skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, apparently this was all reviewed in 2011, after a million Texas homes lost power due to a cold snap, so indeed most of the problems today were not only foreseen long ago, they were experienced.

Since then I guess nobody bothered to do anything? Supposedly it's all described in this here document (I can't actually open it, probably because someone in ERCOT is real scared of GDPR): http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...

Here's a twitter thread by some rando who remembered what happened in 2011 and dug out the report: https://twitter.com/kidstatic/status/1361914818307981314?s=2...
You need to mentally downgrade your expectations of the WSJ editorial board; this isn’t new behavior at all. If you look for it, you’ll notice the naked contempt that the WSJ news side has for their editorial board, and occasionally post “yeah, those were all lies that the editorial board just said” pieces.
Upwork.com
The increase in surveillance states is potentially countered by the increased velocity by which ideas can spread and people can communicate with each other.

We don't yet know which way things will tip.
The perpetrator of the graffiti will be documented extensively, so while this might happen at first, when people realize it's a risky path to legal problems it'll probably die down.
F2P regulations have advanced rapidly in Asian countries and since the games have global audiences, everyone worldwide is now "benefitting" from the regulation. Boot up a gacha game and it will have guaranteed reward schedules, clearly explained drop rates, and caps on spend.

Retail games have had a ratings body and seller restrictions by age for decades now.

Considering video games have such stringent regulations on their design, in ways that make the design cost-prohibitive to tailor for different geographies; and content-based sales restrictions around the globe - it's safe to say that games are heavily regulated as well.

Fortnite sells skins directly without blind boxes, which is as tame as virtual goods come. As it happens, none of their virtual goods come anywhere close to F2P regulations. You could have an equivalent moral panic about Twitch chat emojis.

I guess my point is, how much regulation will it take before Fortnite isn't preying on children anymore? Is uncapped spend the problem? Should we limit the other kid hobbies as well? There's really nothing forcing them to stop buying pokemon cards, or comic books, or TV episodes, or toys they see in commercials.
It sounds like you're one of the relatively lucky ones. From what I've heard "rolling" blackouts are a misnomer for large swathes of the state, unless by "rolling" you mean "the blackout rolled in and never rolled out".

Good luck. I'd be glad to suffer short blackouts here if the grid were interconnected so we could share power with your state.
There is no such thing as cancel culture. It is a rhetorical device created to shift blame, allowing perpetrators of injustices to claim that they are really the victims.
Facebook blocks all Australia news, including from some govt agencies
Plenty of companies can make phones too, but it takes extreme time, effort, and talent to do so. It all depends on where you put the fertilizer - is the fertilizer company saying they should be able to set up a stall in the walmart parking lot, or are they saying Walmart is preventing them from setting up a store on their own land a hundred feet away from Walmart?
>If the left orthodoxy means treating people equally, sign me up.

If we all understand that this is actually (under the law) what MOST people want we'll be able to get along.

>What’s valuable about homophobia? What’s intellectually honest about hating people for their sexual orientation and advocating for discrimination against them?

I just started looking this up to write this comment. I was curious about it and I wanted to be as correct as I can. Ben Shapiro believes that contractually, under the law, homosexuality should be allowed. Full Stop. This is a very libertarian perspective. It's the idea that no matter what I personally believe due to my religion, you can and should be able to legally do what you want as long as it doesn't affect others (throwing that in for the abortion argument).

Personally, Ben Shapiro is a homophobe. Politically, he is not. He's pro-equality of opportunity and recognition under the law.

As someone who grew up really religious, I can understand how he justifies this idea. You are indoctrinated to hate the sin and love the sinner. This does not always come out the way it's supposed to, and leads to homophobia which I believe is evil and a reason I left religion. However, this dualism allows for one to strive for political equality, while still spouting homophobic ideas.

This is a very fine line to draw on a topic like this, but I think it's important for us to recognize if we're ever going to get less divided hateful towards each other. Most people, even bigots, racists, homophobes, etc. want equality. They want the government to give them the same rights as anyone else and to be left alone. They want their rallies, protests, sermons, etc. In order to get that they recognize (at least people like Shapiro do) that they need to fight a cultural war instead of a political one on this stuff.

It doesn't mean that those ideas are ok for people to personally have, but it does mean that we can work together to agree on a lot of shit, make progress.

tl;dr; Don't hate people on the other side of politics, talk to them.
It's about as trivial as problems get.
Nothing, this is a religious crusade, and facts don’t matter.

Apple needs to be tarred and feathered for its sins of taking a different path to the rest of the industry.
The list on Wikipedia is pretty neat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma

> One of the earliest uses of the trilemma formulation is that of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, rejecting the idea of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god (as summarised by David Hume).
Playing devil's advocate: If it bothers you enough, then don't buy an iPhone?
Well, only 1 of Texas' 4 plants is offline, so it's doing a heck of a lot better than natural gas.
The waste disposal problem isn't solved? What part of "Put it in a hole" isn't solved yet? The waste issue seems very well solved to me. Nuclear has been providing a fifth of US power for decades - and more in some other countries.

