skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Desert Sunlight solar farm generated 1,344,841 MWh in 2018 [1] while employing 15 people full time [2]. That is an annualized output of 10.2 megawatts per full time employee.

The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant generated 18,213,519 MWh in 2018 with 1400 full time employees [3]. That is an annualized output of of 1.5 megawatts per FTE.

During operation, the solar farm generates more than 6 times as much energy per FTE.

Of course you need storage too for solar to supply power after sundown. I looked at some recent utility scale battery project news, like the Moss Landing project currently under construction, but I couldn't find information about these projects adding any number of permanent jobs after construction. They may be too low maintenance.

Finally, you need to amortize the project construction labor over the life of the project to get an all-in labor intensity analysis. Diablo Canyon was unfortunately built long enough ago that contemporary reporting was pre-digital. From recent nuclear projects in the United States, it looks like nuclear projects don't have lower lifetime labor intensity (inclusive of construction) than solar + storage either.

The low labor intensity of large scale renewables is an under-appreciated point. Most of the labor is front-loaded into the construction phase, and doesn't amount to a lot per lifetime MWh. When you see breathless reports about how solar power is employing a boatload of people, they're talking about short term construction work. If solar power were at steady-state, as mature as coal or nuclear power, it wouldn't provide many jobs. The only reason its job numbers are so much higher than coal/nuclear is because coal/nuclear are stagnant/declining while solar is still in the rapid growth/construction phase.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm

[2] https://www.energy.gov/lpo/desert-sunlight

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
That is like saying people have no practical use for freedom of speech because they have little or nothing to say.

I recall the first phone I purchase with gps capability required one to pay $10 a month rental on the software required to use the hardware you had purchased.

If you maintained such you would ultimately pay more for the privilege of using really really crummy mapping software than the cost of the entire phone. At the time nobody else was allowed to make mapping software for the phone much less offer it for sale or for free.

Lack of software freedom is leverage you can use to make yourself richer not only at the expense of your customers wallets but at the expense of their maximal enjoyment or even well being.

The various ecosystems that exist now even those full of paid for players is vibrant in part because of the freedom enjoyed by customers and other players. Even Apple for example benefits in part and has benefited from open source software that wouldn't exist without people who valued software freedom.

People don't care about software freedom anymore than they particularly care about EPA regulations but they would care if they couldn't breath.
Why should wealth be taxed? Because inequality is a bad thing and society would be better with less of it. Inequality is bad because the marginal utility of $100 to a billionaire is nothing, but to the homeless it is everything. Egregious inequality is an inefficient distribution of humanity's collective wealth.

Wasteful spending should also be taxed. There is no dichotomy. Yes please, put tax on carbon, on plastic, on all the other things that are bad for society. Ideally the most wasteful spenders should be taxed the most - the ten-millionth dollar someone spends on a carbon-emitting activity should be taxed at 90%.
K. Cooper, L. Torczon "Engineering a Compiler", 2nd ed. (2011)

A. W. Appel, M. Ginsburg "Modern Compiler Implementation in Java" (2007)

S. Muchnick "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" (1997)

The last book focuses entirely on program analysis and optimization. It even has a chapter on optimization for the memory hierarchy! Of course, since it's a rather dated book, the specific details in that chapter are mostly useless today, but the rest is solid.

However, those books mostly cover imperative languages (although Appel & Ginsburg devote a chapter on functional languages, both of strict and lazy variety and discuss some optimization challenges), so if you want to learn about implementing functional languages...

S. L. Peyton Jones et al. "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" (1987)

A. W. Appel "Compiling with Continuations" (1992)

Holy fatcats, those are some old books! But sadly, I am not aware of more modern ones. Try searching for papers on the topics that interest you in particular, I guess (for example, there are several papers that discuss appropriateness of using CPS as IL: "Compiling with Continuations, Continued", "Compiling without Continuations", and "Compiling with Continuations, or without? Whatever". Yes, the puns seem to be the noble tradition in the PL implementation circles). The first book starts as a general introduction but starting at about the middle firmly steers into implementing a lazy languages. The second is pretty much a description of how SML/NJ compiler was made, based on its state in about 1991, of course, and has some interesting benchmarks on efficiency of different implementations of closures.

Plus, there are lot of random pages on the web with resources for various compiler implementation courses from different universities. For one arbitrary example, https://course.ccs.neu.edu/cs4410/
Oakland residents and San Francisco residents are in the same job market, so they have the same salary.
Separating worthy designs from wasteful ones is essentially impossible. I spent the first ten years of my career designing medical devices and worked with a wide range of suppliers. One of our key vendors also did a lot of work designing airtight containers for chewing tobacco.

