skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I agree I'm being slightly flippant.

But it's just a side-project and I will continue late night coding with a glass of wine. I find it hugely enjoyable.

I would have a different mind-set if I was writing software for power stations as a professional.
Pepsi Once Owned the World’s 6th Largest Military Fleet
It makes sense though.

Even though these kinds of certified exams are taken online, it is monitored by a human proctor (from a partner exam platform like Pearson). The proctor will check your environment like webcam, mic, the number of windows opened, running processes, the number of connected displays etc.

Don't expect the proctor is tech enthusiastic enough to understand various kinds of Linux Desktop environments.
You definitely get the sticks in Cape Town, South Africa (along with packets of ham that say “edible” in big writing on the front). The butter is also ungodlily expensive, and margarine is in very common use
The court's decision was more nuanced than that. They basically argued that it was technically not legal for a brief period, but justified, necessary and reasonable under the circumstances. It wasn't exactly an erosion of democracy and respect for human rights, and the court made that very clear in their judgement.

https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/20-08-2020/unlawful-but-ne...
I've tried and failed that too. My conclusion is that they have enough voices on the site to keep it alive so they're not letting in any more people from outside that bubble on purpose.
csvlook/csvkit, apparently; something I never heard of before, which is actually not installed by default in ubuntu. He also included the data itself, which is pretty helpful, but which could have more usefully gone into a git repo somewhere.

Also "kids these days" all reach for docker. Otherwise any sane person would have just used cat instead of csvlook.

Upvoted the kid's article, because command line text cleaning is of TOWERING IMPORTANCE to any DS person worth their salt. But he is definitely an inexperienced kid.
When I was getting my pilots license I used to read accident reports from Canada's Transportation Safety Board [1]. I'm sure the NTSB (America's version) has similar calibre reports [2].

There is also Cockpit Resource Management [3] which addresses the human factor in great detail (how people work with each other, and how prepared are people).

In general what you learn from reading these things is that its rarely one big error or issue - but many small things leading to the failure event.

1 - https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/aviation/index.ht...

2 - https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/Ac...

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
OK, first, I need to say this: that news article has a number of false claims. Most notably, it claims that the fatality rate (# deceased / # infected) is 1-3%. Regardless of your opinions on the paper being discussed here, no credible source believes that the IFR for this virus is over 1%. That information is simply wrong.

That said, the claim for 45,000 excess deaths in March and April appears to come from this:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

With this table having the details:

https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31865-1/...

The 45,000 number in that table is for all of Italy, whereas Lombardy specifically had excess mortality of 25,212 in March and April, with another ~700 in May. So that's 420 excess deaths a day in March/April, over a baseline of 275 (16,480 deaths in Lombardy, on average, for March and April of 2015-2019). This is nowhere near the 650 excess deaths per day you claimed in the GGP comment, but is a factor of about 2.5x over baseline.

For whatever it's worth, here's a paper that makes a claim of a much lower excess mortality figure of 5740 for Bergamo, and 3703 in Lombardy in the first four months of 2020, using better-controlled models for mortality in the regions:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7520169/

I think it's somewhat pointless to debate the exact number of people dying every day, because we'll never know, and in any case, the virus was clearly quite deadly in that place at that time. However, both of these sources note that excess mortality spiked in March and April, and by May, had returned to below normal levels. So whatever happened in Lombardy, it was a statistical anomaly, and we should be careful extrapolating from it.

Did the virus cause significant excess mortality in Lombardy in March and April? Yes. Could the flu cause similar levels of excess mortality in a naive population? It can, and it has. The 1958 pandemic killed about 116,000 people in the US, which is well above the 12,000-60,000 people we see per year in modern times, and worse on a population-adjusted basis:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...

People like to make comparisons to the 1918 pandemic, but if anything, Covid-19 appears to be on par with the 1958 pandemic in terms of overall severity.
I would be more interested in seeing the other thing - that increase in productivity results in higher salary.

(It is taken from granted, but it does not seem to be the case in service-oriented jobs. More productivity means less people are needed to do the job, and while customers are happier at falling prices, it does not mean there is any benefit for the employees - except for lay offs.)
I run a startup (www.de.energy) that opens up solar as an asset class and funds solar commercial and industrial projects in India and Africa. The last project we funded was for 31,500 INR per kW ($425) and we are currently about to fund a few projects at $364/kW for Tier 1 equipment. This is more expensive than utility scale projects. The estimates in the article are what we are seeing on the ground.

Yes, it is accurate that solar can't supply more than 30-40% of the energy mix. But we are still far from reaching that level of supply in the developing world and faster the cost reduces, the better it'll be for continued deployment en masse. Battery innovation as well as other tech will continue to improve the amount of solar in the energy mix.

