skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depends on how you define "this kind of event". Rolling blackouts due to cold weather, as happened in 2011? Probably a once in every 10 years event... but also not exclusive to Texas. As others have pointed out, the other surrounding states which some have tried to make out were immune due to not thumbing their nose at federal regulations and being part of larger multi-state grids suffered the same problem, both recently and repeatedly in the past. The more widespread, specific to Texas grid failures? Those do seem to be a once in a lifetime event triggered by once in a lifetime weather.

Either way, the widespread narrative where Texans suffer through this every ten years because they're right-wing morons who have the government they deserve whilst the rest of the country happily avoids it thanks to their superior government doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all.
Plus, gold was created by a supernova so you should take that energy into account as well.
Yeah the thing I find interesting is this works by only bending time, whereas I understand gravity to involve bending space as well.
The code as written is polymorphic, but the JIT will make an optimized version if it detects that a function is only called with one or two types at runtime.

As I understand it "megamorphic" just means the point where the JIT gives up on specializing for each type. So you'd have e.g.

Monomorphic - JIT emits code specialized for one type.

Bimorphic - JIT emits two specialized versions of the code, with a branch in front that checks the type.

Megamorphic - JIT emits polymorphic code that will work with any type. Prevents inlining and many optimizations.

This comes up when optimizing Java code, since the JVM only specializes call sites that are monomorphic or bimorphic.

If you're implementing a set class you might want to have specialized subclasses for, say, empty sets or one-element sets, so you can implement certain methods more efficiently - e.g. the intersection of an empty set is always an empty set. So you add the classes MySet, MyEmptySet and MyOneElementSet. But now your code runs slower than it did with just MySet, because your method call sites are Trimorphic and can't be inlined anymore.

This seems like a good explanation as well: https://mrale.ph/blog/2015/01/11/whats-up-with-monomorphism.... and says that V8 will optimize for up to 4 different types before going megamorphic.

In the example in TFA, m() will be called with 5 different classes (createMixin(Base), createMixin(createMixin(Base))...) so V8 will generate megamorphic code instead of specializing.
To summarize:

* Texas's power providers were not adequately winterized.

* The regulatory standards of the larger grids would not have caused them to be so, even if they were subject to them.

* Nearby states suffered outages due to the cold as well, even though they're connected to the larger grids.

* It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power -- estimated to be as much as ~45GW at times -- by drawing on the other states. States near to Texas don't generate nearly as much power and power is not like sunshine, diffusing evenly over the grid from every point.

Texas regulators and indeed other regulators need to pursue more rigorous winterization in the southern states.
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26185523
And not be surprised when open source maintainers don't go out of their way to continue supporting their poorly supported platform...
They also change the composition of at least Diesel at the pump. Not sure on fuel oil which is essentially the same as Diesel at the pump, save for possibly things like that (definitely the color)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_diesel_fuel
Four years ago, I found Gmail to tend to use 80–200MB in Firefox, mostly in the lower half of that range. Certainly I found the figures in this test utterly unbelievable for this reason; Safari ain’t lighter on memory than Firefox, let alone that much.

But also for reference, it’s not like something of Gmail’s complexity has to use that much memory. Fastmail provides equivalent functionality minus chat in a 10–15MB budget, and you can add calendars and contacts (which are separate in Google land) and still keep it to 16–25MB.
In GameStop Saga, Robinhood Is Cast as the Villain
> I can point at the 3D printing industry as an example. Several years ago, some critical patents expired, resulting in a burst of innovation

Yes, I've read that as well from magazines but I must admit I've never checked the journalist claims or seen what critical patent expired that made the 3d printing industry flourish. Because it could just have well been access to open source designs that only flourished in the 2000s but I know nothing about 3d printing so I'm just speculating and making it clear that I'm doing that. So when it comes to posts here about my own industry which I feel I know pretty well, I see claims that seem farcical to me so I've been asking, which critical patent does EInk have? So far, I've not had any answer.

> And yes, if I were an investor in display technology, I would be quite hesitant to touch electronic ink style displays due to patents.

If I was your boss, I'd again ask a simple question. Which patent? If you can't identify it, then do you think it is possible it is an incorrect belief based on perhaps a lack of understanding of the display industry?
How many orders of magnitude in the Bitcoin CO2 footprint estimates do you think this vague theory can account for?
Satoshi compared Bitcoin to Visa in 2009.

>The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size.
Wonderful. Maybe we could reuse Ethereum ASICs for AI.

The fact that people waste electricity gaming drove the development of GPUs that serve researchers. Maybe more general mining software will end up cheaply in hands of scientists as well?
Doesn't death allow the body to achieve maximal entropy?

