skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> cpu cycle overhead

The original poster's point was CPU and network overhead. A local procedure/function call or message-send takes on the order of one or up to a few nanoseconds. Depending on how you organize things, an IPC is going to be in the microsecond or even millisecond range. That's a lot of orders of magnitude. It's also latency that you just aren't going to get back, no matter what extra resources you throw at it. [1][2]

In the early naughties, a rewrite of very SOA/microservice-y BBC backend system I re-architected as a monolith became around 1000x faster. [3]

In addition, in-process calls are essentially 100% reliable. Network calls, and various processes attached to them, not so much (see [1], again). The BBC system not just became a lot faster, it also became roughly 100 times more reliable, and that's probably low-balling it a bit. It essentially didn't fail for internal reasons after we learned about Java VM parameters. And it was less code, did more, and was easier to develop for.

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

[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.115...

[3] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4614-9299-...
STL files are the "standard" in 3d printing but everyone else uses step files. EDA packages like HorizonEDA only accept step files as 3d model for electronics components and every single manufacturer that offers a 3d model so far has always used step. Most CNC manufacturers want you to upload step files.
Not the web, but abandon Bitcoin.
My first step is https://concise-encoding.org

All of this constant stringification/destringification just for another machine to read some transmitted data is massively wasteful, but we all do it because we want our data to be human readable, so we use JSON. But what if you could send as binary, with the ability to convert 1:1 to/from text only when you needed a human to inspect or input the data?

What if you didn't need to encode all of your non-numeric data into strings?

I've got many other steps in the pipeline to reduce our energy wastage, but this first one has taken awhile (3 years), and I still need more eyes on it to make sure nothing gets missed before I release in a few months.
I think we should create a carbon/pollution tax and let the invisible hand of the market figure that out - it's too complex and there are so many side effects to adjusting things by brute force!
Such as ... food production? "But your food is consumed by literal fascists"... water supply? "Did you know that evil people also drink the water you are providing and hydrate their bodies so they can do more evil things?"

For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
I have tried the free version, while a bit limited it is the kind of simple interface I want. Unfortunately not open source and you need accounts and to be online to use it. I may end up using it anyway though.
Not every function has to be a programmatic masterpiece

Not every meal has to be a culinary experience

Meat, potatoes and two veg might be mocked as unadventurous and bland but it's a decent balance and gets the job done.
3D? Yes. 2D in a sketch? Nope. It's all parametric, everything has to be defined through constraints, and there's no way that I can see to define such a constraint.
We could start with taking anything said by Ed Lyman with a huge grain of salt, considering he's made an entire career out of concern-trolling anything related to nuclear power.

In this case, his argument is basically that HALEU is a proliferation risk because given access to enrichment facilities, it's more effort to produce weapons-usable HEU starting from HALEU than from LEU or natural uranium. Well, duh! As he himself admits in that letter, it's only a modest factor of three difference for HALEU vs LEU. From a non-proliferation perspective, the critical thing is the access to enrichment technology in the first place!

If one wants to make a case against HALEU, compare the economics vs. LEU.
People from the Nordics had trade relations with Southern Europe and Asia all the way back in the bronze age. Alas, records are vague at best, but there's definitely reason to believe there was an influx of people and ideas from the Black Sea area before and during the migration period, just a few hundred years before the viking raids and Norse settlements all over Europe.

And as if that wasn't enough, the Norse were quite infamous for taking captured women as wives and they also took slaves from the peoples they raided. Those people didn't just dissapear from the gene record.
I think my argument is that thinking about efficiency at this scale actually costs more and uses more power overall.

It's like spending an extra ten dollars once to save a tenth of a penny on each future tank of gas. Yes, there are times where that trade-off makes sense, but for most folks it won't actually make things better and could make them worse.

The author doesn't have any data to suggest what the savings here are. I assume these are miniscule or even immeasurable benefits that come at a very real cost in time and resources.
The incident shows importance of testing.
if you're going web based you can do sketchup or fusion360 as well. Personally I am allergic to web based 3d design apps - they don't run anywhere near as fast as native applications, there are privacy and future continuity concerns, and I don't have to upgrade to the latest version if I dont want to.
How would I work with SMD components on a breadboard?
I am also curious about this. I heard that something like one trans-Atlantic flight is worth 2 years of veganism. And that 10 or so freight ships produce as much pollution as the whole of Europe. These are vague statements, and the reality is certainly more nuanced, but it would be nice to have a sense for what the big issues are. For example: Would giving up coffee, with its links to deforestation, be tremendously beneficial or only marginally?
I love the idea of FreeCAD and how much value it provides if you don't need 'advanced' stuff.
That being said, it often leaves me with impression that UI, UX could and should be so much better in order to become a go to solution for hobbyist and licensing cost mindful people.
p.s-Anyone here into StepNC format?
Breakout boards, I assume.
Stop using Python, Ruby, Pho
I really like IceSL and think its getting too little attention: https://icesl.loria.fr/

It uses lua to be scriptable much like openscad, but it's got GPU support, so you can also describe surfaces as signed distance fields - in shader code...

