skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We don't know for sure, and we probably never will. It's impossible to prove that something is actually a constant over large distances and timescales. You can always go a bit further or wait a bit longer, where it might not be as constant as we expected.

However, most experimental data so far is in agreement on it actually being a constant.

Wikipedia has a section on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Is_the...?
Are you sure? This is a nuanced issue. Ehat counts as "usage". Intentionally destroying evidence is a crime, but broadly automatically destroying data before you have any knowledge of an allegation is not. (Otherwise, thinks lke GDPR would be illegal in the US)
Honestly the shop would just cease to exist. There was a local cake shop and a tofu shop near me that was passed down for generations. Saddly they both ceased to exist in my lifetime as there was no one to inherit the legacy. The cake shop eventually did reopen under new ownership but it's not as good.
I espoused this sort of rhetoric until I worked at a PHP shop. Every other discussion was about problems posed by the shortcomings of the language, crossed with mistakes made by past staff. It's so easy to make assumptions about "good actors" and "reasonable developers" that just fly out the window with a team that picks PHP and/or doesn't know much else.
I was going to share that exact quote. And I think I'm going to believe Lewis more than Moldbug...
same for me on Edge 88.0.705.9

possibly a good idea to highlight there is an issue on windows on the web page, my instant reaction was "whoa, that's horrible, why are people liking this?"
Asking or negotiating is different: Crossing something out and handing it back isn't the same.
Journalists Abandon the Newsroom to Write Substack Newsletters
Wiring Libraries with Cleanse (Swift DI Framework)
Sounds like a great time to consider the differences between positive and negative liberty.

Negative liberty: no one can get in my way of doing whatever I want! Google has the right to rootkit my life and I have the right to ignore it and work at a bodega because all tech giants eventually agreed this is a good practice for them

Positive liberty: corporations can't infringe on my right to a private life and must protect my liberty to be a free unconstrained being

I don't know about you but I'd much prefer a world where everyone is guaranteed certain freedoms than one where big companies can use positive liberty arguments to exploit people in new and novel ways.
A cog being paid $160k or more
Just fill your personal device with dick pics.

They'll stop looking pretty quick.

Only partially joking.
>Perhaps to counter promoters who habitually resort to deception, as observed even in the august pages of HN?

This "because the other side lies we need to too" excuse is nonsense. If nuclear power is a "massive publicly subsidized boondoggle" then you should be able to show a clear advantage without resorting to deception.
The reason is that there isn't that large number of named/popular irrational numbers and you are likely to choose some digits close to the start (say within couple thousand digits). Good chance somebody else will do the same. I know personally two people who do this (chose consecutive digits from an irrational number).
> Surprisingly, her new measurement differs from Müller’s 2018 result in the seventh digit, a bigger discrepancy than the margin of error of either measurement.

Apparently there can be differences based on if you measure in Paris or Berkeley? Though it’s more likely there is some other source of error. I think having the technical ability for a precise measurement may one day help us look for fluctuations.
"LTE/WCDMA/UMTS (auto)" should do it.
What I absolutely love about this comment is that I feel exactly the opposite. Love mugi tororo and cannot figure out how eel is popular at all.
There was only one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_du_Pont
> As companies move to single page applications backed by javascript and REST API, PHP CGI style classic execution model provides no advantage, when it comes to generating or serving web content

I lol'd.

SPAs are a fad. Apps that rely heavily on REST API and browser rendering rank terribly on Google.

Create a SPA and help your customers discover your competitor on the first page of Google.
A charitable reply would be advances (real and predicted) in energy storage- I dont think anyone is deluded into thinking that wind or solar alone form a good baseline.

That said, Germany's investments are clearly a failure, IF you go by the desired carbon reduction goals for 2020-2030.

I also don't know anyone who genuinely believes any of those carbon goals are feasible, or that we have high odds of hitting them... but that might just be that I tend to have cynical friends.
42% of people falling behind as Covid-19 restrictions widen the wealth gap
maturity has nothing to do with your income level. Maturation is the integration of the individual into a community and the establishment of mutual responsibility. You can be livelong rich and at the age of 70 have not progressed one day at all, and you can be poor and be well integrated.

The purpose of these Japanese companies is the latter, integrate into society in a way that strengthens the community they surround. The purpose of SV is the opposite, advocate a culture of individualism, 'disruption' and 'freedom', and then sell you an anti-anxiety smartphone app with a subscription service because you're lonely.
The GDPR doesn’t say you can’t know anything about anyone; “all” it says is that you tell people what data you collect and why, and delete it when you don’t need it.

