skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And the response to that is that (1) that golden age of nuclear was far less successful than you depict, and (2) attempts to replicate it have gone disastrously wrong.

Cost overruns and failures have been the norm for nuclear. In France, we don't actually know the cost of that initial roll out. In the US, nuclear construction routinely overran budgets, often by large factors. When PURPA subjected US power markets to more market discipline nuclear construction evaporated. This should tell you that it was never a low cost source.

Today, even the construction that occurred then is not possible. The nuclear supply chain is atrophied, especially without nuclear weapons programs to provide support. Attempts to repeat the past glories have gone even more disastrously wrong than they did then.

The best people know not to go into nuclear now, so the expectation of its failure is self-reinforcing. Nuclear programs at universities are closing for lack of interest. Hell, even steam turbines (!) risk becoming a marginalized (and perhaps, eventually, forgotten) technology.

> What will be the cost of scaling this up to the hours or days required to make intermittent sources viable?

It will almost certainly be much cheaper than building nuclear reactors, and by a very large margin. But if it's not, no big deal. We could build reactors later if by some miracle it turns out they're needed. I think the best you can expect now is a dribble of seed money to keep the nuclear industry from disappearing entirely, just to keep some level of expertise around as an insurance policy. But if and when renewables prove themselves to a point even you cannot deny, even that could dry up.
Yes, but after getting approval from the board I was able to get a dispensation to use https://isevenapi.xyz/ for some of our calculation services.
The technology trickles down to other spaces as a result of that investment. You could make the same argument about ARPANET only being funded because the government saw military command and control applications it (They weren’t funding it out of charity). Being able to move bits around 3ms faster is a VERY big deal for scientific research, medical technology, video delivery, defense, weather forecasting, and in so many other spaces that benefit humanity.
It seems like 4k is pretty darned wasteful part of the hedonic treadmill. At a more reasonable resolution, this processing power could be used for higher-end graphics algorithms, better AI, longer battery life, and so on.
You can transmit power over long distances with surprisingly little energy loss with high-voltage DC. Any sane national plan for renewable energy would include a large amount of long-distance power transfer, if for no other reason than to minimize the variance in power production.
There are a bunch of startups developing new reactor designs that should be cheaper and safer than existing plants. Some are ready or close to building demonstration plants.

I'd rather we fund the most promising dozen or so of those funding to build demos over the next decade than start building conventional plants now and locking ourselves in to those for decades.

There was an interesting Nova episode a few years ago that looked at a bunch of these new designs.

I remember one that used a liquid fuel in a spherical vessel, with an opening in the bottom to drain into a wider, long, shallow rectangular vessel. The fuel would react in the spherical vessel, but if you drained it into the rectangular vessel it would not react.

This is because in the spherical vessel if a given atom reacts and produces a neutron there are many directions it can go which have to pass through enough fuel that it has a good chance of causing another reaction. It's enough to achieve a self-sustaining reaction.

In the rectangular vessel, there are much fewer directions for a neutron that pass through enough fuel to react. You can't get a self-sustaining reaction.

The best part was how they plugged the drain when the reactor was operating. They plugged it by having some frozen fuel in the pipe. The heat from the reaction in the spherical vessel would quickly melt the plug unless it was heavily and continuously cooled.

Note that unlike other plants where if something goes wrong with cooling you have to take explicit action to stop the reactor before meltdown, in this one if something goes wrong with the cooling the reactor stops itself.

Another good one is the traveling wave reactor. There was a joint venture between TerraPower (a company founded by Bill Gates) and China National Nuclear Corporation to build a 600 MWe demo reactor from 2018-2025 followed by commercial 1150 MWe plants later that decade, but TerraPower was made to stop in early 2019 by the US government.

Besides having a much lower chance of doing something that can harm people in the surrounding area than current designs, many of these new designs allow for much smaller reactors so that even if something does happen the area affected will be small.
Folks also get so worked up about highly efficient new renewable power sources that they forget about transit and storage.

I don't know about the situation today, but for years the massive wind farms on Tehachapi weren't even connected to the grid. Even after PG&E bought the electricity to meet their renewables quota, it was cheaper to waste it than to build the transmission infrastructure.

Renewables have the inverse of the problem you described: They are too distributed, and it's hard to get enough to power a community without running transmission lines over hundreds of miles.

Yes, the centralization of infrastructure required for efficient nuclear energy production is a problem. But don't forget that renewables have equivalent problems.
Rust, and Go, and Julia, and D, and Swift, and what not, should have a shouting and fighting match with one another.

When they are done, they can let me know who won and then I'll take that language a bit more seriously.

In the meantime I'm a humble coder sitting in the corner with Python + C + CUDA (plus some scheme and assembly), doing useless things like AI, robotics, IoT, etc.
Unless the market can remain bored longer than institutional investors can remain solvent...
It's bad for Apple to take a cut of our money and to compete with our service and it's best for the users if they can't do that.

