skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When she first contemplated working at Diablo Canyon, she imagined the rat-infested Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on “The Simpsons,” where green liquid oozes out of tanks. Eventually, like Hoff, she changed her thinking. “What we were doing actually aligned with my environmental values,” she told me. “That was shocking to me.”

You can tell from my username what an enormous fan of The Simpsons I am. One of the few things I wish the show hadn’t done is inserted into its world such a thoroughly negative vision of nuclear energy. If you don’t know much about the subject, The Simpsons leaves you thinking that using nuclear power at all is incredibly dangerous and foolish, and motivated by simple greed. It’s especially effective in this because the show is so pitch-perfect in how it depicts so many other aspects of society and human nature. I see this one element of the show as an unfortunate relic of the prevailing counterculture that informed Matt Groening’s otherwise generally brilliant worldview.
This is the UK, so the parents would have ended up with a hospital bill of £0 and an ambulance bill of £0.
It's a reality that retaining developers in the US sometimes involves indulging their pet projects despite negative expected value. In other parts of the world, many capable developers are happy to just have reliable, reasonably paid work. There may be a correction coming.
Texas Blackouts Point to Coast-to-Coast Crises Waiting to Happen
I'm investing in myself. Healthy food, gym membership, great experiences and memories, courses etc.
Basically everything that makes my life easier and more enjoyable.
And you are willing and able to tot up those statistics for the people who make Bitcoin miners and other machines running nodes? And the buildings that house those, etc.? As long as you are not, it's still an improper comparison.
Is the US serious about extra-planetary colonization?
Where this article is about, Wenatchee, they were for the longest time paying below wholesale, that is changing rapidly.

It was even partially subsidized, the power company used to cover the costs of upgraded utilities to your site, with no contact in usage. then they realized these mines closed as fast as they opened, it cost the local power company millions. Nowadays if you want load, you gotta pay for everything and it takes years to justify, explain and build. Only new data center going in anytime soon will be a massive MSFT DC.
Heat is bad, but MTTF at usually achievable temperatures is hundreds or thousands of years.

Electromigration matters on the order of 100 years.
The textbook used in a digital electronics design course I took in college in the early '80s ended with a section called "The Engineer as Dope Pusher".

It gave an example of clothes dryers. The way most clothes dryers worked at the time is that you told them how long to run and how hot to get. The "how long to run" part was handled by a simple mechanical clock mechanism. You turned a dial to indicate how long you wanted it to run. Thus directly set the clock. You started the dryer, the clock ticked down, the dial moved back toward the original position, and when it got there the dryer stopped.

Those clock mechanism designs were several decades old. They were mass produced, very reliable, very cheap, and when one did broke the repairperson could easily replace it with one from a different manufacturer. Different models might have different mounting brackets, but it was easy for a repairman to improvise something if they didn't happen to have one on hand with the right bracket.

They were also extremely easy for consumers to use.

But they are also boring for the dryer designers. So there were dryer designers out there, the author said, who were starting to design their new dryers with digital timers.

Digital was exciting. The engineer got to play with microprocessors which were new at the time. They got to design printed circuit boards, a power supply for the digital electronics [1], a display, a keypad for input. They got to play around with programming the microprocessor.

But to the consumer that digital dryer control wasn't better. It didn't offer any functionality that the mechanical clock interface did not. It had a much worse interface usually. It was less reliable. It cost more, so when it did break the consumer was looking at a more expensive repair, and a slower repair since the repairperson had to get that specific control unit.

The point was that the engineer should not let their desire to play around with new and fun things take priority over delivering the best solution to the customer. There are places where digital is better than the old way--if you want to play with digital you should work on those projects, not shove digital into places where it is worse.

[1] The mechanical timers were either powered by a spring that was wound up when you turned the dial, or a simple electric motor that just needed a transformer to power it from the AC and maybe a rectifier.
>If you are an engineer and you want to try a new technology, go for it. Even if it doesn't make sense. Learn new things, don't stick with the boring tech. Maximize your own happiness and your own knowledge, not the profit of your higher-ups.

Yes, by all means, have fun, at HOME, not on company time.
country B sells to country C that does the final packaging and then sells it to you.

This is happening right now if you haven't already noticed.
If the owners of the miners are actually able to turn their coins into wealth that increases their lifestyle, then the mining did improve someone's life. Just because it affects a very small number of people isn't much different than most other "traditional" financial products in exsistence.
Sounds like a variation on contract-to-hire. C2H is infamous for being a way to string candidates along and never hire them, but if C2H was the standard for hiring, that problem would go away somewhat, because those who never hire would get a bad reputation.
I see the same DNS failure, but there's a captured version here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210128112359/https://www.andro...
Stop Putting Your Windshield Wipers Up in Winter Weather
Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.

The issues aren't safety, waste, and environments opposition. There are plenty of climate hawks that support nuclear too. It's all excessive costs.

They briefly mention the cooling retrofits for Diablo Canyon in San Lui Obispo, but they don't mention that they bids from Bechtel to simply build a modern cooling system were all billions of dollars of expense. Just the cooling system is more expensive than alternatives.

And this is a trend we will see in the future. For primary generation of electrons, steam based thermodynamic cycles are pretty much obsolete. The number I typically hear is that it's $1-2W to build, say, a cooling system for coal steam. A nuclear plants cooling is pretty much identical. Solar and wind are going to undercut that cost very soon.

So the name of the game is now storage. Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.

