skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless of whether PV production is in fact self-correcting (that seems like an empirical question requiring data), what I took away from "How Sustainable is PV solar power?" is that people aren't aware there is a problem, let alone the scale of it. I think people assume we can just add solar panels until we have enough solar panels to cover our current energy needs, but:

- energy demand is increasing

- solar panel production + installation creates emissions, and may have been a net negative at some times/places in the past

- we can't spend our entire carbon budget on solar panels

- yet we must dramatically increase renewable energy very quickly to avoid climate catastrophe

Personally I'm hopeful that technology like Heliogen's solar oven will help solar panel manufacturers eliminate fossil fuels from production, by achieving very high temperatures sustainably: https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/19/business/heliogen-solar-energ...

But I fear that if there is not enough awareness of or investment in the issue, we will blow past our carbon budget due to not carefully considering exactly how we execute the transition to renewable energy.
Theres a nice one of him on stage at the 1988 "Monsters of Rock" singing "Bomber"
I remember in orientation for my first internship the HR lady disparaging Chinese Communist party and the phrase "happy ending" may have made an appearance during that part of the presentation. It was absolutely perfect for the demographics of the audience (a bunch of college kids) but man did it ruin every BigCo orientation since. I think she missed he calling as a comedian or some sort of entertainment professional.
Thanks. I tried to get a hardware Steam Link working with Gamepass games and failed, I either tried with that App or some other one I forget but ultimately I got it working by installing Moonlight on the Steam Link instead and essentially using it like a remote desktop.

I've read reports of Windows Store overwriting mod files, either this is a game by game problem or maybe it's solved. I do know a year or two ago the Window Store refused to open on a Windows PC of mine so it's a real problem and there's no way to easily reinstall the windows store if it occurs.

Whether Microsoft has solved these issues by now I don't know. I think I eventually got the windows store back with a Windows update.
this is pretty standard pricing for custom made one off furniture. you can't really compare pricing to items off an assembly line style factory.

imo whether you consider it art is irrelevant. the main cost is material (wood) and labor.
The argument is that moving ports act on the probability of the attack, not the possibility of the attack.

Reducing the probability of the attack attemp is good in itself and reduces the noise and thus allows easier detection of worse attackers in server logs.
I'd say this looks like a hit:

"I asked Greenewald if he considers himself a journalist. After all, when he files foia requests, he does so under the news media category in order to get fee waivers."

[...]

"But Greenewald doesn’t identify that way. “Even though I write articles and interview people and get quotes, I’ve just never considered or labeled myself a journalist, simply because I didn’t do the formal schooling,” he said. "

Cue a spiteful bill from those agencies for back waived fees and other means to take the site down or punish him with process. I hope the gofundme for his defense gets posted here too. :)

I'm sure it's nothing.
You can do that now. Its not quite the same but pretty close:

fn f(n: Option<u8>) -> u8 {
match n {
Some(n0) => n0,
None => 10
}
}
fn main() {
let n1 = f(Some(20));
let n2 = f(None);
println!("{} {}", n1, n2);
}
War Story: Apple, IDFA, Probabilistic Device Fingerprinting
iRobot Gives Us a Break with More Affordable Roomba I3
> This system also makes it hard for marketing and spam to get a foothold

> You’re certainly familiar with another federation [...]: email
> You can delight the people you meet with by sending a detailed note with everything you covered on a meeting (very few people do that)

Be careful with your approach with disseminating meeting notes, despite what this article claims, they are not always well received. I've been promoted, in part, for providing this kind of structure to meetings but have also found myself embroiled in a political battles with gas-lighting coworkers.
Who are your customers? There are plenty of low level systems developers at Facebook and Google and so on. The solve the same hard and interesting problems that you do, probably at greater scale so they're even more hard and interesting. Often they're many layers removed from the people who directly get others to click ads. Being a low-level developer, or being at a separate company, doesn't necessarily put you at any greater remove from the advertising octopus.
Worth mentioning that this dates from not only a time when the US space program remained a going concern, but also the same period of US military thinking that produced, among other hilarities, the failed OICW "smart rifle" program whose most famous output has proven to be the HK XM8 fish gun. It's accordingly worth being a little generous in your interpretation, the work having been written a highly eventful quarter century ago.
I've enjoyed them myself too, and I still use things like IRC on a daily basis. The two impluses I see to get federation to a larger market share are A) to 'save' people from the platforms they're currently stuck on, but also B) get rid of, or at least diminish, their network effects.

You could argue maybe A) won't work or isn't possible or needed, but I feel B) myself a lot. For example I meet someone and want to talk to them, but it's likely they might suggest we chat via Skype or Discord or something like that, and if I don't want to use that service I'm often out of luck.