Better sensor maintenance and weatherproofing systems seem like they could solve the issue Texas faced with nuclear power. That seems like a much more minor change than figuring out how to solve the issues with gas, wind, or solar. Plus, as far as I can tell the problem was with a fifty year old power plant. If we had been building new nuclear plants and investing in them I bet we'd have better, more modular, and safer systems (that might not rely on a single safety sensor system like this).
In the analogy, Apple is Walmart. Could you explain what it means for Apple to be "mayor of the town"? Apple is not the mayor of any metaphorical town. They own a business.
Not terribly prescient. The current cold snap has even shut down coal and nuclear plants in Texas.
Facebook just blocked a bunch of government information pages (specifically health and fire departments), saying they are “news”. Stinks of retaliation.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/facebook-ban-hits-he...
I disagree in that I think neither position actually gets a "the system should do this" - Devs will put together a solution they think will fulfill a user request and QA has the difficult job of figuring out why-in-the-hell the dev thinks that's something a user will figure out. /s

More seriously there is a lot of differences between the two tracks but a QA person who can write clear and repeatable reproduction steps will save a company a whole bunch of dev hours and doing so usually requires a pretty good understanding of why the system is actually breaking.
Can you elaborate how the patent system is good in general, yet e-ink is abusing it in a unique way? I don’t have a ton of knowledge on patents or E-ink’s business practices.
The target audience of the WSJ has learned long time ago to treat the editorial board as the crazy uncle you ignore at Christmas gatherings. The WSJ has arguably the best news gathering organization in the US. Their editorial board is a joke in comparison and nobody takes them seriously. They usually take the side of the rich against anybody, so I am sure most old school WSJ readers appreciate that but that does not mean one should go as far as believing them.

It is not unusual for the news section and the editorial section to take completely opposing positions on an issue. (I think they did that this past summer on the issue of effectiveness of masks.)
I do think it's a silly argument that paying someone to do something means they're not freely consenting to do the thing. As long as it's not your fault that they're in a bad economic situation, all you're doing is offering them an option that they, by accepting it, believe to be an improvement over their current situation. People who don't like sweatshops should be removing all barriers to the setting up of more sweatshops, so that they will compete for workers and eventually have to improve working conditions or raise wages.

However, in this case, I suspect offering a monetary incentive wouldn't be necessary. Everyone knows about the terrible disease; just make a patriotic appeal and I expect you'd have plenty of unpaid volunteers.
This is cool. Can this be used for personal finance? I hate Mint and Personal Capital and am willing to pay for a developer friendly alternative.
I can only assume propaganda and fake news don't count. Any one have thoughts about that?
>Nobody in the establishment knew what the mechanization of death with automatic machine guns was going to be like.

Machine guns had already been employed extensively in colonial conflicts. Everyone was familiar with them and how they effected tactics. People just didn't know that a war with both sides having them combined with modern artillery would turn into an entrenched stalemate.
Which seems crazy to me. How is it cheaper and/or more efficient to create an entirely new system of gas pipes to every home so consumers can each inefficiently burn gas than simply converting the gas to electricity in a highly-efficient centralized plant and send the energy over the existing electrical infrastructure?
The majority of the energy use in a natural gas furnace is still the core heating of air functionality. The electric ignition and fan aren’t most of the energy to my knowledge, although “decent chunk” is a fuzzy term.
People with heat pumps would all be running them as resistance heaters in the weather they are having right now.

In that mode less of the energy in the gas becomes heat in the home (good furnaces are really good).
https://www.microverse.org
anything like this?
The first step is far more fundamental. Have system of electing the members of goverment that results in a fair representation of the "will of the people". FPTP converges to a two party system and is undemocratic (at the extreme a party can have total power with less than 50% of the popular vote).

The UK needs Proportional Representation.
404 on this today so I guess they were terrified.
> I would guess tens of billions of dollars and tens of decades, and that's if it would ever get approved in the first place.

So a quarter or two of FAANG profits for scale?
Yeah, rolling blackout seems to mean more than 24 hours for my friends and relative back there.
I work with product that detects water vapor in NG - if you have an example where this contributed to this blackout please send!
Ad Hominem AND vague conspiratorial claims? Glenn must be over the target, yet again.
Heavy dose of irony
I beg to disagree.

