skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Weird how many people are defending this price when it's clear they sold it to everyone else for 1/3 the cost.

How is this not just an obvious example of profiteering? Yeah they made something valuable, they should be rewarded, but also people are dying.

Plus they are going to be making money from this for YEARS. No-one thinks Covid can be eradicated, we're going to be buying an annual vaccine from these companies for the foreseeable future - this is why AstraZeneca were happy making no profit now - they know they'll make some money eventually.

Also another thing to bear in mind - one of the purposes of their new RNA vaccine tech was to make vaccines CHEAPER.
For me everything i do is about productivity, but that's because i have more things i'm interested in than i have time or energy.

My play time is 100% about maximizing my enjoyment and regeneration, to get me back to doing the things i really enjoy doing. Even my casual, lounge time is a calculated effort at that.

Now hopefully i have a healthy balance. I don't work myself too hard because i don't want to burn out. I'm also less productive if i'm burning out.

But yea. I just enjoy building things. It's who i am. If i had one wish it would be to not need sleep. With those extra hours i'd learn to woodwork or something physical, but still build - create.

My only regret is that my ability to build (software) is limited per day, and i give a significant portion of that to the necessities of life. Aka work. It's not making me rich, nor is it things i truly want to solve. But hey, i still enjoy it - and for that i am truly fortunate.

After seeing what my wife went through working retail; I can't imagine having to work retail. It was awful.
It's the only way to increase the net standard of living, and richer, healthier, more comfortable conditions is generally a common human interest.

We could have stopped increasing our productivity in 1820, but I doubt most people today would like living at an 1820s standard, and in 200 years time, I think people will be glad they aren't living at a 2020's standard.
Me too, but I desperately want real metrics that demonstrate real work being completed against a project. Otherwise, my darker side fears it is the end of the industry as we know it.

Specifically I'd like to see us semantically identifying code objects and rather than doing commits in lines of code or whatever, print things out like "submitted a highly connected object" or "made amendments to some fields on a class" or "updates comments in a text file".

The current GitHub metrics reflect all of these changes as identical little "events of participation" but they're not indicative of the amount of work or effort put in to them.
> thus it is incorrect to say that the free market will solve the issue.

Are you arguing with yourself now?

This is your text (emphasis mine): "And frankly, there will not be more mobile platforms because even the current two is already much for companies to develop for. Free market doesn’t work that way."
> article doesn't even bother to identify the court case

The court case is public record.
I think (I hope!) it's pointed at the Texas representatives who have used every natural disaster in blue states to talk about how the opposition can't govern, and not the common Texan who votes for them.
IMO you should never be shocked by what you read on social media, if you keep in mind that you are seeing the most shocking of the millions of reactions to recent events. The way retweets on Twitter work mean that the most interesting tweets get distributed widely and are more likely to end up in the average user’s timeline. That means that your timeline is going to show you a lot of stuff that’s not representative of the average person’s reaction, which probably gives you an inaccurate view of public opinion. A lot of people will adopt views that they are presented as popular, so this can have the effect of making the most extreme views more prevalent. Then you hear your friends spouting insane conspiracy theories that were invented five hours ago, or proudly repeating clever jokes to spit on the graves of the recently deceased.

Of course, it’s not just Twitter that has this effect. Political commentary shows on TV and radio have been doing this professionally for decades, newspapers did it before that, and politicians probably invented the practice. I do think that social media, by drawing from such a large sample of posters, can find more extreme takes phrased in a more compelling way, and deliver them to people are weren’t event looking for political content.
So, you take this "general purpose model" (with a huge corpus of standard text) and you attempt to use it for a narrow purpose. The model requires a lot of prompt tweaking and other things for this narrow model but eventually you "make it work".

How do you know you're not just "programming" a chatbot (by indirectly filtering for the text-pieces you want) but in the most indirect and unguaranteed fashion possible? I suppose the advantage is you can say "look, it's intelligent".
Pulling the download isn't sufficient if it has already been downloaded - either they have to offer the source to everyone who downloaded, or they have infringed copyright by this distribution and can be justifiably sued for that.

However, this article implies that nobody really cares about them releasing the source, as it seems that it does not have any interesting improvements.
Let's see how he ends up in 10 years. Better yet, let's ask his wife and kids if they agree.

Maybe he is the one out of 100k who can manage a Heroin habit. Well good for him, he can keep it to himself.
Countries (governments) have to service the debt, that is pay interest on it. More money into that, means less money into regular spending (infrastructure etc). This in turn may mean austerity.
Secondary Markets
Someone on ars said its Delphi. But I don't have a ton of faith in ars commenters.
I don't know about "you deserve it," but this whole shit show is certainly a huge failure of government to do basic things, like invest in, and maintain infrastructure. [0]

For example, Rick Perry, former Texas governor and Trump administration Secretary of Energy says “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business." [1] It seems to me that many Texans disagree.