That, personally, is what bothers me the most - that network effects seem inherently anti-competitive because they force me to use a platform I wouldn't otherwise want to use, only because they purposefully make their software unable to communicate with competing platforms.

For all of the open protocols and specifications we have from HTTP to TLS to HTML and literally one thousand others, we just re-use them over and over to create closed systems that can't talk to each other, which feels like going backwards. Sure it's great all of our computers speak TCP, UDP, TLS, HTTP, and so on. But they don't all speak iMessage, Zoom, Skype, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Mastdodon, Matrix, Slack, etc etc. I still feel constantly locked-in to all of these platforms just when I want to communicate to someone that happens to be on it, and the area is certainly not progressing because the fight to gain this huge market share of users is never-ending.

Ideally, that is what I would love to end via federation. If I could actually use some type of FOSS and open protocol, and actually talk to any other person I wanted to with it, and I wasn't forced to use a certain platform, service, company, and give them all of my data in the process. I don't see any way for this to be achieved, but I can always dream.
Aha! I came across some odd Whiteclaw (alcohol) product placement on Unsplash, and I was wondering if “influencers” were trying to make a go of it on the platform, but that didn’t seem likely — now it all makes sense.

E.g. https://unsplash.com/photos/GMLfxktwWcM or https://unsplash.com/photos/RtdjA55Su2k
Except MKULTRA was part of CIA’s “family jewels” —- indeed, it was so infamous that a cover letter to the DCI suggested they not familiarize themselves with the program in order to maintain plausible deniability. And MKULTRA was only part of a set of equally concerning operations, such as its progenitors, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, or Project OFTEN, which collaborated with pharmaceutical firms to uncover drugs too risky for release that might have covert applications (and which were then tested on unwitting military personnel).

While CIA certainly uses disinformation for a variety of reasons, this doesn’t obviate the fact that the agency has been — largely if not quite entirely in the past — a very, very amoral actor.
Apptricity Beams Bluetooth Signals over 30 Kilometers
Whatever you would use a browser extension to do now, there was probably a standalone application to do the same thing before.

The original vision of the web didn't just have "sites with servers" and "consumers with browsers", but rather tons of potential independent "User-Agents" that would perform tasks on behalf of people. The consolidation of the web into just browsers, and subsequent flipflopping between creation and destruction (similar to the EEE cycle MS has employed), has killed whatever of that vision might have flourished.
Possible to get a screenshot, or a browser info & viewport info?
I generally take the amount of garlic in any given recipe to be a suggestion. I find that, most of the time, doubling the garlic makes a much more flavorful dish.
Malbolge: Intentionally difficult to reason about esoteric language
They better not be on the same G Suite account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826368

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109809

Google Domains charges $12.00/year for .com renewals, compared to $8.56/year at Porkbun and $8.03/year at Cloudflare. With Google's reputation for poor support, most domain owners simply have no good reason to use Google Domains.
Did everyone clap?
Google has pushed PWAs more than anyone. Now Microsoft is getting on board. Apple is dragging their feet for the reasons you mentioned.

But IMO there will also be room for both PWAs and native applications. I hope Apple will soon agree and help move things forward.
I was never going to fly with an airline with a bad track record, so this is a false dichotomy you’re putting up. For me the question is would I fly with one reputable airline on a max 8, or on another with a a321neo. The answer here is clear.
Interestingly since the last time I looked at this stuff (around 2015) it looks like there have been some new and interesting approaches to generating Malbolge programs, see the “Update” comments here: http://www.acooke.org/malbolge.htm

I first found Malbolge via the “discoverer” of the first hello world program, Andrew Cooke - he was at one point a prolific contributor to Quora, and at some point decided to disappear themselves from the community like a lot of early Quora power users.
I struggled with this too. I used to have separate blogs for different interests (especially anime, for fear of judgement, some of which has since come true in some of the comments below!) Eventually I merged them back to save on maintenance, and I'm glad I did.

People should expect that a personal site necessarily has your interests. I don't think it'd be weird at all for you to post tech-related content. And you never know, there might be an intersection with your exiting readers you didn't know about.
It is absolutely a bad thing. I've been in the web dev space for 15+ years now, and I've never seen useful back button hijacking yet.
I'm interested in what's changed. Per the webpage: "As a federal laboratory, CIA Labs seeks collaboration with other federal labs and academia and is interested in outreach from such partners"

My understanding is that the CIA has and does pursue those arrangements via In-Q-Tel (their venture capital arm), DARPA grants (technically DoD, but I have to assume they collaborate), and one-off relationships with labs (e.g. the Lincoln Lab, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Lincoln_Laboratory). Is the new thing just that they're soliciting applications? Why and from who?