We don't want the users to be able to easily shift from our platform to anyone else's, though. That's bad!

(Obviously the corporate interests only align with the consumer interest when it serves the bottom line of the corporation.)
> First, bit field descriptors is a huge pain - where, in C, you would define an enum for the task, there isn't a real equal in vanilla Rust

“A litany of constants” is exactly what your c enum is though.

And you can define a "degenerate" Rust enum with explicit discriminant values:

enum Foo {
A = 1,
B = 2,
C = 4
}

They are cast-able to integrals too:

println!("{}", Foo::C as usize); // prints "4"

Doesn’t work so well for flags however.

> Second, the over-reliance on nightly is a tough sell for - having inline asm gated makes it very hard.

The alternative would be to simply not make the feature available at all until it is done and ready, with even higher risk (as it would have been exercised even less).

As is, if the feature is fine for you as-is you can use it, and if you can't or don't want to use nightly you can go and assist its shepherding to stable (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/72016)

> while format is great, it's also very heavyweight. Not having (AFAIK) variadic arguments is hard, and there isn't really an equal to printf.

There are no safe Rust-level variadics, but Rust can call C variadic functions, and under RFC 2137 (not stable yet I think) define them as well.
Ok, I will increase contrat a bit. I cannot increase too much or the text will hide the slide...
Ask HN: What neat/helpful things have you run on your k8s cluster?
I have a k8s cluster that's been sitting on GCP for a year. I'd rather find some good uses for it then tear it down. What are some of the most useful things you've done with a k8s cluster? If I can get more value out of it, I'll keep it running. Thanks!
What technological advancement? Is boring holes through a mountain somehow revolutionary technology?
Wow, according to Wikipedia, the "Junta Constructora del Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família", the board promoting the building of Sagrada Familia, was founded in 1895.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junta_Constructora_del_Templo_...
> This is how Lewis D. Wheeler, a Boston-based white male actor, found himself holed up in a studio for days listening to and repeating snippets of Nixon’s audio. There were hundreds of snippets, each only a few seconds long...
Wheeler’s job was to re-record each snippet in his own voice, matching the exact rhythm and intonation. These little bits were then fed into Respeecher’s algorithm to map his voice to Nixon’s.

It would be nice to hear what the actor was able to produce directly, before it was "mapped" to be Nixon. With the amount of effort that was spent, I'd presume that there are actors good enough to create a convincing fakes even without the post-processing. Are there any before-and-after samples available?
Root cause analysis of Californias rolling blackouts [pdf]
This one is clearly anti-competive and I hope someone will help them out and pick it up. This is the most obvious requirement for the future of preventing these monopolies. The ability to get your data out.
The time to connect to the CDN hostname will negate any benefit, especially if push can be used.
If they couldn't breakup Microsoft they have no chance of breaking up Google. A waste of time and effort.
Nobel Prizes Are Not as Prestigious as They Used to Be
Why would people in the same room match the sound of the hum to different frequencies? And why would no one be able to record the hum, even with "sophisticated audio equipment"? It seems like these two things would rule out nearby boats as the cause.
oldhatemachs write-up is inaccurate. 4chan isn't what it is because it's a magical place of anonymity where your opinions are considered in a vacuum. 4chan is what it is because, as time goes on, the website attracted the people that were getting banned from pseudonymous websites. As these kinds of people accumulated and accumulated, the website became progressively more toxic in every way, which drove out people who didn't enjoy that, which gave the most toxic members hegemony.

It's also not true that 4chan has stopped doxxes and raids. Just yesterday /pol/ was full of people that were scouring everything they could to doxx the security guard involved in the shooting. 4chan was also counterraiding the leftist bunkerchan to have revenge on them making a meme about the facial features of the kind of people that enjoy /pol/.

And it's also wrong that 4chan is a paragon of free speech. It used to be, but as the userbase started harboring more and more fascists, and as more and more of them became janitors, they started censoring leftist posters unless they refrained from, well, anything that makes a Chan a Chan.

4chan in general is also highly resistant to evidence that goes against their narrative, and won't shy away from accusing the authors of any study they disagree with of being part of a Jewish conspiracy.

Most of all, the biggest meme in that post was calling /pol/ "slightly grown up from their libertarian idealism, [...] now with a hint of conservatism". /pol/ is openly fascist. As in, Julius Evola, Swastika, Black Sun, genocide, kind of fascist.

People who spend their time talking about the day of the rope being censored isn't what drove them to violent tendencies, what drove them to violent tendencies is a mix of being socially recluse, racist, white males, egged on by literal Nazis who saw the opportunity to radicalized them, all of that in a community so repulsive to anyone else that few enjoy being there.