I get that Republicans are theoretically in favor of small government and minimal regulation (although you wouldn't know it by the way the Federal bureaucracy has expanded under Republican presidential administrations). There is a certain sort of logic to that position, which I won't delve deeply into, but I do want to acknowledge. But, if there ever was a place for government regulation, a public utility that serves the entire state (the Texas power grid) is certainly one of them. Republicans are doing themselves no favors politically by saying things like this while millions of Texans are out of power, and basically making caricatures out of themselves.

---

[0]: Just for the sake of fairness, I will mention that PG&E is not great on this front, either, but they're not the subject of this article, after all.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/18/rick-perry-t...
A GeForce will have much more resale value than a mining-specific card once mining becomes unprofitable or the next generation of cards come along
This article is light on the details about this being a GPL license violation or not. The final paragraph also makes it sound like Stockfish is under a permissive license (only requiring attribution) when in fact it's licensed under the copyleft GPLv3.
Ted Cruz voted against aid for the NE after Hurricane Sandy and was pretty quick to ask for FEMA assistance after both Hurricane Harvey and this self-inflicted catastrophe.

Some people deserve it. He's one of them.
Although labor market recomposition plays a role. There's a major shortage of semi-skilled blue collar labor, leading to some of the strongest wage increases of any sectors in 2020. This includes construction[1], manufacturing[2], and logistics[3]. These workforces tend to skew older, and hence were more affected by workers dropping out due to Covid fears.

Unlike traditional white collar professions, these are industries where workers are likely to take a second job. Particularly during boom periods when pay is attractive. It's very likely that at least some of the increase in second jobs is driven by rising secular wages in semi-skilled blue collar jobs.

[1]https://www.tradesmeninternational.com/news-events/the-const...
[2]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/11/manufacturing...
[3]https://www.joc.com/port-news/us-ports/warehouse-worker-scar...
Nobody is ever against it, until they realize that money spent on infrastructure is money not spent on something else. Do you use the infrastructure money on less police, less education or less healthcare? This is an intentionally provocative statement of course, but somehow you will need to make choices on how to fund it and there are (extremely solidly) entrenched players all over the field. Even worse, most of the entrenched players actually have good points.
would dust stay in the air longer or shorter than on Earth?

also is it technically correct to call the Martian atmosphere "air"?
It all depends on availability - if there are no more CMP cards available, but GeForce cards are still around and there's a known good cracked driver for them, this won't even be a question.

Miners don't care about driver updates so it's really a one-off, not endless, once it's running they don't have to touch it.
Most people don’t realize how toothless ERCOT and MISO are.

What enforcement mechanisms do the grid operators have?

I’m under NDA so I can’t go into detail. I can say everybody at the ISO’s are just trying to hang on. The do a fantastic job. They don’t control spending on grid infra.
They did not have electricity to begin with.
Pretty much all new commercial jets have an autoland mode. If something happens to the pilots get into the cockpit (this is the hard part!) fast put on a headset, find the push to talk button and yell help. You need to be fast enough that the radio frequency to use hasn't changed (this is almost as hard as getting in!) as the plane moved on, but if you get a response whoever it is will get in contact with control for you and from there on they will tell you what buttons to push.

Of course if you are in an old airplane (private plane, or legally retired but still in use in some poor country) all bets are off.
And there was a confirmation window in the software, it just didn't distinguish between some and all of the funds being wired out of the bank.

> Raj then proceeded with the final steps to approve the transfers, which prompted a warning on his computer screen — referred to as a “stop sign” — stating: “Account used is Wire Account and Funds will be sent out of the bank. Do you want to continue?” But “[t]he ‘stop sign’ did not indicate the amount that would be ‘sent out of the bank,’ or whether it constituted an amount equal to the intended interest payment, an amount equal to the outstanding principal on the loan, or a total of both.”

(from the judge's opinion, via Matt Levine and Bloomberg)
Currently rewriting a bunch of stuff in Oracle Forms 6i to .NET 5, definitely looks like Oracle Forms 6
To be fair, there was a large influx of people to Texas recently. Plus the lowest temperatures in 30 years.

Not an excuse, per se, but it makes sense things were stretched. Personally, I live in Illinois, we use nuclear power and have to say I'm very pro-nuclear. Wind can stop, solar causes a lot of environmental damage (mining, producing, shipping, etc). Nuclear has minimal risks and produces a lot of energy for minimal pollution. I'd love to see some deregulation (still keep safety) and investment.