As long as you’ve told your user in Sudan that country of origin is something you collect for marketing decisions, it’s fine.
Headless Commerce: Getting Started with Headelss CMS, Next.js and Snipcart
Many things wrong with this. First, clickbait headline. Renewables aren't cheap but they are saying they will become cheaper over time.

This yet another use of the trick where you say something that is universally true but irrelevant to decision making. All objects go down in cost when production scales. The key factor is the UNIT cost of renewable energy with scaled production vs UNIT cost of fossil fuels now(already scaled).
Utah Officials Found a Strange Object in a Remote Desert Last Week
Surely some portion of that can be attributed to agency ("doing") but I'd contend a non-trivial amount is due to being recipients of American hegemony ("being")
I'm sorry but any article that refers to "the singularity" so casually and cursorily loses my respect. At the very least this needs to be defended and/or explained, because as far as I'm concerned it was a big marketing ploy for Mr. Kurzwel to brand himself with.
Hairdresser, 24, dies by suicide during coronavirus shutdown salon
> And "OK Google" is particularly tongue-twisty due to the repeated "oh" sounds.

It doesn't have repeated vowel sounds unless you pronounce it something like "OK Go-Goal"

It has, in order, one "o", one "u", and one "ə".
Really depends on what the business is doing.

Chewing through TBs of data every hour? Probably not a good idea to use Ruby.

Doing a bunch of really heavy math? Probably not a good idea to choose PHP.

Doing a SaaS service? C++ probably isn't a good choice.

There are some really good general purpose languages that can fit most circumstances (Java, .Net languages, Go). However, I'd be careful to say that you could apply them everywhere.
The only paperwork I saw in 2014 before my first day was an offer letter (no contract per se; CA is an at-will state), NDA, relocation offer (always ask for one; it's rarely offered) and a list to fill out of prior inventions. The rest does get signed in noogler orientation.

The benefits (to Google) of being a giant company with at-will employment.
Austin Mayor Who Told Citizens to ‘Stay Home’ Was Vacationing in Mexico
There was this notion of a mobile app for a minute there - https://github.com/monicahq/chandler - which I think might've been super duper awesome, but open source is hard.

I would 100% use that over the desktop app if it was stable.

Re automated / scripted vs. manual - manual all the way. I keep on mentioning to folks this study I read years ago about teachers who had a student tracking system in their school.

The key point from the study was that the teachers who found the system useful are not the ones who got the most detailed or relevant reports, but the ones who actually INTERACTED with the tracking process. Some sort of "obligation" feeling or something drove them to look at the data and then utilize the learnings from it, IIRC.

If anyone remembers such a study I'd be happy to get a link to it.
You don't need the complexity until you do, and then you're facing a rewrite into the complex system. Defining a deployment in YAML isn't really all that hard.
> What if local bosses make a law that firearms holders have to turn in their firearms?

How are they going to enforce such a law? (Same question for your other examples.)

> (Assuming no interference by non local authorities.)

You must be joking. Without support from non-local authorities, local bosses would simply be laughed at if they tried such things. Where you see such things going on in localities, it's because of support from non-local authorities.

> This example is contrived, but has happened often enough in human history

Please give specific examples. I'm not aware of any case where local bosses got away with such things without any support from a non-local, higher-level government.

> if you can outline a credible method for the unarmed citizenry...

In the historically default situation, the citizenry is not unarmed. Having large numbers of citizens unarmed is a recent and historically aberrant situation, and requires a huge level of support from higher level governments to even make possible. Local authorities in a society where higher level governments do not exist or do not provide such huge support for disarming citizens simply won't have unarmed citizens to play with.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that a similar circumvention of company policy for non-labor union purposes would not have been met with immediate termination. Unless Google can say that this was normal punishment or was part of a pattern of behavior, it's kinda hard for it not to look like retaliation.
Great question!

Here's what Germany did: They invested a vast amount in local renewables, at above market prices, that had the effect of dramatically driving down the global price of wind and solar. Because they radically expanded production capacity. Effectively, Germany gave the world a 'gift'!

This had the long-term affect of dramatically increasing global solar + wind deployments (b/c prices fell) and transferring a huge economic boom to China, who actually made the solar panels and who's government subsidized production.

Unfortunately, for domestics political reasons, Germany also shut down their nuclear plants and kept burning coal. So their total CO2 emissions have been roughly constant and about 10x higher, per person, than France or Sweden.