There are only so many academic institutions and I imagine they are easy enough to one-off approach (unless they're trying to target individual researchers...), startups should be well covered by VC, big tech cos have never seemed to have a problem pursuing govt contracts (see all the recent news about MSFT, Amzn, and Google doing business with them), so what's materially different? That anyone can apply? The nature of the arrangements?
You also receive the resources of the United States intelligence community (and probably DoD) to design, experiment, and operationalize your ideas, which ain’t nothin’. And, in general, no one sticks it out in the IC to get rich — these are folks who really are dedicated to mission over money (they could make a hell of a lot more decamping for the private sector, or even doing the contractor two-step with their existing jobs).
You can't mod anything that's on gamepads due to the encrypted filestorage it uses. At least that was the case when I checked last year.
I think this might provide more context which you are looking for (and your suspicion seems spot on!):

> This means more writes to do on updates and makes access to old row versions quite a lot slower, but gets rid of the need for asynchronous vacuum and means you don't have table bloat issues. Instead you can have huge rollback segments or run out of space for rollback.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25153532/why-is-it-a-vac...

Edit: Just wanted to explicitly call out that the Robert Haas article linked in the answer is excellent (I am still reading my way through it).
I can't imagine a use case where I'd be willing to go the hassle of paying $0.50 for 1000 pages but wouldn't pay $2.50 or more for those same 1000 pages.

It would take me probably an hour or more to scan 1000 pages. Given that, I don't see a significant difference between spending "an hour plus two quarters" and "an hour plus ten quarters".
> Software is eating the world.

Software ate software.
I’m feeling like, during the lockdown, we need to have some kind of shit throwing HN comment competition to get all the angst out of our systems.

First rule: make every assumption about the other commenter’s intent.
Second rule: never actually directly respond to the other commenter.

It’s like code golf, but to get toxic online interactions out of our systems in a controlled environment. What do you think? :)
Nah we both play passive (avoiding aggression ourselves), besides blatant smurfs getting 15 kills by 20min are not tagged as smurfs. I just don't think there are any mechanisms to catch that and match noobies with other noobies. Instead they are sent straight into slaughterhouse.
KPIs that are being optimized result in increasingly user-hostile products, like Facebook and Twitter.

There certainly are UX problems that the current federated social media projects have. They're not technically unsolvable, it's just that current federated social media projects don't want to solve them for some reason. That's what I'm trying to address with my project (that's not yet ready to be demonstrated, sorry).

The primary problem that the current federated social media projects are facing is that there's no global user search. At all. You sign up for a Mastodon account on the instance of your liking, and now what? Sure you can follow Eugen and like the cat pictures he reposts. Cats are cute. But how do you find people you already know without asking every one of them whether they have a Mastodon account? You don't. And that's how you not build a useful social media service. Every single social media service that has had any semblance of success offered an easy way to bootstrap your social graph — be it a detailed global search feature and rich profiles to go with it or the ability to import your friend/contact list from somewhere else. That alone should be telling.

There are technical solutions to this, like making a DHT out of instance servers that could be used to link the user IDs on centralized platforms to ActivityPub URLs. Even if said centralized platforms refuse API access to instance admins, there's still machine-readable GDPR data export to take advantage of. It can be done. It's just going to take some time.
They can, but domains are easy to spoof, which leads us to operators having to decide to accept unsigned domains and risk bad actors getting through to the filters and milters or rejecting well meaning but unsigned email servers into federation.

That's a problem that can be fixed from the get go if you design a federated system that doesn't assume all actors are charitable. The major players could cut down on a huge amount of spam by only accepting signed domains, but email wasn't designed to force all email through only it's home server, so that's not as backwards compatible as you'd like.

That's not however a strict federation problem, it's more of an 'email was designed to assume everyone is a good actor, before we had much proof to the contrary' problem.
I have just been informed that there is now a new version written in Rust.

Complete with its own rust based Befunge compiler.

https://github.com/revnull/noisefunge.rs
Closing Paragraphs of Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now
The seal of approval that an encryption scheme actually works.
The allegation is made in paragraph 26 of the first section of the document you linked to. The conversation I understand this allegation relies on is on page 6 & 10 here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/886185-pe-123.html

Manning is the one who passed the hash, not Assange. If it even is a hash, Manning is unsure. Assange never agreed to crack the password. There is no evidence Assange communicated the alleged hash to anyone else let alone attempted to crack it. A couple of days later Assange asks manning about it again, and there's no response. Assange never inquires about how Manning got this 16 byte value, nor does he offer any instructions on how to extract password hashes.

