skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The main issue is that the largest cost of a nuclear power plant is the capital investment to build it and staff to run it, which is fixed. In comparison fuel costs seem to hover at about 25%.
Therefore you need to run your plant at about full power all day to have a chance to recoup the investment. With renewable, although intermittent, sources vastly undercutting nuclear energy on price many hours of the day this becomes an almost impossible calculation.

Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation or storage can make the same, and still undercut you.

This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.
yeah I thought that was the point of it. Sounds like the article authors don't get the Fediverse, and use it interchangeably with Mastodon. It's like saying Linux sucks because it's so complicated, having only tried one distro (i.e. Arch)
1. “I am a veterinarian and recruiting is way more straightforward”

2. “Also I just changed jobs and was able to write code quickly because they were recruiting with tasks in mind for me.”

Is no one else confused by this? How common is a coding veterinarian and why do veterinarians write code?
Affordable housing is out there -- quite a lot of it too. My parents paid $140k for their house a few years ago in flyover country. $300k would be going overboard. My mom's a nurse and my dad is basically an account executive for a food distributor in the area -- both thoroughly normal middle class jobs. My guess, though, is many folks here wouldn't be willing to do either of those jobs or they wouldn't be willing to live in middle America. If you want an interesting, trendy job in a hot urban center where you're constantly surrounded by the best restaurants, parks, bars, museums, and more, naturally you're going to need to either make a lot of money or make sacrifices in your life.

> No amount of stop-the-rat-race mentality gets me a house for $300,000.

Note that the median price of a home in the US is somewhere in the $250k - $300k range.
I heard someone say "Pre-LOI SPACS are loot boxes for investors".

While they may come off as a pump & dump, all SPACs have a floor of hard cash placing them around $10; notably Ackman's PTSH is $20. Looking at IPOE popping 20% off Chamath's tweets, it does feel like some variant of musical chairs.
The issue is not primarily technical, it's economic. Operate a nuclear plant at lower capacity factor and the economics becomes even more hopeless.
> I can also promise you that they do in fact know

Of course they know, but I don't care about what they know, I care about what they say and if it's true or not!

Are the headline figures fudged by neglecting storage or including subsidies? Or is the headline legitimate, and solar can actually stand on its own now?
This quote is neither true nor false. The author called it a "sentiment", but I think when Kronecker made this statement, he took it as some kind of principle to work out the foundation of modern mathematics.

Basically the mathematical notion of integer is trying to make sense of our idea of a discrete unit. Taking a bite of apple makes it non-unit, but I think you would agree that the notion of "one apple" or "two dogs" makes common sense.

Also when reading someone's quote, I would always consider its context. I think Kronecket had the axiomatic construction of real number in mind. The idea of rational number and real number can be investigated by just assuming the idea of increment by one is solid.

These mathematical concepts are usually covered in a undergraduate analysis class. For more information, see Cauchy's construction and Dadekind's construction.
Yeah, but some email providers don't support IMAP and on those it is not end-to-end encrypted.

https://delta.chat/en/help#is-delta-chat-compatible-with-pro...

https://providers.delta.chat/
The science behind "inflammatory foods" is pretty shaky:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-messy-facts-a...

https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/05/05/closer-look-anti-inflam...
That's just the world shifting around.

I wish I could find the source, but I read a quote from someone that grew up back around the turn of the last century.

She said, "I never thought I'd be so wealthy as to have my own automobile. And I never thought I'd be so poor to not afford any servants"

Also, housing prices are highly regional. My brother bought his first house (4 bed, 2 bath) in our hometown for $58k about five years ago. Now he lives in a similarly sized house on 20 acres of land that he paid $200k for.

I live in a more populated area, but I also bought my house (3 bed, 2.5 bath) three years ago for $100k.
Yeah I understand. That's actually been a pain point for me because that is literally what the fruit is called. Check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum
Estimates are that the spacex starship could launch 240 starlink satellites. I can't imagine how many cubes they could hold.
Is that the only benefit of Pleroma over Mastodon? Have you checked Misskey before https://join.misskey.page/en/? It looks interesting too...
The fact that Delta Chat is catching on is a sad reflection on the state of the IM tools and protocols.

Compare to most IM systems Delta Chat is:

- easier to set up: you already have an email

- equally private: most IM systems leak metadata anyways. A global observer can infer your peers.

- compared to Signal, it does not snoop your phone number

- decentralized

- cheaper to run 1: managing mailservers is cheaper than managing both mailservers and IM servers

- cheaper to run 2: mailservers evolved for decades and are now pretty efficient, especially compared to most IM servers
"Money doesn't buy happiness" is also considered obvious common sense. The study is looking for the phase boundary where one obvious statement ceases to apply and the other takes over.
I wrote a simple BASIC too, for nothing more than a sense of nostalgia:

https://github.com/skx/gobasic
What's the difference between a SPAC and what used to be called a "reverse merger"?