The article is correct in that vastly more electrical transmission is needed to effectively integrate renewables. The article is misleading in describing price spikes. Yes, there are 2-45 days a year of price spikes for a few hours, but on average price is lower b/c of renewables outside of Germany. (Again, Germany did everyone the favor of buying renewables before they were economic.) Texas average prices are some of the lowest in the world. CA wholesale power prices are very low globally, while retail prices are sky high b/c PG&E is a monopoly combined with an inadvertent domestic terrorist organization.

Something the article only eludes to, the energy transition covers many more areas than just power production. Germany has done a bad job in both transportation and building emissions. They're overly reliant on Russian natural gas for heating and have been slow to embrace electric cars (VW is doing 'ok' but not great). Both issues are separate to renewables but major failings of German policy to either reduce emissions or increase energy security.

Overall, the German investment in renewables electricity production is a massive success and global gift. Completely underrecognized. Everything else sits in the category between "failure" and "didn't even try."
> After learning some number of programming languages it's hard to find something new, where you feel like you are exploring something.

Like the Cenobites of Hellraiser who after running out of territories of pleasure to explore are forced to venture into pain just to find new experience.
Dang that's fascinating
What does this mean?

>Lazard’s latest annual Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 14.0) shows that as the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, certain technologies (e.g., onshore wind and utility-scale solar), which became cost-competitive with conventional generation several years ago on a new-build basis, continue to maintain competitiveness with the marginal cost of selected existing conventional generation technologies.

I assume new-build is building a wind for or nat gas plant.

What is marginal cost? Is that adding capacity to a wind farm or nat gas plant, or just having an existing nat gas plant generate more power per day.

Are they basically saying that renewables are competitive when capital costs are included and also when capital costs are excluded?
Huh, this is pretty interesting. I'm not really familiar with Smash.gg, but if what people in this thread are saying is true, that it's a fairly straightforward platform that could be easily reproduced by Microsoft, then it seems like this acquisition was almost altruistically motivated. It feels like it's easy for a lot of big companies to make better competing products and drive the little guy into extinction, but this acqusition move feels like the company encourages startups and isn't entirely motivated by greed. But I may be biased; I already do like Microsoft, Nadella, and what the company does and how far it has come since the Ballmer days.
Does someone mind posting the math on this? I'm getting something like 775% chance it would happen yearly, but that seems too likely, and I think I screwed mine up somewhere, and wouldn't mind seeing where I made some wrong assumption in how to compute the probabilities.
Containers came from Solaris and the BSDs, and the warehouse-sized containerized deploys that this article/changelog is associated with came from Google. You're both right.

And agreed, Docker is a mess. It seems like everything that's good about Docker was developed by other companies, and everything that's bad about Docker was developed by Docker. The sooner the other companies can write Docker out of the picture the better. I want the time I wasted on Swarm back.
Ask HN: Need help identifying piece of high school science experiment equipment
It was way back in the 80s but there was a device that was made up of two clear plastic platters with 30 to 40 small disc shaped magnets in a ring on the outside of one and pickups on the other, there was also a hand crank that when cranked caused one or both of the platters to rotate.
When you cranked it, sparks were generated across a gap between two brass spheres.

My friends and I used this device to charge lightning jars and then zap one another with the jars, which if charged long enough acted like a modern day taser(Yikes!!)

I have been searching for this generator for some time now. In my "Minds eye" it was a beautiful piece of functional art and is part of a fond memory of my youth.(Simmilar to the nostalgia of old game consoles some people have) In any case, I would like to own one now if they are sold anywhere. I have spent a long time searching the web for them but have been unsuccessful.

I'm sure that in todays schools such a device would not be allowed due to its inherent danger but it was a different time back then, heck there was what we called the smoke pit where students and teachers hung out together at lunchtime on school property smoking cigarettes! (Which is probably why my friends and I could play with the dangerous toys in the science labs unsupervised!)

Does anyone else remember seeing or using these and possibly know the name of them?

Thanks for taking the time to read my question.

PS: It wasn't a Tesla coil or Van De Graaff, but acted more like the magneto on a lawnmower just more beautiful and powerful.
> Don't choose any pattern of numbers

...unless that pattern of numbers wins...
> Rooftop solar still have 5+ years ROI

Why is that a problem? Most people take multiples of that time just to pay off their mortgage. Maybe if you are house flipping, but even then this tends to increase their value.
You can find this pattern in so many things. Companies, Projects, or Artists spend their early days building up reputation. Usually by making something great. After some inflection point they switch to spending down that reputation (usually trading it for money). At which point someone new comes along. They make something great and start building up reputation.
Of course, the other half of the "court of public opinion" believes that one person has history of successful business dealing, and the other has a career of government office grift. Alas, that's not the point: the point is that such character evidence is inadmissible in the court of law.
Why co-founders are the foundation of any startup
>Its actually not that hard and Chinese content platforms are a breath of fresh air

That's sort of like saying Chinese politics is a breath of fresh air because you don't have to worry about picking a side and hearing the various parties arguing with each other.
> Substack co-founder Chris Best said journalists are flocking to the platform after becoming exhausted by the constant pressure of landing the next viral hit on Facebook or Twitter.

