skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Desalination uses a lot of energy, so if energy is cheap, then so is desalination.

Both solar and wind power have gotten incredibly cheap (~ $15/MW), and more importantly will continue to get much cheaper over the next decade. Boca Chica has lots of wind & sun.

Desalination can also handle the variability of wind & solar quite well: just use water from a big water tank when both wind & solar aren't available. Expensive batteries not required. And to a first approximation it's always windy in Boca Chica, so not much storage is required anyways.

OTOH, piping water from Brownsville to Boca Chica is probably a 9 figure project.
After Centuries, a Simple Math Problem Gets an Exact Solution
Yep, that’s the case if you use the scroll parameter, but their search_after API is not stateful and that’s the sort of thing this article is about.
The money saved does not go into the healthcare. The healthcare is paid from taxes paid from salaries etc. So the bigger the salary the more funding for healthcare.

I’m not complaining about the situation. Supply and demand determines IT wages quite well. For some reason US based devs are simply more in demand.
I was pretty excited about Linux on DeX for Samsung devices since it had a capable CPU but unfortunately they discontinued it when Android 10 was released.
@D13Kabani accidentally transferred 4000 LINK to the wrong Ethereum address, losing his life's savings.

To help him out this Christmas the Aavegotchi project setup a donation address (santagotchi.eth).

Earlier story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25443212
Aren't kite systems much more efficient and lighter and cheaper?

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-ship-sailing-with-the-...
A peer-to-peer-relay approach helps with this!

Peertube is apparently getting support for live streaming, or already has it. I can't tell.

https://joinpeertube.org/en/roadmap
Steel division 2 is completely broken at the moment, with axis enjoying ridiculous Winrate and tournaments relegated to mirror matches for the inability of eugeen to balance the game

Some mods fix the most glaring problems, but they require investing in all dlc and make almost impossible to find an online match
It shouldn't be acceptable for startups, nor anyone else, to play fast and loose with personal data, just as it isn't with financial data.

Unless your business model revolves around usage of personal data, in which case GDPR is a very useful set of minimum baseline requirements for handling the data, compliance is fairly trivial.
Cambridge is quite a nice town, but is is a small town; 20 pubs, 6 Indian restaurants, 1 cinema [1], not really comparable.

[1] not been there for a while, those numbers may well have changed
I think you have the right idea there

> I saw a list of European unicorns (on HN in fact I think) and probably about 2/3 were UK/London based

While unicorns are an interesting measure (even though it favours the biggest startups - are 2x 500Mi startups "worse than" 1x 1Bi startup?), I always wonder how much of it is some form "language blindness". How much value is on startups or companies that don't get on HN or "don't speak English" much?
Show HN: Parallelise Pipelines of Python Iterables
I've had an idea for a browser extension that can actively warn you when you're dealing with a company that uses dark patterns.

For example, say you go to the NYTimes' subscription checkout. It lets you know "Hey, just so you know, they make it very hard to cancel. Here's more info etc."

Sort of like an ad blocker. If enough people install it, whoever is managing its database of dark patterns/warnings has the power to really punish companies for this kind of thing. Of course that also means they have great responsibility.
I'm excited to see another tool for off-site encrypted backups! But I'm also wondering why reinvent the wheel when we have Restic (or does this predate a usable version of restic?). How does it compare? It sounds like Restic does everything this does except it doesn't need a local database and this only skips files that are already uploaded rather than actual de duplication, but I might be wrong there.

Why was the design decision made to hash filenames with sha1? I don't see a security flaw in this specific use-case, but why dance with the devil? If it's about shorter hashes, it's safer to truncate a sha2.

Since it uses a public key to encrypt to, can a malicious server overwrite your data with encrypted but fake data or is the data also signed using a private or symmetric key on the client side? It might seem like an unusual use case, but why trust the server if we don't have to, and for servers the attacker might know what software it runs and therefore what the file structure is. If you can make someone restore software with modifications of your choosing, that would be rather powerful even if admittedly difficult to pull off.

How does that local sqlite database grow, e.g. for a regular amount of files for a 1TB drive, do you get a bunch of gigabytes of state like Duplicity? (I gave up on duplicity because it ate too large a chunk of my ssd while restic didn't need local state at all.) What if the local file is gone, can it (albeit slower I guess) still run normally or do you now need to do a full back-up?

Edit: Found one of the answers: it signs the data with hmac "using a combination of the RSA Public key and the passphrase used to protect the RSA Private key" as key. Erm, what? The private key is contained on the client? What's the point of public key encryption if not to not be able to decrypt the data unless you have access to the private key? If the client has the public and the private key, it might as well use symmetric encryption. But what's weirder: the passphrase that protects the private key is used for signing?! Why not use the private key to sign the hash if you have access to it?! And mixing in the public key does nothing, as this is known information to an attacker. Might as well store the plain hash if it weren't for the private key's passphrase.
Free-space optical links for space communication networks
Sometimes I think my version of this is writing comments on HN. :/
Or, we have one final generation of people and let nature sort itself out...
I don't think you are right about labour supply. UK has always had the upper hand when it comes to immigration. Half the world wants to move there.
They will have absolutely no problem attracting devs from all over the world.
Whoa, wait!
>... for example, after a tire explosion for me...

