skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
…and the rest of the time it's good old coal and gaz.

Each nights, when it's cloudy, when it's raining… during all those time periods (so way more than 50%) there's no sun. You can install GW of solar panels, they'll produce during those time close to 0MW of electricity.

Math are already done, "backing-up" things with batteries works to power up for a few hours a neighbor or hospitals. This doesn't work to provide electricity each nights and during cold-not-sunny-winter weeks or hot-AC-everywhere-summer-nights.

Even if you store things in water dam, that is today the easiest, quickest and most cost efficient way of storing electricity. In France where all the dam are already build we basically have only a few days of "electricity storage". Battery is around 2% of the total, so less than a few hours.

If you install "dirty" backup, such as gaz or coal, you're basically erasing all the benefit of installing win turbines or solar panels regarding CO² emission.

If you choose to install nuclear power plants as backup, regarding the building cost and the fact that such plan is having a big inertia (days) regarding the nuclear fission and that the cost stays roughly the same whatever change you're making. You better not use that as backup solution but better than a close to 0 CO² emission source (in France wind turbine is ~60g of CO² per MW, it's 6g of C0² for nuclear plants).
The point of serverless for vendors is lock-in. Everything else about it is an annoyance, from their side (having to manage lifecycle, controlling load in shared engines, measuring resource usage...). But it locks people in and can be slapped with basically-arbitrary prices. The incentives to set standards are exactly zero, because once all providers support them and easy portability is achieved, it becomes a race to the bottom on price. Unless vendors can come up with some extra value-added service on top and choose to commoditize away the serverless layer, there won’t be any standard.
Imagine you are having a blue cheese dip and reading this article.
What are you going to do when the container solution / node.js instance / insert x component here crashes? Wait for support to do something about it when you can fix it instantly? Or when you want to deploy a gRPC / crypto daemon to communicate with your back-end?

As an experienced back-end developer and linux user I would pull my hair out if I was completely helpless in fixing an issue or implementing some side thing that requires shell access. I don't want to wait for some guy in Philippines who will be online 12 hours later to come try to fix it.
Someone should make a Rust Graveyard website like the "other" graveyard website except this one is for people giving up on projects due to an unaesthetic and pedantic programming language.
Burson's Observation on Programming Languages:

When someone who knows a lot about programming languages has a task tn do, they probably already know a language well suited to it. They also know how many person-years of work are required to turn a new language from a toy into something others would want to use. So, it's unlikely that such a person, needing to write a program, would create a language to write it in. There would have to be some use case that no extant language handles well.

On the other hand, when someone who doesn't know all that needs to write a program, they're much more likely to say, I know! I'll create a new language!

Therefore, most new languages are created by people who don't know what they're doing.
Perhaps skeptics is a less loaded term?
If they change color in sync then that is a known property of both marbles. Say you have a marble that is blue if the number of seconds is even and red otherwise. Knowing the color of one marble is enough to know the color of the other marble without information travelling between the marbles?
Certainly, I have known Zola for a while and it has a nice feature set.
I recently bought a "ninja" keyboard, where the labels are on the front of the keys, not the top. Looks "badass" according to a nearby 15-year-old. While technically the keys are labeled, in practice looking at them is useless, especially in anything less than bright room lighting, so they are, for me, effectively blank.

As a reasonably fast touch typist for many years, I found that for prose it was basically no change. But. There were enough things that were a total drag that I couldn't keep using it.

There are times when the key you need to hit isn't part of a flow, and you have to hit it perfectly: passwords, Illustrator/Photoshop commands, punctuation-heavy inputs like URLs, postal addresses, etc. I'm not a programmer, and others will have other things they do.

So, I bought normal keycaps and replaced them on just the letter and number keys. Much better.
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but anyways:

Maybe I should have added reliable to data.

I'm highly skeptical of the ~4000 deaths figure reported as the death count for China and I have the sense that the authors of the study were too or they would have included it in their study.

As for India, when you factor in rural areas, I don't think the reporting and data would be as reliable as for the US. [1]

To go back to my original point, I'm not arguing that the US successfully handled COVID. Nor am I trying to demonize China or India. I'm just saying that the author's decision of foregrounding absolute death toll over per capita is poor and misleading given the sample they used. It could be seen as bad faith on the part of the authors when the per capita number can support their argument just as well.

[1] https://www.sbs.com.au/news/india-s-coronavirus-cases-pass-7...
What was the insight that boosted your ability to write creatively?
I'm not proud to admit (but I was interested to read that I'm not the only one) that I've gotten into the habit of making a tarball of my working directory and .git directory before large rebase operations between multiple feature branches, because like you I've lost work because git got into awkward states I couldn't get it out of without losing work.