[1] provides one with a whole-data-set training method (ADMM, one of such methods). Page 8 contains figure 2(b) - accuracy of training after specified amount of time. Note that ADMM start where stochastic gradient stops.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02026.pdf

At [2] I tried to apply logistic regression trained using reweighted least squares algorithm on the same Higgs boson data set. I've got the same accuracy (64%) as mentioned in the ADMM paper with much less number of coefficients - basically, just the size of input vector + 1 instead of 300 such rows of coefficients and then 300x1 affine transformation. When I added squares of inputs (for the simplest approximation of polynomial regression) and used the same reweighted iterative least squares algorithm, I've got even better accuracy (66%) for double the number of coefficients.

[2] https://github.com/thesz/higgs-logistic-regression

There's a hypothesis [3] that SGD and ADAM are best optimizers because that everyone use and report on. Rarely if ever you get anything that differ.

[3] https://parameterfree.com/2020/12/06/neural-network-maybe-ev...

So, answering your question of "how do you know" - researchers at Google cannot do IRLS (search provides IRLS only for logistic regression in Tensorflow), they cannot do Hessian-free optimization ([4], closed due lack of activity - notice the "we can't support RNN due to the WHILE loop" bonanza), etc. All due to the fact they have to use Tensorflow - it just does not support these things.

https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/2682

I haven't seen anything about whole-data-set optimization from Google at all. That's why I (and only me - due to standing I take and experiments I did) conclude that they do not quite care about parameter efficiency.
This might be a reasonable excuse if they didn't have the same problem in 2011 and weren't warned it could have been much worse.

But they did. And were warned. And they ignored it.
> This is the sort of thing we should have some baseline regulations to support

Texas runs its own power grid specifically to avoid doing that
<rant>Cryptic titles seem to be commonplace these days for some reason. If you want me to read your article please take the trouble to spell-out the subject matter.</rant>
> It seems to me that it is difficult to measure the productivity of a decentralized asset like BTC.

It’s actually really easy, because the answer is just 0. Bitcoin is not productive capital in exactly the same way that the USD is not productive capital. “Investing” in Bitcoin is not like investing in an enterprise, it’s financial speculation. This is perfectly demonstrated by the “1 BTC = 1 BTC” meme, at the end of some period of hodling nothing has been produced, no matter how long you hodl for. Now, there are some second-order benefits to financial speculation, it can drive price discovery and provides the liquidity to make markets efficient, but financial speculation on Bitcoin doesn’t have these second-order effects because those second-order effects are only relevant when some amount of non-speculation demand exists for the speculation target. There are other cryptocurrencies that can be used for more than just financial speculation, i.e. that actually have productive uses, and some people are working on finding ways to staple productive use cases to the Bitcoin blockchain, but a Bitcoin is still not productive capital. It’s not good for the economy if too much financial activity gets sucked into financial speculation, since we need financial resources to actually be invested or the economy grinds to a halt.

Now, none of these are issues for a currency. Of course a currency isn’t productive capital, it’s a medium of exchange. But currencies are most useful when they are stable, and Bitcoin is a resounding failure as a currency.
The imprudence is chilling. From that doc:

"THE EVENT

The strong arctic front that arrived in North Texas on February 1, 2011 was the most intense cold wave for the majority of the state of Texas since December 1989. The event was so severe that the National Weather Service issued a rare Wind Chill Advisory for much of the state. The arctic front reached deep into Texas and sustained below freezing temperatures as far south as Corpus Christi. Much of North Texas experienced record setting sleet and snow, producing blizzard conditions and temperatures well below freezing for up to 100 hours. Snowfall occurred as far south as San Antonio, with snowfall totaling up to seven inches in North Texas. This winter storm was also accompanied by sustained winds of 30-40 mph with gusts as high as 51 mph.

The icy conditions of this winter storm resulted in the closing of both DFW Airport and Dallas Love Field. In addition, Dallas-Fort Worth area water utilities reported hundreds of water main bursts during the event, compared to expected four to five on an average winter day. ERCOT also reported a new record winter peak of 56,334 megawatts.

The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration. Lows during the period were in the teens for five consecutive mornings and there were many consecutive hours below freezing temperatures throughout Texas. Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant convective heat loss (wind plus ambient temperature) event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity. (Reference: Weatherbank, Inc.)

Generating unit issues that affected reliability were mostly attributed to frozen instrumentation due to convective heat losses greater than instrumentation design, faulty instrumentation heat tracing or compromised insulation. It is normal practice for the operating units to add incremental protection against these extreme winter weather events. Typical examples are wind breaks and heat sources applied to high risk areas.

In addition, the cold and wind affected the units that were not operating. Units in cold start status are less prone to derates/trips if they are dispatched to minimum stable load (MSL) before the onset of extreme winter weather. Bringing all units to MSL gives ERCOT maximum flexibility in responding to grid emergencies.

