skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with most of your assessments.

> Despite being called "engineers," most decision are pure cargo-cult with no backing analysis, data, or numbers

This is indeed so, most people are developers/programmers rather than software engineers. As a discipline, writing/crafting code still lacks the systematic approach
of other engineering disciplines.

If I ask for a house to be built for me, people give me a plan as well as cost & time estimates, as part of a pretty standardized process. For sofware, there is much of a zig-zag route towards a foggy end goal in many projects.

That's why I'm working on a methodology to make things more systematic (there are of course many people working on methodology, some heavy like UML, some rather light/"agile", my focus is on methodology for data-intensive systems - systems that require machine learning components, which imposes a rather special list of process requirements on the project, for which nobody appears to have written up detailed guidelines/best practices, so that's ongoing).

> After performing over 100 interviews: interviewing is thoroughly broken. I also have no idea how to actually make it better.

I've interviewed a few hundred people in recent years, and been interviewed a few times myself. I agree most people use a broken process. My idea for making it better is:
(a) cover a range of areas: motivation/goals - interpersonal - project experience - management - algorithms & data structures - coding practice. No silly logical riddles, but examples that are common in the daily life. So in case they really have been doing what their CV says, they should not need to have to practice for any of it.
Also available as an adblock list: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/
Don’t read this because you can’t unsee. I prefer to be ignorant of what it could have been because I don’t want to groan about it for the rest of my days.
There were plans to build huge solar plants in the Sahara desert but all got scrapped partly because of energy storage and transport, and partly because few countries want to depend on energy production in countries with either (looming) civil war or semi-regular terrorist attacks.
>800,000 CDs

This is going to be quite a task, even with a bunch of the big boy 1000 disk auto loaders. Im not familiar with any solutions capable of opening CD jewel cases. You might want to contact few hackerspaces to inquire about building specialized machines just for the task of loading disks into spindles.

btw why not proprietary? like http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Exact_Audio_Copy
It isn’t a rat race, it is inflation. My dad purchased a house in the city for $30,000 in 1981. No amount of stop-the-rat-race mentality gets me a house for $30,000.

My elder cousin purchased a house in the city for $300,000 in 2001. No amount of stop-the-rat-race mentality gets me a house for $300,000.

Prices have gone up, way more than salaries.
I reckon, I used to live in inner west Syd, watched the local councils cut down all the trees for various reasons. Now you can barely walk down the street as it's basically a concrete slow cooker in summer.
As you are a numbers guy, I’m sure you can whip up such a spreadsheet in half an hour. It isn’t that hard. NREL has a calculator you can use to estimate annual production, and it’s up to you to figure out what your utility’s rules on net metering are. South is the best aspect, West is next best, but this can be affected by local climate (e.g. frequent afternoon clouds). I think NREL factors climate.

If the net metering rules are favorable, skip the battery, forget entirely about your own consumption patterns, and just install as much as you can. The job is almost half fixed costs, so a bigger array pays back much faster.
Launched my side-project on Product Hunt
That's sort of the point of it though, right?

If you equate your income with your self-worth, then you'll never feel that you have enough.

If you can step outside that framework, you'll find that you may still make significant money, but it doesn't really matter so much.
That's super good to know. Caramelizing onions takes forever
If you enjoy playing Factorio, Age of Empires, 0 A.D, Clash of Clans, or other such modern RTS games, you probably would have loved Empire.

Think Age of Empires via a command line over the Internet (pre-web) in open source.

Empire was the context for one of my favorite, earliest programming hacks. Games went on for weeks, sometimes months, in real-time, 24/7. After meticulously expanding and building and tuning a country's economy, the stakes were high to run the country efficiently and be able to persevere when inevitable conflicts arise. Intense battles, driven by leaders via command line interfaces at any time of day or night, were common.