> "The platforms we're spending all our time on incentivize that stuff and make that stuff easy and give it fuel," he said. "The way to fix that is to have a better business model where that's not true."

Maybe this could be the big reboot that journalism has been needing. Trust based on the reputations of individual reporters, instead of the conglomerates that are constantly shifting (and lately, degrading). Payment for consistency and quality, instead of clickbait.
That's an unfortunate comparison. Go came around 10 years back and has started to become mainstream fairly recently. PHP has been around for 25 years. So ofcourse the number of libraries you see in PHP are much more and hence much more "amateur" libraries. The professionals writing go code today are the same professionals who wrote PHP code few years back.
I worked as a field construction supervisor (as a junior civil engineer) and remember that the senior supervisor used to told us that we were "his eyes of the job site". Because at the end he was the one who aproved the important things. Of course I also used to take decision in the field and aprove little things. But if placing "video cameras and AI" could replace 70% of my job at that time and pass the rest of the tasks directly to the senior supervisor to aprove it in a faster way, then the junior field supervisor might not be necessary or might have to be retrainned in other areas.
I'm biased as heck because I'm a westernized Chinese, and I am impressed with the rapid development everytime I visit China. In my mind, being pragmatic wins. When I visited SF recently, I was constantly wary of dangers and mentally ill people, though less as I went to Silicon Valley. There is something that feels immediately wrong and backwards that no amount of whataboutism and armchair debates about the harms of authoritarianism can persuade, because I face reality every time I go outside.
Building circuits is neat, but I think this has some problems as a game:

1. It seems to only let you save one solution for each level, even though there are two optimization goals. It should let you save one for fewest components and one for fewest NAND gates.

2. It's not really clear how NAND gate counts work in later levels where you're using potentially non-optimal components you've built? Like does it count each one as the number of gates that you used, or the number of gates that is optimal, or what? Someone else told me it was the latter, but it seems like XOR counts as 6 even though there's apparently a way to do it with fewer?

3. Why do some levels give me the message "This is optimal!" while others say "This is the simplest solution!"? What's going on here? What do these messages mean specifically? It's not clear.

All this adds up making attempts at optimization a bit frustrating and as such I just don't really want to play it very far. If you're not worried about optimization it seems fine, but if you are the interface really kind of works against you.
I just wanted to clarify that I specifically called out how easy it is to hire for. A lot of developers are pretty quick when it comes to adapting to a new language and there are virtues that lean in favor of a language being easy to pickup: sharing a paradigm with popular language, sharing conventions with popular languages and good documentation.

I have yet to work a day job in Rust, but I've worked in Java, C++ and Go so I'd be quite confident applying to a Rust position as long as it wasn't specifically security focused... I would be less confident in how quickly I could pickup Prolog - I think my brain works well for the nuances of the language but I'm less certain.
> Again, reasonable for her to be fired.

The NLRB is where decisions like this are argued. They weighed the evidence, with a much fuller view than any of us here, and came to the conclusion that the firing was illegal.
This is essentially the same outcome.

They start relationships with everyone poorly and they pay the price.

There is a reason stuff like the danmore debacle can even happen.

They're a huge echo chamber.
well the problem in our grid is mostly coal. it's cheap (in germany since it's subsidized for the next x years) but it generates exactly the problems in the article.

basically mckinsey study is not against green energy, it's more of a "politics do way too less" i.e. mckinsey analyzes the co2 targets for germany and it critizes it for doing way too less and having unrealistic expectations. news article basically love such studies besides that the studies in question want to show that we need to do even more.

tbf between '19 and '20 we atleast reduced lots of lignite/hard coal in favor of wind (onshore) but 2019 (year of the article) it was really really bad for renweable in germany, we actually only talked about green energy, but internally we were really dirty... but we are still behind norway, sweden, denmark and lots of other countries.
Note this is a just a single case report.

A single case report is an interesting starting point but in the hierarchy of evidence [0] it is the lowest or doesn't even make the scale.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_evidence