HOW IT AFFECTED ERCOT

The high load demand, coupled with generation issues within ERCOT, resulted in actions from ERCOT that triggered an Operating Condition Notice (OCN) issued for cold weather at 08:55 on February 1. The event level escalated to an EEA2A (Energy Emergency Alert) declaration at 05:18 on February 2 to deploy responsive reserves, followed quickly by an EEA3 declaration at 05:58 on February 2 to begin shedding firm load to maintain system frequency at 59.8 Hz or greater. The event continued until ERCOT cancelled the EEA at 09:58 on February 3.
"
You’re being unnecessarily confrontational and hostile.
Will people eventually have to pay, or give something else up, to share news links in email and text? Blog posts?

Yuh know, the web didn't used to be about advertising, those people just horned in and stank the place up. "We" were here first.
I’m skeptical. By that logic, isn’t any voice of disapproval an attempted cancelling?
I am saying Walmart is preventing the fertilizer stall on their own property. The iPhone hardware, OS and platform is the property of Apple, just like the parking lot is property of Walmart. But actually, I am not even saying Walmart is preventing this. I am just saying Walmart won't hand them this opportunity for free. The result is the fertilizer company suing Walmart.
I mostly agree with your statement and your issue with companies wishing to eliminate the QA budget (never a good idea).

But I question this bit: "QA Requires a pretty different mindset, one which developers lack entirely."

I don't think that's true. I've done both roles, successfully, at various times. The key, I've found, is that a developer can't test their own work. Developers of a project should also not be put in charge of testing each-others' work if they are working in close capacities. A QA strategy that begins and ends with "test your own stuff", "code/peer reviews" and "write unit tests" is going to reach a quality cliff as the complexity of the software increases. You can get away with it, sometimes, but it doesn't scale.

I'm not sure what the cause of this is, or if it can be improved (it can, but can it be completed eliminated?). It's a similar phenomenon to proof-reading your own work. You mentally add words that aren't there. You follow happy-paths in your software because you know what they are; you don't "misuse" your UI enough[0].

[0] One I think of often was when I wrote a UI for a desk conferencing device. I tested every aspect of it and it was returned to me shortly thereafter when the QA guy joined/exited about 15 "on demand" meetings as rapidly as possible throwing the UI into a state that couldn't be recovered from without rebooting the device.
Answering my own question via a helpful comment I found below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26172785
Tbf, traditional banking is more than just moving cash from one account to another. If anything, the vast majority of activity inside / within banks is dedicated to the numerous services they offer.
Wasn't it the NYT, the model for online subscription funded journalism, that released that incorrect story accusing Marc Andreessen of saying the word "retard" on Clubhouse? That seems about as bottom of the barrel as it gets.
How to move from LastPass to Bitwarden in ten minutes
For the most part, but especially early-stage negative p/e stocks. Surprisingly, the FAANG stocks aren't nearly as stretched as the rest of tech. AMZN is pretty close to in-line with its historical levels.
Yeah great if we can get that much money.

Did you have some good idea how to achieve that?
> an electrician telling someone that they can't wire their house themselves

FWIW, in general it is perfectly legal for a homeowner to do their own electrical work on their own home.
I found something similar, finding a number of cell towers in a lake I'm pretty sure no one would ever put a tower in (it's about 10 feed deep).
Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] pid: add pidfd_open()
US investor ‘Roaring Kitty’ sued over GameStop rally
You should always be doubtful of the thesis from editorial articles, but you could be less contemptuous... and more correct.

>...between the mornings of Feb. 7 and Feb. 11, wind as a share of the state’s electricity fell to 8% from 42%, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

>Gas-fired plants produced 43,800 MW of power Sunday night and coal plants chipped in 10,800 MW—about two to three times what they usually generate at their peak on any given winter day—after wind power had largely vanished. In other words, gas and coal plants held up in the frosty conditions far better than wind turbines did.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-spins-into-the-wind-11613...

so wind power cratered and other sources are running at 2-3x their normal despite problems from the cold like equipment freezing and water at water intake facilities freezing. this is despite a just in time operational mindset that is causing shortages of natural gas. power plants are shutting down because they don't have gas to burn.

so you can't blame it on wind power really. but your comment is fantastically derisive.
The difference depends on if you are talking about what is legal (eg right to repair) or what is possible by the consumer without modification. Legally you can do whatever you want since you own the hardware - but in both Apple’s case and Lexus’ case, installing a non-OEM part will void the warranty on that part, or in Apple’s case, the entire kernel since you’re modifying that kernel (although it’s easy to factory reset an iOS device and remove the modification without a trace).
I had a little booklet 20 years ago or so that had a section suspiciously similar to this one - I think it was called "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook"
That is nothing like the GDPR.
Ohio became the first state to accept Bitcoin for tax payments. It will be interesting to see how this progresses.
https://www.coindesk.com/ohio-becomes-first-us-state-to-allo...
I like the fact they offer DECWindows...

https://vmssoftware.com/products/decwindows-motif/