It doesn't seem to be open source (yet?), but there are contributors listed [0] (it came out of inria, the french university, sylvain lefebvre being the lead dev[1])

Check out %appdata%\IceSL\icesl-models or thingiverse[2] for examples.

edit: formatting

[0] https://icesl.loria.fr/about/
[1] https://www.antexel.com/research
[2] https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=icesl
That depends on how you look at it. In the case of this thread, is it better for the environment that PGE continues using 100 year old electricity towers and saves the resources (metals, fuel, labor) necessary to replace them? Or is it better that such massive fires are reduced in frequency?
I'm not a huge fan of putting client-side rendering on everything, but I still feel it's unfair and shallow to put so much blame on it.

For an app getting more than a couple page views in a session, a SPA solution may provide significant savings on rendering and db queries. Combine that with resource caching and these effects extend to following sessions.

That is, of course, if the app was built with some consideration regarding overall performance. Unfortunately, not too many web developers (both FE and BE) seem to be overly concerned with efficiency.
This is a mild example of a type of argument that I like to call "destructionist": to save something, destroy it as fast as possible so we have to deal with the consequences sooner. I've seen it applied to climate change: save the earth by ruining it!

It's fallacious, though. If you can save it later, you can save it sooner, and if it's worth saving at all, sooner is better. It's not an argument for a _solution_, it's an argument for _finding the will to implement the solution_ -- and it's the "minimally moral" argument for that. "Rather than do anything that takes moral strength, just make the problem worse and let other people deal with it!" The only worse stance is to no longer want a solution at all!

Of course it does seem like the real problem isn't figuring out what to do, but convincing people to care enough to do it. But our collective human intellect ought be able to do better than this.
> My view is that the best way to speed up the transition to clean energy is to vastly increase demand for electricity.

No. Historically, and globally, when electricity demand increases, electricity sources stack up. We may create more clean energy that way, and that will increase the percentage of renewables in the energy mix, but the atmosphere doesn't care about percentages. It cares about how many tonnes of carbon are released by the existing electricity sources that need to be shut down.

The last thing we need is another source for more electricity demand. Electrifying transportation alone will increase demand more than enough for your dream market investment magic.
they're doing the web app thing now, so the last native version is the last native version ever. Personally I stopped using it then.
Freebsd has used lua in its bootloader for a few years now.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2014/LuaLoader

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2018-Feb...
I feel like the inflation measurement is BS. It tracks prices of goods, but doesn't account for people paying for things they didn't pay for in the past (day care, bottled water, health insurance, retirement savings), and comparing that to their income. 25 years ago it was normal for families to live fairly well-off on a single income...nowadays you'd barely make ends meet.

It's deceiving nowadays because we're basically living the same lifestyle quality we were 25 years ago, except that either both parents are working like dogs, or the even sadder reality of couples foregoing/delaying kids because of their finances.
fusion 360 is free to most people and is good. Unfortunately its a web app and I don't trust autodesk enough to spend time investing in it.
I don't believe asset and component delivery are the energy hogs this article implies. Actual computation uses more energy. Youtube transcoding the 500 hours of video it gets every 60 seconds uses much more power than too many unoptimized PNGs do. We live in a time where people will run their car to charge their phone. It's not js packages. The inefficiencies are in the chair, the users chair.
"disappears": there's a kind of weird bug that may be a feature (not sure) where when you undo something, objects don't display anymore.

But they're still there. Just select them in the model window and press spacebar and voilà, they're back.

In fact the whole tree of your operations is preserved at all times, and you can do modifications at the very beginning of the chain without redoing everything.
Oblique mention of Project Drawdown that tries to tackle such questions (albeit at a slightly more abstract level) methodically [1]

[1] https://drawdown.org/
It's in fact exactly the same thing, since NetBSD Lua started as a port of Lunatik, which is the topic of this article.
Dynadot, because it allows domain tasting. If you impulsively buy a domain you later regret, they'll buy it back.

Reminds me of a blog post I wrote on why we buy bad domain names: https://medium.com/@jasoncomely/why-i-buy-bad-domain-names-e...
Heating, cooling, and transportation probably dominate your personal carbon footprint.
Well, assuming that metric is a reliable indicator, that presumably just indicates the perception of the vaccine amongst the population is positive; it says little about the actual success of it.

