skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Sweden we used to have a conscription army. It was said that they got really good at leadership and training since they could afford to experiment. If they screwed up one year they could just scrap the whole batch since they anyway got a new cohort every year.
> Bottom line: there isn’t an easy solution to weather events that happen once in a hundred years [...]

I think it’s extremely misguided to characterize this storm in this way. We will probably be in for more of these types of events sooner than later.
Patching up C has been attempted many times, with great success. Problem is, once the patch-up is completed, the language and memory layout of things like stacks, structures etc. that you end up with makes that secure language no longer C. You lose the ability to recompile billions of lines of legacy code, you lose binary compatibility and/or require compatibility and emulation layers or stupid "unsafe" modes that negate the benefit.

What you end up with is a silly new language that inherits the awkward syntax of something designed in the 60s and lacks the rich expressivity and idioms of newer languages. At that point, it makes little sense to not start from scratch and work with a completely new language adequate for your application - such as Rust or Java.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev Testimony at GameStop Hearing
> Municipal owned fiber is great -> you permit and add it on EVERY dig. Putting a new sewer line in? Run fiber. Someone wants to replace their sewer lateral? Run fiber. Repaving? Run fiber. Someone doing a new development. Run fiber.

Ok, I can see how a municipality can make everything else very expensive and slow if they become an ISP with a government attached.
You can't be cancelled if you never say you're sorry.
Making thousands of commuters drive past your 'city' farm to get to work burns a lot of fuel too.

It's hard to know what to do with people who don't get even that.

I guess get them to pay $$$ for their energy intensive crops in their fancy cafes. Which if they are happy doesn't make that bad. The environmental movement doesn't help the environment, but it does make people happy, if they would just stop proselytizing it'd be ok.
Illegal drugs increase addiction rates because drugs are often cut with different drugs. How many heroin addicts were created by lacing lesser drugs with more addictive ones?
Price is dependent on delivery time. You want Fast Shipping on Amazon? You have to pay. You want large volume of Vaccine within a time frame? You have to paid more.

I am still surprised most people around the world, inclusive of those in purchasing and procurement, fail to understand the time and value proposition in the equation. Entrepreneur or Business man tends to be far better at it.
I wonder if that could be solved more easily. Build sufficient rail network and hydrogen/electric/other zero-carbon trucks to move produce from production to there and then train it in. And this is really a sector we could fully automated almost already.
NASA Prepares to Land Perseverance Rover on Mars
What an accomplishment for mankind. Congratulations to NASA, JPL and the whole team.
When will they ever learn? Forcing ISPs to block websites will only antagonize the scholars more, who can anyway access the website with or without a ban. They'll do nothing to harm Sci-hub, in fact it'll make it even more popular.

Elsevier also did this in India - it pissed me off so much I shifted towards downloading papers from Sci-Hub even when I have a university subscription.
Oh, please, terrible people who enjoy abusing children just create their own children to abuse. Why would anyone abuse other people's children when they can make their own and have complete control over them?

Ask me how I know.

You guys are acting like there's some sort of vetting to become parents, it's bizarre.
> My friends on the left tend to blame deregulation. Sadly, not one of them is spelling out exactly what regulation they think would solve this problem.

This is objectively false and highly misleading. What to do isn't going to be spelled out by 'friends on the left' because those friends know they do not have the technical expertise to make such suggestions. One typical characteristic of 'the left' is looking to experts for solutions not just their own knowledge.

In 2011, there was a SIMILAR event in Texas. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) wrote a study and issued report - see link below. That is how this should work, I know engineering enough to read the thing and say 'this seems logical' but I don't know enough to write something like this. I'm what he would call 'the left'.

The report has an EXTENSIVE list of regulatory recommendations. Most of them go to 'collecting documentation about power plants' and 'checking that power plants aren't lying'. Others are 'changing your thresholds for action to be more conservative'...that is regulation! People seem to have this idea that regulation is some massive thing...but really it is knowledge management. Example from the document:

> 5. ERCOT should consider modifying its procedures to (i) allow it to
significantly raise the 2300 MW responsive reserve requirement in extreme
low temperatures, (ii) allow it to direct generating units to utilize preoperational warming prior to anticipated severe cold weather, and (iii) allow it to verify with each generating unit its preparedness for severe cold weather, including operating limits, potential fuel needs and fuel switching abilities.

Translation, they want the texas energy regulators to:

* (i) Raise the threshold for when you start getting more energy if the forecast says it will be cold. Your current threshold is basically running it to the empty light on your gastank and thats reckless

* (ii) Authorize themselves to tell plants 'its going to get cold please start getting ready if your plant is off'

* (iii) Actually check that what the plants are telling them about their cold weather preparedness is true.