A full system backup of my laptops is taken roughly every three hours so it's quite hard for me to lose more work than that. However recovering from a failed rebase without losing changes can also consume a sizable amount of time, which explains why I'm still careful and take precautions anyway.
Is WW2 generally perceived in america as having caused many deaths among american military aged males? I'm sure we can point to D-day and other punctual events as being outstandingly bloody but does this extend to the whole conflict?

I'd be particularily interested in comparing the above ratio for Vietnam, or to German or Russian (combat & non-) WW2 deaths.
The problem what I see with serverless, is if you need to store your state into a database, the classic relational systems will not scale well to the problem.

pbBouncer[0] in transaction mode tries to solve the problem of limited connections by giving a connection from the pool to a transaction. This has a limitation of not being able to reuse statements; e.g. they have to be deleted before the transaction is released, adding an extra roundtrip for the queries. It also means you must wrap every request into a transaction, if planning to use statements. Otherwise the solution is to sanitize all your values and concatenate a single SQL query. It has the big risks of SQL injections and is against all best practices, but this is what Active Record is doing to solve the issue, and I guess it works for them quite well.

pgBouncer has also the statement mode. Here you can't use transactions and with that, no prepared statements either. So you must then just use the text protocol of the database and concatenate the parameters to your query.

Amazon has the RDS, and I haven't looked into it that much yet. What I kind of think I know about it, is it pins the connections when using statements. Meaning, when pinned, the connection is for one client and cannot be reused until disconnected.

MySQL has the serverless-mysql package[1], which is a client side library killing of stale connections and disconnecting as fast as possible when done. So, basically during the request, it reads the system tables and tries to drop the connections from other sessions. I haven't tried this either, but more I think about it, it really doesn't feel like a good strategy at all. For one, you need a root access to the database for every client, and then you need to modify the state of other connections from the clients. There could be a bug in the client library, that is quite nasty to find and can cause really hard-to-fix issues.

Then the last thing is of course the locking of traditional relational databases. They don't scale to massive concurrency that well; the MVCC chokes when running with many parallel queries[2]. So you need a distributed system, something that can have locking mechanisms that can scale to tens of thousands of sudden connections when the serverless system gets a request peak. Hopefully something with a stateless connection. If somebody knows a system that can do this, I'd like to hear about it.

[0]: https://www.pgbouncer.org/

[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/serverless-mysql

[2]: https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2019/papers/02-transa...
There are so many things worth learning on unproductive time that making myself marginally more productive with an esoteric command line tool actually isn't the greatest value proposition. VIM, for instance, is my preferred editor. It's on every Unix machine I need. I learned a ton of basic things I can do with it. I don't customize it because I don't usually have the permissions or the time. It lets me get in, edit, get out. You have to judge the reason for a tool.

Personally, the best tool for typing productivity I ever have used is a keyboard with no letters on the key caps. It also means I'm the only person in my immediate circle that can use my computer at all. My wife literally can't use my PC.
> Without such measures, deaths would have been 10-20 times higher.

Is that based on anything? I’m skeptical - many places that took more severe measures did worse than places that took less severe measures (both within the US and internationally), and nowhere ended up with death rates per capita an order of magnitude larger than what we’re seeing in the US.
A colleague of mine has a small farm which he inherited and operates as part-time-business.

He once wanted to sell some surplus seeds from a harvest to other farmers on a facebook page or similar. He was quickly reminded that he was strictly not allowed to this, since he did not own the rights. The cooperative he operates under (basically the only way farming is done here) sold/gave him the seeds and the right to plant them and resell/bring the crops to them afterwards. Everything else was "unlicensed" and would be fined harshly.

That's just the way it is - particularly with newly developed variants. Breeding takes decades and needs to pay off somehow.

For a different view on this I suggest the SciFri podcast on the new "Cosmic Crisp" Apple. Or some research on the "Honey Crisp", "Pink Lady", etc.
I've always felt, no resume is burdened by the fact that I need one. My best opportunities have come through the fact that the person hiring me has never looked at mine.
Good question, all the emitted CO² stays for centuries in the atmosphere. What is happening if in the end they can't replace all those "dirty" backups ?

This whole plan will basically work only if this big "if" is solved and deployed.
Blogpost with technical background: https://www.mnemonic.no/blog/exposing-backdoor-consumer-prod...
I have never needed to reach for per-class operator new/delete. I suppose there are cases when you need to, but then you will most definitely be working on something extremely complicated.
Yep, adding random invites by email to the document in hopes someone reads it. Spam over google drive instead of email basically.
Kahoot picks up $215M from SoftBank for its user-generated, e-learning platform
I strongly disagree, I don't mind some people shooting beyond reason on that topic. Misattributing issues of free speech is common. It is even more dangerous to say it would just concern the government.