I.e., when a smaller (but publicly traded) company, merges with a larger private company.

These used to be pretty common scammy ways to generate capital, usually through pump and dumps.

Same thing, just new acronym?
> a) a family had one breadwinner and b) he would expect to work at a single company his whole career.

Not disagreeing here, just spitballing. Back then you were likely to live in a small apartment or a Levittown-type house that was about 850 ft sq, was poorly insulated and had no air conditioning. The family shared a single (comparative deathtrap of a) car, there were no cable bills, phone service was inexpensive, you dried your laundry by hanging it up outside, and there was just one TV. I bet one could still afford that lifestyle on today's average salary, no? It seems to me that we just want more stuff now.
Wikipedia has an article on the Fediverse, to sum it up it's a community of communities based on open web standards:

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

I don't know anything about this "infosec-handbook" group.
>Road maintenance is the cheapest form of public transit in the US

Roads are pretty expensive:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...

> So, for example, a representative cost in 2014 for reconstructing an existing lane of a major urban freeway was $7.7 million per mile; doing the same on a collector street in a small urban area would have set you back $1.5 million per mile.

So at $20/person, you need a density of 4000 people per mile (assuming 18 year life for the road).
I am not familiar with them, but a quick Google seems to suggest they won’t work with WPEngine, Wordpress.com, etc. In any event, they’re bolt on solutions, but the core of Wordpress is still a mess of configuration split between files on disk and the database. There is nothing so valuable about Wordpress that you couldn’t just get a more reliable solution from scratch than by bolting more stuff onto WP. I’ve heard people say “oh, our users are already trained on WP, so it’s a good CMS” but I don’t buy that at all. I’ve had users praise my homegrown CMSes before. There’s not much difficulty in pairing a WYSIWYG text editor and some form fields with modern web stacks these days.
Besides Pleroma mentioned elsewhere in this thread, has anyone checked our Misskey (https://join.misskey.page/en/)? It has some interesting features, like arranging your own virtual room and sharing it with others. I've not seen much of it yet.
Hacker News used to be a good website. Why do they allow things like this on the front site.
Well, if they "discover" it, then they did "learn" something.
10 years to recoup an investment in real estate seems OK.
I've been using this with one single solitary friend for about a year. It works really well and we both love it.

What has bothered potential adoptees is the idea it needs their email account credentials. People who don't think it is super cool already don't seem willing to adopt it. It would be nice if that changed.
Yes, the hermit syndrome - one possible end case.
Ex-CIA engineer and Vault 7 leaker tells judge he's incarcerated like an animal
You don't have 'sort by most recent replied to topic' and a forum subtopic view like most message boards do although. There is a hard enforcement of posts sorted by initial post time.
This is why cursors on text terminals would blink.

But I'm not sure making a mouse pointer blink is the right thing to do.

The whole Windows-Icons-Mouse-Pointer environment was developed when 640x400 was a high resolution and 22" monitors were considered huge. So easy to pick out the pointer at rest, but I can see how you can get lost on basically a 4K resolution TV.
No, stop spreading your disinformation please.
You just compared the retail energy costs instead of the production costs in all your nauseating pro-nuclear comments.
Well, it did, up until one day...
Play a sport. Preferably something coed. Nothing hyper competitive.

You'll make friends AND stay in shape.
Putin Has Created the Ultimate Bond Villain's Lair
Is the fee also fixed?
> You may speak as you will, I do not deny that the current usage of the word “man” has acquired a secondary meaning of “adult male human” opposed to it's historical meaning of “human" and if you wish to use it as such, then I'm confident I can usually discriminate by context.

You mean primary.
IIRC it went through 2 failed attempts at revitalization over the years, but this one absolutely took off. My guess is it's just the influx of tech workers?
Brexit has already gotten an effect on Eurosceptic movements within the rest of the union. They're not as strong, and the parties associated with it aren't as vocal about it anymore.
The numbers take into account the lower capacity factor of solar. So yes, they do take into account that the sun is not always shining. Judged just on a peak kW basis, solar's advantage would be even larger.
We’re using the White House as an excuse to talk about Wordpress.
I cannot help but think of this tweet [0].

https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/866313289306963969

In short, solar production had increased steeply between 2000 and 2015, but each and every year, the IEA predicted that production would plateau. Each and every year, they were wrong. And yet they did it again the following year.
It's not just one lake.
That's all fine. But I don't think social science research supports the idea that rank-and-file (or self-identified, if you prefer) conservatives in the US are actually motivated by a devotion to, say, Federalism (as opposed to, say, hegemonic masculinity, white nativism, etc).