Edit: You may also find this helpful - https://de.energy/blog/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020-...
DevOps Maturity Model What Is a Better Alternative?
Looking pretty path dependent at this point. Don't mistake luck for good policy.
A ton of small-dollar donations are flowing into Harrison's campaign as well as plenty from national sources. Graham is not well-liked by either side really.
And podman seems to be better than docker in every respect, and it doesn't require special permissions.

I'm not an expert in this area. Are there any things docker does that podman cannot? Also how much code do do they share? (as in libraries used by both)
My guess would be something like PgBouncer. Someone may have installed it to the production server at some point in the past.
Svelte for Sites, React for Apps
I think his point that with renewables + nuclear Germany would have been at much less than 50g of CO2 per kWh.
Why would people have to go without power if there is no sun at their place? We do not go hungry either when there was a bad harvest in our area. We just transport goods in from where they can be produced.

Intermittency is only a problem when one has a medieval image of self-sufficiency in mind. Solutions are either averaging out peaks and dips temporally (by storing energy e.g. in pumped hydro plants, in batteries, ...) or geographically by moving power where it is needed and from where it is currently being produced. You do not even lose gigantic fractions of the power in the process: high-voltage direct current power lines have losses of around 3%/1000km. China, for example, has power lines that move a dozen gigawatt over a distance of over 3000km. It can be done.
I’ve read somewhere that meltdowns are impossible in modern reactor designs, is that not true?
I would describe it from another perspective.

Servant living in someones quarters is dependent on his employer. Such person probably does not have enough freedom to change employer.

Contractor on the other hand should be able to refuse to work for someone if he does not like it and find another customer. So it should be more of a partnership relation.

In reality of course it is not so clear cut, but personal freedom element is more important for me than "emotional well-being" or "social nicety". Especially because I would expect "social nicety" from any contractor I hire and if I would have to deal with obnoxious contractor I would not hire them again. But of course I would not expect them to know my children names.
I am waiting for their .NET SDK.
If they did, they would have noticed that the columns were empty (because they were wiped clean for PI data).

The parent is either misrepresenting the situation or they didn’t do what they say they did.

Also in any production setup, before the migration in the same transaction you would have something along the lines of “check if the column size is larger than and then abort”, because you never know when that can be added while working on the database.
This is also one of the core tenets of SRE. The chapter on blameless postmortems is quite nice: https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/postmortem-...
I love this pencil so much that I have three, with different lead in each. It’s completely brilliant. And a bargain, or it was. I really like the venerable Pentel P200 series but I only use the 0.7 and 0.9 because there’s no Kurutoga.
Well, it's not like x86 unaligned access was some cute thing they did just to make it extra complex. It made complete sense in 1976 when designing an ISA that might support implementations with an 8 bit memory bus and no cache. Why eat more bus cycles than you need?

Fast forward a decade or so and all processors had cache and multi-byte memory bus so the unaligned access and compact instruction streams are no longer necessary.

But processors these days are complex multi core beasts with IEEE fpu, simd units, mmu, memory controller, cache controller, pci-e northbridge, all kinds of voltage/thermal interplay, and even iGPU. ISA is over emphasized.
You can take it with whatever grain you wish, but it doesn't change the fact that the government will throw all rules out the window when they want to get their way.

A quote: “We came, we saw, he died!” she exclaimed."

- Hillary on the murder of Colonel Qaddafi

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/libya-isis-hi...

(A NYT sourced article, just for you)
How to use music in your life?
Between this and the Sciter (edit: added missing r, thanks everyone :-) project the other day and a number of other projects I'm starting to get optimistic that the web might soon be ready for a real overhaul.
This an entirely pessimistic point of view that assumes that human innovation does not exist.

Many cheap things have hidden downsides, but not all of them, and some of them have fewer and smaller downsides than you seem to be assuming.
Roads may well be a good thing to cover, depending on the costs of the structure. And I don’t mean “solar roadways” — a roof keeping the rain and the snow off isn’t worthless, and the extra lighting cost is small compared to the solar energy because neither streetlights nor car headlights are as bright as sunlight.

And (/s notwithstanding) people have considered floating PV on reservoirs to avoid evaporative losses.
> and are state election campaigns THAT expensive??

I wonder what percentage of that ad spend goes to Facebook. Does Facebook profit more if political discourse if very divisive?
> taking responsibility for their own incompetence.

I think they’re doing that with this post? At least I find it hard to imagine myself writing down that I’d drunk a few glasses of wine and dropped the production database.