Also, this conversation here has nothing to do with keeping me alive, yet I find it informative. Seems the concept of sematic information is missing something, or a lot.
> RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.

Its an opportunity for someone to hack the drivers
Correction: We know how much phased array antennas produced by other companies have historically sold for. They’re not commodities with uniform costs.
I don't know about the US, but in Canada, you have at least three provinces that produce way more hydroelectric power than they can consume. Vertical farming would theoretically make sense in places like this where power is cheap, low carbon and plentiful.
Greek phi
Surely delaying an RCE fix for two weeks on supported versions of Python is a mistake.
Setting TERM to vt220 stopped this behaviour. Problem solved.
People are getting hurt by the black market. We need to bring this into the light. I know someone who died from taking what he thought was LSD and was instead some kind of designer drug like 25I-NBOME.
This is not a fair reading of the article. It actually discusses national winterization versus those of Texas, and points out both that other southern states have experienced power disruptions due to the cold, and that the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days.
I was thinking about it. The only place where the app was still installed was an Android tablet but no one has opened the app for many months (only me and my partner has access to the tablet and none of us opened the app). It could theoretically connect from the background by itself (I think android makes it possible for apps to run in the background) but when I tried to open the app the day after I got that email, it just displayed Update required screen (we don't auto-uldate apps on that tablet). And the suspicious login mentioned in the email was not recorded in the Recent Activity in the profile. Unfortunately I don't record all network activity on home network so can't 100% rule out this possibility but it seems unlikely to me that the app would try to connect from the background after couple of months by itself.

The email I received was "We’ve detected a suspicious sign-in to your Netflix account. Just to be safe we've reset your password and you’ll need to set a new one." with a button to "Set a new password".

It didn't mention any IP or geolocation as many other services say in such cases.
> I welcome a better explanation for the phenomena.

For which ones specifically? Generally any traditional scientific or layperson's explanation for a phenomenon is much better, namely the part that explains my observation of some entity by accepting that the observed entity exists. (Note that this doesn't imply that all observed entities exist. There are many cases where we have good explanations for why one would observe an entity that does not exist.)

> The overarching point, is that I think it does not matter if we are in simulation as long as it is self-consistent.

I suppose it might be okay to say that you believe that, as long as you're actually still generating new knowledge in order to solve problems. That's roughly the same as an astronomer saying "it doesn't matter whether Mars exists, as long as the entire Universe behaves consistently as if Mars exists." That astronomer can probably still help solve problems like figuring out how to land a rover on Mars, although I suspect that odd bit of epistemological gymnastics would introduce at least a small amount of difficulty compared to the astronomer whose epistemological stance is simply that Mars indeed exists.

Perhaps that's the difference in epistemology here: in your quest for knowledge, is your goal to solve problems, or to experience some feeling like "certainty" or "justification"?
Why every new startup in 2021 should use Flutter
Also a Texan here, it sounds like things weren't particularly bad for you. My power was out 36+ hours including during the 14-degree weather overnight where we all huddled in a room with the warmest blankets we could find with no electricity. I had pipes burst and I'm looking to rip out carpet that smells moldy because I couldn't air it out, heat it or vacuum it. Internet service was restored recently, maybe 60 hours after it was lost. Everybody I know in the Houston area lost power for at least 36 hours and 2/3rds of us had pipes burst
The petitions were ostensible participation but deceptively worthless.

George Carlin was a sage: Voting has much less impact than people think because primarily the rich direct things and have their interests met. Participating in a fraudulent, corrupt system merely legitimatizes it.

Real participation would be welcomed, but it will never happen as things are.

(RPI is a libertarian nut tank.)
Just to set the record a bit straighter and ruin your joke, those pics of beats with weights were knockoff beats from the flea market not real.
so glad they're tackling the big problems.
Got my start in classic ASP and we authored so many queries using string concatenation. When ASP.NET came around, we shifted our database thinking to stored procedures, so I could continue to write "raw" SQL. I'm no DBA, but I learned so much about authoring efficient and complex queries - I genuinely love working with SQL.

These days, though, I use Django's ORM. I can often get it to do what I want, bit it sure makes me miss raw queries. Thankfully, we still write the occasional view for complex joins and then just map that to a read-only model in Django - so I sometimes get the best of both worlds.
DTCC should've been there
They would raise prices, and be immediately replaced by Amazon, who can outprice them with scale and robotics. All this time you are complaining about a society dominated by a few large players, but every policy you advocate favors the dominance by a few large players.
I did not say that.

