skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
n=1, but I've sat in the room in contract renewal negotiations between a big insurer and a hospital.

There was no collusion, it was two sides that nearly hate each other arguing over rates. Hospital wanted more, insurer wanted to pay less.
Nice! Great point and it might just apply here as well!
Nameplate capacity (power, in MW) isn't the only consideration in electrical generation, but total generation (energy, in MWh), dispatchability, cold-start capability, pollution, other impacts, maintenance, storage, accident risk, waste storage, and other factors.

Even smaller hydro sites are valuable in that they represent very raapidly dispatchable load --- a dam's turbines can be put online or taken offline in seconds to minutes, where other sources (notably conventional and nuclear thermal power) require hours to days to make large cycling changes.

Solar and wind rely on incident available energy, and are not deployable at operator discretion, though balancing over the grid or via storage, or dispachable load, may be possible.

Hydro banks power in the form of impounded water. And with relatively simple moddifications offers 90%+ efficient pumped hydro storage capabilities.

The downsides are the large ecological impacts noted in the BBC article, sedimentation (a particularly large problem on the silt-heavy Colorado River), as well as some risk of structural failure, though the US record on this is generally quite good.

With many thousands of dams, there've been a handful of major failures. Planning, alerts, and response generally eliminate of minimise deaths, though disruption from evacuations, or property damage can still be substantial. Long-term consequences spanning centuries, as with nuclear failures, are not a factor, even in utterly catastrophic failures, largely experienced outside the US.

I'm not defending the Klamath hydro facilities, only noting factors.

Your obsevation that there are both benefits and negative impacts is true of any technology or technological intervention.
This makes a lot of sense. Thanks for your answers!
Are they magic beans or just beans?

A bitcoin address gives you a unique global address decentralizated that funds can be sent to. There is utility to that function.

Using your description the internet is a magic place faeries built that provides no usefulness because it's virtual.
The major fast food franchises aren't the people this law is protecting, its Joe Blow's Pizza Shack that can't afford a lawsuit against Doordash.
can I trust the Winklevoss twins to not flood the market and dilute my bitcoin savings?
> But that, of course, is not what any of these services do.
Cheering for more anti-competitive laws. Do you never learn?

This law does nothing except increase the cost of entering the delivery market, thus acts to protect the extant delivery services from new competitors.
The thread was about addiction and anyway, calling these gambling is a stretch. You do know about partners gambling and people do complain about it. The partner and kids are typically the person who get the most of consequences.

But my other point was about hypocrisy. People here go at length hating on Farmville and talking about addiction, because Farmville is not cool in their social circles and is game they personally dont like.

You do not get the same outcry about games that are actually the most frequently mentioned by people who deal with gaming addiction issues. Those games are mentioned either positively or not at all. And if you would call the people who play those games feeble minded, you would not ended up upvoted.
Are you a delivery platform? The law only applies to delivery platforms. If you want to hire an individual contractor(or just casually pay your buddy 3$ to pick up a pizza for you) you can still do so.
> Reading more meant as people got older they couldn't see the small words. Glasses were invented then later the lenses used for making telescopes and then microscopes.

This is covered in a chapter on glass in Steven Johnson's book How we got to now: six innovations that made the modern world.
> Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.

This is just plain false. A nice book that I can recommend on the actual history of it is Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.
What would your top three clarifications be?
Small Unix Distributions (2016)
Show HN: iMessage Wrapped – your year in texts
Careful there... Apple (or any manufacturer) could say the same thing about Ebay. Any sports team or band could say it about Stubhub. Nike could say it about StockX.
I really like the idea and it made me realize that I want a simple interface to list/switch/create tabs from custom tools.

However, I think a less powerful extension that just subscribes to `chrome.(tab|window).*` events and reports them to a local server and listens for commands (e.g to create tabs) would be enough. Not using the debug api and not exposing more than tabs, windows and URLs.

The reporting bit of the extension could be as simple as a bunch of listeners a la:

chrome.tabs.onSelectionChanged.addListener(
(tabId, props) => fetch('http://localhost:8118/report?'+JSON.stringify([tabId, props])));
So one thing really cool about KIO is that any KDE application can understand KIO URIs.

You can paste any KIO URI into any application's file open dialog box and it'll retrieve it. So for example, you could open any KDE media player, paste in an audiocd:// URI, and it'll play the specified track from your CD.

