and generate new elements by successive application of the permutation, you will only generate a strict subset of all the possible elements.

On the other hand, if your permutation only has a single cycle, then that procedure will generate all the elements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation#Cycle_notation
Computers are good at giving you facts, that's why computers will be able to write a car brochure. Poetry is more about making you feel something. That's harder for a computer to do.
> Yo, what? IIRC, most amphetamines are either illegal in the US or like FDA Class 1 substances or something like that, and you just want to throw them at people operating > 1 ton machinery? That seems like it could have an even higher* risk for danger.

That's true, and my comment was mostly sarcastic (but a little serious). Amphetamines are given to military pilots to increase alertness [1]. They're also used to treat attention deficit disorder (stimulants also increase focus in healthy people, see coffee). Some years ago I read that they're also popular in some parts of Asia not for recreation, but to help workers focus on boring, repetitive tasks (and they apparently can even make that kind of work seem "fun"), but I can't find the exact article again.

The kind of job these "car monitors" are expected to do is so unnatural that it's ludicrous that someone could be expected to succeed at it perfectly, unassisted.

[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8885/do-militar...
Again we disagree :)

"if you're doing OOP your code will have methods and "setters" that mutate or set internal state"

I don't think there is nothing in OOP that "forces" you to explicitly mutate state. People just happen to do it that way, even if there was no need for that.

I.e. instead of mutating an instance of class Foo

void Foo.set(Some bar)

There are several patterns that make instance of Foo immutable. As an example:

1. Use just 'Factory' pattern to build state and disregard mutation altogether
FooFactory fact; fact.AddBar(Bar bar); Foo foo = fact.build();

This may appear as mutating (the factory) but the point is the mutations are located at the factory, which is expceted to have a limited scope, and the entity with larger scope (Foo) is immutable wihtout setters.

2. If there is need to modify existing state, instead of mutating the instance, return a new instance with the value modified. So instead of

void foo.Set(Bar bar)

Use method that creates a copy of foo, modifies state, and then returns a new instance of Foo

Foo foo.Modify(Bar bar)

Just removing mutability actually goes long way in making programs more legible akin to functional programs.

I agree functional style is often the best. Unfortunately we just don't have a functional language that could replace C++.
Lots of people who can't afford or can barely afford Louis Vuitton also have LV stuff. Low income families buying Apple products doesn't mean they're not luxury, it means they are aspirational.
Why would Pearl's approach be better at scaling? If anything, the Rubin causal model scales wonderfully with more variables.
Its that the 'fix' is so unprofessional.

The problem is that the program runs out of RAM. The challenge is to write the data and metadata in such a way that a program crashing at any point for any reason is recoverable.

This is the basic promise of the Durability in ACID, and people using MyRocks expect it.

Rather than actually making sure that MyRocks is durable, they simply slap on a 'max transaction rows' to make it unlikely you run out of RAM. Instead, you simply get an error, and can't do stuff like ALTER TABLE or UPDATE on large tables.

Of course its easy to run out of RAM despite these thresholds, and its easy to find advice when you google the error messages you get that lead you to up the thresholds and to even set a 'bulk load' flag that disables various checks you probably haven't investigated.

The whole approach is wrongheaded!

A database that crashes should not be corrupt!!! Isn't this reliability 101? Why doesn't myrocks have chaos monkey stress testing etc etc?

</exasperated ranting>
> I would add also Nvidia's hostility towards standards.

With CUDA I get a comfortable C++ dev environment that integrates with their products AND Visual Studio, FOR FREE. I played a bit with raw OpenCL a couple years ago, and it's.. uncomfortable. I've looked for free (as in beer) SYCL implementations... couldn't find any. IDEs with integrated debugging for OpenCL... couldn't find any, at least not for free. (Intel charged $$$ for their full-fledged OpenCL tools.)

CUDA is popular because the development environment is free AND comfortable. Has the situation changed the last years?

> Khronos standards

You could argue the other way: CUDA has become the de facto standard in certain areas and other vendors should release CUDA-compatible tooling for their products. I as a developer want to get work done and I don't care about ideals like "standards". I choose and recommend tooling that gives the shortest way to the result.

---

I'm mostly working with REST these days and I curse the HTTP protocol and URIs, etc. that are a mishmash of hacks to get it work with 7-bit charsets. At one occasion I said: "Just because something has a 30 year old RFC doesn't mean it's suitable for use in _today's_ applications." Standards can just as much hold back and prevent better ideas from emerging as they can help with interoperability.
Why walk when you can fly?

Gravity.

Overcoming gravity takes a lot of energy, and if you're only moving a relatively short distance it's a huge waste getting a payload in to the air if there's an acceptable alternative.

For long distances fixed wing drones will definitely be better though.
An AI system that makes let calls would revolutionise the sport!!
New AirPods firmware enables Spatial Audio
I'm very surprised these are electric.

I would have thought they would have to be fuel based.

I would have thought electric for information (ie photography) Fuel for the meat world.

The Chinese are electric as well - https://www.xa.com/en/xp2020

I don't get it?
A thought I had:

The goal of photography is to look like CGI.

The goal of CGI is to look like photography.
Why shouldn't Uber give them anything? Also, who's them?
fema wood gasifier - power generation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6e3CprVTi8
It would still be worth conducting fintechy business. It would barely affect bonuses. It would still buy all that stuff after behavior adapted to the change.

Your claim is of a piece with claims that raising the minimum wage would destroy jobs, and people on minimum wage would be out of work. Guess what, we tried it anyway, jobs didn't vanish at all, poor people have more money to spend on necessities, and everyone is better off.
That's why they offer better quality, they put a lot of work into their product while other studios just want to release and move to a next product.
Semantic Experiences by Google AI
Good to know that the safety equipment in the car (camera etc) is there for the car company's protection and not the drivers and pedestrian protection.
I accidentally discovered a way to get hold of passport details of random people by applying for Visa on arrival to Vietnam. There are these online portals which do some document pre processing which is legit. And on landing in Vietnam we are expected to show that we have already applied for Visa. It so happens that these portals do batch processing. Which means my application is processed along with a half a dozen or so other random applicants.

And so I applied for one. And when I received the confirmation document I received the entire batch file. It included passport number, expiry date and other PII of ten random people which would be super valuable in the hands of criminals and such.

And conversely ten random people know my PII
> lead me to believe

well, that's a start. it has the largest amount of people in prison in both per capita and in absolute numbers.

many of those people are taking plea deals simply because they cannot afford their rights.

the primary difference between the US and other systems is that we are apologists for the US system and simply don't respect other systems and thats the only distinction.

people are conditioned to retort by comparing the US with the worst countries in the world, to rationalize why we're the best in a race nobody is even in. this is a mental disease.

they're conditioned to dismiss flaws by saying "but at least we can talk about it", deflecting further discussion about the state of the system to a comfortable imagined assurance of consequence free speech, ignoring the exceptions to that part of the Bill of Rights and the other 9 amendments in it, amongst every other article and procedural gaff