skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The world needs to move to lifestyles that use less energy, not more"

That is literally never going to happen through the nature of technological and human advancement. The solution is where you source your energy from, not reverting to the stone age or jogging in place as a society.

Being forced to save in a currency the central banks treat as toilette paper would indeed decrease my life quality specifically through the purchasing power decrease of my lifetime labor.
Don't. OOP was/is a mistake.
Agree 100% with you. Almost same scenario here, I sold my Bitcoin in 2017.
UK - Beyond that I won't comment!
The bitcoin mining farms claimed to shut down, so some industrial load shedding seems to be in play in Texas.
This is true, but colloquially they were known as fads. At least on YTMND, 4chan, SA, or any other major hub in the late 90s/early 00s
A bit OT, but I would have no idea about Russian-style stoves until I saw this video a few days ago. Amazing.

https://youtu.be/r_TO30jzyUA
I'm not talking about whether gun control should be carried out. Or if gun ownership is the source of America's societal ills. I'm talking about the reality that getting rid of a large proportion of anything by the government has never been an issue of having accurate records.

Again: make it illegal, make compliance an individual responsibility, punish breaches heavily, (optional) incentivise law enforcement to find breaches
There are non-critical loads all over that were never interrupted (my neighborhood, north edge of ATX). It's pretty arbitrary.

Even worse: for about the first 24h there were (largely uninhabited!) commercial buildings all over the place that were fully lit up. We're talking skyscrapers. Even some unfinished skyscrapers. I think they've finally begun to address those. The charitable interpretation is that it was simply a massive failure of coordination.
Oh, I don't disagree that they change or amend the constitution.

My point was that you can't read into a theoretical ramification of an interpretation of an amendment to overrule the plain meaning of the text of the constitution.

Edit: I’m a little zonked out on cold meds, but I believe if I were to go back to my legal days, the relevant canon of construction in statutory interpretation is ‘repeal by implication,’ if anyone’s curious about this idea of how we square two ideas that may be partially opposed. The basic principle is that courts will be unlikely to repeal something just because another part of the law implies it’s no longer valid. IIRC there’s some thought that subsequent laws in subsequent legislative sessions carry more weight towards a repeal, so that would be in favor of repeal in the case of the amendment. But it’s still pretty uncommon, and highly discouraged. And in this case, I think when you have a plainly written passage enshrining the right of congress to enact Copyright-esque laws, you’d need some clear language to remove the clause. The 21st is a good example, but you wouldn’t need to be that explicit.

Pretty unrelated, but for those looking to argue about IP law on a constitutional basis, look at the congressional authority to enact trademark legislation. Unlike Copyright and Patent, which is an enumerated right, federal trademark law (the Lanham Act) is all based on the commerce clause. The commerce clause just being a broad clause on interstate commerce. It’s much weaker, and fun to pay attention to since the strength of the commerce clause waxes and wanes with the Supreme Court. Anyways, I hope someone enjoyed this cold medicine fuled aside.
Maker of Makerlog here. I'm so glad to hear this!

Congrats on the launch!
I believe the term of art is simply "old meme".
Wouldn’t this neuter the most useful Chrome extensions? Cash back/coupons, adblock, etc.
I'd say highly probable. But it's always a good story.
Show HN: WavTool, in-browser audio editor and dev tool
What can we do with our unique skills that every other American cannot?
We're talking about forced air furnaces here, I think. Something has to force the air. A big blower motor that takes hundreds of watts.

Forced air heat is not great in terms of comfort, but in Texas you already have all the ductwork and the blower motor and so on for AC, so it's simplest just to add a gas burner to that.
Delta times make difficulty for games that rely on lockstep for multiplayer. It's why factorio, for example, is capped at 60fps and will slow down gameplay at slower framerates.
Hey HN, excited to show off WavTool here!

WavTool is part audio editor, part dev environment, running in the browser. In addition to recording and editing audio, you can write and run audio programs in JavaScript to generate and transform sound.

I started this project for two reasons:

1. I felt deterred from getting into audio programming due to the effort necessary to feed data in, and hear my own work. It would be nice if this was more like making bits of web UI, where you can open a website like codepen.io and start typing.

2. I wanted a reasonably good audio editor that I could load up instantly to record and make basic edits to audio. If I'm having a jam session with my dad and we come up with something cool, I'd really like to be able to record, fade the edges, time it up, and export it without having to install anything on his PC.

Anyway - thanks for checking it out, I hope it interests you!

(You are also welcome to join the mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/hqN6Ib)
Ha. I live deep in the heart of the Lone Star State.