And it also meant that any application could open remote files without having to manually download them first. Like, if I wanted to open some random file off the web in a text editor, I can just go into Kate, hit Ctrl-O, and paste its URL into the dialog box, and it'll fetch it into a temp folder and open it without me having to first download it manually. This was especially useful for PDFs, because Okular is generally way better than any browser's PDF reader (and I was doing this before most browsers came with PDF readers).
Where does the cocaine go? Is it sold separately? :)
Have you ever listened to this Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast on the 808? It is a good deep dive into its history, its distinctive sound, and what made it as influential as it was.

https://www.20k.org/episodes/808
The term "copper bottomed" for something utterly reliable (e.g. "a copper bottomed guarantee") also derives from this.
JavaScript-dos: An API for running DOS programs in browser
Software developers now have a moral obligation to make sure their code is ready to run on any future tech stack? Sounds .... not correct.
Password Managers| Offline vs. Cloud
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600711
Best thing since sliced bread!
On other hand should then the bad behaviour be allowed to continue forever? Isn't something late better than never?
I always wondered how do Google, MS, FB, {popular_game e.g Riot Games/CDPR} and so on employees feel when they read that bullshit
How about the PageRank algorithm, where your crawler detects new links and you need to insert new weights into the matrix from which you then later compute page ranks?
Are they all paying customers or does that include freemium users? That’s interesting if they are paying but not using it at all.
Fascinating science stories overlooked this year
In the second scenario you will not be able to pay the waiters you had on staff before the pandemic. There's nothing for them to do (assuming the restaurant moves to carryout only, as is currently mandated in DC.) You get paid for the food from the delivery service, but you don't see any tips.
What use case is there for this where it's better than bitcoin?

This is just a local payment system, that's existed for centuries as scrip. ("On a computer" doesn't change the nature of it.)

Centralization undermines the purpose of bitcoin.
Every state requires information control to exist...

If that were true, rational people would be anarchists.
Yes, that's the trivial "fix" to make it work, but that's not my point. In most other similar situations the compiler does that for me, but not here. It feels like something the compiler should be doing, not me.
> If a restaurant welcomes takeaway orders then whether you order and collect in person or hire someone to do it on your behalf is irrelevant.

This is a big if, because existing outcry already belies that this assumption is actually not reality.

Besides, if that’s the case it should be super easy to call the restaurant and ask to be a partner. You can mail them stickers to advertise for your delivery platform by pasting it on their doors/windows. “Official GrubHub partner” could even be a badge of legitimacy because GrubHub needs to protect their reputation as a source of good restaurants.
Team Initiatives – Stop Starting and Start Finishing
Hey, that's a cool yet tough suggestion, but we'll see :)
It was decent but not amazing. Definitely one of the weaker entries in the Stormlight Archive, but hey, it's a novella so you don't expect much. You get more backstory on the "awesomeness" character.
I can imagine this being true at a micro level. But at a macro level, Obamacare has a rule that insurers can have a maximum profit margin of 20%. So you have two ways to increase profits in the long run:

1) Increase number of subscribers. Possible to do, but the market is pretty saturated.

2) Raise prices of healthcare overall. 20% of larger costs is more than 20% of smaller costs.

Intuitively, lowering costs would seem to be a money-making proposition, but if you are already at the 20% margin, it doesn't actually help you.
The author has a point perhaps, but this

Twitch streamer Tyler Blevins (Ninja) films himself playing video games for people to watch for 12 hours per day

sounds not unlike any other workaholic at work.

Replace 'gaming' with 'coding' and you'd hardly get anyone surprized on HN.
Covid-19 is still around, but tuberculosis remains India’s biggest health crisis
I have found someone in Colorado who specializes in underground/earth sheltered homes. But local Texan expertise is even better as they’d know what has and hasn’t worked for local conditions.
The only bummer is missing upstream support.
Although right now the only thing missing seems to be the NAND.

https://linux-sunxi.org/NextThingCo_CHIP

https://linux-sunxi.org/MTD_Driver#Challenges
> I contributed to a couple of projects that received money from FP7 (sort of the previous iteration of Horizon 2020). In a certain sense, the whole thing seemed like a huge waste of money.

I guess your mileage does indeed vary. I contributed to a subproject of a major FP7 research program, which counted with the collaboration of a major industrial manufacturing company, a state research institute, and a couple of university research groups. In the end, besides a hand full of research papers, the industrial company developed a commercial product which is being rolled out as we speak. The state research institute didn't gained much out of the deal but we did developed institutional relationships that have been fruitful since then.

What you take from a research program is proportional to the legwork you put in. I'm sure some projects aren't immediately fruitful but it's short-sighted to claim that the money is wasted, specially if you take into account that this expenditure is what makes this sort of industrial effort possible.
Interesting discussion of historical analogies for the “megacorp” sci-fi trope in this one.
Isn’t Apple doing both a and b? They seem very open about struggling with suppliers, commit to goals they can use their clout to impact, and report on those goals using third party verification.
> A second-order digital filter requires what, about 4 stores, recalls, and multiplies per sample?

This is true today using something like the Chamberlin form for a state variable filter. I don't think that level of optimization had been discovered yet in the DX7 timeframe.

Also, for adequate quality you want to oversample at least 2x, preferably at least 4x.