This is true up the entire supply chain. The same machines that produce barrier plastics for first responders also produce material for plastic wrap for retail packaging.

Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations.

The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.
We know what they could accomplished because billions has been sunk into nuclear research in the last DECADES. Decades which we could have spend that money on renewables and storage a technology already so cheap that it makes nuclear utterly pointless. A technology which would have made the whole discussion obsolete and in fact: it is obsolete today. The time scale in which "nuclear" is researched, approved or build is being counted in decades. We don't have decades so why waste a single $ on it?? It makes no sense at all.
Mark my words: if that even looks like that might happen, the advertising behemoths (chiefly Google and Facebook) will spend every last dollar trying to get some kind of human Internet ID program passed into law.

If our weapons (programs, scripts, "AI") become half as effective as theirs (the advertising giants'), they'll drop nine-plus figures paying to have ours outlawed, guaranteed. The only thing that might save us from that in the US is that national ID of any sort is pretty unpopular across party lines, and that's effectively what it'd be.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're already quietly laying the groundwork for such an effort.
The basis of my complaint is that some things are well designed, others are just nicely documented.

moment has a, to me, counterintuitive "hidden" type system that is a different-kind-of-menacing. In code I've had to review and maintain, the moment parts or more than often a soupy mess of the previous coders in combat with the nuanced hairy complexities of the library as opposed to straightforward execution of the api (compare to say, jquery, where setting all architectural disagreements aside, there's no substantial evidence of frequent "programmer struggle" in the codebases using it)

This leads to poor long-term maintainability as the code passes through many hands over the years.

If, after a year or two of average "blue collared" programmers touching a codebase it gets so convoluted that you generally need to abandon it, then fundamentally you are using poorly designed tools.

Again, we all only have our own personal lived experiences to make such assessments on, and I way too often end up "debating" what mostly amounts to my work history of parachuting in and rescuing code (it's a psychiatric problem I have) so the pessimistic aspects become quite sharp to me.
The product they're working on might be super specialized, but oftentimes the skills needed to do the work might not be.
> written in go

Why does the implementation language matter for non-library tool? Is that its only selling point?
The claim that Android is open source has long been false.

Yes, there is AOSP, but that’s only a small part of what constitutes an OS these days.

Here’s a link to a post showing how dismal things are: https://bitcannon.net/post/finding-an-alternative-to-ios/
As a technical CEO, I was good at sales and getting deals. I didn't have the focus to close deals though. I had a non-tech co-founder, but he wasn't CEO and he couldn't close things like funding all on his own.

Putting the best tech person as CEO effectively makes it a solo founder effort. The ideal is the business person as CEO, or perhaps some multi-talented person where product development is fully delegated to a CTO.
Old Street Solutions – Intuitive Jira reports for non technical users
> Define industry quotas for how much 'new' plastic is allowed to be made from crude and make companies bid for it in a "new plastic" market

If you implemented this one, all of your other goals would naturally fall out of the increased cost of plastic.

Where you give the free market conditions where it ends up doing the things you were thinking of 'requiring' it to do, you'll end up with a much more effective solution, because no set of laws or requirements is ever as comprehensive as the effect of millions of people in millions of roles trying to save a few bucks...
Taxation is basically a limit of property ownership. The inheritance tax comes to mind (also an estate tax although those are not well established everywhere in the world) but also income-taxation limits what you can earn as a person and therefore what you can own.

And taxation is also not the only parallel one could draw. For example, limits on the usage of you property is also highly regulated in various ways. Usage and ownership are very closely related.
I've seen this explicitly espoused on many occasions by many people that only the inclusion of certain groups that are marginalized is meaningful for inclusivity and that explicitly excluding groups not perceived to be marginalized is not damaging to inclusivity and the final determination on this is based on the subjective opinion of whoever is talking meaning that many people who agree on the premise disagree on what meaningful inclusion means at the implementation level.

They all seem to agree that the consequences to people who don't agree with their vision should be severe.

This would certainly not conform to most previous definitions of inclusivity.
I agree with this except to point out that Nuvia and Marvell are not dependent on Arm.
And one of these "features" is arithmetic and displaying a number?
You’re welcome to disagree but repeating that doesn’t make for engaging discussion which is kind of the purpose of this forum. If you aren’t willing to defend your support of those who are subliminally attacking others, maybe just don’t post at all. It’s just not interesting and doesn’t add anything.
I just discovered I've always wanted this.
I spent hours (dialup) downloading what I thought was powerpoint to work on a school project as a kid and it turned out only to be a viewer. Unfortunately buying MS Office wasn’t in the budget either so I was SOL.