Don't make assumptions, buttercup.
The demand for USD, as with most things, does fluctuate regularly. The value of USD is stable because there is a more-or-less omnipotent central bank that can alter the money supply to match demand and target 2% annual inflation. The way we pay taxes does not matter nearly as much as the Fed. By design, BTC can never have such a central entity that ensures price stability, so its price is practically doomed to swing wildly with speculative booms and busts.
Really appreciate this. I totally agree - these tools aren't for every organization. Culture is what you put into it. I've been on teams that "prefer email over Slack"... (I know).. Another strong point you made is regarding how small teams are the key to early growth. Thanks!
Don't forget "pour hot grits down my pants", "Natalie Portman, naked and petrified" and of course GNAA.
She made money already by making the tattoo (unless it was free, which I doubt).
I agree, this is a good one. It's a bit rare to get retrospectives like this. Typically they tend to fall into one of three categories: the 'great-man' biography, which are more history lessons than anything else. The very poor and/or very unlucky people, those born into genetic diseases, addicted families, or some bad misfortune. And the middling and very unread section of otherwise perfectly normal people without much to say.

PG here bridges the gap between the 'great-man' and the middling-man. With a fair bit of luck, he manages to become wealthy, but not wanna-be-space-cadet wealthy. It's an under read area and full of very good lessons in that bridge of worlds. I'm not in that bridge, so my take-aways weren't as much. But perhaps with some luck, I'll be able to revisit this in the future for more savoring.
Same

Would benefit from a article about RSI though
>One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.

I definitely would not call that a scam. I have no reason to move my BTC.
This idea could be a very powerful way forward for society when combined with cutting-edge technological approaches.

In particular I am looking at distributed technologies, which, counter-intuitively given their name, are actually the best ideas we have for creating ubiquitous holistic systems (such as databases).

Ethereum (2.0) has great potential for enhancing government. I also think that some type of distributed data exchange protocols standardization would help. Or maybe a standardized protocol package registry rather than mandating specific protocols, in order to facilitate dexterous evolution of the systems.
I feel one interesting effect of this ruling is that it creates a strong incentive for parties in a credit dispute to plant or corrupt employees in banks that are involved.

The people who process these payments almost have a lot of power - they can send out nine-figure sums of money. But that power is hard to abuse, because “accidental” payments can be reversed by the legal system. They are neutral parties, just making sure the trains run on time, and don’t have a lot of decision-making authority. But if their mistakes can be made permanent, to the advantage of some aggressive distressed debt investors, suddenly the work of these folks just got a lot more important.
There's an incredible irony in your uniformed views. You suggest that photography couldn't possibly be art because it involves technology and then you go on to talk about the indignity of the "Amen Break" which itself only gained popularity because of sampling technology. In fact the same can be said for all the break beats on the "Ultimate Breaks and Beats" compilations. Much of early Hip Hop was the result of sampling technology[2]. Is Hip Hop not art either since by your reductionist logic all someone did was press a button?

It's also worth mentioning the Winston's B-side of "Amen Brother" from which the "Amen Break was sampled is itself a derivative work. That track is actually based on the Impression's track "Amen" itself a traditional Gospel song[1] as well as a top 50 hit in the same year the Winston's recorded it. However the Winston's credited themselves with the songwriting. The outrage and sympathy seem to be pretty well cherry-picked when you consider all these facts. It made for good headlines for a while though.

Drum part's aren't copyrightable for the sole reason that they are not songwriting but rather are accompaniment. And they are copyrighted in the context of the master recording. Trying to imagine a world in which drum parts are copyright is an exercise in insanity. The classic Bo Diddley drum beat while one of the most recognizable beats was certainly not invented by Clifton James. Nor would he ever claim he did. It has roots in Afro-Cuban music and in fact goes all the way back to the Yoruba in Western Africa. Anyone who has ever been to Carnival or Mardi Gras knows this beat. How exactly would such copyright litigation unfold?

By the way nobody "made photography an art." Like all new mediums it was once hotly debated whether it was art or not. That debate ended a long time ago however. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who has looked at the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe or Ansel Adams conclude that it wasn't art.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_(gospel_song)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Breaks_and_Beats
Try it. I was confused the first time I used ours when the power was out. That switch still worked.
SpaceX Raised at 74b Valuation
Bartosz and Factorio? That was an unexpected, but welcome crossover!
Did index funds exist 100 years ago? I'm pretty sure passive investing is a more recent phenomenon.
On the flip side, the fact that we're talking about a Texas-specific outage means that the system actually worked as designed, in a degraded state.

We generally try to incorporate redundancy and decentralization in systems design for the purpose of antifragility and graceful degradation. If something bad happens, best to isolate it so that it doesn't afflict everyone globally.