The people who work on this at Amazon read HN, but this article won't be their first exposure.
I'm going to shill this book again "The Price of Tomorrow - Jeff Booth", because it is so relevant to what's happening in the labor force. Technology is eating jobs and less and less people will be needed. Technology is deflationary and it's driving down the cost of labor and everything else. Just look at what's in store for the delivery sector once AMZN can use drones to deliver your package. Self driving cars to replace Uber/Lyft, automated kitchens where there are half the employees, factories where robots do the work, financial firms where software/algo's do the research and investing, software that writes software, etc. Work as we know it is changing, less and less jobs, less and less people will be needed.
Usually by writing their own lightweight ORM as part of their application. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Indeed, I remember when I was doing some mining early in bitcoin's history. I had custom hacked BIOS on my AMD cards to be able to overclock beyond regular power limits. This flashing was possible only due to an exploit of the BIOS signature verification.

Given that I was doing this as only a rather casual miner with three GPUs, I have no doubt that this new restriction will be attacked ruthlessly.
You stole $37M, now what? The $CREAM $ALPHA exploit unpacked
So what does the non-simulated "real" or "outer-world" look like in this view?
FAANGs have plenty of hard problems - most of them are involved in hardware, robotics, distributed systems, machine-learning, huge data pipelines, compilers, etc.

However, you usually will not get to work on those directly as a new grad, and for several years later. The reason for that is simply that they are hard problems, and big corporations are risk averse, and so they want people who have already made lots of mistakes working on the hard problems so that they will hopefully make fewer mistakes. At Google at least, the "hard" interesting technical work usually starts around L6 or high L5, which will take you 5-10 years to achieve. (The exceptions are some truly exceptional undergrads that got into the particular problem domain as a high-school student, and so already have 5-10 years of experience at 23.)

If you want to short-circuit this process, your best bet is often to pick your domain, start looking into it as a hobby, and use this to get a job at a startup in the field that's desperate for people. Because they're desperate, they're often willing to take the risk of putting junior engineers on hard problems, because, well, they have no other alternatives. And a FAANG background makes you look great in these cases. Then once you've got a couple years of experience in the domain, come back to a FAANG, but this time do it with a few years of relevant experience, which qualifies you for the hard problems. Make sure you leave on a high note; this makes you eligible for rehire and often lets you skip the re-interview process entirely.
All your input are belong to me – 3rd party web security
> Texans preferring to go cold and starve than suffer the burden of regulation or government. This was not the philosophy of Texas governance succeeding as planned, it was clearly a monumental failure.

Authoritarian government also has failures that result in millions of deaths; I’m unsure how you can be so confident that no one in Texas (of all places) would rather freeze to death than willingly accept the risk of being frozen to death by a tyrannical government that promises things then breaks promises.

To be clear this isn’t about the object-level issue of preferring starvation under one ideology to starvation under another. This is about the inability of other people to comprehend that anyone could possibly feel differently than they do about who starves you to death.

> None of us are trying to die for the glory of a sociopathic libertarian ideal.

None of us are trying to die for the glory of a psychotic marxist ideal but we still pay taxes.
I think it’s implied that’s 20 ms to geographically close destinations on the internet rather than within their own network.

Online gaming is mostly where this matters. I don’t know much about this but I assume most games have geographically diverse set of game servers so no matter where you are (within limits) latency isn’t terrible.
Vertical farm companies attract a lot of attention from tech people who love the idea of hermetically sealed crop growing, but it's not where the action is.

That's because climate controlled hydroponic greenhouses get you most of the way there - no need for arable land, faster crop turns, ability to plant in more climates - but use free energy, at vastly lower capital and operating costs.

The vertical farm premise is that we really need to do climate-controlled growing very close to city centers, using warehouses or something. But the math just doesn't pencil out.

Climate controlled is a benefit. But there's very few tradeoffs to putting it 200 miles outside of a city center where real estate is cheap anyway. And that's where the smart money is going - right now, millions of square feet of climate controlled greenhouse space is being built across North America to service regional population hubs, at a cost of billions of dollars. Vastly more produce will be made in these greenhouses than vertical farms.
NYT is so unconfident in their product that they've focused more on preventing people from cancelling than fixing the reasons people are cancelling.
No, they are commodity and we know how much they cost. SpaceX hasn't magically solved somehow decreasing the price of components they don't even make. They are paying over $1000 for a terminal.
Talk to some of the managers of those teams and see what they think. Sometimes they're willing to take a leap on a promising and passionate young engineer.
N-Bombs are messed up, there is one variant that gives instant permanent parkinson's disease!