It's not even that creative either. The main mascot of /pol/ was stolen from some random webcomic, the wojak came from Krautchan, and so on. It's just slight memes from someone else's art and a few puns. It's not a main creative force of the internet, far from it.

Those are the dynamics behind 4chan becoming what it is. Purely anonymous websites in a pseudonymous majority will inevitably become a disaster. That poster is someone who was carried down the rabbit hole and can't realize just how extreme and wrong their opinions are, who can't realize what their values became, trying to convince themselves their worldview and website isn't as insane as it is.
Please tell me what commonly used videoconferencing software allows for 4K conversations and how to enable it.
I would also say, for those not familiar with Julia, that the main advantage of Julia vs Python or R is that you can write performant code in Julia that will be fast enough for most scenarios.

For example, there are efforts to write a pure BLAS in Julia that is still performant [1]. If you are into numerical computing, you will quickly understand this is crazy cool.

A consequence of that is composability. Most libraries are pure Julia, small, and play nicely with each other.

[1] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/11634
Why aren’t there any secure, paid browsers that put security a priority?
Its just a business model.

You decided to understand tangible goods and decided not to understand ephemeral goods.

The value is no less real and the distinction is arbitrary.

The only thing happening here is an uncomfortable relationship with people making money and having complete discretion to acquire more goods and services with that money than others.

HFT has no more or less arbitrary value or merit than any ephemeral software business that you might happen to respect. SaaS, ad tech, data brokering, YC cash burning darling, etc.

Trying to rationalize its utility (“is it providing liquidity or just front running”) is just as much of a red herring.

Its just a business.
I'm a keen cyclist and I prefer to ride on the road rather than on bike lanes. It tends to be a faster way to get around, especially since roads don't have the same habit of ending abruptly that bike lanes do, and it is rarer that one has to slow down for slower traffic ahead. However, not everyone is capable of cycling fast enough to move safely in the flow of traffic on the road, and not everyone is confident enough to ride in and among cars. I expect, given the demographics of this website, that you (like me) are a reasonably fit and confident young man - perhaps the subset of the population most likely to be undaunted by road cycling. For people like us, it is likely that the road will always be the preferred way to travel. But a cycling culture must be all-inclusive.
Had both, don't remember them fondly at all because I moved a lot.
These 35kg monsters were the perfect combination of unwieldy and delicate at the same time...
> Please help me, what real value does an investment like this yield for the economy as a whole?

I see this situation to be very similar to the reason why the Bitcoin network burns hundreds of MWh of power per day. They do this because it is the only way to ensure everyone adheres to the market rules that were collectively declared as "fair".

Bitcoins' fairness rules work by incentivizing an arms race of who can compute hashes faster. The "conventional" stock/bond/futures markets ensure fairness by resorting to time an order was placed as the ultimate arbiter when it comes to whose orders are filled first. In both cases, there is a physics-related element that cannot be cheated by any one market participant, because nobody can transfer information faster than light and nobody can produce power out of the void.

The end product of this is "fairness" - which is extremely valuable, because without a reliable ledger, bitcoins would have no value, and without the ultimate judge of time at the stock market, there would be no stock market, because nobody would trade at a market where a specific participant could just backdate his orders.

Of course the "fairness" is not directly a product of the 300m$ investment for that ultra fast data connection. Nor is it directly a product of the MWh of power burnt for bitcoin blockchain hashes. But these two things are direct outcomes of the rules that effectively produce the fairness we want, and without accepting that we get these outcomes, these rules would not function and would not be accepted, which would void them, because they can only produce the desired "fairness" product as long as they are accepted by the market participants. Hence I consider "fairness" to be an indirect product of these two effects - and all similarly-categorized effects that don't directly seem to serve any purpose except for being actions in some kind of arms race between market participants.

One could also replace "fairness" with "trust", if that's more to your liking. The concept is the important thing, not what the product is named.
HFT is not front-running. Front-running is a form of trading on non-public information.
It depends on the context. Yeah it'd be lovely to have your system connected to the internet - but no, our clients wouldn't give us money if you do that, and we need money. So, maybe yes in this case, start writing some quality, well thought out maintainable libraries (that can include audited third party code), and just bill it. In my case, the cost to the client of a team of devs working on that was less than the cost to them of the risk of a film leaking...

[Edit] - But what I have found through experience is that the code that was written under these constraints seemed to be better, more secure and robust, than without them. YMMV.
The Best College Prank of the 1790s (With Bats, Poop and Grass) (2012)
I've always been really interested in these far flung places and used to spend hours on Google Earth scanning the middles of the oceans for islands like this and think about how to visit them.