And 16 bits usually won't be enough headroom in a digital filter for good audio quality. Too much truncation.
A family member of mine got horribly addicted to FarmVille back in like 2008-2009. He would sneak off from the family to go upstairs to grab something and then we would find him there three hours later playing. He built up a huge farm and since it had the mechanic for visiting nearby farms became quite famous. Then one of his daughters, who was a freshman in college at the time, came home with a few of her friends. The family member mentioned FarmVille at one point and all these teenagers went “omg you are [his game name]?!?!?!” He quite literally became an in game celebrity for a time apparently. He quit a few months later and never went back.
I don't know about great, but using Twitter as PWA on the iPad was better than the app b/c the iPad app was so bad. The app has since gotten better though.
No, it's only a "happy new years eve" type. If written separately, it'd represent the whole year :)
Good question. Consider chrome puppeteer. Might require some intermediate JS skills but it is doable.
1) Towards the end of a production cycle mostly laborious work is remaining that doesn’t require as much creativity to produce. Not so much programmers working on an engine, but rather art teams working on finishing assets. For this kind of work you do get more output per hour worked, even if people are overworked. Some companies (many companies unfortunately) do plan for this crunch early on.

2) For a multitude of reasons, usually related to biz dev and budgeting, release windows are set way ahead of time. Then a marketing campaign starts months in advance to build up to release. A marketing campaign is extremely costly, and loses much of its effectiveness if it’s interrupted. it might be impossible to build up the same level of attention a second time, and most companies aren’t willing or can’t afford to take that chance.

3) The work remaining that does require creativity, responding to QA demands, porting, redesigns, bug fixing, etc ends up in a crunch by necessity due to 2).
It doesn't work, nor does "Open PDF in Browser". It reloads the same page or it asks me to create a "SSRN Account".
Big Sur Internet Recovery Unavailable Replaced with Catalina
I think we can carve out an exception specifically for food and food services. Why? Because of the extremely limited shelf life of hot food. That’s what sets it apart from your other examples.
Volkswagen Is Working on a Car Charger That Comes to You
Thanks, been looking for an instance to join Mastodon and as one interested in Welsh, I think this just light be the perfect place to begin :)
"first game at scale that leveraged big data"

Haha, yes, but not for the good of their customers.

It was optimized for addiction and peer pressure.
Agreed. EU has no track record of producing leading edge nm chips, any EU designs will more likely be fabbed at TSMC or maybe Samsung.
> Isn't the fundamental difference here that we can't print more bitcoin to bail out bad investments?

Absolutely. (Although it's "a" difference, not "the" difference.)

> you can lend out bitcoin and even do fractional reserves, but ultimately, the bill must come due and over leveraged bad bets will get wiped out and good bets get rewarded.

Yes, and the subeconomy of bitcoin investing has a very different risk profile. As an example: I mentioned in another comment, the exchanges are already doing fractional reserves in spades. Bitmex has an insurance fund, and there has been at least one occasion where liquidation could not be covered by the traders and then exhausted the insurance fund. What happened then? The insurance fund paid out pro-rata on the successful bets (the successful traders made less than they should have") and much grousing ensued.

So it's the rough equivalent of an old-fashioned bank run, but tempers lessened because some money was made and nobody was zeroed out (other than the losing bets who should have gone negative but were only zeroed out).
Kubecon+CloudNativeCon NA 2020
Hi,

I wrote (and am still writing) Gig'o'Books (http://www.gigobooks.com) -- Accounting for gigs and side income.

I'm the first user (ie. dogfooding).

Thing is ... I'm sure there's a lot of people with gigs who would find it useful but for some reason, I'm having trouble finding them.
Flash games on Facebook feels very quaint now. It makes me remember all the other dead web 1.0 walled gardens like AOL games, Yahoo games, MSN games etc

The crappy shovelware games live on though! Seems to be a resilient style of software, moving from platform to platform like a virus lol
I don't think the US will allow that. They probably have enough leverage.
My first Linux machine had 4MB and ran Slackware
> even I had a son

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon got you good!
Yeah, if you try that with a megacorp, they'll drag you up and down the courts until you give up:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/09/pirate-trader-...
> Going straight to opt-in seems like it could hurt some businesses.

So, Facebook is indeed right when they say Apple’s opt-in tracking prompt will hurt small businesses?
The problem with modifying FSM is if you start with modifying the code. This is wrong approach.

The FSM is not a code but a model and the code is just an implementation of the model.

What you want to do is to recreate the process of modelling (or modify existing model) and then recreate the code based on that.

What I do is to have an implementation-agnostic model of the FSM that gets translated to code. That code is never modified, it only is called from external modules or calls external modules.