But even that pales in comparison with peer pressure and fears about missing something, the main driver of virality on platforms like facebook. Restriction on free speech can be subtle. You just don't speak about it or are compelled to say something specific or face retaliation.

That there is some retaliation if there is someone openly denying the holocaust is a dishonest argument.
Hardware was certainly the reason for the development of new assembly languages, and for the creation of niche languages for niche hardware (such as CUDA and OpenCL for GPUs).

However, I don't see new hardware as being the impetus for the creation of any of the most popular languages of today.

Do you mind elaborating on which languages you think arose due to which hardware capabilities?
Prolog is a very different kind of system. It basically does backtracking natively, and everything else you have to build as libraries just like in any other language.
Espruino (a JS interpreter for MCUs) runs really nicely on this too now - you get wireless programming and debug, and a full Bluetooth LE stack (you can run Web Bluetooth on the device and use to control other consumer electronics).
Hmm not sure I understand.

You're saying that maybe the 1st amendment could be edited a bit so that it was more clear that such things aren't okay?

I'm thinking people interpret "free speech" in sometimes quite different ways
Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’
Wikipedia's Simple English page on Bell's inequality actually has a nice overview of a simplified way of thinking about quantum entanglement: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
No battery charger on board, but we’ve done a lot of work on power management so you can sleep with very low power consumption (>100uA) on USB - which means you can use USB battery packs. AAAs work really nicely in classrooms and for teachers (easy to buy, clear what you need, low cost batteries are safe, also familiar for the existing 5M users), and have a lot going for them in terms of safety for open electric devices used by novices! The AAA batteries can also last a lot longer now if you design your code to be lower power.

You might also like some of the accessories people have made - I used these when strapping some micro:bits and RGB LEDs to samba drums and it worked great!
http://www.kaise.com.tw/index.php?route=product/product&path...
Google's OR-tools can use coin-or under the hood. So it's many people's main way to interact with coin-or.
I'll get one, if it can pretend to be an Amiga 3000 and run Unix. Extra points if it emulates a C65 and a C128.

One thing that makes emulating an Amiga easier than, say, a Spectrum or C64, is that most software of the time was clock-agnostic, so you don't need to emulate the timings as precisely as you'd need to do with an older machine.
My general approach is to look at the unit (and possibly integration) tests: if the new release has no changes in test code, that's a PATCH release. Of course it's not clear cut and can't really be automated, but as a guiding point it has served me well.
I'm not sure what you're asking here, both are mentioned in the very first sentence -

> The US has experienced more deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) than any other country and has one of the highest cumulative per capita death rates.

Why is that misleading or bad faith?
Manage your Kubernetes cluster with swords and TNT
Cool! Refreshing with new hardware capabilities, and it seems they thought it through with the addition of a universal (yeah ...) hex format to support both v1 and v2 platforms from a single file.

The new nRF52833 MCU [1] seems pretty capable and certainly inline with what is being used in industry for suitable applications (it's an Cortex-M4 64 MHz, 128 KB RAM, 512 KB flash, Bluetooth) but it doesn't seem to have hardware support for any ML-specific stuff that I could see.

Oh, and there has been a keming accident on one of the images that is a bit unfortunate, the word "MakeCode" looks a great deal like "MaleCode" which is perhaps not optimal in their context [2].

[1] https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Low-power-short-range-wi...

[2] https://tech.microbit.org/docs/latest-revision/assets/blog/s...
I agree. But you can still do native apps today, if you’re willing to jump through all the hoops that OS vendors set in your path and maybe renounce a couple of platforms (like chromebooks). Unfortunately, now that basically OS vendors are also effectively cloud providers, their incentives are set to increase those hoops (“for secuyriteh”), nudging more people towards “easier” cloud deployments.
Sony Playstation TOS for users with China as country/area of residence
Island Not Found deserves a mention: http://js13kgames.com/entries/island-not-found

Gameplay falls a bit short, but in my opinion it's the technically most impressive entry this year.
I wish it had more explanation about how the model works. The same website also has a "Predict MBTI Personality from Text": https://gimmeserendipity.com/mbtimodel/text/

What's interesting about it is that normally learning someone's MBTI type requires their active involvement. They either have to fill in some type of survey or tell you their type. This would be fine, were it not that there are plenty of people who attach WAY too much importance to MBTI types.
The common kitchen aluminium foil works. We now use it in our lab to shield stuff. A few layers of it works much better than the expensive stuff from 3M.
Show HN: My first android game - Tricky Maze (about escaping form the labyrinth)
You can put it to sleep now from software, and also you can safely connect a LiPo battery (not only 2xAAA). There's no LiPo charging circuit on it though.
> those are exceptional cases

the 99/100 year lease is quite common in many Europan countries. It's not "exceptional" here
Kogito is a nice upgrade that we've now been experimenting with for some months https://kogito.kie.org/
> No, the bandwidth chokepoint is organizing thoughts, and those thoughts into sentences (or into code snippets).