And what happens if the vaccine turns out to be a dud? How will that mobility then be positive, given the spread? And what about the damage to trust both in Russia and internationally for vaccine announcements after a failure there?

I've obviously no idea about whether or not the vaccine works.

The problem is - by international norms - neither do those deploying it, and yet they are.
Via the citations, I found a video on how the engine roughly works:

http://www.psatellite.com/direct-fusion-drive-technical-anim...
A carbon tax implemented by a "world dictator" would work.

Any individual country implementing a carbon tax doesn't work because they put themselves at a big disadvantage, and goods and services go across country borders, taking with them almost-impossible to fairly calculate amounts of carbon.

The biggest things the world could do towards the "world dictator" approach would be:

* Have a consortium of countries implement a carbon tax, while taxing all inbound goods from countries that don't tax carbon.

* Adjust WTO rules to allow taxing imports based on estimated carbon content.

* Have the WTO decide which countries are "on track to meet carbon reduction targets". Allow taxes on imports from any country that isn't.

* Allow countries to "sue" another country for environmental damages. When they don't pay up, have a UN court able to threaten anything up to military action/takeover of the country's leadership to get payment.
> "From data centres to transmission networks to the devices that we hold in our hands, it is all consuming electricity, and in turn producing carbon emissions. According to recent estimates, the entire network already consumes 10% of global electricity production, with data traffic doubling roughly every two years."

That's interesting. It's more than I would have guessed. I assume that's dominated by the energy used by data centers and whatever devices the users are using, and that all the switches in between are relatively cheap to run relative to how much they're used?

Anyways, my suggestion is the obvious one: turn off all that ad and tracking nonsense. That's incompatible with the business model of a lot of popular sites, though. A good fallback may be to encourage everyone to use ad-blockers.
Yep, virtual memory aliasing comes in handy when you’re working with data structures that can have page-level granularity. One of my favorite tricks is to create a ‘magic ring buffer’ by mapping two contiguous virtual pages to the same physical page, so that the wraparound is handled transparently by the MMU at no extra cost.
End of quarter promos can take a good license under 5k, and once you have a license you do bot have to rebuy it every year.

Updates come with annual maintenance, roughly 20 percent of license.

People can and do get a license and just run it for a long time.
I'm pretty sure state meant a sovereign government before the united states existed.

Remember, the original idea of the united states was that it was a bunch of separate governments that were federated. It still kind of is, but the federal government used to have much less control.
Quite simply by becoming web professionals in the first place.

All of the inefficiency examples create unnecessary cost or worsen the user experience. It's well documented that most people work better and more often with fast tools. And there's lots of regular folks complaining that fashionable hipster websites are horrible to use. And lastly, lots of Javascript also increases maintenance costs.

So all of the points could be summarized as "don't make user hostile beginners' mistakes"

Now the more important question is: which company actually values its users / customers enough so that they won't outsource to the lowest bidder?
I use pass and I would switch in a heartbeat to a fork of it that used ssh keys or something similar instead of gpg. For something so amazingly simple and useful, its dependence on the klunky mess that is gpg key management is an anchor that weighs it down.
For learning purposes you can just follow along this video series and reproduce the 3d models step by step.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czj1RYx8LyI&list=PLKu--JcOZK...
Is it like a competition in sarcasm here?
For the backend, stop using Php, Python, Ruby and start using Java, Rust, or C++.
Ask HN: Recommendations for where to sell/publish teaching videos?
I want to publish some videos teaching people computer/software related stuff.

I’d love to hear what recommendations the HN community has.... where should I publish?
I don't know FreeCAD specifically, but #2 SHOULD be very hard. You do not want to rotate the part, you want to draw the sketch on an already slanted plane. Your sketch (and resulting solid) should be agnostic to reference plane orientation, otherwise the whole parametric model becomes "spaghetti code"
I mean, if not making wild guesses is considered a big scandal, well so be it, but I find it quite exaggerated to call this a "scandal". There was no lie, no one was mislead, they weren't even wrong in a sense. At first there was no evidence that masks could prevent the spread, and then there was a shortage of masks for medical workers who needed them, and only later did the data show that asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission was possible, so there was now evidence to advice wearing a mask, even a non-surgical one.

You could say they are to be blamed from making the default position the status quo. But the opposite is a harder default, how far do you go when nothing has been shown to be necessary or prevent anything yet? Like do you tell people to just go full on quarantine? To wash all their delivered packages and produce with soap? Like how far? And then if you tell them to do all that, and it later shows they arn't necessary and don't help prevent the spread? So in some way, the status quo does seem like a good default.