There are some cases where I would just hardcode the FSM without the model. Those cases are when I do not expect the state machine to change because it follows from the fundamental description of the problem. For example, I might have some communication protocol and the state machine describes the state of that communication channel. If I do my job well the state machine maps 1:1 to the problem and will never need to change even as the rest of the application changes.
> a few people might leave bad reviews on yelp when something is clearly DoorDash's fault?

If you don’t have a good set up for delivery, the bad reviews will not be “a few” and it will certainly be more than what you would’ve otherwise had. There are examples of restaurants receiving literally dozens of negative reviews from this in a short period of time.
Korg's new OpSix is a very successful reinvention of six-op FM and a very nice-sounding synth. It's really quite impressive and also much easier to program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6X4QSP0NpY

The real issue is that the synth universe has contracted around a relatively small number of "classic" synth sounds. You have the Moog bass, the supersaw pad, various dreamy pads, various EDM plucks. the TB303 squelch, Oberheim brass, various dubstep pseudo-vocal woobs and buzzes, various clockwork-like sequences, and so on. There are maybe a few hundred of these sounds, and to music consumers they all sound like "synth."

Even with vintage analog, the space of potential sounds is much, much bigger. But the number of people who are real sound design virtuosos - as opposed to patching up some kind of raspy randomness on Eurorack - is tiny.

It's so much easier to treat sounds as presets or as imitations of the "classics" - which are often imitations of imitations - instead of approaching sound design as an imaginative exercise in mood and association.

So that's why some analog synths have legendary status. The promise is a legendary sound without having to do much work. And that's a very boring reason to play with synthesizers.
Can you smile to some square roots?
I'm using it. It's reaction to network degradation, even one just moderately worse off than LAN with a single switch really hampers usage on cloud servers.
That reminds me of the Raines sandwich. "Minimum viable sandwich"

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/raines-sandwich

So this is "Minimum viable pizza"
> But that, of course, is not what any of these services do.

Likely because customers don't care. Nor does this law introduce such a requirement. Instead it increases the cost of entering the delivery market, thus it protects extant delivery services from new competitors.

> So Sally should maybe have a right to refuse to sell to anyone other than the end consumer.

They can already do that; restaurants know which delivery services are placing the order.
Indeed, in my use (with the Parabola GNU/Linux-libre distro), this is the killer use-case of distcc. This is how most of Parabola's packages for MIPS were built, and how many for ARM are built.
For most insured, payments that go towards the deductible make more sense than payments that don't, even with a fairly large difference in price.
Damn should've known I was doing it wrong.

All I know is dang noticed and now I can die happy
There are different ways to assign the vote disproportionately without the flaws of the electoral college. Many countries give disproportionate geographical representation -- for example, in Canada the small provinces have both more senators (who aren't even elected anyway) and more representatives (who are elected) per capita.

But the EC system seems specifically set up to allow for slow communications distances and no way to "check back" quickly with the sending jurisdiction. That specific need is long gone.
A lot of "local restaurant order forms" are actually sites set up by the likes of GrubHub, Uber Eats, etc. Not all of them, but it's one of the sneaky ways they use to insert themselves.
Everyone here's mad except me and thee, and I have my doubts about thee...
Read Color Appearance Models 3rd Edition by Fairchild, it covers __everything__.

I think someday soon I'll be communicating about this more widely, we'll see though
It's a German perspective, actually ;) But I presume it's similar for the US.
Are you commercially providing a service of picking up burgers? There is already a clear distinction in law between commercial and non-commercial activity.

Obviously my single sentence isn't yet enough to be standalone law. But you rightly pointed non-commercial activity could be exempt from this restriction.

I can imagine somebody picking up burgers and delivering them to homeless people. I believe this could be exempt as non-commercial activity.

There are again questions, what if Uber decides to pick up burgers and deliver them to homeless? One could say that even if deliver it for free it is still commercial activity (because they obviously stand to gain PR which has a value). Also they can just ask a burger place for permission to buy burgers from them for homeless people, I see no problem with that.

Also all attempts at distinction of small and large scale seem to have issues with them. First is the arbitrary definition of what small and large scale is.

Then what if you are wealthy man and decide to feed all homeless in LA for Christmas? I guess you could try to get permission from the owner of the establishment but I don't see why you shouldn't just be able to decide, in a spur of the moment, to send a dozen of your minions to various establishments and just buy the stuff.

What then if Uber decides that their minions who deliver goods are actually small businesses providing the service on its own and use Uber's platform as a service to coordinate them with buyers? How would large/small scale operation be defined?

To summarize, I think:

- commercial / non-commercial distinction is better than large/small "scale" (however defined),

- non-commercial organizations and private individuals should not be subject of this law

- commercial activity most likely is calculated to gain something from this whether the delivery is or isn't paid for by the consumer and so I think it should not be exempt,

- "small scale" commercial activity can probably be perverted by corporate lawyers.

- if the law is restricted to online platforms, there is possibility corporations are going to work around it so that it does not meet the criteria of online platform.