You cannot expect all engineers to be fully versed in the vagarities of database administration. Especially if they’re the only ones working on something.
What you don’t take into account is that destroying the planet with carbon pollution is going to be extremely expensive too.
Yeah he tells you the answer why it's an American problem in the first sentence.
See also the "Writing a Linux Debugger" series of posts in which a source-level debugger is implemented: https://blog.tartanllama.xyz/writing-a-linux-debugger-setup/
May I ask for a link to Scite project? Curious.
> complex data (punctuation, newlines, etc..)

Oh, the irony! Text with punctuation and newlines is complex data.

CSV is doomed but the world runs on it and pays its cost with engineer tears.
I am not giving you advice on how to run a company, I am saying that your anecdotal opinion will not affect my decision-making process. And I am clearly stating that it should not affect the decision-making of other people here either.

Also I am going to underline that what you did was relevant 16 years ago; which you did not state in your initial message about the usefullness of Excel.

Which is kinda funny, if I didn’t ask you would have otherwise omitted a lot of otherwise relevant information which makes your opinion even less important.

It only makes me question why do you take this whole thread so personally? Probably because by now your skills are way less relevant than back in 2005.
If you use terraform to deploy the managed production database, do you use the postgresql terraform provider to create roles or are you creating them manually?
You sound like a complete novice, funboy or the one who knows only JS. There are many issues, it is possible not to touch or to work around them, TS and flow helps. JS solved just a few — 'use strict', strict comparison, arrow functions, string literals. Core problems still there — implicit types, prototype declarations, number is float, toString/inspect division, typeof null. Every javascript programmer has to walk that way of embarrassment.
The reality is, most people are going to get the 'rona. Germany for example; they didn't get it as much last spring; they're getting it now. NZ, same thing's going to happen, unless they develop North Korea style immigration policies or 12 monkeys style lifestyle. They're better off in general because they have healthier populations than, say, the US or the UK, but putting it off isn't going to work forever.

I don't think the US, Brazil, UK or Turkey explicitly realized this or anything (Sweden did; they're doing fine, and are basically over with it). But ultimately getting it over with is probably going to look better in the long term.
We have something similar in Ireland: many of the coronavirus regulations (don't travel outside your county, don't have big gatherings in your home) don't have the force of law and/or the police don't have powers to enforce them. The government gave itself some emergency powers back in March, but these lapsed after I think 6 weeks and weren't renewed.

The interesting question is why they didn't renew the emergency powers. They arguably weren't constitutional in the first place, but the only real challenge to them came from the conspiracy theorists /anti-vaxxers who got laughed out of court on about a hundred technicalities.
Aren’t most of Frances nuclear reactors really old? Of course nuclear is cheap decades after you built them. Most of the costs are during construction. Isn’t it unfair to complain about not counting systems costs for solar, but then doing a comparison that basically if ignores most of the costs with nuclear (if starting from scratch)

Seems to me that France has built up a lot of debt in terms of old reactors that need to be decommissioned and replaced. As far as I’ve read, their plan is to replace most of those with renewables (targeting 50% renewables)

I feel like I see this all the time - nuclear advocates being extremely nitpicking about cost and challenges with renewables, while ignoring or brushing off those of nuclear power. I’m not against nuclear power, we should put more R&D into it to hedge our bets. But I’ve yet to see a compelling case for a huge bet on nuclear power that’s not ridiculously simplistic.

We all know that energy storage and synthetic fuel production is the missing key to going all in on renewables. But we also know that breakthroughs in these areas are absolutely essential to making transportation CO2 neutral. So going nuclear doesn’t avoid solving that problem. I’d argue that going for renewables is a huge benefit in that it channels more money into energy storage, increasing R&D, making it easier to solve the climate crisis across the board.

We can return to nuclear power in 2-3 decades and hopefully free up some of the land claimed by solar and wind power plants.
I know this was snarky and probably in violation of site guidelines, but it is my personal opinion that Facebook is the main impetus in the hatred and division between political ideals in the US right now.
Technically, a bolt is a machine. (Wire rope is a machine too.)

The tighter your tolerances the more deeply you need to go into the details. For example, a hole drilled by a two-flute drill isn't round nor straight and to make it so you need to broach or bore it. You need to check how much out-of round it is and you do that with a three-point ID micrometer, since a two-flute drill makes a roughly triangular hole. Then for straighness you need a set of pin gauges...

The softer the material the less tolerances matter. This is why plastic is cheap and machine tools are expensive.
The user? Start a discussion about using better programming language and you'll see people, even here, blaming the developer.

The common example is C: "C is a sharp tool, but with a sufficiently smart, careful and experienced developer it does what you want (you're holding it wrong").