Ve (Visual Empire) was an offline, visual map based on curses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)) that was helpful strategically but of minimum use tactically in the heat of battle. To gain a tactical advantage, JustUs adapted it to be a command center. While opponent leaders were rushing to type individual military and economic commands, re-issue map display commands, re-issue status commands, etc to see the results of an attack or economic tweak, JustUs could coolly issue "super commands" that aggregated the basic commands to achieve higher level goals, immediately updating the state of the world in two dimensions rather than one. A single super command typically would expand to dozens of primitive commands, all issuing in fractions of a second rather than many minutes, yielding significant advantages in battle and economic management. One ally with whom I shared Veo (Visual Empire Online), Keith Graham, aka Dreamlands, contributed some pathfinding code that found least cost routing between two points on the map -- very useful in super commands that could resupply entire regions of the economy or battlefield rather than the sector-to-sector primitive commands that came with the game's stock client.

Nowadays, many multiplayer games prohibit programmatic access for understandable fairness reasons -- not everyone can code. However, back then, it was a lot of fun, and I'm not sure whether I enjoyed the game or the hacking more.

Broken links note:
Some of the links that are broken on the empire.cx site, including the original Empire Hall of Fame posting (http://www.wolfpackempire.com/firstempirehalloffame.txt), are operational when viewed from http://www.wolfpackempire.com/ instead.
What's driving the recent popularity explosion of SPACs? They've been around since at least the early 2000s, but total capital participating has risen nearly tenfold since 2014.
This resonates with me. I’ve noticed an absolute dependence on mental stimulation. I think your solutions is the same conclusion I came to. Cheers!
Yeah, Win10_20H2_English_x64.iso is UDF these days, which doesn't have the ISO 9660 file size limitation of ~4GiB. Basically same as FAT32.

These are the two largest files in that image.

5.0G ./sources/install.wim
534M ./sources/boot.wim

I wonder how Microsoft's media creation tool deals with this...
Your point is interesting enough to think about once but please don't spam multiple threads with the same argument.
Invest in batteries
> HN is one example!

actually i think HN - ie. the comments, especially TLDR - is an example of, at least partial, solution, and this is why me like many other people usually go straight for the comments instead of the original article/post.
I grew up in a block in Europe. The equivalent body met once a month at best, you could even delegate someone to attend for you. I don’t think that’s anywhere near the sort of web you end in when growing in a small town, particularly if your folks have been around for more than a generation.
There's no algorithmic advertising, no universal tracking, and your instance's mod team is known to you instead of a faceless automation farm.
Yes. It's a heterogeneous allotrope made from typically pyrolyzing the matrix, followed by slowly decomposing Acetylene inside the porous structure until the porosity is gone.

Other ways are to just infuse the porous matrix with more resin, before pyrolyzing again. Then loop a (few) dozen times.
Road maintainence, energy usage of personal vehicles.

The US economy is so unsustainable on so many levels it's really hard to argue about anything like the status quo. It's an extremely convoluted and leveraged systems which cannot be fixed in a way that ends up with something similar.
That's fair enough, but I still doubt you use 1/250 of water in salt, even when you're cooking. If you add things like showering, washing clothes, and lawn care, it's not even close
The reason for this is that we bankrolled much of the initial trajectory of cost decline. Unfortunately, we stopped investing heavily when prices dropped due the black/red grand coalition not wanting to risk losing votes over potentially higher power prices. Now we are stuck at high Co2 and high prices.
Chia Network
My parents own an off-grid home with ~12 panels (about 3.3kW installed power I think).

If it didn't cost over 30K to pull power to the house, it'd be impossible to make the math work for solar. If you don't count the climate externalities I doubt there's one city on Earth where the payback period (before incentives) is less than 10 years.

So there's no point in making a spreadsheet at this point, really. You're either buying solar out of need, a desire to "green" your life further, or you're being paid by the government to do it, or buying at a loss.
In the US in particular, corn is subsidized and turned into ethanol at an alarming rate. Subsidizing solar seems like it would be a better use of land. Especially if you can combine it at all with buffer zones to control runoff.
and there is now the super-powerful Fortran 2018.
That is quite a challenge... some people struggle to summarise an article into 5-6 sentences for an abstract.
Engineering event: how to be a good developer/when is it time to let someone go?
Come hang out! :)

Engineering roundtable on how to be a good developer in 5 or 500 person teams.

Speakers:
Ahmad Nassri: Co-founder of Cor.dev
Kyle Campbell: CEO and co-founder of CTO.ai
Sanket Saurav: Co-founder of DeepSource.io
Colin Chartier: CEO and co-founder of LayerCI.com
Virgin Galactic releases renders of proposed supersonic jet that can reach Mach3
This is a relatively minor nit, but the 75K conclusion was reached in 2010. You can at the very least adjust that to 90K now given inflation. I don't think this changes the refutation, but I've seen a lot of comments talking about the 75K with more granularity, and it's worth pointing that inflation effect out.
I think part of what you’re qualifying as “and yet...” may be exactly what GP is talking about. They worry less and get on with things, comfortable that they can, rather than harming themselves with 1000 “economical” cuts. See too the boot metaphor[0] that is a real impediment to getting to somewhere comfortable. There’s a potential tipping-point that’s personal to each person.

[0] https://moneywise.com/a/boots-theory-of-socioeconomic-unfair...
#1 is exactly why I want to be back in the office.

#2 also goes the other way - you don't want endless home interruptions when you have work to do (kids, deliveries, significant others)
That's all true of hosting a private Discourse instance, as well.
I’m not sure ARM could have grown to the point it has without those safeguards. If they were to extract every ounce of profit their customers probably wouldn’t have picked them. Their model has been far more successful than most of their contemporaries.
5x Speedup on CICD Using GitHub Action's Strategy.Matrix
Being able to pick where that line is, and who gets to decide it is a big part of the draw.
The magnetic behavior of the windings can depend on this, though. A good example would be a toroidal transformer, which tends to have a high inrush current, even if the output is open circuit.
I recently blogged about it [1] and think Delta Chat is the messenger we should migrate to.

Email is decentralized (at least when not everybody is using Gmail) and isn't a silo like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Threema. Because what happens when Signal goes bad? Everyone has to move again...

[1]: https://jlelse.blog/posts/email-messenger-delta-chat
I think you've missed the point of science somewhere.
For me personally (not who you responded to), honestly not very well. I'm always losing track of which tabs are which. When the tabs are simple content it's mostly okay; mentally it's just like having a tabbed notebook. But if the tabs are interaction- or app-centric, my brain begins to slowly jam up.

My ADHD almost certainly takes a lot of the blame for that.
> instead doing everything we can to ensure couples live in a world where they WANT to bring another life into it.

Neither of those suggestions actually increased birth rates, individually or in aggregate. Pretty sure many Scandinavian countries tried all of those, and it had little to no impact on their birth rate.

Do you have any source to show improvements to birth rate?
How can someone take take your income from you ? Assets aren’t income. All assets have a carrying cost / risk, it’s always been that way.
I do exactly the same! What I mean is, there are those that will vote or even comment without reading the article - I don't believe it's a problem unique to fediverse platforms.
I'm going to take this opportunity to repost the article about the McDonald's Pizza: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/65467/short-strange-life...
You already made a top level post asserting this, there's no need to keep repeating it.
Computing industry at the end of 2020 as I see it
>Why does EVERYTHING have sugar in it?

I suspect that added sugar increases sales.
Solar panel farms seem like a good option.
It is the job of the journalist to at least be able to ask "what do you mean by 95% accuracy?" and to publish the answer given or the fact that no satisfactory answer is given because the reader is not in a position to be able to ask that question to the entity whose results are being publicized.
Clubhouse is pretty cool I feel. But, I try my best to avoid it. Every session I attend consumes almost an hr!

My email and twitter in profile. I have 2 invites to give. I believe, invites can only be to sent to a phone number with a country code
Machine Programming. What if computers would program themselves?
A fair comparison would take a per population approach and compare similar environmental regions, and calculate the cost of supplying that region and population with the energy demand over the span of years.

It is however not that hard to do since the energy market basically operate already on this principle. Energy companies bid on supplying a specific demand in the future, and the bid that is lowest win. That bid also include if I understand it right the cost of transmission. The practical end result is that different companies win the bid depending on all the variations that makes energy production commercial viable. A solar plant that is not producing enough energy because of weather conditions is not going to put in a bid, and thus the fossil fueled power plant wins the bid and the outcome is pollution. The more times fossil fueled power plants win, the more economical incentives there are to build more fossil fueled power plants, and the more pollution we get in the air.

The only way to have a non-polluting power grid is to either outlaw fossil fueled plants from bidding, or make sure that there is always an pollution free alternative that has an economical reason to make a lower bid. Nuclear, renewables, batteries, solar, wind, carbon taxes or what have you, as long as fossil fueled power plants can manage to make the lowest bid we have a problem.
Yes, you've repeated this elsewhere, and as others have noted, your stats and figures do not reflect an accurate assessment the the advantages/disadvantages of renewables.
> That ship sailed long ago.

That ship was sunk.

Germany had a lot of nuclear power, and decided shut it down. That is why Germany is producing so much CO₂.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...
Does that mean the iOS app isn’t encrypted? (Guess I could just go check the source code instead of being lazy)
"Filter - Begin With" didn't seem to work for me on a couple columns.
GFC?
Thanks for digging that up! Absolutely agreed about self-hosting and treating it like email. I've seen quite a few instances shut down in the ~6 months I've been around.

It's a pretty rough experience for people that are coming from the mainstream, since it's probably hard to imagine a social network powered by a rag-tag few people behind each instance and not multi-billion dollar tech behemoths.
There's lots of good tips in replies, but some things that work for me that I didn't see mentioned.

Avoid caffeine. If not entirely, at least don't have any after noon. Everytime I have a really hard time falling asleep it'a because I had a (delicious) coffee or cola after lunch. Enough times that I've almost learned my lesson. ;)

Go to bed quickly if you're feeling drowsy in the evening, even if it's before your preferred time. I often feel sleepy just before 21; and if I get into bed then, I usually sleep through the night and wakeup rested; but if I push through it, for whatever reason, I'm no longer drowsy in 30 minutes, and I will have a hard time sleeping until much later.
which room are you talking about? i'll perhaps listen in
If only nuclear energy had seen such promotion and investment as solar energy, instead of endless hysterical fear-mongering.
Do you have any recent data to back this up?

It was kind of a statistical tie the last time I looked at this (wind was possibly slightly in the lead out of the three in terms of CO2 per KWh) but the wind and solar numbers seemed to be trending downwards over time.
Non-native speaker. I meant "open-access" in terms of "against IP and patents".

Thanks, tho. Kinda ironic.
Many places are still like this . I had to use pto in addition to working 60hours when I got back after one week for the birth of my son. I ended up leaving this job due to the stress on my marriage and health . Unfortunately many people do not have that privilege
The string change (rightly) is always brought up, but the one that has always amazed me is they changed how division works.

Whenever I show this to people they are (rightly) horrified.

~ $ python
Python 2.7.16
>>> 3/2
1

~ $ python3
Python 3.7.7
>>> 3/2
1.5
It isn't a lack of incentive to move it is a lack of ability. Think about what it realistically costs to move to NYC right now, first months rent, last months rent, deposit, and even then most rentals aren't even on the market unless you pay a broker several thousand. The majority of people in rural america surveys can't handle a 400 dollar emergency let alone the cost to move to a large metro.

And before you say "well they can get the money to attempt a move by selling their family property", realise what you are saying. Sell dilapidated rural property to whom exactly? How does that happen?

Unless you have grants of approx 15-30k to bring people to cities I don't think it is even possible. And what cities would even want this to happen enough to participate? Probably places like Cleveland? Detroit? Out of the frying pan into the fire I suppose.
Nuclear is too expensive, takes too long to deploy and the projects always exceed their budget.
Go have a beer in the VFW hall some time, the people who live out there aren't a different species to be thought of like zoo animals, they're just regular folks with some interesting stories.

When I lived in LA a friend inherited property out there, we had a memorable week checking things out and shooting shotguns at washing machines with some of the locals. One of them even brought out a propane fueled potato cannon! Good times.
Exactly. Some prices have just gone up way more disproportionately, like housing, making it difficult to compare to older metrics.
How do they handle spam?
The title starts with "Our experience with the Fediverse", so your criticism seems misplaced. They are describing their experience, and don't seem to claim that this will be everyone's experience.
Global financial crisis, presumably.
I wonder if taking melatonin supplements for a week or two could resolve your issue. A very small dose (0.3 mg) of melatonin is usually sufficient to restore nighttime plasma melatonin levels to those characteristic of young people.
In fact it does. The projected 15.1M new homes needed is not the same number as the projected number of new households, for reasons the text explains clearly.

It projects 12.1M new households, 8.4M of them either one-person households or married couples with no children (which presumably means a two-person household, although I suppose it's possible some of those might have a third person living with them, e.g., an elderly parent). Only 1.6M of new households (married with children) are obviously more than two persons. The remaining households are 0.6M unmarried with children, which could be two or more persons, and 1.5M unmarried living with other adults, which could also mean two or more persons. It's not impossible to get somewhere close to 80% from that.

At any rate, the comment I responded to asserted that the expert in this field said something obviously untrue, yet offered no evidence except his own personal experience shopping for a suburban home in one particular American city, as if that proves anything at all.
I'll keep using Chromium rather than Chrome.

I don't need sync that badly. If enough people are fed up by Google's cut, they will probably build an open alternative soon...

But we can see a pattern: if you rely on companies (either as a paying customer or as a user of their open free APIs or source offering), you may be let down. Can't happen to open community projects like Wikipedia (happy birthday, btw!).

So a major reason (for anyone, certainly for me) to use open projects is continuity! Anythink proprietary can go anytime.
My understanding is that the Yamato are not indigenous to Japan. For example [1]:

> Now [1997], in two landmark actions, a court and Japan's national legislature have taken the first steps to recognize that Japan's Ainu (EYE-new) people predated the Yamato race that conquered its land and systematically attempted to stamp out its existence. For Japan, a nation with a near-religious belief in the homogeneity of its people, these decisions mark the first time it has ever formally acknowledged a minority group living in its midst.

[1] Apologies for the AMP link, but trying to open the article URL directly redirects me to the Baltimore Sun home page.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xp...

See also https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/world/asia/03ainu.html
The current argument is that we know exactly what to do with nuclear waste. Put it deep geologic repositories like onkalo.

https://www.posiva.fi/en/

If we do end up building a few thousand large reactors, we will want to switch to waste recycling.

The whole 'no idea what to do with it' is what the antinuclear movement chose to say after stonewalling the permanent disposal work in the USA for years. Very cynical in my opinion especially if you consider existing waste to be imminently hazardous to the biosphere.
They’re ok but they should be more precise:

1. Require websites to be concise and offer a yes/no ONLY.

2. Reverse-lobby browser vendors to turn this into an API.

3. Require everyone to use the API.

Now users can block or accept all requests at once like they can block or accept Notification requests.
The problem isn't just with the area but also location. Would it be okay if it were about the size and location of a rainforest? That's what we're doing here in Florida. Drive down I-10 and you'll see large previously-forested areas now covered by several large solar plants. Really, really dumb. I've no problem with putting solar over parking lots or open desert. But forests? My state is so moronic sometimes.