> 6. Transmission Operators, Balancing Authorities, and Generation
Owner/Operators should consider developing mechanisms to verify that units
that have fuel switching capabilities can periodically demonstrate those
capabilities.

Translation: If a plant says 'hey look at this cool thing I can do' the regulator should say 'show me' not 'cool I trust you'

If you look at other professional codes and standards (e.g., ASME, NFPA) the way it typically works is 'here is a standard you should design to' and then you attest that it is designed to or that you ran the test. More important regulations might involve outside validated testing but really...most of this is just documentation. This isn't overly burdensome, it is basic good practices.

This isn't 'the left' failing, this is them saying 'listen to experts' and people laughing.

https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/...
> That's my point. The farther left you go the more things the state has control over.

Is this true, though? With full socialism isn't control supposed to be pooled by citizens? If anything, it's more akin to libertarianism, just that instead of citizens self-organizing in groups to manage bits and pieces they self-organize in groups managing everything.
Touchdown confirmed!! Congrats NASA.
The Nasa person they have helping narrate what's going on is so genuinely happy the landing went well. It made me kinda tear up. It's infectious just how excited all these people are about this project. Also, I was a bit worried he was going to pass out. 10/10, would watch again (and probably will with my kids)
We in the EU should have temporarily nationalized Pfizer/Biontech and force them to give up the formula and manufacturing process.
We should have done the same to all pharma capable of manufacturing the vaccine.

We are in a state of war..This is no game.We have ordered hundreds of millions of people to suspend their lives and hundreds of thousands are dying.
First surface photo is in too!

https://i.imgur.com/C2s1job.jpg
Proposed bills are usually off topic for HN. That's because they rarely go anywhere, are mostly political theater, and the discussions around them tend to be generic and predictable.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It's better to wait until something significant happens and there is significant new information (SNI) to discuss.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Somebody created dns-over-wikipeda for this:

https://github.com/aaronjanse/dns-over-wikipedia
> "This brings us back around to the original question: what regulation would have solved this problem?"

I dunno... a regulation that forced plants to winterize so they're prepared for extreme weather?

I also find it laughable that Texas is all about small government and deregulation until the PUC and ERCOT start losing money. Then they decide that it's ok for ERCOT to backdate prices and change the price of electricity already sold days ago.

I'm just waiting for my electric company to try and change my pricing even though I'm on a fixed-rate contract.
I think it drew attention to the fact that it was a real human that was involved, and made the story a bit more personal, as if to say this could happen to anyone. But I do think that they could have used a pseudonym to the same effect, maybe something like "fell to a subcontractor, let's call him Raj." blah blah blah.
Precisely the point and considering when it is one of the most sought after product currently on the market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm0b_ijaYMQ

Landing successful with images already coming in.
We actually got a picture like 3 minutes after landing. (Okay, a picture from shortly after landing.)
Nope never, or any other opioid either, fortunately. But thanks that’s really interesting. Neither of my parents seem particularly affected. But who knows.
Pictures already coming in to JPL apparently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPrbJ63qUc4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm0b_ijaYMQ

Live feed
Minors and majors are mutually exclusive. You don't minor in something if you major in it. Majors should be the same as in the UK. And yes you can determine from the start what you'll be studying in the US in many schools; just depends on the college policy.
NASA’s Perseverance Has Landed
There is absolutely a lack of a decent SQLA tutorial for IRL code.

The doc is very formal, and if you want to make a website, a quick script or a data migration, you are left on your own to find the proper setup.
Yes!! Artificial monopolies make no sense in the 21st century. Data is infinite and the only way to lock it down is to prevent computers from copying it. That will necessarily destroy free computing as we know it.

We must let go of these archaic ideas in order to safeguard the future of computing.
Lumber prices top $1,000 for the first time
LastPass has essentially put a gun to the head of its free users. It has probably gained much traction, by offering a free service. Yet now, as it isn't actually FOSS, they are able to make a change to its model you can do nothing about. It leaves you with a few options, all worse than the current situation:

- If you want to continue using the service, as you have, you must start paying up.

- If you wish to continue using LastPass for free, you can only continue using it on either computers or tablets. A completely unnecessary barrier simply meant to on-ramp as you as a paying customer, or get you off the platform as a freeloader.

- If you wish to continue using another pass manager service for free, you will have to likely remake all your passwords there, and spend possibly hours or days changing all your account credentials over to this.

They have employed a strategy of duress on existing free customers, to make them pay. With FOSS, this would be possible too, to be fair, however, there's an easy remedy. Existing users could choose to continue using the current free software as is since they have access to the code, without this needless feature barrier that was introduced. Any security conscious person, should not use these proprietary closed-source systems in the first place, but this occurrence should clarify why non-FOSS models are absolutely terrible for users, in every possible way...