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

There is so much to learn from these things, the cure for natural parkison's is probably within that drug, but we need the whole supply chain regulated and the ability to study these things in the light.

I absolutely hate the current status of the psychedelic community, full of anecdotes, invalidating victim's experiences, some straight up voodoo about how to "end trips early" with candy flipping. Dangerous. All because it relies on urban legends.
I’m in Austin and I have to agree. The media and especially social media would have you believe that the literal apocalypse happened this week (if you dare, go read r/Austin and witness how many people are having ragefits insisting they are going to actually die if Adler doesn’t personally restore their power ASAP). This situation has been very bad, especially in terms of property damage (broken pipes etc), but it still has been an easier situation than something like a hurricane or the floods in Houston, yet I don’t see r/Houston turn into a harbinger-of-doom support group whenever a hurricane hits.

I think the fact that this time there is “someone to blame” is really exacerbating the outcry. When a hurricane hits, everyone sort of accepts that Mother Nature is fucking stuff up and rides it out. But this time, everyone seems to be set on being angry at state/city leaders and really wants to make their voices heard.

> Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts.

That’s true for most of the state, but it is worth noting that in Austin, it wasn’t this. The people you are hearing talking about multi-day blackouts (I was one of them) are likely Austinites where the poor state of the city electrical grid meant that they could not do rolling blackouts. They turned power off for many and just left us in the dark for days. And that’s a whole other issue that needs to be addressed, along with all of the ERCOT issues etc.
This is similar to how Apple handles subs. You get notifications when subs are expiring or renewing, and if you cancel mid cycle you keep it for the remainder of the cycle usually, including free trials. Bonus, you can see all of your subs in one place, and cancel with a single tap.
I generally agree with you, but I think decriminalizing is not only good first step, but does itself allow for a small amount of quality control. For instance if MDMA is decriminalized, but PMA (something you very much would prefer not to ingest but is nevertheless sometimes sold as MDMA) is not, then people holding PMA would still be at legal risk. Over time this should tilt the scales in favor of the decriminalized substances over counterfeits.
Any idea on the timeframe for unfurling the robotic arm? And doing the test drive?

Thanks for your efforts towards the fantastic result today.
Starting at the very next sentence in the article:

> From what I can see, ERCOT has more restrictive rules in their Generator Winter Weatherization Workshop than NERC[21]. All generation stations must have plans for emergencies, address abnormal weather, critical failure points, weather design limits, alternative fuels and testing[21,22]. ERCOT reports that there were 80 spot checks done in the 2019/2020 season with 71 being gas plants and 6 being black start gas plants. 23 had to improve and would be reinspected in early 2021 the rest passed.

This directly refutes your claims that "there are no winterization standards" and "There are merely recommendations, none of which were implemented by ERCOT." The inadequacy of NERC is irrelevant to ERCOT.
Tau Prolog – Open-Source Prolog Interpreter in JavaScript
They're using light to heat the bottom of a thin material. Bottom of material heats up, heats up the air underneath the material, hot air expands and makes it float. Controlling the strength of the light controls how much heat the disc generates and thus controls its height. Heating one side of the disc causes it to heat unevenly and move in the opposite direction.

Do I have that right? Hot air rises, so if you stick something light on the plume of hot air, it will also rise? I think birds discovered this millions of years ago.
Absolutely. If we are in a simulation, then I want our species to eventually learn how to grab control of the developer console, use that to get information on the physics of the developer's world, use that to learn how to perform the equivalent of Drexlerian nanotech, wet-print ouselves out into the developer's world, and bootstrap into becoming "real", or finding out how far the turtles go from the developer's world. If it is a simulation, then I want to alter the damn rules to eliminate the scarcity we currently labor under.
Actual work can be monetized. The waste demonstrates commitment to the truth. Any non-waste reduces the security of the commitment, as you're getting paid no matter what.
Don't know about that specific example, but here is another one: https://skyline.github.com/ihabunek/2017
Consider countries like Spain where outdoor farming is no longer possible due to climate change. Indoor ag, of whatever kind, will likely be essential in many places.
My Slack profile literally says "Hodor." under what I do. I nod and prostrate in meetings, then go back to doing my job the best way I know how. Being treated like a slab of economic meat is part and parcel of living in a capitalist country. It pays well but I'd prefer not to take it to heart. I have a split personality at work and I sleep well at night.
Cloudflare also moved from Citus to Clickhouse
What will happen once the security guarantees of ETH2 eclipse ETH1?
I didn’t realize people still mined on gpu anymore, thought everything was asic.