Software in school should at least be gratis, which seems to be happening with google docs et all.
I realize that air filters are the perfect candidate for a subscription service... but it's just insane the that every product in existence has a business prepared to ship some of it to you monthly.
'Fire is medicine': the tribes burning California forests to save them (2019)
> they should be prepared for a softball ethics question.

> That seems like a small price to pay, tbh

I don't think it is the question itself that's the price to pay here. The price to pay here is having to work in a workplace that the imagination usually paints for a company that would think that seriously scoring candidates on their answer to such a question isn't straight up ridiculous.

I.e., it isn't the question itself that would bother me. It is imagining what it would be like to work at a workplace where they ask these questions during interviews. If they ask it during interviews, they probably have discussions on this at the office all the time. While it might be desirable to some, there is not enough money in the world to make me tolerate working around people talking all the time about their ideas of morality and political views at work.
It doesn’t matter that it’s ‘more than apple’ or if some parts are open source.

Android as most people understand it is not open source.

Google promised an open alternative and have simply reneged on that promise.
In the past, I’ve used the Mac’s text to speech capabilities to help debug async shell prompts. It’s hard to relate but using aural cues as clues to execution paths feels quite different from print-based debugging.
Most Facebook staff believe company NOT responsible for curbing election disinfo
> Project owners were notified. There was no need to disclose it publicly. I say it's childish.

I don't think you understand how disclosure works within security.
I've never been much of a gamer.

Dune II was one of the few games I ever really bit into. I played it more than anything else.

Honestly, it was like "Okay. I completed the Gaming Experience. Enjoyed that. What else does life have?"
On the upside: software would have no bugs :D
You know that's not what I meant.

Let's chat again when you've executed and launched five unique revolutionary companies.
Mainstream scientists regularly write papers about things they cannot "formally prove". For example here is a Nature paper suggesting, but not proving, that SARS-Cov-2 had a natural origin. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

> Today every western lab is dependent on China for reagents. There's a big risk getting short on them.

So Chinese companies can ship reagents to labs around the world and ensure that none of them reach some specific Western lab? How could they possibly prevent them being resold?

> Maybe the scientific journals also suffer from "the Disney bias".

Disney is afraid of the CCP because they make a lot of money in China. I suppose it's possible that some journals are afraid of a CCP-led boycott, but there are quality open-access journals that would not be financially impacted by a boycott.

If a journal did publish a peer-reviewed article promoting the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese lab, and the CCP responded by boycotting the journal, that would be a big deal and I think would rebound badly on the CCP.
All three of the big cloud providers have a solution for ML model deployment and support more libraries than just Fast.AI. What are some of the reasons one would use Deepserve.ai vs. the other cloud providers?

This is really neat though. The fact that this is so easy to use will be a big appeal to a lot of data scientists who don't want to write production code or deal with lots of bootstrap configuration. There are also a lot of benefits of abstracting the deployment as you can seamlessly add a lot of features like logging, or even make performance improvements by tweaking a few env vars and everyone will get it by default! Thanks for sharing.
Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, did a test of low cost VPS providers in October 2019. Still useful in 2020:

https://toys.lerdorf.com/low-cost-vps-testing

Also discussed on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725853
That's a good analogy, and explains how we ended up with banana republics. They were just hostile takeovers of competing companies in Central America, leveraging our superior military assets. When you phrase it in those terms, Jeff Bezos looks much more like David than Goliath.

And it's why I want government to use its monopoly on violence to stick to keeping the peace, and create an environment where actual companies can compete without violence.

Because when the men with bombs also own the means of production, they do whatever they want, and you get mountains of skulls.
As far as I'm aware, the fsync/fdatasync sharp edges are around what happens after an fsync/fdatasync failure. My understanding is that you can't rely on anything. The only sane option is to crash the process and attempt recovery on restart. Even that is fraught because data can be in the OS cache but not synced to disk. Pebble (and RocksDB) both take a fairly pessimistic view of what can be recovered. Sstables that were in the process of being written are discarded. The WAL an MANIFEST (which lists the current sstables) are truncated at the first sign of data corruption. Getting all of this right definitely takes time and effort.

From the Rebello paper:
> However, on restart, since the log entry is in the page cache, LevelDB includes it while creating an SSTable from the log file.