I'm 72 and have yet to experience a tire explosion or be in the vicinity of one. How many have you had?
Interesting, but right now it seems they return HTML and use some sort of Turbolinks like logic to make it seem single page app? Or is GraphQL not yet implemented there / used on some other layer in backend for example?
No one ever explains why despotism, justly and competently executed, is in principle bad. Because the benevolent despot is not the one people find undesirable.
I can’t see the future, but from where I sit, people have been saying this for more than a decade and it hasn’t happened.

The day SIP can’t be disabled we’ll know things are changing, but until then the machines are only as locked down as you want them to be.
> Could a commercial bank function with only giving out loans and no deposit

As I mentioned in another comment, banks will have to do a better job at convincing me to open a deposit. Hopefully this will increase competition between banks and make them more transparent.
CSS-tricks.com. Postfix your searches with it and you’ll get well explained answers.
> SC2 is a short (~10-20 minutes) 1 on 1 APMs contest.

This is the first time I learned this. (Sorry tongue in cheek a bit.) But yeah as an eSport (1v1), or in modes where people play 1 on 1 (and APM tends to win), your statement is true.

It is not the only mode you can play SC2, and while it might the most recognized or popular setup, the people I play with prefer basically ever mode except that one. (Many of us also enjoyed the campaigns!)
Before - saudis murdered a martyr for journalistic freedom. After - barbaric power struggle spilled out of Saudi Arabia and claimed one of the players as victim
> Way too early to say whether or not we've got our way out of covid with Keynesian inspired stimulus packages

The cheques that were/are issued by the US Congress should not be thought of as stimulus packages (which they are not): they are disaster relief.

The economy (or economies, plural, of states considered individually) were put into a coma purposefully for health and safety reasons. It would be paradoxical to 'jump start' the economies when they have been shutdown at the same time.

The purpose of the cheques is that help those who cannot work, and draw an income, to pay the rent and purchase food. At least that is the opinion of folks like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman.

Some people are of course labelling them as "stimulus cheques", but that is incorrect: it is probably undesirable for people to go outside of their homes and try to do 'normal' stuff. At least not until vaccines are rolled out in volume.
Thank you. I don't fully understand your answer. But i'll do some research until I do.
After this year, I've had more than enough of 'solidarity'.
Does anyone have examples of use cases where the target audience would care or even notice a landing page without JavaScript?
It's best shelter possible to have + it can allow fast travel between long-distances (faster than the 1,223 kmph Elon's referenced before with Hyperloop here on Earth due to gravity being lower on Mars).
how to make the next big e-sports RTS hit, instead of a game that many people will want to play

The problem is that we want to do both. The competitors to RTSes, games like League of Legends, Fortnite, Rocket League, and Hearthstone, are all (very different) games that are enjoyable to play across the full spectrum of skill levels.

RTS games really seem to be split into two categories: indie games that are appealing to casual players and competitive games that appeal only to esports competitors. StarCraft Brood War may be the most popular RTS from a spectator standpoint but it is a pretty terrible game to play if you just want to unwind after work.

So then the question is: why do we want both? The theory is that a highly popular spectator esport drives sales for the game. If your game doesn't do both then it either needs to succeed on its own (without any esports fame) in an overcrowded market or it's a spectator sport without any low-level players (and somehow needs to make money only from high level tournament play).
That is a given for every resident in most European countries.

Edit: it seems I am wrong. I commented a bit too fast.
The UK government has recently turned the economy to dust through forced lockdowns. Thinking about moving to the UK any time soon is not a good idea.

Also, taxes will go up soon to pay for the current economic depression.
Pollution of the Ganges: https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/pollution-on-river-ganga?s...
Pretty sure you need a tail-wind to use a kite system, this works in any wind.
I constantly highlight text as I'm reading, clicking constantly. No doubt the heatmaps of my journeys through websites leave an interesting impression.
Walking in circles within the house and talking to myself out loud: I do this all the time, especially when I need to figure out a particularly hard problem (an algorithm to solve a particular issue, an architecture that handles my business needs etc).

Last time I started a new project and worked on its architecture, I walked over 10km in a single day, according to my cellphone pedometer. In a tiny apartment! This trend lasted for a month, after which I sat down to actually implement this.