Developers still do this to each other.
Learn GPT-3 in 10 mins [Free E-Course]
Does anyone have some good resources for learning about (writing/understanding) shaders? Everytime I come across them it's like magic to me
Depends what you mean by “realistic”. Realistic by cost? Right now, tens kilowatts to low megawatts, and similar losses to sunlight at whatever wavelength.

Realistic in the sense of “if the $2 trillion per year currently spent on energy was spent on bootstrapping known tech but in space”, rather a lot more.
A function called database_model_create() should not drop something.

Here it would have failed to create the already existing tables and raised an error.
Vertical or Horizontal
Honestly modern JS has far fewer "wat" moments than most languages, modern javascript is incredibly well designed. And JavaScript does have integers now.

Nowadays it feels like the opposite, the committee takes so long to dot the i's and cross the t's that features take multiple years to make it through the approval process be ready to use (I'm looking at you, optional chaining).
The User-Agent – That Crazy String Underpinning a Bunch of Analytics
Blue Peter shows off a phone with no cable (1976) [video]
I took the exam a while ago, biggest BS exam I ever took. It tries to figger out if you know the correct flags and syntax for commands.
> Proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job. . . . If it doesn’t do that, it’s not real examination. If it doesn’t come attached with destruction of your current life, then you can’t create the new life in which you will not have the anxiety.

This is hilarious and feels like something out of the tvshow silicon valley.

I guess throwing everything away, literally everything, your job, support networks is incredible easy when you're loaded from a decade of cheap easy VC money.

These people live on a different planet and should be mocked relentlessly, it's a real life comedy. Naval definitely did not follow his own advice prior to suffering all this survivorship bias now.
Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity?
Author here.

I will rewrite this sentence, "invalid instruction" is too limited. It should be something like "an instruction that traps, and which isn't already used for another purpose".
Syscalls trap but they are already used; and INT3/CC are valid instructions.
Probably a local maxima for creatures that are already not too distant from it. Interesting topic tbh, the Wikipedia article on the coconut crabs (linked in article) is particularly interesting!
You got extremely lucky.
For a lot of garden owners the yard work is kinda the point of the garden.
It reads like the db was deleted intentionally for the sake of blog post - marketing that is. :)
Author here.

As I mentioned above, I will rewrite this sentence to include dedicated special instructions. It was a wording mistake not to mention it!
Couldn't waste an easy to execute weird idea like that :D
What exactly do you mean by "schedule-based safety model"?
I just fail to see how sensor data gives you an edge or (ultimately) a higher margin.

Is this about optimizing things to a precision that is impossible when humans try to decide whether something is too much or too little of something?
The North Vietnamese state successfully expanded to southern Vietnam, Vietnamese-trained revolutionaries took over neutral Laos after and largely because the US dropped as much ordinance on it as Europe during WWII and Vietnam successfully invaded Cambodia and installed its still current leader after Cambodia infamously disastrous experiment with a unique homegrown variant of socialism. And it wasn't as if Vietnam would have been on course to be a superpower without the bombs.

The only part of US Indochina strategy that worked was pumping Thailand full of money. Ironically, dangling that carrot could probably have tempted Vietnam into more "market reforms" and fewer collective farms a lot earlier, given that Ho Chi Minh was fond of quoting the Founding Fathers as well as Marx and appealed to the US when he was fighting his anticolonialist war.
Yes - "implicit assocation tests" for cognitive bias work on exactly this principle: identifying when 'male' follows the same process as 'good'.
Talking about nail clippers: I always found it weird that nail clippers seem to be the most common device for cutting your finger nails outside of Europe. Over here we have specialized scissors[1] for this which seem to give a lot more control and better results. Anyone seen these elsewhere? I guess they’re a bit harder to use?

[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagelschere
> The intermediate specification would be another language, so it would have the same impedance mismatch as the other N languages do.

Yes, but even though this is a limitation, every language only needs to care about connecting to this one intermediate "language". This is also why going through a C API already works quite well.

Also it's interesting to note that Microsoft's latest version of the WinRT APIs are providing a standard C++17 wrapper on top of COM APIs and don't require C++ language extensions anymore.
> it ignores sensor data sources, which are both the highest velocity and highest volume data models by multiple orders of magnitude.

This has long been the main marketing message used to promote Complex Event Processing (CEP) [1] systems. There is no shortage of enterprise and Open Source solutions for this space; what is missing is strong demand/adoption which in itself undermines the next-big-thing claim.

One can argue that sensor data is included in the ETL category.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_event_processing
Italian here, from a quite warmer country.

There shouldn't be any salt in your butter.

There is no salt in milk, there is no salt in butter.

Unless you want salted butter, in that case you can simply buy a slab of salted butter.