This is why the pass generator/manager I'm working on, which is very different from existing ones, and instead solely based on cryptographic principles such as crypto HD wallets, rather than vaults, is FOSS.

It's at https://app.srspass.com and under continuous development. I've used a system such as this to handle my accounts for years, and wanted for a while to release it. You don't have to worry about it working on either a phone or computer... it literally works anywhere, as it's a PWA, and it doesn't need to store any of your passwords anywhere, they are deterministically generated based on your inputs.
Raptor Maps (YC S16) Is Hiring a Director of Marketing to Scale Solar Power
I'm not seeing an email address can you tweet me on twitter?

Basically if someone can show me how to make the sidebar vanish on a mobile browser i think that's the main thing. i might have looked at this some time ago and given up.
Two LeBron James Cards Are Worth $7M
NASA Rover Lands on Mars
It’s not just a bad characterization; it’s a lie. Texas’ power grid had issues due to the cold in 2011, and the current temps were last experienced in 1989.

That’s once in 31 or 10 years, depending on how you want to slice it. Not 100, nowhere close to it.
Most of the carbon costs of providing food comes from the process of growing it, not transporting it. Most of the carbon costs in transportation also come from consumers driving to and from grocery stores. See: https://www.salon.com/2012/06/16/eating_local_hurts_the_plan...
In practice, I don't think I've ever seen a SV example of that kind of litigation from garage development of IP. Maybe I've just missed them?

Theft of IP from one company to a new company on the other hand there are multiple public examples of.
> Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the solar panels.

Is this true?

Plants use specific ranges of light (narrow bands of red and blue). Solar panels absorb a broad array of wavelengths. So isn't it at least possible that one solar panel could produce more than its size worth of productive sunlight for the purposes of photosynthesis?
I'm just using a 9-plant Aerogarden Bounty right now (think it was ~$175 on Black Friday). My wife says I can upgrade to an indoor Tower Garden or Lettucegrow if I do 3-4 cycles on this thing without getting bored.

I also built six 4ftx4ft raised (dirt) beds in our back yard a few years back. I plant fairly densely (usually using 1x1 squares for most things, 2x2 for tomatoes) and I'm thinking about trying one of the tower gardens as a replacement for a single 4x4 bed this growing season. It's been a minute since I ran the numbers, but I think you can plant 20-25 plants on one tower vs maybe 4-16 in a single bed and theoretically not have to weed/water as much (but then you get pump maintenance/ph balance/feeding/cleaning instead).
In the short term nuclear energy is expensive, but in the long term nuclear energy is one the cheapest sources of energy available. Source - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

(this is even more true when you consider the cost of externalities)
As shitty as it is, do you think that the CUNY school has the ability to write a spec for an administration system that handles all of the business needs and compliance requirements? Or do that and manage the delivery of those requirements?

The answer is of course no.

The Oracle pitch is "We do this for Michigan State and can do X, Y and Z". That is true.

Oracle gets alot of shit for this stuff because they own the market for enterprise financial software. Their software is gross, they bought out the competition and generally suck, but that is what the market demands.

My uncle is a locomotive engineer. His railroad makes a conscious decision to remove any creature comforts from the cab, like a chair cushion. It's needlessly uncomfortable and is awful, but that doesn't mean that GE (or whomever) sucks. They delivered what they are asked to do.
It’s very unlikely for anyone in the marketplace to believe “UberCheats” is made by Uber or cause confusion in the marketplace. As such they are unlikely to win a court case, a Google internal process on the other hand is another story.
Or restoring native habitat.
> We need money that has actual value that can't be manipulated. That is why the gold standard worked. At the same time that is why those in power ended the gold standard.

No, the gold standard worked because at that time, manipulating the value of money to tweak the economy was not a practice. And besides-which, gold is a terrible standard anyway. We use tons of the stuff in basic, cheap electronics all the time. We use it on boutique audio connectors. It's not uncommon or rare at all. It's like diamonds, the only reason they're worth a goddamn thing is that everybody just agrees they should be, even though the same substance that sits on the end of a $10,000 ring is ground up and coats the outer surface of saw blades.

> Without the anchor to gold our money can freely be manipulated for personal or political gain at the expense of the public.

As we've seen though, this can be done with virtually any asset now, which is why land remains basically the only thing that holds value, because increasing or decreasing the supply of it is really ridiculously hard.
> My guess though is the Citibank executives who signed off on this got promoted up and out of the department that has to budget for these licensing fees and support costs, and on both sides they received tidy bonuses for "increasing revenues".

Oracle paid Citibank over US$500 million for this company. There is no way a transaction that big isn't being approved by the CEO and board of directors of both firms. It wouldn't be under the control of the software licensing department. It would be controlled by the business development group in charge of M&As and divestments.

