skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Wow. So the proletariat aren't revolting, because the society has met their needs? And that's a problem? Only if you're more concerned about having a revolution than about the point of the revolution - to make peoples' lives better.

Marcuse's point was that material goods, and the system that optimizes that freedom, comes at the cost of other freedoms, in particular of political dissent, autonomy, and freedom from total administration of the state. It would be better to consider the point Huxley was making as closer to what he was getting at. Marcuse tried to synthesize Marx's sociology (while maintaining that Marx's classical economic analysis has been superceded in modern capitalism) with Freudian social psychology.

>And, the rights and freedoms that let the proletariat have a non-horrible life is therefore something to destroy, so that the proletariat will then have a reason to revolt?

No, this was never Marcuse's argument. Instead he argued that not only are the majority of workers better off materially, within capitalism this comes at the cost of the loss of revolutionary potential. For Marcuse, the availability of goods in capitalism was one of its strong points, but the alienation and libidinal repression of workers was not. Marcuse did not argue for destruction, but rather for individuals to consider for themselves what are 'true' and 'false' needs.

In other words, Marcuse thought there were problems with capitalism which are not captured purely in terms of the material wealth in Western countries. Marcuse was not very quotable, but this quote of his points to his rhetorical style:

> “If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”
Transfer amount does not matter.

In general a Bitcoin transfaction fee is a market price to get your transaction included in a block. There is one block mined every 10 minutes and each block has enough capacity for a few thousand transactions. You put your transaction out on the network with a fee specified, and miners trying to create blocks can choose whether to include it in the block they attempt to mine. Naturally, miners trying to maximize profit will choose to include the transactions with the highest fees, occupying the least space in the block.

The size of the transaction (in bytes) is not related to the amount being transferred. It is tied to the number of inputs and outputs. Bitcoin doesn't directly track the "balance" of each address. Instead of a transaction saying "deduct 1000 satoshis from my account and give it to Charlie", it says, "take the 800 satoshis received from Alice in this old transaction, and the 500 satoshis received from Bob in that old transaction, and with that 1300 total give 1000 to Charlie and 300 back to me". 2 inputs and 2 outputs in that example, but you can imagine how both the # of inputs and the # of outputs can vary in practical usage. Therefore, a transaction that moves Bitcoins accumulated from many small transactions will be somewhat larger and have a more expensive fee than one that moves Bitcoins that were acquired all at once.

However, don't take this to mean that has an impact on the cost of withdrawing from an exchange: since the exchange doesn't make on-chain transactions for each buy/sell, it doesn't matter whether you bought your Bitcoins a little at a time or all at once for calculating your withdrawal fee. It'll pretty much be a flat fee.
The irony is that longer distance connections is also what spread covid from one community to another. I think it's often just a combination of things that gives us resilience. Both longer distance grid connections could help, but so could more off-grid solutions. Maybe just designing more fail safes at various levels.
The comment is just hoping that they have some degree of warmth in their apartment and not way below freezing. That's not dumb.
Sorry, I meant the _other_ past link at the top, the one associated with the article, between "hide" and "favorite".

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Umberto%20Eco%3A%20Ur-Fascism&...

I'd somehow never looked at the very top past link.
This current problems wouldn’t be fixed if Texas wasn’t on its own grid. The Texas grid does have connections to the other grids, and even right now is importing power from both the East and West interconnections.

The problem is that this is a truly regional event and not just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, and other states) has been struggling with forced blackouts over the last several days as well. They don’t have enough power for their own grid, let alone enough to share with Texas.

If Texas was more interconnected with the SPP, the end result wouldn’t be Texans all having their problems solved. Many Texans would still be without power, but so would many more Oklahomans. The fact that the Texas grid is separate is the only thing keeping OK from having even worse blackouts. Which makes sense, because the entire point of grid isolation is to keep issues localized and not cascade over the entire network. And that’s working to Oklahoma’s benefit right now, but Texas is getting the short end of the stick.
Thank you! I didn't think about the AC synchronization.
What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn't figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done).

How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?

https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/...

The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating/SLA for a power plant's acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It'd seem pretty basic to be able to ask "How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X"?
Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn't seem like it.

If you want to know some of the specifics about what "winterization" means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It's kinda interesting.
> Bitcoin is inflating as an asset.

I don't think this is precise. Inflation of an asset means that the asset itself drops in value, relative to the value of other goods. For example: when prices rise, the USD itself would be inflating because would then take more USD to buy goods.