Right, but particularly when writing, what "organizing thoughts" often looks like is writing a burst of text (a phrase or several sentences) then possibly editing it / deleting it / whatever. Being able to quickly bash out the bursts I think makes the whole process faster, or at least less annoying.

I switched from QWERTY to Colemak several years ago; I'm not sure I've gotten back up to my previous top typing speed, but it's certainly a lot more comfortable.
It seems that hidden variables have always been made to be simple hidden states. But we now know about RNGs and seeds and such.

A shared RNG seed is essentially entanglement.

This delves more into complex hidden variables, that normal analyses ignore: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC137470/
Entropic Inference and the Foundations of Physics
For billionaire, wish list will have this top item:

1. Kill solarmist (it's good starting point).
For quantum computing to be impossible, basically all of quantum mechanics would have to be wrong.

There are enormous engineering challenges with quantum computing, but no fundamental challenges.
I don’t see that “fixing” Facebook solves anything to be honest.

I kind of feel like trying to “fix” Facebook is akin to taking a time machine back to 1930’s Berlin and smashing up Hitler’s podium. Yeah it’ll be harder to spread hatred for about five minutes but there’s still a bunch of nazis everywhere.

The education system is imho the root cause of all of these problems. We don’t teach children critical thinking. We teach them about science but not why science.

We also dump our kids at school for childcare rather than education, which doesn’t inspire an interest in learning just for learning’s sake at all. Relying on overworked and underpaid teaching staff to care more about educating our kids than we do clearly hasn’t worked either.

My point is that a well educated person will be able to easily identify most bullst when they read it, will know how to check the credibility of their sources, and will know why some opinions really are more valid than others (you wouldn’t ask a plumber for advice on a tumour, or a doctor for advice on a busted boiler, so why would you trust some rando on the internet’s whackadoodle conspiracy nonsense?).

I hate saying this, but I hate more that you’re not allowed to say this.

Every time a post is made about Facebook or Twitter or Instagram it comes back to a variant of “how do we manage what gets shown to the cattle?”. We don’t use that language, but it’s what we mean.

They’re not cattle, they’re our friends and family, and they’ve been failed by our broken education system.

Not to go all Will McAvoy (not least as this is not a partisan problem) but the first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging there is one. There is a not insignificant number of people in the world who have been failed by the school system. We need to solve the real problem. We need to invest in intelligence and critical thinking.
Corporations are people, and cuddly people too! What could go wrong in giving them ownership of our food sources?

/sarcasm /despair-for-humanity
Ask HN: You have access to all Google data and computing power. What do you do?
I'm looking for feedback on my very first android game - Tricky Maze. This is a puzzle game where you need to get out of the labyrinth in a limited number of moves. 450 handcrafted levels to train logic and memory. Hope you will like it!

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playrea.tr...

Simple controls using swipes.

There are two modes in the game:

"Classic" mode to train logic. The player must think a few steps ahead before every swipe to reach the exit with a limited number of moves (from 4 to 10) each quantity of moves has 50 unique levels.

"Explorer" mode to train memory as the player sees no obstacles at the beginning of each level. Therefore, first he must explore the labyrinth, find and remember many different wrong routes and find the only one correct way to escape. To play this mode open Modes -> Explorer

Let me know your thoughts!
You should be good showing off a few websites made by you plus showing off your knowledge where you can, using technical terms and doing tests etc.
Devine Lu Linvega has been running Plan 9 on a Raspberry Pi for a while: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/plan9.html
And what happens if you repeat these calculations over different period?
There is a "harvesting" theory which claims that COVID causes some deaths to happen sooner. So it is a possiblity that there were many more deaths in April 2020, compared to Aprild 2019, but there will be way fewer in April 2021.
Somewhat similar "dry tinder" theory is sometime applied to Sweden: they had fewer excess deaths during the flu season for a last couple of years and got hit hard by COVID claiming lives spared by the flu.
Let's be honest, very few people would want to pay upfront for that. Maybe it could work with very specialized social media with 50,000 users max, but not at the scale of Facebook. The question is, why is everyone flocking to these giga social media when smaller forums like HN did the job for decades before that?

I like HN, it's not perfect, but I had several opportunities to engage with "famous" developers in meaningful ways that would not have been possible on Twitter or Facebook and this is invaluable to me. Same with another design/photography related forum in my native language.

This is a model that might work commercially or at least with crowdfunding. A paid Twitter of Facebook? No.