For reference, you can see energy costs yourself

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/

And production:

https://www.eia.gov/state/
If diversity just a euphemism for "non-white", then NYC is as diverse as Atlanta - both with about 40% white population and 60% non-white. NYC is far more diverse than America as a whole - 30% fewer whites, 2x more blacks, and 80% more Latinos, 3x more Asians, and 10x more Jews than one would expect from America's overall demographics.

In fact, by most measures NYC is more diverse than Atlanta. Atlanta is for the most part whites+blacks, whereas NY has an actual latino and asian population.
Given that they were already stuck with the hardware, is it possible that an optimistic approach was a reasonable way to manage the grid? Constantly monitor the status, be ready to shut down parts at any moment, but hope that you won't need to?

I do not know the answer to this question. I know nothing about power grids. However, if they were following such a strategy, it's not surprising that they would end up disabling the system "seconds and minutes away from a catastrophic failure". That does not make the shutdown a last-minute precarious decision. It could be a preplanned response to a certain combination of failure conditions.

The article fails to disambiguate between "react quickly with a planned decision" and "react quickly after analyzing the whole situation from scratch". The latter makes the operator seem more heroic.

I agree with nimbius that some of the quotes lean towards the latter, but it would be better if the article removed the ambiguity.
Are greenhouses in deserts harder to build or maintain than PV farms and power lines in the same desert?

Not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don’t know. I assume it varies by desert, but farming and power are both way out of my domain.
There is nothing simple. You just have to accept this. It’s really appealing to create the perfect system, but it is just not going to happen. I’m sorry. It’s not going to happen.
Data Science Courses That Range from Free to Paid
Even in Texas? They seem to have built everything in this saga to a fairly low standard.
Making Peace with Nature
Here's a really excellent video that answers all your questions: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM

TL;DW: Martian atmosphere is so sparse that it's equivalent to flying at 100,000 feet on Earth. (The altitude record on Earth is 85,000 feet, set by the SR-71.) In order to fly at all the blades have to spin at nearly the (Martian) speed of sound. The drone wouldn't fly on Earth because the atmosphere is so dense that the blades would never make it up to speed.
The fact of the matter is that those in charge, who made the decisions that led to this, are at best, "suffering" political consequences. They aren't suffering the same way that the people of Texas are suffering.
They seriously should have just auctioned off doses. Have someone take the political heat for it, but with people bidding up doses like Hamilton tickets, you can bet distribution would have been better, there would be only one specific complaint about "fairness," and the price would signal that it's desirable.
Because rooftop hydroponic farms have to be tended to almost daily, or at least for planting/harvesting. Solar panels don't need nearly as much maintenance and allow you to concentrate the actual growing operations for the economies of scale.

Do you mind if I ask why you're so against the idea?
Texas is NOT anti-renewables.

We're #2 in the US for solar[0], #1 for wind[1], and #5 for nuclear[2] with roughly 25% of our power coming from wind alone.

Unfortunately, since weather like this doesn't occur very often (every ~60-100 years), the wind turbines aren't weatherized as they are in Canada and elsewhere. When half of that went offline on Sunday morning, it fell to natural gas to make up the difference. When the temperature continued dropping, the gas flowed more slowly and couldn't keep the right pressure levels, removing roughly a third of that production.

To be fair, your criticism would be more useful if it was built on facts.

0 - https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/solar-energy-produc...

1 - https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/wind-generation-by-...

2 - https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/nuclear-generation-...
Gaulish being around in the 9th or 10th centuries is a bit fanciful. As far as I know direct sightings end during the 5th century and circumstantial evidence ends during the 6th c., at the same time Christianity became truly ubiquitous even in remote areas and Latin was solidified as the only cultural language. It makes little sense for Gaulish to have survived much longer.

There's certainly a case to be made for some dialects of Breton having a Gaulish substrate (after all Gallo-Romance languages all have it and that mutation occurred around the time Bretons migrated into Gaul).
> how you get rich as an employee

How do you get rich as an employee then? Because I've never heard of any salaried line engineer getting rich except through winning the startup lottery. I sure have friends who have done exceptionally well by working for the right startup with the right acquisition however.

Even Google engineers don't feel rich when they have to stretch to afford the down payment on a house in Mountain View.
Is mining a viable investment?
For years and years GOP policies in the state have led to an apparent reduction in costs for utilities but, in actuality, what was actually being skimped on was the system resiliency. Spending money on maintaining and improving infrastructure is always important and it requires a constant supply of revenue to ensure that utilities are able to withstand events such as these.

Additionally - a lack of regulation heavily failed Texans. There are ways to weatherize wind turbines to operate in the cold properly but Texas long ago stripped these away.

This is a tragedy and many folks in Texas are feeling a lot of pain right now, it's not the time to guilt over politics but it is a good time to realize that moving forward social services do need more a reasonable level of support.
Expert Advice for the New Intel CEO
I think in many English speaking countries there is little understanding that these are actually distinct characters in other countries.