If this had been a chat log from a legal pentest that was being conducted by Manning then nobody would claim that Assange helped or contributed to it in any way. If there was an actual conspiracy going on here the logs would look much different.

The rest of the allegations basically claim that putting out a general call for people in possession of state secrets leak them is conspiracy ipso facto, as is taking any step to follow up with anyone who is interested in leaking, or taking any step to prevent a source from getting caught. It's ridiculous.

Is there some additional evidence in support of the allegation that Assange conspired to crack a password that I've missed?
No, it hasn’t been dealt with. My point is prior to 2004 there was enormous amount of disinformation in the world that had no trouble spreading quickly. The documentary presented no evidence that somehow people are now misinformed more than they had been in the past. Social media is one way to spread both information and misinformation but it’s not the only way and it’s not clear that its net effect is that people are misinformed more than before. I remember the world before iPhones and Facebook and I’d say average person in that world was totally misinformed about many things.
> No, if you want to compete with them, you just need to have a damn good product that billions of people use multiple times a day.

* using billions of people clicks to infer what the best results for every single search query

If crawling was enough, we wouldn't be all here arguing that Google is too big. It's not the tentative that are missing.
If you're an employee at e.g. Google or Microsoft, the best you're gonna get for your patent is a one-time bonus of a few thousand dollars, and not a dime more. This reads as though these are _CIA officers_ (i.e. employees) already. This is a ridiculously generous offer by the industry standards when it comes to employees, and one that's very likely to spur real innovation. If this is also $150K _per invention_, really creative people could invent themselves beachfront mansions in Maui pretty easily.
Discounting for Patient Philanthropists [pdf]
That was so confusing for me. I got worried that he must have pulled the shockingly inappropriate mascot.

It's the socks. Those mismatched socks are clearly triggering the kinds of people who serially straighten out picture frames.
If I'm calling a meeting, I'm sending out the agenda and meeting notes and expect the same of meetings I attend (and decline if there's no agenda sent beforehand).

Plus side is it really cuts down on pointless meetings since many times people just want to call meetings to avoid doing actual work, and with documentation responsibilities falling on the meeting caller, they have to do more work, not less.

Downside is the strong correlation between people who suck at meetings and people who suck at taking notes. Which can be pretty frustrating because you know who the pointless poorly run meeting people are, but you also can't rely on the notes if you skip.
The Mike Speiser Incubation Playbook
I've wondered about the potential for subscription search engine that partly works by seriously punishing things like hijacking the back button. Hijack the back button your website is now a tier 5 result with a phat warning.
I had one orientation where the presenter showed images of the men and women who had jumped out of the WTC during 9/11

Then he cut to slides with several enemy combatants, followed by a massive explosion, followed by a large smoldering crater, and said "Pay back is a real bitch."
Er, neither really, 'val-you'. Two syllables, definitely not three, but there is a 'y'.

Rhymes with pew, few, you, new, yew, Kew, etc.
Yep, that was the case with me. I supported Assange and I stopped being sympathetic when these connections came out.
> Federated systems just don't work in practice because of inherent problems with them that don't have good technical&social solutions yet. Everything on the Internet (including Internet itself) degenerated from federation into monopolistic centralized services for a reason, and somehow people keep ignoring the evidence, and just keep trying harder.

Email would beg to differ. Google and Microsoft may have a lot of users, but interoperability is astoundingly high.

Yes, there is a high barrier to sending emails from a new provider, and yes, Google/Microsoft have a large chunk of the market. Still, there's little barrier to using ProtonMail or Fastmail or whatever free host you want, and everything interoperates shockingly well. You don't typically have to think about "what if this person has gmail?" or "I don't know if I can send to that host from outlook".
You might have a point with general lifetime pricing plans, but in this case, I think the usage above of "lifetime free credits" was perfectly clear to most (and is in fact, limited).
I’m surprised SimpleMind didn’t make the list. I’ve tried a quite a few mind mapping tools and SimpleMind seems to be the most consistent across platforms; it has one of the best touch UIs I’ve come across on any platform; data is pretty easy to import/export and it syncs with most cloud providers out of the box; they don’t nickel and dime you with subscriptions; and they deliver consistent upgrades and useful features.

https://simplemind.eu/
I appreciate that he had sympathy, but I think max he can do is refund $25. I think that that amount is the least of concern to the most developers.
Google should start announcing a month's worth of deprecations at a time to make it easier on us, like how Microsoft had to start doing Patch Tuesday during the Blaster/CodeRed era: https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-details-new-security-pla...
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1f5TyjZ1eAYUJgCyOERWn0?si=6...