> The Buckley type is just articulating and explaining concrete social phenomena on the ground.

"Explaining", or "dressing up"? You're speaking in good faith, but personally I don't think that's the case for most of the rank-and-file, or the people who represent them.
Yes, the three of us lost our sense of smell. Now, I am back and can smell again, but I cannot smell my body odour after a workout even so normally it smells really. This is at the moment the only thing I cannot smell.

The questions are: is it because the infection had for effect a change in my body odour? Or is it because I recovered all my sense at the exception of the capacity to smell my own body odour?

Nobody in the family can answer (too small or still suffering from anosmia) and I am not yet ready to ring the bell next door after a hard workout and ask the poor soul the smell!
The causation arguably goes in the other direction too. You can't make money if you're unhealthy at baseline. Nor can you as easily acquire more education or new skills.
I just did what you're planning to do even though I'm old. It's a blast.
This is really interesting. I was talking about using email instead of WhatsApp/Signal last week when the whole WhatsApp privacy situation exploded.

It's a shame this wasn't more visible last week when there was a big uptake of signal (or was it?).
I think that is due to the quality of the commenters here and to the subtle, but effective, moderation provided by dang and the other mods.

And the latter is at least partially responsible for the
former.

The voting system is also crucial, imho.
That can work both directions. If China is going to disregard all US intellectual property rights, then the US can do the same to China (which is the world's largest manufacturer and has at least as much to lose as the US does over such an approach in the coming decades as they seek to move into high value manufacturing increasingly).

That means as China produces its first leading semiconductor products, US companies are free to reverse engineer them and immediately begin producing them (whether in Vietnam, Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea, India or Arizona and Texas), all without compensating China a dime.

As China begins producing its first leading pharma/biotech products, US companies are free to steal all IP from those companies and sell it as their own all around the world, with zero compensation to China.

And so on.

China is going to become the world's largest economy and will soon have the most to lose (if they don't already). Let's see how they like it when the tables are turned.
At some point it gets cool enough that it's hard to extract useful energy from it. Extracting energy from hot water is easier, but as a byproduct you end up with an enormous amount of lukewarm water that isn't useful for power generation.
The hard part in out house is estimating how much power we'll use in the middle of the day, and after we return to the office after covid.

The feed-in tariffs here in my state are effectively nothing.

I'd like to wait for battery prices to come down so I can go completely off grid. (though this may not happen with cars gobbling up all the batteries for a long time to come)

I think as electricity gets cheaper and cheaper, connection costs will get more and more expensive, so being able to disconnect will be a significant saving.

Right now we are working to remove all gas appliances here at home so we can disconnect from the Gas entirely.
I'd say a good amount of it is for status.
It's literally at 3oz a day though, so "cutting" would effectively be zero. Maybe I could try decaf since I seem to need a bit of coffee for, ahem, regularity.
The problem is corporations: they want employees clustered in hubs, not wfh, where they cannot "control" them.

Aside from a couple tech companies out there, good luck trying to relocated and wfh in the mid-west.
I wonder what the world would look like if the Chernobyl disaster and the Challenger disaster didn't happen. I think both of those events, combined with years of rhetoric, were a turning point in 1986 which really damaged the idea that governments were capable of solving problems and pushing society forward. We didn't give up after the Apollo 1 fire. We did give up after the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl.
Heat engines work with a large temperature gradient. In the same way heat pumps can’t drive a larger temperature gradient past a point (see AC in the Arizona summer). The 35 or 60% efficiency of the first phase can’t simply be stacked. If you don’t have an industry that uses heat directly, on site (cogeneration), that’s simply the cost of extraction.
There was insane hype for all things atomic for decades. A few catastrophes like Chernobyl made it very unsexy
I've always wondered if it was truly accidental.
F9 can only deliver 60 Starlink sats per launch, which would be 685 more launches. (Transporter-1 delivered more because the satellites were lighter/smaller.)

SpaceX is currently developing Starship[1], which aims to increase the payload capacity to about 100,000 kg. The mass of a single Starlink v1.0 is 260 kg[2], which would be 384 sats per launch, although I've seen SpaceX talk about 400. If Starship was operational now, assuming the rate of 400 sats/launch, this would give us 103 more launches for the full constellation. For comparison, SpaceX launched 26 times in 2020, and is aiming for up to 54 launches in 2021[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
It's just a bad rate of return for an investment. Put the same amount of money in a better investment vehicle (say the stereotypical index fund) and you'll be able to afford buying the same amount of electricity from the grid as the panels would generate and have enough spare to go out to dinner every week.
A lot of this talk was more 'What is OCaml' than 'Why OCaml', but here are the parts where he talked about the 'Why':

- Jane Street is in a business where, because of the sheer volume, even the tail ends of normally distributed events happen with surprising frequency, so they don't feel confident deploying with just tests--they need the universal assurance that a typechecker gives

- The transactions they are involved in can be adversarial--someone actively working against their profit motive--so they need extra assurances about their code

- They got to hire some incredibly talented people who would otherwise have never considered Jane Street but for the choice of OCaml
I hate you, and I hate myself even more.
I feel like there are a few plateaus that are different for everyone, but probably within a fairly tight range.