Basically, the CDC just said: Go on with your daily life, don't panic, don't buy all medical equipment that the medical professionals need, and as the data arrives and shows evidence of what measures actually help to prevent the spread we will update our guidelines.
Felt this happened to me once before too. Could have been a coincidence but... since then try to be careful not to search on GoDaddy.
He's talking about Sweden as a whole. There's nothing anecdotal about it and the raw data is one Google search away. Sweden currently has one of the lowest death rates in Europe.
I can do one better: Just learn to use the standard unix tools directly. If you keep stacking wrappers upon wrappers and grow to depend on them you will be totally lost once you have to work on another machine. It also makes it easier to e.g. replace grep by fzf.

For reference:

kb list -> find
kb list foo -> find | grep foo
kb edit --title "git" --category "cheatsheet" -> vim cheatsheet/git
kb delete --id 1 -> rm path/to/file
kb grep foo -> grep -r foo
It's just the different attitude to Sandwiches in France vs America (notice the name of the restaurant you're eating at).

If France, bread is amazing. A baguette from a boulangerie is so tasty all by itself that all you need is a little bit of French butter (which is also incredible, compared to its English and US cousin) and ham, and you're good to go. Too much meat, and you'd overpower the flavor of the bread, which is the reason we're eating a sandwich in the first place.

Personally, I'm also a fan of the American philosophy, where a New York deli will use a a couple slices of bread as a convenient handle to wrap six pounds of (freshly roasted today in an oven at the shop) turkey, so that you don't get mayonnaise on your hands.

I think the disconnect comes from the fact that Pret a Manger's baguettes aren't really anything special. They're just the kinda tough to chew, bendy crusted thing that you get whenever you try to make one in England or the United States. So yeah, if that's all you're getting, coupled with some boring English butter and a slice of ham, I can sympathize with your disappointment.

But next time you're in Paris, be sure to grab a real baguette from a real boulangerie, along with some Paysan Breton butter and a little pack of ham from the quickie mart next door. You'll see what they're going for.
Should Google's targeted advertising also be prohibited?

Should Google's algorithmic filtering of content also be prohibited?

Should Doubleclick/Google's surveillance practices (which almost certainly include some kind of "shadow" profile) be prohibited?

Also, people have been talking about shadow profiles for at least a decade now, and yet no disgruntled FB employee has revealed all. Why do you think that is?
TBH I am sick to death of this website and am therefore clearing this comment. Apologies to the commentor responding below - I posted a response to your comment in a previous edit of this comment. Somebody please invite me to the land of crustaceans.
Asymmetry between complexity of principle and power.

Ie., we are easily persuaded that something very complex will be very powerful (eg., a smart phone) -- but we intuitively regard something simple (eg., a hammer) as under-powered.

Hard to say how well this actually holds, but I'd guess in both cases we arent really enumerating use-cases in our head, we're just using explanatory complexity as a guide to practical power.

This is probably more extreme in cases where people have a specific notion of complexity in mind, eg., in academic environments where "tool A" is as simple as "tool B" if they use the same theoretical basis.

ie., Tool C is worthwhile if it includes a more complex theory, as therefore it is more powerful.
Being an on and off customer since 1998, I was fascinated by the idea that I can walk in and pick a sandwich out of 20-50-100 combinations (I honestly don't remember how many options were available but I remember it as "oh sooooo many!!!".

I treated it as a snack. Once I moved back to London some years back I was (negatively) surprised that MANY people consider lunch to be: "1 sandwich +1 bad of crisps/chips +1 sugary soft drink". I believe that Pret helped push obesity in the UK (and McD, and KFC, and many more - but Pret definitely contributed).

It is sad to see that jobs are on the line, but in all honesty people need to start eating better and stop considering Pret as "the place to get lunch/dinner"

It should be only for a quick lunch for tourists that may want a quick bite before they go from tourist_attraction_A to tourist_attraction_B without spending time and money for lunch.

To the profit point: liquids tend to make most of the profit. Sandwich takes time, effort, material, cost for quality, etc. A coffee (nowadays) is cheap and easy, it won't go bad after 24h. I was reading somewhere (HN? Reuters?) that BP sold 150mil cups of coffee.. easy money for all!
What? The part design workbench is the best of all.
Heavily outwieghed by the downsides.

Facebook has done a lot of good, but IMO there is no question that it's done more harm.

And Zuckerberg is a crazy person. There are a lot of people I wouldn't want to ultimately report to, but Zuck is right next to Larry at this point.
Funny story, this loophole existed for both the Wii U and 3DS eShops. While 3DS got it patched, the Wii U is still vulnerable.
Based on the PAL project and WiFi capability, I think the ESP8266 does emit electromagnetic radiation. Whether it's interference or a feature depends on your perspective.
The principle section of this article makes it seem like such a complex device with many intersections between various fields of physics and engineering to make it all work. Remarkable.
Sometimes I recycle tabs instead of opening a new one :)