I thought it was just me being autistic but it's interesting to know others do it as well :)

I never worked in an office setting, but I can only imagine it would be extremely prejudicial to people like me and the author. Restraining us to a table would limit our output for the sole reason we would be unable to pace and think (no space and too much social pressure).

Anecdata: sometimes I visit my parents and work from their place. I can't pace there because I don't feel comfortable doing so, and that alone is enough for me to not be able to tackle challenging problems there.
US is a nation of immigrants where you can basically fully integrate in a matter of months.
In non-English speaking countries this is impossible. If you put a lot of weight on fraternity and equality you have to consider that if you move to France or Germany you will always be "that foreigner who moved here".

Just something more to consider. Although I do agree also with your post.
No, it's called getting shafted. The EU has more or less the same wealth floating around as any other western country, but it's in total stagnation.

We can argue about why this is, but the end result is that asset prices are high, while there's no incentive to cycle money through the economy in a way that allows wealth building.

Not even the government is willing to spend, which is a problem because the government has set itself up to be the subsidizer of everything. The scale of the problem is easily appearant when you see Brussels celebrating a €10b climate package. Exactly what is €20 per citizen supposed to achieve?
> A while ago, github replaced the pagination on their commits page to be based on a git commit ID instead of a page number. After that change, it made it a lot more difficult to find the oldest commit in a large repo

git log has a reverse option to reverse the order of commits displayed. You can also provide a commit reference like HEAD~10 to get the 10th ancestor from the head commit.

Does Github have a way to specify URL parameters to achieve something similar?
Can you explain what you mean by "made every unit ranged"?

Does that mean that zerglings, zealots, ultralisks, firebats/hellions, banelings... (did I miss any) are ranged attack units? Because they swing claws and blades and flamethrowers around?
I do this. It’s fascinating how most numbers seem to have a (subjective) pattern of some kind; I wouldn’t have thought so many 2- and 3-digit numbers have some meaning to me!
I was curious as well, turns out they're using a non-standard parsing with a comment in the function explaining why:

/* This uses a non-standard parsing (ie not inet_aton, or inet_pton)
* because of legacy choice to parse 10.8 as 10.8.0.0 not 10.0.0.8
*/

src: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/iproute2/iproute2.git...

(the entry point to start tracing down to the above inner function is right around here: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/iproute2/iproute2.git... )
I honestly believe that this is because it’s cheaper for them to make arrangements with the “no win no fee”-firms than to create a proper process.

When you get the first couple of “technically a lie but an excusable lie”-responds they pick out a couple of layers of complains each, then when you reach out the the “no win no fee” I’m certain their first 1-2 layers back to you are just steps in the same process “you might have a case but could take this small payment” “you have a case but it will take for ever, here’s a slightly higher offer” and these can be quickly negotiated because they just split the damage with the airline.

They have a multilevel yearlong process of starving our customers from extremely reasonable compensations, which they have deviously optimized so they can sell tickets at what? Maybe 10-20% lower rates and steal the high-volumes low rate market.

I think it’s naive to believe that this is all progressing without a level of collaboration between them and the airline that is at least unethical and potentially illegal.
Yes exactly. I would also debate the popularity point: how many games released by 2003 (release year of The Frozen Throne) still have an active pro scene, meaning people whose job is to play this game at tournaments?

With the rise of streaming I'd venture that most pro players do not rely solely on tournaments (and their tournament sponsoring) anymore, but the point remains that the game seems to have seen an increase in popularity in the past few years.

The Warcraft 3 scene is nothing compared to the biggest names in esport, but it is still remarkably healthy. One reason for this is that Blizzard let the community take the lead unofficially with things like https://www.w3champions.com/ which is basically like Battle.net but better than Battle.net has ever been in many regards.

I think it also helps that WC3, as a RTS, can still be relatively enjoyable as a beginner: fewer units to control, fewer resources and buildings to manage, and at the very beginning (say, with 50 APM) focusing mostly on the first hero (meaning a single unit) is clearly the best return on investment to increase one's win rate, which can become apparent after just a few games. Few RTS games are able to both offer such a gentle learning curve and the depth required for people having played the game for more than 17 years to still refine their strategies.
For software, I don’t expect much to change. I’m basically as Remain-y as it’s possible to be, but the post-Brexit issues are:

• Mutual recognition of qualifications: usually not as important in software as what you do after your degree, but even when it is the “engineer” in “software engineer” isn’t a protected term.

• Customs and border controls: solution for software is “the internet!”

• Work visas when visiting the content from the UK: apparently not needed for short business trips?

• Work visas for those going to the UK: IIRC the UK wants a minimum pay threshold such that most of us would reject a pay offer that low even straight out of university.

• Pay/living costs: possibly a real issue — as others point out, the UK is already not very competitive for pay and London is somewhat expensive.

•• Regarding pay: while the exchange rates may swing sharply in the next few months, I expect that a year from now they will mostly be close to the current values.