Pebble and RocksDB both inherited this behavior. The nuance here is that the sstable is then synced to disk and no reads are served until the sync is successful. If the machine were to crash before the sstable was synced, upon restart we'd rollback to the durable prefix of the log.
I'm not sure that I would recommend Prelude for someone who's already got a memory stick with their emacs config files in their pocket. On the other hand, I do recommend it for people who are new to Emacs, especially those who want to see what a well-tuned personal setup can do for you (especially compared to the out-of-the-box product.)

I'm at around a quarter-century with emacs, too, but I tried Prelude a few years ago when I was looking to integrate magit into my workflows better and became interested in projectile.el. I ended up changing a few of the initial defaults, but I must say that I found Batsov's set up very clean and logical. I ended up adopting some of his choices even on packages I'd already set up for myself. The thing that had always irritated me about things like Evil and Spacemacs, even CUA-mode, was the attempt to make emacs something it wasn't--Prelude, on the other hand, felt like emacs properly tuned.

I've moved on to my own curated set now, but quite a few bits migrated from Batsov's work into my own, and I still look at the source for Prelude if I'm looking at incorporating some package into my personal setup.
this is already messed up though.
Salary _does not equal the value you provide the company_. It represents the cost to extract the value. A quality senior engineer provides 3-7x the value of a junior, but only gets paid 30-40% more.
Even if you'd like to pretend there is none, it doesn't change the fact that giving for the sake of giving versus giving for the sake of recognition are different things.

Giving anonymously can be a way for the giver to prove to themselves what kind of person they are.
You're not paying attention. Apple discontinued the Time Capsule and Airport product lines in 2018: https://www.macworld.com/article/3269361/apple-discontinues-...
And a media streamer box isn't a TV
$2 million is not broke
As an upper-middle class white dude, no it wasnt for us. Maybe upper class black girls can take it?
Exactly. And now with full-remote work, NYC & Tulsa the same job market too.
You're both correct! A company like Google hires both generic SWEs, who are hired without a specific project in mind, and super specialized roles like (say) wearable hardware integration engineer, who are hired to fill a very specific niche.
> I have yet to see a casual user crazy about any
> free application yet.

Invite me to dinner if you haven't heard about VIM yet.
Or break Google apart. In a perfect market, ad companies would compete and their terms around UGC would be a part of that competition. Since Google is basically the only game in town, break them apart until they are no longer in a position to dictate what speech is acceptable on the internet.

Google should absolutely have the right to say no to running ads on sites they think are objectionable. The issue is that there's not a healthy market.
It’s not a network-connected key value store so you need to interact with it from Go. That makes a pretty big difference.
That's an interesting perspective. In particular, "I don’t think it’s hard to vote with our wallets at all. We just can’t expect to get what Apple built", aligns well with my experience switching to Linux. I included this part in the post:

> Something I learnt from my move to Linux though, was to embrace the platform's conventions as opposed to trying to reproduce the system you're moving from as much as possible.

Which is kind of along the same lines. I think my experience so far was that it felt like giving up too much to go the more/completely open option at the moment. With projects like postmarketOS though, I feel there is some progress being made on this. I will continue to keep an eye on it.
I think at this point it's just Azure using "vCores" and everybody else has migrated to less dishonest terminology.
France recycles yearly 1700 tons of nuclear waste, since 1966. Over half a century, that's what I would call safe enough. That's about the size of the US waste production, and represents the waste produced in France plus the Netherlands and Germany and and. So that end-to-end model exists already, it's just many people don't know some things are happening also outside US borders.
“Tell me, where are you going to go?” threatened the abusive husband to the cowering wife.

That comment is a bit “let-them-eat-cakey” even for California royalty. And the other comments seemed to me more “après Jerry, le delugé“...pretty typical for guys like him of his age.

Consider the 1960s, probably the most formative decade for California as a US State. When the “death of the hippie” was announced in 1967, the heat-seekers were already leaving. Some stayed in California, but many went to small obscure places in the rest of the US. Under-appreciated places that were made the new cool places by the creative energies of the newcomers. They did not move to prepackaged hipness...there wasn’t any, except for maybe NYC and they had just left there to go to SF and weren’t coming back.

If the Bay Area or California is your place of the heart, then you should stay. But don’t stay out of fear. There is a big wide wonderful country out there, and you have the golden ticket to go wherever you want. Keep your mind open, make a commitment when it’s right, and build a good life wherever your heart tells you to stay. But don’t be a self-important preachy idiot to the locals in the process, or your bodily remains will be discovered in some bayou, holler or arroyo.