Bitcoin is rising in price compared to the USD. So it's not "inflating." If we treat Bitcoin as a currency, it's deflating because right now it takes fewer Bitcoin to buy goods than one year ago.

This is also why "asset inflation" is not precise. The asset itself is not inflating, it is actually deflating wrt. to other goods.
Austin here, staying at a colleague’s place who’s in an over-55 community on the hospital grid (unlikely to be taken down).

Agreed that they’re misusing “rolling outages”. We got an hour of power a day for the last two days and don’t foresee getting even an hour today. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling because everyone here knows exactly that these outages aren’t rolling and is out for ERCOT blood.
Setting timers is basically the main use case for any voice assistant that people use it for.
I'm just glad that reddit still offers their old design through old.reddit.com, and that RES can force the old design.

Honestly if reddit ever takes away the old design and a browser extension can't recreate it, my days at reddit would be over. The new design is awful.
I was the same way until I got a HomePod. After a little bit of trial and error, I use Siri a lot for automations, timers, shortcuts, spelling assistance, and a whole slew of other things. That has now translated back to my phone so it's nice that the interface across all my devices is the same for this.
There are a number of countries with very high renewable usage that are in cold climates. Denmark comes to mind, where, on average, it's right around freezing for months at a time. Hell, they have turbines in the extremely corrosive oceans, getting blasted by freezing rain and they make it work.

Last I saw they got something like 50% of their power from wind.

Anyone who is using this event to say that renewables are a bad idea is selling a completely false narrative.
I remember "all your base" as a meme on Slashdot. They weren't particularly funny then, either.

More generally, memes are only funny to people who are immersed in them. You were probably more immersed in the memes then so they were funny to you. And less now so they are not. But nothing fundamental has changed. Memes by their nature tend to be based on inside jokes that are only funny to the people on the inside.
I'm thinking if the bitcoin's future is wire transfers between countries. In that case all 21M btc will be comparable with 100T of the world gdp and 1 btc will be worth 50M. Also, it will be illegal for peons to touch real btcs.
> One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.

If you buy an option for a barrel of oil, Robinhood doesn't even deliver it to you. Same for wheat and gold. What a scam!

In all seriousness, if you want to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, Robinhood may be better than using some of these more sketchy exchanges that offer decent amounts of leverage.

If you want to actually purchase Bitcoin, there's regulated exchanges where you can do so, though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list.
>Also: I live in Texas and have 100% renewable energy

Are you living off the grid, or living on the grid but paying for a "100% renewable" provider? If it's the latter it's likely that you're only being 100% renewable on a net annual basis, and still using non-renewable sources during peak hours. https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equa...
Great little lesson here:

"It's not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it's a sign both that there's something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives. Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious. If anything is going to lead you astray, it will be the desire to impress people. So while working on things that aren't prestigious doesn't guarantee you're on the right track, it at least guarantees you're not on the most common type of wrong one."
I'm sure being 'on' continuously is difficult and draining for some folks. For Tim it just seems like his default mode.
That's kind of obvious, but we are just really stubborn about it for some arguably-good reasons.

Consider gun registration. Gun owners are not, as a group, considered to be at the cutting edge of technology. But even they understand intuitively that a database is the first step toward any policy that will threaten gun rights.

And that brings the stubbornness: people want government, but don't necessarily want a super-effective government because it would be effective at both policies you agree with and policies that you don't.
Nothing Inherently Exists
I got my first Internet connected account in '93 Sep and I uploaded Volkov Commander to SIMTEL pretty soon after. Their answer was that I am pirating Norton Commander (which I obviously wasn't) and they didn't contact me -- they contacted the highest level of university sysadmins and apparently at the time it was a realistic threat the whole university will be disconnected from the Internet because of this. So I was summarily booted from the university VAX and all I was left with were some small Unix accounts at the CS department. And because said department started experimenting on Linux at the time as Unix licenses were expensive, I got an extremely early start on Linux, too...
It took a while, but I finally found my favorite DOS program that I used for _everything_ (even in Windows) until I switched to Linux in the mid-90s: Stereo Shell, a fast and easy-to-use Norton Commander clone: http://www.lanet.lv/ftp/simtelnet/msdos/fileutil/sts_410.zip

Screenshots at: https://www.danielsays.com/ssg-dossw-ss410.html
I think BTC energy consumption is a major issue, as is speed and capacity. I'm actually not sure what real problem BTC is actually solving currently!