At the time of this writing, every State in the contiguous US except Georgia, Alabama, Florida are covered in snow; for many of those States, the snow is catastrophic and generally unplanned. The fact that, in the face of that black swan event, it was "just" Texas that had degradation means that, collectively, the US is better off. Obviously we should learn from this and improve Texas's grid to be resilient to such a failure in the future, and that's exactly how a healthy system that "localizes" implementations should function over time.
Somewhat related: https://www.unisonweb.org/
Perseverance might confirm past life on Mars for us.
Well, it might pull up the samples that a future mission might use to determine if life once lived on Mars.
But we are getting closer.
It's amusing to see people on "Hacker" News afraid of the spooky tech that is Bitcoin :)
People are mostly voting against the other side today, not in support of one party, but to prevent the other from gaining power.

For example, Biden. A lot of people voted for Biden not because they think of themselves as Democrats but because they don’t want republicans in power (this includes former republicans)
I guess my point is that if there had been sufficient contracts for industrial shutdown, there wouldn't be rolling outages in residential areas.
This was two or three years ago before it was totally acceptable.
>That undercuts a myth, propagated by white supremacists, that lactase persistence and milk drinking are somehow associated with white Europeans.

Isn't it most associated with that ethnic group? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lactase_persistence_...

Even a broken clock can be right...
I have little knowledge of evolution theory, can you please help me understand this?

How can one force evolution by invoking a fitness cost? Wouldn't that actually just drive extinction?

I would have thought that if producing lactase when consuming milk has a cost, then over time, milk-consuming populations would suffer and disappear from lower fitness, and the ones who aren't drinking milk would survive and win the genetic race.
Seriously, there are already disinformation agents hard at work across the internet, at least one in this thread. By November this cold snap will be tied to Benghazi and a pedo ring run out of a pizza joint.
I've read that ice can build up on the blades and impede function, just like on airplane wings, and that de-icing mechanisms exist but it's likely they simply didn't spend the money on them because nobody thought they'd ever be needed in Texas.
Spark Microsystems Announces CDN$17.5M Financing Led by Cycle Capital
So this is the new bluetooth?
Of course it sounds patronizing, it's extremely patronizing. Did you make a real effort to understand my argument?

This is probably going to also sound patronizing, but have you considered that you're wrong and I'm right?
Pretty damning the pics of downtown in various Texas cities lit up like normal!

https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/over-200000-people-in...
How does one go about getting an invite to this exclusive club?
These extensions don't need to run remote scripts to work properly, and they work perfectly in Firefox. Typically, "legitimate" extensions use remote scripts to dynamically insert trackers or ads.
Being close to the gulf a lot of people have generators that are likely big enough to power at least their fridge and one or more window/portable AC units. (For hurricanes.)

That size is usually big enough to run a blower and control board (and maybe a few other circuits), but it wouldn't come close to powering an electric heating element. But having a gas heater makes it all doable.

That's what we do, anyway.
Boilers/furnaces are ~90% efficient now. Combined electrical/heat generation can only hit 50-80% efficiency.

In theory heat pumps powered by electricity would be the most efficient option.
There is certainly a hard core of criminals who go out of their way to get unregistered guns. But mostly there is not a bright line between "regular people" on one side and "criminals" on the other.

Unregistered firearms don't completely negate the usefulness of keeping track of guns, in the same way that unregistered cars don't completely negate the value of having a car registration process.

It's socially desirable to be able to investigate crimes involving guns, have some idea how many of what types exist and where, and to be able to restrict access to known firearms for specific individuals who might be having issues with violence or mental health.

I think you could reasonably make the case that in the U.S. the cat is "so far out of the bag" that there's no point even trying, but in many other countries it's a useful system.
no, olympics and wine... to keep ppl on low income happy
I think you hit on the real truth: this is an electric grid optimized for cost, not for resilience. Electricity in Texas is much cheaper than in California. California grew 7% from 2010 to 2020, but electricity consumption fell from a peak of 302 TWh per year to 277 TWh.
Given the current crisis, it seems like they weren’t scathing enough.
And the hover caption correctly predicted that it will occur in AD 2021!
My father did that a long time ago in a house that had baseboard heat. Made a fire grate out of plumbing pipe, ran the baseboard water through that. It worked, when it did. It would also somehow get air in the lines and start banging from time-to-time. I was a kid, so I don't know if the monetary savings offset the pain in the arse, or not.
My guess why we keep seeing rolling blackouts mentioned is that ERCOT has three alert levels, and the way you would typically deal with number three is with rolling blackouts, so that has become the term everyone uses.

Also, it's up to the power distributors in different cities to cut in the ways that they can. Some are doing rolling blackouts, and others (like mine...) aren't.
QWaitCondition: Solving the Unavoidable Race (2014)
You realize ERCOT doesn't specify how rolling outages are implemented, right? That's up to the generating utility/transmission network. Ift you're not getting what you think you should, point your frustration where it belongs at least.
They didn't break compatibility. NodeJS never attempted to be compatible with the Web. The design work that TC-39 and the browser makers did is also much better than what the NodeJS community puts out. And it's a design that was in ECMAScript 6. Six years later, and you still have to opt in. The TypeScript team got it right, working in a way that NodeJS should have been taken lessons from.
i dont mean to be one of those grumpy spectator types, but i found footnote 6 kind of amusing: after wondering all the way through why the author chose such a poorly contrasting color scheme, very difficult to read, he then rails against UIs with low contrast.
My municipality is planning to replace the majority of the water supply infrastructure this spring, so I am planning for extensive outages and boil-water advisories.