It also seems popular to use the Danish/Norwegian ø instead of o, one example is an energy drink called mønster.

I think they meant to write monster but tried to be cool, however mønster is a real word in Norwegian that translates to the English "pattern". Monster in Norwegian is the same as monster in English.

For reference, ø sounds like the i in the English word bird or e in herd or herbs.
Unsecure gRPC Implementations Can Compromise APIs
You put the answer right in your post. Russia regularly sees weather like this. This is a rare/ record breaking event in Texas.
> I'm surprised there aren't more independent apps geared towards maximizing earning for drivers. Like it can't be that hard to create an artificial surge price if there's enough coordination between most regular drivers at popular spots (e.g. airports).

Wouldn't an app be relatively easy for Uber to monitor and subvert?

Drivers are already sometimes coordinating to create surge pricing, and they don't need an app to do it: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/uber-lyft-drivers-artificia...:

> While a reporter looked on, a group of about 50 drivers for both Lyft and Uber sat at their waiting area at Reagan National waiting while two drivers watched online to see when planes were about to land. After a plane lands, a lot of passengers request rideshare rides, which pushes demand up to begin with. But the drivers further tipped the imbalance between demand and supply by simultaneously turning off their apps five minutes before landing. Then two drivers stood at opposite ends of the waiting area, looking at the Uber and Lyft pricing for fares from the airport. They kept checking fares and watching the surge price increase until the fares were $13 higher than normal. At that point, they told the other drivers to turn their apps back on so they could begin accepting rides. The whole operation took less than two minutes, but now arriving passengers would pay around $13 more to reach their destinations.
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I don't know about commercial by 2030 but leap frogging ITER doesn't seem far fetched at all because of the all signficant advances in superconductors achieved after ITER was planned out. Also, if the new superconductors do work out, it's very likely that all other forms of energy generation and grid level storage will become almost immediately obsolete and any additional focus moving forward would be only on improving the efficiency of fusion. The remaining use cases for solar would probably then be on small off-grid type situations.
> The old system let them quickly navigate with the keyboard in seconds while talking to the patient.

Encountered a similar issue many years ago at a company trying to sell a new ad booking system to Titan - they had crufty old VT100 based systems, the new one was fancy AJAX HTML whizzbangs. Exactly the same result - they could handle 5 bookings on the old system in the time it took to do one on the new (which was also terrible and ugly besides slow.)
>an someone explain how "demand > supply" leads to things (apparently literally) blowing up?

Imagine hitting your car accelerator to the floor in neutral - things blow up when spun too fast.

This was what was going to happen to parts of the grid, and then the now higher per unit demand would blow another item, etc...

They had to disconnect things so this didn't happen.
We really should take the SpaceX approach. There is too much at stake on a singular multi-billion dollar rover landing on Mars every now and then. We need more funding so that we can send these things to Mars much more frequently and get samples back before my kids have their own kids.
The Second Life episode from “The Office” from the show and startup's POV
Politicians who let their constituents freeze to death deserve no sympathy. This isn't "just" a blackout people have already died from it.
FLEXCUBE code base is two decades' worth of hard coded decision trees. Fitting yet another decision tree in there might break something else for every single loan.
Why is this down voted? Things are incredibly unstable.

Further, while "increasing debt can be the sign of positive developments" it can also simply reflect a panic dropping rates to zero to try to bail out the boat. The big question is the utility of that debt. Is it being used to expand wealth or is it being consumed -- especially in buy-backs to artificially inflate stock prices?

This isn't rocket science. This isn't a good thing.
Replit raises $20M for collaborative browser-based coding
Similar post this reminded me of:

> Unplanned Freefall? Some Survival Tips (2001)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429863
The irony is that when apple moved into music they won the court case that they could not because of apple studios, they also got away with making the iphone, while their existed the cisco (?) iphone.

On the other hand apple goes after any little shop with a logo that looks remotely like a stylized fruit. I guess it's more about how big you are, not how right.
I was reading an article about the Z-Machine recently [1], and I was quite surprised that in addition to being a virtual machine, it also implemented virtual memory! Thus, pages could be swapped in and out of disk as needed. (Since CPUs like the 6502 didn't have a hardware MMU, I guess this was an explicit software step -- i.e. a called function that would check if the page was loaded, and if not, arrange for its load.)

With a virtual machine, virtual memory, and (for the time) a great natural language parser, it shows that the Infocom folks learned their craft in world of academia, high-end computer hardware, and ideas, instead of the more amateur (at the time) world of microcomputer enthusiasts.

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/zil-and-the-z-machine/
We'll do it the other way around since this one was posted earlier (and neither link is particularly informative, beyond the core bit of news).

Edit: whoops! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184190 is clearly where both threads should be merged. Doing that now.