Also, I don't quite understand your first question. Care to elaborate?
It is even weirder than you find it. When you read towards the end of the article, it says

"Most of the power knocked offline came from thermal sources, Woodfin said, particularly natural gas."

So natural gas and other thermal sources (i.e., coal and nuclear) created most of the problem.

Wind power is actually potentially a very good solution for occasional cold spells, because extreme colds usually comes with high winds. Of course you have to design your turbines not to freeze.
would it be valid to state that Apple is 1% of United States total wealth? Are the lines blurred because of multinationalism? Am I looking at apples and oranges?
> Every idea is vulnerable to the monster understatedly known as "business rules."

Cool take
"Fractorio"
Watch for nested loops. That's pretty much it. Well that and be aware that if you have two nested loops then one of them had better be looping through log(n) the elements of the other or less.

The most common quadratic algorithms have two loops that both loop 'n' times, or the inner loop runs between 0 and n times. Both are quadratic - the second case is twice as fast, but still quadratic. In some cases the inner loop is not on 'n' at all but is on something that is typically proportional to 'n'. That's just as bad. That is, O(n*n/100) is still O(n^2).
This is the only one I'm still interested in, and the only one I hold. When you transfer it around between your wallets and exchange it feels like "Yes, this is what I thought BTC would be". It's significantly more eco-friendly and actually a really interesting concept in how it works: https://docs.nano.org/whitepaper/english/

Needs more adoption from the mainstream crypto payment providers though. Honestly I suspect half the reason support is lacking is because nobody actually understands how it works (because it is quite different).
Clearlinux.org Is Down
For the past three or four hours, I haven't been able to access http://clearlinux.org, which seems to be the only way to access the Clear Linux distribution, by Intel.
This position is a somewhat naive because it does not following through with the consequences of the actions: you missed the part where there is no National Geographic - and you don't get any content - in the most ideal scenarios from the user's perspective.

The business model of the internet is advertising, as of today, that requires cookies, which by the way, don't represent material harm.

Also - you're specific view is in no way representative of the population at large. 'Most people' would rather remain completely private at the same time, they would forgo at least some degree of privacy for the option.

Given the choice of a:

a) No content
b) Constant popups
c) The previous imperfect norm but where people can get their content without hassle ...

They would chose option 'c' - hands down.

The effect of legislation is to create popup hassles for individuals that they never read - and to provide no real material improvement for people.

What they could have don instead.

i) Orchestrated cookie-free advertising exchanges and solutions

ii) Created privacy 'categories' and relevant rules and symbols, like movie ratings - and a symbol could be placed o prominently on the site so consumers have a quick and easy mechanism to know where they stand.

iii) worked with other nations and groups to arrive at consistent standards. With Canada, Australia, Japan on board, it might be very well possible to convince a Biden-lend USA to buy into some kind of standard.

What we have now is not pragmatic and it's ill conceived.

This would all go away if users were will to fork over 5 cents to read an article.
Think about all the people who bought lotteries since you were born and have became rich while you stood on the sidelines. Do you feel regret?
I found it perfectly readable and checked with Firefox' accessibility tools: The contrast of the main text is a 12.19 and thus meets the WCAG AAA standards for accessible text. [1] is the documentation Firefox links to.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/U...
Just an FYI, unless you’re off the grid you aren’t actually 100% renewable. I live in Texas and found this to be super confusing when I signed up for power for the first time. If you think about it for a second it makes sense that you’re getting the same energy as the rest of your neighbors and the grid is made up of many many different types of power plants. The “100% renewable” bit means that when the power broker gives a cut to the state that money is used to fund only renewable projects. Hope you learned something new today!
These types of things are my favorite use cases. I set up a little test with a beacon inside my bedroom and now it automatically turns on the lights for me when I walk in (if I'm wearing my Apple Watch) and then turns them off when I leave. It's not perfect but it's very convenient.

I also have a few automations that are set up for when I leave the house to make sure music turns off and my thermostat is set to "Away" mode.
SAT going on 24 and 36 hours of effectively no power. It's 44 in room.
> if you’re calling that renderer from JavaScript that has already done everything except the rendering, which would be the case with the kind of architecture I was describing if you were just using the plugin for the final rendering layer

Writing such renderers is huge amount of work. I know because I once did something similar: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac When I can, I prefer someone else to do that. Unfortunately, they all do it differently. Not just in terms of pixels on output, but general things.