I plan to have a water tank or two with several hundred gallon capacity and a pump to service the house.

I would be curious to see a recommendation for a whole home UPS.
I haven't seen a gas oven that can work without electricity. A gas stove, yes, you can simply turn on the gas and quickly use a kitchen lighter to ignite the gas manually and hope not too much poisonous gas escaped the stove. But ovens? How?
Of course it could have been avoided: much of the rest of the country has much colder weather regularly than this "extreme" Texas cold weather event. And the solution is to winterize the power generating facilities. And this type event regularly happens in Texas every couple decades or so. Look at what happened in 1989 for example.

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/san-antonio/weather/2021/02...
Watching that video really made me wish it was possible to short Google products...
> What I am saying is let's not pretend that either one was a group of exclusively peaceful protestors

But how is that even relevant? These two events are not comparable and should not be spoken about in the same breath except for to say that the comparison is abhorrent.

The protests were a months-long event that was legitimately protesting abuse of power, regardless of who coopted the frequent, massive, public demonstration to do public damage.

The insurrection at the Capitol wasn't about anything other than disrupting the certification of the election. There can be no doubt about that. This is why well prepared and informed attackers were present and integrated with the crowd, which only existed for one day at one place that only one thing was happening at.
This is interesting! I think for this to really work for Nigerians right now, there needs to already be some critical mass of Nigerian BTC holders bootstrapped. Would be interesting to know if this is already true; from my understanding Nigeria has the among the widest BTC adoption in the world.
Doubt it. But keep on shitting on people going through a severe weather disaster to make yourself feel better. Guess you really need it
Clubhouse was notably started by people from Coinlist and a lot of their engineers are from Coinbase.
Doesn't the suspended dust carried in these wind storms need to be taken into consideration? I presume they contribute significantly to the density.
That's how NASA funding pays off!
Do grid operators really have controls at that level? In California they can shut off a substation or not, and that's as low as they can go except in the special case of industrial customers with demand-responsive equipment installed. If those empty skyscrapers were on the same local circuits as a hospital, perhaps it simply wasn't possible for the electric company to turn them off.
Remote workers just became a resiliency requirement for businesses.
That's a good point. Is there some kind of time lag between the builds and the repo updates? If there's not time for anyone to check the code then the door is still slightly open for malicious code to enter the store without scrutiny.
Yes it’s a huge area but the Texas interconnection[1] has a long history of fierce protectionism from other parts of the national grid.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
I read an interview once with a guy who, due to various intolerances and circumstances, ended with a raw meat diet. He has some source of getting good meat, like a farm which also lets him take the animal straight to the butcher, stores it frozen, and eats it just like that, IIRC.

He said that in the beginning, he had trouble digesting it, until he let some meat get to borderline rotting and then ate that. Somehow that colonized his gut with a biome which could digest it, and he was golden after that.

Something to think about in this context...

Personally, I find most milk to be difficult to digest, but cheese and yogurt and such goes over quite well.

Edit: https://archive.is/cX98n https://www.vice.com/en/article/nnqw3q/this-guy-has-eaten-no...
Gold's differentiator is long term trust. No matter what other people in the world do it will always exist as it is as long as it isn't touched.

With gold I trust the laws of physics and reality (not a human based system), with BTC I trust the consensus of the network participants and that the rules everyone follows will result in trustworthy outcomes, with a bank I trust that bank.

The big threat to BTC trust therefore IMO is if the network participants as a whole or enough of them aren't trustworthy. Marginal cost of mining a block favors cheap electricity countries (i.e. hydro China power) in the long term as the difficulty of the network changes to price out other competitors as they scale up. In that instance do you trust the person with the cheapest electricity to verify your transactions? Given my understanding of crypto that's probably the biggest threat to any long term investment in BTC. For PoS currencies I'm guessing your trusting the stakers by amount put down (i.e the rich people) to verify your transactions.
"The purpose of a system is what it does."
https://www.genscape.com/blog/record-freeze-offs-result-wide...

It's not the natural gas itself that's freezing and the article never claimed it was. Things aren't misleading just because you didn't know about it - that's the point of articles in the first place.
US Cyber Command: Valentine's Day Challenge [Reddit Progress]
It's more that they needed to communicate with the owners of the buildings to shut off massive systems that weren't even being used, while the minority of residents who still have power are being asked to "live as if we didn't" and navigate by candlelight, etc.