In particular I've always been fascinated by Tristan da Cunha which has a village and is livable if you can get there:

https://wikitravel.org/en/Tristan_da_Cunha

And Bouvet Island, which is totally uninhabited:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvet_Island

And for whatever reason, one I discovered by browsing Google Earth directly (as opposed to the others which people mention as far flung places), which I can't remember the names of right now, but I can find them on Google maps though they're not labeled: a series of three islands between NZ and Antarctica, closer to Antarctica. Barren islands only potentially visitable for part of the year. The winds and sea in the Southern Ocean sound terrifying. Here's the pin:

Dropped pin
Near South Pacific Ocean
https://maps.app.goo.gl/PpsVCzE7LXLrZFZe8

We're lucky to be able to see some videos of these places on youtube. When I was little, there were only satellite images and the occasional grainy photo or two online if one did a deep search.

A short documentary of a place called Kurlis came out recently, you should watch it if you're interested. It's about conservation.

https://youtu.be/kHGarqZFY1k

This documentary is particularly interesting for me because I used to browse satellite imagery of the place and to see people walking around it it's as amazing as I had imagined. A volcano in the middle of a lake in a remote island???! Thinking about this stuff is also what led me to have a tech career that has been related to conservation of these places (Kurlis from satellite):

Dropped pin
Near Severo-Kurilsky District, Sakhalin Oblast, Russia, 694550
https://maps.app.goo.gl/6X54ZqdruRgB5KYW7
Good luck with Servo, I hope you have millions of dollars available.
Yes, their service IS great in a lot of areas... but between what they're doing with podcasts and now this bit with playlists, you have to ask yourself if you want to support a company that's pushing vendor lock-in so hard.
Do I get Covid in airline cabins? New Results
I think there is a higher chance of Microsoft Open Sourcing Window Kernel ( but not other part of the OS ) than running Windows on Linux Kernel.
Well, maybe not "disk based" per se. It can be stored on disk, yeah. But it can also run in memory. I think in this case it's clear that ChuckMcM meant a machine with 64GB of RAM (not disk space), therefore they are talking about having SQLite running in memory, not on disk.
that's what I meant, million data points costs $60
Order-triggered auctions are slowly becoming a thing, but they have limits too. In this scheme, everyone submits an order and e.g. once every 100ms the exchange will cross them. Very little understanding of them, but they look cool
"that motorist believe belong to them"

Not sure how roads are paid for where you are, but where I live half the cost of roads is funded by gasoline taxes and various other fees on vehicles and drivers.
I agree. But I think your statement points at a bigger problem. We need to start looking towards a global human coalition. More than the UN/WC. The US has had too much power for too long, as well as China, Russia, and any other country with "veto powers".
Graphhopper Maps
Facebook Timeline
Console #22: Seaweed, Names, and Awful AI
Public opinion has softened its views on Brutalism
With energy from wind farms 1000 km away, hydro and biofuels closer by, and nearby storage. At the beginning, you'll probably also have a small amount of "dirty" generation as backup, but which sits idle most of the time.
After looking at the comments I wonder how many permutations there are to solve this problem.
I feel the same way about CRTs. Things are so much better now (to me anyway). I also feel the same way about loud keyboards. The current fetish for "clackety clack" keyboards cracks me up.
I don't have a specific route I can link to, sorry. I was navigating in an unfamiliar area of SF once and directed to turn right one street before what turned out to be a major street, then make a left turn onto another major street. The directed left turn was from a stop sign onto a street with poor visibility and cross-traffic not stopping. If I had gone one street further before the right, there would have been a stoplight.

Basically if you have data on the type of an intersection, favoring nearby controlled intersections for difficult turns would probably be helfpul, especially in hilly areas.
I really want to support Joris since I think extremely highly of TeXmacs and its principles. Frustratingly, the shipping cost to the US is almost as much as the book: 49 euros for the book and 31 euros for shipping. I hope they can find a US printer to bring that cost down.
It's a shame, though. Content aggregators at least should allow the ones that exist to bubble up.
Advertising absolutely generates value. An advertisement might sell someone a vacuum cleaner when they were previously using a broom, saving them countless hours every week to spend on other economic pursuits, resulting in a net benefit for society.
Only one person (or perhaps two) works at X and lives at Y. Location data can never be anonymous.
As a semi-serious road cyclist (5000 - 8000 mi/year), I can attest to the shortages and the general backlog in the industry that has made it very difficult to get a bike, but more especially to get bikes serviced. Everyone's digging out the rust-bucket under their porch and trying to get it overhauled, when they're not snapping up entry-level road bikes and casual cruisers/hybrids/commuter bikes...

The ultra-expensive stuff remains more available, though not necessarily service for it. That's the stuff we hardcore roadies buy anyway, but now it's pretty much the only thing sure to be in stock, and even then, far from assured in all cases.
At least back then we got to have desks that were bigger than a cabinet door, if only because they had to accommodate the CRT.
The CRT monitors do have a faster response time and higher refresh rate (I've seen up to 640x480@480hz <1ms).

But you would be sacrificing fidelity for this "competitive advantage".