Like, compare SVG and PostScript – many features are common, yet you gonna need substantially different things on input to make these two formats with the same image.

It’s somewhat similar story about rendering libraries.

> No GUI framework can do this for you

Sometimes XAML can. I remember there was a checkbox in Blend for some target platforms called “fluid layout” or something, the framework automatically replaced some discrete changes with auto-generated animations. Not universally applicable, but sometimes it was good enough.

> Who is using a 240Hz high-end gaming monitor .. yet concerned about some unspecified power saving

On the first page of US Amazon bestsellers in the “Laptops” category there’re a few models with 144Hz displays. These people care, occasionally.

I can agree that was an extreme case, but to lesser extent that applies to laptop users in general. I think laptops have been outselling desktops for a decade now. People don’t like choppy animations; they cause otherwise good GUI to be perceived slow. They don’t like spinning/noisy fans and reduced battery life either.
No, you just need to enable showdead in profile settings. Certain karma amount is required for vouching permissions.
How do you reconcile with the fact that at the worst wind only provided 0.7GW on 30GW installed. Don't you understand that people are going to blame wind because it only provided 2% of its total capacity. Also even taking into account the dangerously overestimated capacity they count on during winter peaking events for wind of 6.2GW it is way worse, only 11%. Comparatively gas is at worst at 50% of 56GW installed and nuclear at 75%.
They had self hosted sync with the old vault format. They removed it when they switched to the new vault format. Dropbox always worked. Now they push their own service.
Most folks will have used a least a little declarative programming if they're ever interacting with a DB - you can drop out into procedural land using cursors and functions but SQL really shines when you tell your DBMS what you want and let it figure out the details itself.

Building complex logic ins declarative languages is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I tend to prefer a strong focus on type transformation when approaching a problem in any paradigm (I'd tend to read "Get the user's name" as "Create a transformation from a User ID to the User's Name and then cast the value") but just putting all the blocks for declarative programming together and then saying "Now, go!" is quite satisfying.
I think it's probably not that clear cut. What happens in a cascading blackout scenario? If you are part of a larger pool are you more exposed to have a service disruption now when there is a problem in another part of the grid of the pool that you don't directly control?
new crew dialamac gotta be dissin / says Ruby first class functions are missin / tries it on in da y combinator / but

y = -> f {
-> g { g[g] } [
-> g { f[-> v { g[g][v] }] }
]
}

/ see ya later.
Jacquard is French for "Solution in search of a problem"
Texas Power Retailers to Customers in Face of Freeze: Please, Leave Us
Or if you have totally unshakeable faith in it, because you see us heading towards a game-theoretic attractor where bitcoin is the primary global store of value. That's worked for me :)
This particular use case works for me for HomePod too. More complicated ones fail, though.
>That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects.

Yes, when all your founders are first cousins.

Humans as a species are incredibly inbred compared to any other primates. Native Americans even more so.
A social political decline is what happened and continues to happen.

When California encountered power issues, it was easier for Texas politicians (and many of their followers) to espouse malicious soundbites about Commifornia than to empathize, offer support and self reflect on what lessons can be learned and applied locally.

Now that Texas is reaping its own fruits of decades of anti-"other side" politics and political mismanagement it's all too easy for whatever "other side" to treat Texas with the same derision and malice instead of empathy and support.

The government run Texas grid is ill prepared because the responsible parties are more interested in playing division politics than in governing.

Cold and snow are not novel, it's not a technical problem.
Geez, have you heard of a contrast checker before?

https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
JTAG Explained (Finally)
Efficiently updatable neural networks for computer shogi [pdf]
Show HN: Crane – A self-hosted research literature management web service
If the slowdown is sufficiently bad and it's happening on Windows then you can always record an ETW trace (https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9025467) and share it with me. My DMs are open: https://twitter.com/brucedawson0xb
I've resolved a few Chrome performance issues due to strangers on the internet sharing ETW traces with me, and analyzing those traces is actually my day job.
> All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.

The technologies can work, but only if measures are taken to make them work that way, and those measures are expensive. Texas' grid, like most of the nation's grid, is optimized to keep prices low for consumers and profits steady for generators and distributors, and it's worked amazingly well at that.

But "running lean" is great and everyone wins until you get hit with a highly consequential long-tail event (Taleb's Black Swan), and then you sometimes get caught without any backups.