•• Regarding living costs: if it hasn’t been for COVID, I’d have expected housing costs to go down and everything else to go up (when measured in £), given COVID I have no idea what to expect.

I’d actively try to dissuade you if you were doing anything involving hardware, chemicals, medicine, law, space, or food; and I’d still put 5% on this developing like the Northern Ireland Troubles; but software as a particular domain is probably either fine, or at the very least the problems will be unrelated to Brexit.
Isn't the author's statement here moot? Capital investment allows spending - assuming the recipient needs to spend the money; giving $1,000/month UBI to everyone 18+ years of age, you can bet 95%+ of them will spend it, it won't sit in a bank account, and it will lead to an ROI - even if that's personal development or quality of life improvement that will have cascading, lifelong productivity benefits to (including counter counter-productivity).

Does this author have vested, financial interest-motive in Bitcoin or other crypto-"currencies" - which centralized digital currencies (legitimately fiat, a better transparent version of)?

Edit to add: looks like they likely do, re: a project they list in this site's menu - oh, and in their about me: "Early Bitcoin adopter, now Bitcoin Cash supporter." Would it not have been best practice for the author to list their vested interests as they're writing about a competing product/offering?

Imagine if everyone countering the positive narrative (propaganda in part) perpetuated by the "army of HODLers" was financially incentivized to counter that narrative whenever they had a chance, and not only that but proselytized their position, Bitcoin et al would have never reached its position today and many people who bought into the hype - or even killed themselves because of their losses - would have not unnecessarily, unreasonably transferred their wealth to someone else; a true centralized digital currency could take the cash you transfer into the digital currency "out of circulation" instead of giving it to someone, Bitcoin et al similarly structured - the "army of HODLers" are akin to a religion that's financially incentivized - even Fred Wilson - https://avc.com/2019/04/orthodoxy/ - stated he dislikes the cult-like behaviour of some in their community, without realizing he's in the community but just taking a priest-like role where he's in a more refined position and better controls his behaviour/image.

I am glad higher profile individuals are starting to voice their opposition, dislike of Bitcoin et al - Elon Musk recently tweeting out "Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money;" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1340588909974200321 - fiat currency can shift into a better system supported by immutable, transparent blockchain - but with centralized control so no shenanigans can occur hidden from other allied nations you're trying to fairly balance economies with, arguably who will all be democratically elected governments, democracies.

Edit to add: With the growing "army of HODLers" with more vested asset holders waiting for the value of Bitcoin et al to recover and then some - while chanting the mantra "HODL!" - we need to pay attention to counter regulatory capture that this newer industrial complex will work towards.
Brexit was essentially those arseholes taking over the country and doing their best to lock out or break down anyone with real skill or talent.

This is not exaggeration. The point of Brexit was "sovereignty" - but only for a somewhat eccentric and delusional ruling class which saw its financial and political power being eroded by the UK's links to the EU.

Instead of integrating and keeping some influence and privilege - something the continental aristocracies managed relatively smoothly - they decided to pull up the drawbridge and launch into a fantasy of Empire 2.0.

This will not end well. But in the meantime the competent middle classes will find working and living conditions in the UK increasingly harsh, expensive, and unpleasant.
Who's arguing the last election was a fraud? I can't recall any major Democrat who claimed, continually without evidence, that Russia or Republicans engaged in voter fraud. The argument was that Russia interfered and/or colluded with the Trump campaign to spread misinformation and hack the DNC. No one was claiming the votes themselves were fraudulent.

There have been investigations into allegations of voter fraud in this election. In fact one of the cases the Trump campaign alleged in Pennsylvania turned out to be true! The guy voted for Trump twice!
You might want to replace > (greater than) with -> (arrow), I was confused at first.
FANG salaries and financial rewards aren't relevant to most software engineers, though the proportion may be higher on HN.

Realistic salaries more generally also can't be taken out of the wider context of living in a country with different social values and funding of them (I'm trying to be polite in reference to the comparative British/European vs USA perspectives of and funding with regard to social support and social disparities).
Because of various org restrictions I attempted to create a developers image on Windows 10. I got the container running but mounting the volumes back to my host workspace was not performant. A build that took 10 seconds on the host took 90 seconds in the container.
Oh, me too!

It is annoying though when websites show a custom "pop-up" to the selection, usually to share the "quote" at Twitter. I think Medium used to do it, not sure if it still does since I always switch to reader mode when I'm there for this very reason.
Show HN: Social Media Defaults for Mindfulness
Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres (2018)
My mate has done this type of UI work for several Hollywood films; https://paulroberts.tv
That's not true. For example in Germany there is an explicit difference between statutory healthcare and private healthcare. Private healthcare will get you to the front of the line and will give you easy access to all services. With statutory healthcare you will have to go around searching for specialists who have time for you, as most will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked".