skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a huge problem.

Worse, bitcoin's massive electricity usage results in data center consolidation.

If a nation state just simply wanted to impair bitcoin, they could chop off electricity to a few warehouses. If they cut off 25% of miners, blocks would take 25% longer, and difficulty retargeting would take about three weeks. At 50%, blocks take twice as long and retargeting would take a month.

Worse, there's the "time travel attack". Say a nation state quietly amassed 51% of mining power. They could quietly mine blocks and release them all at once, reversing transactions for however long they were mining. This is not a double spend mind you, just simply release empty blocks. Mined for 2 weeks? Reverse 2 weeks of transactions. Then rinse and repeat.
I’ll bet they worked with my friend who is the Deputy Surface Mission Manager for the rover. He gave us a little presentation of what he worked on, including the little helicopter that is attached to the underside of the rover. Veritasium did a cool video about it a couple years ago. [1]

Kudos to everyone who worked on the project and got it launched during the pandemic!

[1] https://youtu.be/GhsZUZmJvaM
I agree. If undecidability (or some stricter but still off-putting set)in a given language means an extremely complicated compiler that would be a mark against it, but if it's just an obscure edge case or something that is already not possible in a normal language, then I really don't care.

I would, however, like to see termination analysis applied to code more often - e.g. rather like only accepting a pure function in an interface, this function must terminate but might not be pure.
Are you familiar with skin prick tests? A grid of half inch squares are drawn over the test area, usually your arm. Each square receives a different allergen via pin prick. After a few minutes or sometimes days, the allergist accesses the degree to which you had a reaction in each square. The reactions vary from nothing to blistering. The reactions are isolated to the site of the pin prick. You do not know what allergen was applied to each grid square. It's only after the fact that you learn what you've reacted to.

The skin prick test done over my partner's entire back using dozens of allergens to form a comprehensive list of allergies. There was not a 100% reaction to all allergens and there was no way for my partner to know which allergen was applied in each grid.

You're going to tell me that my partner's selective reactions to over 100 different skin pricks were all psycho-somatic? I actually find your remarks dismissive and rather offensive.
Tagged Pointer Strings
The people down the street from me in Houston are currently powering their house with their solar panels, actually. They were able to loan their generator to their neighbor. We had to abandon our house.
It increases your costs a lot. There can be benefits too of course but those costs have to be passed on to the users, so if there aren't any compelling reasons to run it all server side, it's unclear why people would want it. Consider also that the local os is an integration point too, for files, devices and other things.
I can barely read with that font colour..
Is the loan secured to anything? What is the incentive for the borrower to repay this loan?
TSLA is still undervalued.
We were at 14F this morning...
Solar panels provide less than 1.5% of Texas electricity generation, so the fact that they can't be used under snow isn't the cause of the deficiency today.
BTC cannot be stable, even eventually. There is no way to increase the BTC supply so when productivity increases, prices of goods (expressed in BTC) will always go up. Assume that BTC is the only currency and world productivity goes up 6% each year, or 0.5% each month. Then when you go in store to buy apple, you will see price gone up by 0.5% than previous month because there is no way to increase money supply. One of the advantage of fiat currency is that you can control the money supply and try to keep prices stable. For BTC, there is no way out either way. The worse case occurs when some economic disaster strikes like subprime mortgage. In that case there is no way to fix the issue and massive uncontrolled depression will trigger and can stay for decades whether you like it or not. In other words, the same things that makes BTC as good store of value, makes it a extremely weak to guarantee stable economy.
Isn’t the whole thing about climate change that it makes black swan events more likely (less black?)? It was well known that the most immediate effect would be weirder, stronger weather events.
In cold climates, solar panels will have builtin heaters that makes the snow slide off, but it seems likely that they didn't bother to install that for a solar plant in Texas.
Funny enough, the design of Deus Ex was built from researching real conspiracy theory at the time.

> We did a vast amount of research into "real" conspiracies -- the Kennedy assassination, Area 51, the CIA pushing crack in East L.A., Dwight Eisenhower's UFO connection, and of course Freemasons tunneling below the Denver airport and building abducted-baby cafeterias for alien invaders at George Bush's direction. Only a fraction of this stuff ended up in the game, but it gave us a peek into the minds of conspiracy buffs that was both scary and useful.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131523/postmortem_ion...
What a horrible article. First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics. Electricty travels at the speed of light so a continuous grid from coast to coast would get out of sync on phases just by travel distance. Texas just happens to be physically in the middle and large enough to have trouble by being supplied by either east or west grid. Second, ERCOT manages when utilizes can take assets out of commission to do maintenance. Texas peak demand is in the summer so if you have to take a power plant off line you do it in the winter. So there are a lot of utility assets under maintenance outages right now. One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here. Several gas pipelines in the state are having freezing issues causing the gas price to spike. ERCOT controls rates so if gas prices spike and utilities are forced to sell power for less than it costs to make, they would rather shut down and did until ERCOT stepped back in and let them charge real rates. People on variable rate power contracts are now basically screwed this month. And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well. Somee have frozen or iced up enough to be out of commission and the rest are operating at severely reduced capacity. So basically a varatiy of these went wrong and everything will be back to normal in a few days, but ERCOT has some work to do to make sure this doesn't happen again.
There seem to have been a numbers of surveys of this, most citing Pew research, but I couldn't actually find a pew study to confirm it. I did find thus study that was a survey of grocery users:

https://www.supermarketnews.com/consumer-trends/nine-10-groc...

It shows 89% of those survey use the phone in the grocery store. Separately pew estimates 81% smartphone ownership rates in the US. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
> I would argue part of the problem is that the majority of developers are computer science illiterate.

While I wouldn’t argue against that...

Sometimes people who do know what they’re doing choose slow algorithms knowingly.

I implemented a way finding algorithm that works in O(n^4) a while back. Because I knew the specific use case we needed it for had a max of around 200 for n, and that I could run a brute force of all possible routes for that in less than a minute in unoptimised Python on my laptop, so that I could then cache all the results and just do a very fast lookup from a ~40,000 row database table in production. I was very very clear to everybody concerned that this solution was not a scalable general solution, but it worked like magic for what our customer needed.
Foreshadowing:

'Google made the surprise announcement on February 1st that it would be shuttering its in-house Stadia game development studios. But the news wasn’t just a surprise to Stadia customers; it was a bolt from the blue for the Stadia development team, which, just a week prior, had been told that the studios were making “great progress,”'

"In a Q&A with staff on February 4th, Harrison reportedly admitted that Google’s execs already knew the shutdown was coming when he sent the email praising the team’s progress"

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/16/22286252/google-stadia-st...
That's a mystery to me. I'm not interested in commercial sport at all. I never google games or scores or players. When I use Flipboard, it always, always inserts sport news into my feed no matter how hard I try to suppress, block, or mute sport topics in my feed. I start suspecting that it's some kind of sponsored promotion that obliges Flipboard to inject sport news into the feed.
Texas does have connections to other grids. But the problem is that since the grid frequencies aren't synchronized, you can't just plug one into the other.

Transferring energy between grids requires either converting it from AC to high-voltage DC and back using solid-state electronics, or converting it via mechanical energy using a variable-frequency transformer. With either approach, you need bulky and expensive equipment in proportion to how much power you want to handle. These connections are designed to smooth out (and profit from) short-term capacity fluctuations, not to power the entire state.

Currently, the Texas grid has two DC ties operating at full capacity and drawing about 800MW from the Southwest Power Pool. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the ~45GW of current demand, or the estimated 70-80GW of demand that would be likely if it weren't for the outages.

http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
With 8 GB it becomes a viable small desktop box.
He's very artfully using Clubhouse to his benefit.
Exactly. Bitcoin proponents tend to tell only half of the story, and pick and choose economic theory that fits the "buy more bitcoin" narrative.

In economic terms, Bitcoin is inflating as an asset. Specifically, it's demand-pull inflation.

Bitcoin isn't even uniquely positioned to protect against inflation, other than the mistaken public belief on that topic. Inflation is an increase in the price of assets, so investors can (and do) escape inflation by investing their money.

Ironically, Bitcoin's limited supply disincentivizes holders from investing their money.
It's like Zombocom wrote it for them.
I don't know enough about importing capacity in that other grid since they're hooked up to the western half supposedly but I agree with your points. TX being hooked up to the rest of the US could have saved them and this other regional grid appears to be managing it better than TX.
The average transaction fee is a bit disingenuous. Many people are not even using segwit and thats on them. You can also use lightning at this point in time but people dont know how to do it and wallets have not implemented yet. High fees usually prod people and services to adapt to the current tech to get costs down. I expect this to happen soon as high fees are somewhat recent. Also you can send a 50 cent tx fee and it will make it through but not be the fastest.

One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.
Conspiracy theories tend to encourage syncretism. It's as easy to disbelieve the official narrative on one subject and to substitute it for a theory, as it is to do the same to another. Different theories are but different crimes from the same culprits.
I can't decide if this was a completely absurd undertaking, or if because the other side is working the same thing, it makes sense to throw a few dollars at it just in case it turns into something.
yes, this is what i had intended to point at. thanks!
AIUI, as the official way setuptools is used is a setup.py calling setuptools.setup(), doing this will remain supported in perpetuity and will really still be powering everything under the hood, it's just no longer what people are told to do when they ask 'how do I make a new python library?' - newcomers and people with simple requirements will be directed to poetry or whatever and avoid that whole mess. For obvious historical reasons python's pretty averse to large breaking changes, and its support for all kinds of weird native interops and obscure platforms is one of its major assets (but also why setuptools is such a mess), so that's almost certainly not going anywhere, even if it's now kept even further back in the shadows. Regarding pyproject.toml if you already have a setup.py doing what you need then it's really only for specifying suported python versions and setup_requires (solving the problem of your setup.py itself needing Cython/wheel/etc).
I'm interested. Any links with benchmarks or example applications demonstrating the difference?
It_is_ hard - there's a typo in it "satifies".
Home solar saving the day for my neighbors in Houston today, actually.
Judging from the Github links posted, this list looks fairly out of date. Many of these organizations no longer exist, switched away from using D and heck, one of them isn't an organization but just a guy's solo project.
That was what mozilla did when they had resources to do so... now I think they have a different tactic but if you obfuscate it they require a full unadulterated source code link. google operate(d/s?) on the permissive model where you pay for a small membership and then they let you put it up unrestricted and if it gets too many reports it gets pulled. I think mozilla has the slight edge personally but either way i'd be wary of installing extensions willy nilly.
French fries are not people or ideas, are they?
It's IFTTT as a wearable...only expensive, dumber and likely an ethical/legal morass waiting to happen.
The reason this might be 'climate change' related is because the warming Arctic is impacting on the jet stream, which then leads to these unexpected hot/cold events:

https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/03/07/climate-change-may-...

The slowing of the jet stream, therefore, could cause weather patterns to remain in place for longer, resulting in prolonged heat waves or cold snaps.
I’ve enjoyed many of pg’s essays, but this is my favourite of all time.

I often feel burned out and uninspired these days, even after past successes. It’s wonderful to take a look back at a time when overly ambitious ideas would be naively pursued, unrelated hobbies would prove fruitful in unexpected ways, and to remember that inspiration can be found again many times through the course of life.

Thank you pg.
Hedge fund Alden to buy Tribune Publishing in deal valued at $630M
If "you won't have to use it" is something people accepted then wouldn't everyone stick with kitchensink languages like C++ instead of coming up with new "clean" ones like Python, Java, C#, etc? :-P
Right Wingers don't care about solutions, just their narrative. So windmills are to blame and the gas plants are okay.
Every package manage is a horrible vulnerability (along with being a useful tool). When you package a webapp:
- Debian
- Maven
- NPM
- On the dev machines: Brew, Chrome extensions...

Aren’t they very easy to exploit, for a mildly dedicated actor? I don’t see any decent solution to this. Any line could contain a wget | bash...
Trump was a beast for the ages.

AOC is closer to a regular ol' populist. Note how she and Cruz were the first to join the ranks of angry people online in lambasting Robinhood before they could explain themselves in the GME debacle.
Or A tier people like Andrej Karpathy and Justin Johnson holding a paper reading club.

But mostly what you said.
It was the first of its kind. And it does not have any major flaws.
There is a word for "lack of belief"... Agnostic.
Programming paradigms are all very much different sides of the same n-sided coin. One thing that's quite interesting to me about Factorio is how intelligent components like inserters are - they refuse to accept materials that their destination won't accept so one parallel in Factorio that isn't going to be matched by most views of functional programming is that you have an input of {{Gear, Gear, Iron Plate, Wire, Wire, Turret, Assembler, CPU}, {Coal, Coal, Coal, Wooden Chest, Ammo, Wire}} and an Assembler with Inserter setup to build Inserters - given that belt state prior to execution then you will apply that function and end up with a belt state like: {{Gear, Wire, Wire, Turret, Assembler}, {Coal, Coal, Coal, Wooden Chest, Ammo, Wire}} and a produced Inserter.

Factorio is incredibly resilient to mistakes which is a bit odd in that style of game - normally bad input in an assembly line game like that will result in a system freeze but Factorio just shrugs and keeps on keeping on.
Adding more wind capacity doesn't help because you still need a substitute for when it isn't windy.

As far as I can tell we still don't have reasonable grid-scale power storage and until we do increasing the ratio of intermittent generation capacity (wind, solar) to non-intermittent generation (hydro/gas/coal/nuclear) will increase the probability of not being able to meet demand at times (all other things remaining unchanged).
I've read Marcuse and I'm a little disappointed that, even in the excerpt posted here, the author hasn't elucidated why he thinks Marcuse was a pseudo-intellectual, nor has he substantiated the claim that his essay published in a book of three essays on critique of tolerance was as influential as he claims, especially outside academia. There were far more potent and forceful critiques of liberalism and particularly of free speech. It would be more accurate to say Catherine MacKinnon with her idea of speech that silences - and the modern litetature against free speech based of the development of her theory by Langton and Hornsby since 2000 have been far more influential.

If you want to read about Marcuse's actual philosophy written by someone with an expertise in philosophy rather than a blogger with an axe to grind, check out the article on him of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/
GridPlus Lattice1
You know you can shift AC phase, right? That “out of sync” article doesn't seem right.
I'm not saying its bad for the people with solar, I'm saying everyone else suffers because of the people with solar.
That doesn't seem hugely staged.

If you've got a park that's the "default" wedding place, you could well reliably predict newlyweds there during wedding season without having to explicitly place them. Or you could be aware of a public reservation list-- something you see in plenty of Western cities-- for each of the sites you're visting.
By the time you understand Bitcoin/crypto, it will be too late for you to make profit from it. Get in now - lot more smarter people are in there and doing wonders for themselves. Look at your friends. Look at colleagues in your company. A lot of them are in. And here you are trying to make sense of it from your perspective. Even Ray Dalio is opening up and fair to say he knows a lot more things about finance and economics than you. Just get in.
It was posted as it's own story here, but it's mildly fascinating to watch the demand versus supply figures from Ercot. And the demand, I assume, doesn't include those places currently without power. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

As I post this, demand is 99+% of supply, and the outside temps are dropping.
You're missing my point. There are people sneaking downright weird shit into kids' feeds on Youtube.

https://www.theverge.com/culture/2017/11/21/16685874/kids-yo...

The difference between brothers Grimm or old Disney films and this is coherence, and possibly motive. At the very least they are trying to tell a story of some kind. But this stuff is closer to porn (except its surreal? instead of titillating), and the motive is unknown.

It's totally different and a new thing compared to the 60s/70s/80s kids argument.
The landing animation video (2/3 way down in article) is really amazing.
Yeah, that's a good point. Ethanol from corn in particular doesn't have a great reputation.
same. thanks pg
Nah it's because the plants are literally freezing up.
dup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26160028
Nuclear relies on water for cooling, which froze in at least one plant.
The KGB were unfortunately extremely good at the real deal - they were probably just as mad but when the fabric of the country effectively is Chekism these things come easily.

The KGB were at one point convinced that NATO were planning a preemptive strike because the lights were on at 10PM in Whitehall - the more astute reader may correctly guess this was actually due to the cleaners.
The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more locally." No, having stronger, longer distance connections is what makes you more resilient, at least when there are local problems.
Ah, the days when memes were actually funny
Not sure why you would use C# when you can use Dlang?
This confused me as well. In the article, there's the criticism that by not being allowed to charge for electricity what it cost to generate, producers have fallen behind on maintenance of their plants. But I don't see how that follows from deregulation. When I think deregulation, I think something more akin to, "Alright boys, you're on your own. Ya'll will live and die by your ability to profitably generate the power people need and want, and deliver it how they need and want. Don't get lazy now, or some whippersnapper will buy your infrastructure for pennies on the dollar after they bankrupt you because all your customers went for their better customer service."

Not being allowed to charge actual cost of production strikes me as something that would come of price controls, which are a kind of regulation, not deregulation.
Did you read the article? From the first paragraph...

> The North Dakota state senate voted 36-11 on Tuesday not to pass a bill that would have required app stores to enable software developers to use their own payment processing software and avoid fees charged by Apple and Google.

You can keep your walled garden and still allow app developers to use a third party payment processer.
Just on the topic of Haskell - if you ever do want to give it a go there is an infinitely entertaining book out there called Learn You a Haskell for Great Good![1] that I'd highly recommend.

1. http://learnyouahaskell.com/
Rolling outages work when you need to shed 1% of your load, not when you need to shed 80% of it. If Austin is down to critical loads only (hospitals or whatever) there may not be anything left to rotate.
That's an incredibly bad take.
It does look like they intended to roll, then figured out they didn't have enough capacity to roll. So, the people "rolled" first got stuck.
"Bitcoin isn't a particularly good store of value because the price is driven purely by demand, which is currently in a state of market mania. It's not even the first market mania around Bitcoin. Past bubbles were also met with a "this time it's different" attitude before the inevitable sharp losses."

This is true, but the bottom at which people value bitcoin continues to rise significantly over time. Yes there are crazy bull cycles and bear markets that make the price highly volatile, but even people who bought at the absolute worst time 3 years ago, at $20k, before the price tanked by 80%, are currently nearly at 150% profit.

The price continues to be volatile yet less and less risky and overall trending upwards.