$a/yr is when you no longer worry about how to pay for food/clothing/shelter and have a little extra for some relaxation, which is probably right around $75K a year in most of the country.

$b/yr is when you no longer need to check your bank account for small purchases.

$c/yr is when you no longer have to maintain a family budget -- you make enough to know that whatever you consider reasonable will be affordable.

$d/yr is when you no longer worry about larger purchases, like cars or cruises or multi-week vacations.

$e/yr is when you no longer have to work.

$f/yr is when you no longer have to work nor maintain a budget.

The order of the last few might change depending on the person and their lifestyle, and obviously if you aren't working you aren't really thinking about dollars per year anymore but total assets. I feel like after "no longer have to work", there is not much to go after that, unless you have a personality disorder where you cannot be happy unless you have power over others.
Can you please expand on what makes you say that "storage (...) is a problem that's rapidly being solved" ?

Have you read articles with scenarios about % electricity stored compared to daily consumption for instance? Are we going to reach any significant number in the next decade?

From this IEA article [1] it is not clear that we're getting close to it fast enough

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-storage
Or other storage technologies. In particular, thermal storage with heat pumps appears very promising, allowing energy to be stored in extremely cheap material (rocks), and turned back around to electrical energy with a round trip efficiency ~60%.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.0016...
Add: so the idea is that once we have integers, we can construct rationals and even real numbers instead of talking about reals as granted. Now when taking a bite out of an apple, we can say it takes, say 1/3, of an apple, while we only assume the idea of integers.
I think you may have missed my point. Whatever people you disagree with believe, is the business of people you disagree with. There is no need to "flip out" about it. Someone wants to take a knee, that's his decision. Someone wants to fly a nazi flag at his own home, that's his decision.

If a group wants to believe that America is fundamentally "good", that is the decision, and the right, of the people in that group. If a group wants to believe that America is "bad", that is the decision, and the right, of the people in that group.

For instance, I believe the fundamental "goodness" of America is this ability to believe what you please so long as you don't bother anyone else and play well with others. As an example, people are free to dislike black people. That is what is "good" about the US. However, people should not be free to stop and frisk every black kid that comes along due to a bias stemming from that dislike. Why? Because that infringes on the rights of the black kid. Who, in turn, should be free to like or dislike you.

It's a "circle of like" kind of thing. Or a "circle of dislike" if you prefer. It can be whichever! That's the beauty of America.

I explained all that so that maybe you might have a better idea of where my belief that lefties and righties are problematic is coming from. You can believe that America is "good". You can believe that America is "bad". Where I part company with you is if you "flip out" and attack people who believe the opposite. As that is as clear an indication as any that you don't really believe in America as envisioned in the Constitution.
Either this guy's level of self-awareness is so low that it could strike oil, OR, he's written a shitpost that might just save Texas.
Wowie.
Not enough. I hate my job and would retire in a heartbeat if I had the money to.
Good read, really interesting. Thanks!
None of the issues they bring up are any better on big tech's social media. And of course we should all work to "other" big tech and its employees.
When you've got 104 amendments to a constitution that are the governing high level principles of a state, you know you've done something wrong.
75% of Americans are overweight. When do we consider that an eating disorder?

People worried about the few people who get anorexia from this are like people who worry lifting will just accidentally make you bulky
This reaction to the Chernobyl is akin to throwing out the baby with the bath water.
I know. I hate it.
I had not heard of this. Reading now - thanks!
Does this use canvas or the dom?
There is no problem here. We should be happy that this unsustainable all-consuming population growth is slowly coming to an end. Not having children is by far the best thing you can do for the environment and the world as a whole.
Upvoting this comment while it's still visible... which it won't be for long. I too am a little saddened by what feels to me like a classist anti-suburb attitude here on HN. Maybe I'm just oversensitive. But I grew up not rich and not safe. Am very, very happy that I can own a few acres 2 miles away from a Costco and 13 miles from the (currently dormant) opera.
I now regret paying for Synergy!
I'd say buying panels is very far from an investment in real estate. If you buy an apartment to rent, say, you can count on having return in the form of rents every month and on the property appreciating over time. So you can justify a very long payback period because at the end of 20 years the asset will be worth more than at year zero.

Solar panels generate cashflow in the form of electricity but they depreciate over time. So the payback period (in the form of cashflow) has to be much shorter than for an apartment or home.