> Citibank developing in-house software then selling it to Oracle so that they can charge recurring licensing and support fees for eternity is incredibly short-sighted if you're Citibank or Manna from heaven if you're Oracle.

I have no internal info on the details of the Citibank-Oracle relationship (my role at Oracle was technical, not the kind of role where I would know that kind of business relationship stuff, and I never worked on the Citibank account either.) But, as @dagmx has already pointed out, I think it is highly likely due to the history of this software that Citibank has some kind of special licensing deal with Oracle which protects them against that sort of thing.
Not yet. Just attended the first presentation two weeks ago. The org has been big on psychological safety for a while although I don't see it much since IT is ancillary, not the main biz line.
Those BBS games back in the day were only 1 or 2 people

Not entirely. Even with phone connections, networks like ARB could do multi-player. But they turn-based, and as I said, took a long time.

If you wanted more real-time, you went with something like CI$.
The brand new Raspberry Pi costs as much as used laptop's motherboard with a core2duo processor so I think nobody does this.
Upright and in one piece. :)
No, but seriously: amazing engineering and amazing work. So great to see the images streaming in already.
>and the discussions around them tend to be generic and predictable.

That's a pretty easy claim to make about most articles.
Nobody says it’s impossible, just that there are trade-offs. France has a monthly minimum wage that works out to under $12/hour on a 35 hour week. It also had 8.5-9.5% unemployment over the last few years before COVID, while the US was half that at 3.5-4.5%.

Same thing with socialized medicine. Nobody says that socialized medicine is impossible, just that it requires a level of taxes nobody wants to pay. Again to use France as an example, health insurance is paid for with a 20% tax split between employers and employees: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=924192.... America could easily pay for socialized medicine with such a tax. That’s not how any proponents of socialized medicine in America have proposed to pay for their proposal.

Ironically, that’s just a different form of American exceptionalism. “We can have high minimum wages and socialized medicine like Europe without having higher unemployment and higher middle class taxes like Europe.”
> The blame has to be shared, however, with the battle-axe personalities of the people that use this stuff. They would like nothing more than to retire while still using the _exact_ same applications and dated interfaces they've used for 20+ years.

Are you sure they wouldn't like a new interface if it was actually a real improvement?

I'm reminded of a story[0] about Norwegian doctors refusing to use the new GUI system and stubbornly continuing to use the obsolete text-based system. Were they luddites? No. The old system let them quickly navigate with the keyboard in seconds while talking to the patient. The new system required them to use the mouse, so they had to spend a lot of time focussing on using the GUI, rather than helping the patient.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289172
Nvidia to Launch Processor Tailor Made for Ethereum Mining
How about water outages?
Because you won't use raw SQL on any serious project forever. You'll end up building an ORM yourself or at least a query builder.
Do you mean "sine qua non"?

People don't generally like writing raw SQL because you have to map the results to and from your programming language. So at a minimum, you need a query builder that does some minimal and flexible mapping.
> - The RBMK-1500 in the now decommissioned Ignalina Power Plant wasn't built near a big city, unlike the Belarusian power plant.

Well, it was around 120 km from Vilnius, the new NPP is 60 km from Vilnius which is still sufficient. Leningrad NPP is around 70 km from St. Petersburg.

> Lithuania invested a lot into the safety of the Ignalina Power Plant, installing the latest European safety systems. Partly thanks to EU, yes, but the point is that there was cooperation and safety improvements.

It's still an RBMK and therefore far less safe than any VVER-type reactor.

> Belarus largely ignored the safaty concerns and recommendations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The IAEA was on site and inspected the plant:

> https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-delivers-inir-miss...

There is currently also a EU nuclear expert group at the site:

> https://twitter.com/RosatomGlobal/status/1361996208928153604

- Lithuania didn't invest into natural gas -- this is just factually not true.

Quoting: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2020/04/28/eu-nuclear...

"For Lithuania, which invested a lot of money in a liquefied natural gas floating storage and regasification unit in Klaipeda a few years ago, the Belarussian nuke plant means it is a potentially cheaper, and definitely cleaner, readily available source of power generation for neighboring nations. In theory, that takes Lithuania out of the market. It’s the reason they are working overtime to get countries not to buy energy generated from it."

Wikipedia source on the LNG terminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaip%C4%97da_LNG_FSRU
Never understood all of the hype that the Model M got. It was made purely as a cost reduction to the Model F and it got "worse" in almost every way. I can't stand typing on a Model M. The Model F is where it's at and IMO deserves the praise and obsession that the M receives.
It's easy to write raw SQL queries. It's a lot harder to generate SQL programmatically, correctly, based on a variety of requirements your app may have. ORMs do this well.