The best estimate of what the cheapest possible future grid looks like is: solar/wind capacity at 4x of total demand (thermal generators are roughly at 2x on the current grid), with 3-4 days of storage. This translates to world with abundant energy, at certain times, that's generated at zero marginal cost. There are still lots of transmission costs however. The future of energy is all about spatial and temporal arbitrage of renewable electrons.
Capitalism seems to be the best of the possible solutions to the resource utilization problem.

Bitcoin seems to be just the latest in a long string of events suggesting that humans are irrational, not necessarily that capitalism or markets are bad.

If Bitcoin were processing a zillion transactions at a very very low fee per transaction, I believe few people would be saying it was a waste of resources.
> Is BTC really more stupid way to burn resources than making sports cars? F1 racing? Gold mining?

Even looking at the usage of graphics cards specifically, is Bitcoin an objectively worse usage of those chips than playing video games? Than running ML models at Facebook?
Ironically, this tool also includes HN.

"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id={username}",
I would obviously turn off the main at the street and open all the facets. That should be enough to weather the freeze. If it breaks on the city side that's their problem.

Anyway, quite a few of these folks lived in apartments and it comes down to not doing the math.
My conclusion of modern "free markets", as you crank the iterations of the, uh, market simulation, will result in cartel or monopoly. That's what practically all markets have collapsed into if there is any degree of entry cost due to technology or infrastructure.

Also, I've noticed a HUGE drop in that term from the various GOP politicians that used to parrot that daily back in the 80s/90s). That leads me to consider their monetary overlords (I'm not suggesting the other side doesn't have them, just that the GOP is a bit more eager to directly funnel their sponsor messages) DON'T want free markets, because they all have won free markets.

Which is really a bad state of affairs.

I've also realized that money in politics is way up in the same period, and regulation to allow more money into politics has risen at the same time. Monopolies get more ROI on lobbying to help control their monopoly market positions, and keep antitrust at bay.

It's tough because free markets result in predatory pricing in times like this. Heavy regulation (especially these days, see above with money in politics) is highly resistant to change and not necessarily reflective of the common good or even "reality" or even physical laws.

Anyway, Texas is modern america: a rapidly failing government, and a rapidly failing economic system, all being undermined by steady shadowy corruption that doesn't become apparent until a sudden external stressor appears.
Analysis: Profitable B2B SaaS producing $42K ARR/$41K profit, asking $160K/3.85x
Power cost is not typically something people consider when deciding to overvolt. Have you ever done any mining?

Most people prioritize the longevity of the cards. Resale value is not negligible.
There is no 21st century option to refuse public social media. As observed with Clearview AI, if you end up in someone's photo on a social media website you will be inadvertently added to a social and location-based graph. I believe Facebook does this internally, so if you have any friends or relatives using Facebook who uploads a picture of you, no matter how old, your social graph is present there.

And try as you may, so long as you have a phone number you will end up in someone's harvested contacts list.
It's Fine to Put Your Windshield Wipers Up When It Snows
Sure, but this still only consumed a tiny fraction of the Playstations in production at the time, rather than ~all of them. There are only so many HPC labs in the world (and an HPC lab using PS3s is a font of good press coverage for Sony!) while there are as many crypto-miners as the market will bear (and they generate only negative press coverage on top.)
My girlfriend and I discovered it and watched it and enjoyed it. But we were screaming at the tv at how nonsensical it was.
If it takes no fuel (from being solar-electric powered), and can be accomplished in parallel while the spacecraft on Earth is prepared, why not? Sounds reasonable to me.
But this is not a problem with the tool, this is a problem with those platforms. Even if this tool is not published, bad actors can still make their own tools.

I think we should rather demand the platforms to enforce better measures against this kind of usage, rather than blaming this tool.
Robotic process automation remains on a hot streak as UiPath blazes the trail
> (10+ years in operation with little-to-no incidents, despite a huge amount of attempts to attack the network).

Shame about all of those hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin that have been stolen. Come to think of it, while I haven't crunched the statistics, it wouldn't surprise me if your money were more likely to be stolen if you kept it in Bitcoin than a boring bank account.
I think right now biggest earner for GPU mining is Ethereum. And (I think) it's aiming to move to Proof of Stake sometime in next 12-24 months, which kinda time limits the utility of both Eth-specific mining chips, and large investments in GPU mining (unless mining burns GPUs out really fast?).

Regardless, most proof of work algorithms are already being optimized with ASICs (ala bitcoin)... Or, like Ethereum's ETHASH alg, they have a step requiring high throughput random access to large amounts of memory, ala scrypt or argon (5gb or so for ETHASH right now, and slowly increasing). That's what's kept ASICs from being profitable for Eth, and is probably limiting factor for FPGAs as well. Though maybe there are FPAGs with dedicated memory on par with a modern GPU?
I think, yes, somebody should adjust taxes accordingly. The status quo with existing costs and taxes already effectively establishes some preferences for industries/goals, just implicitely. I think trying to explicitely express those preferences is better. (and it will never be 100% optimal that's for sure)
66% of all dollars were printed in the past six months?
> While taxing carbon usage is a good idea, there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea of allocating so much resources, in servers, in power and in space, for what essentially doesn't improve people's lives.

There's something fundamentally wrong with the idea of deciding for people what might improve their lives and what isn't allowed to try, rather than letting them decide for themselves individually. People decide to allocate those resources, for something they consider worthwhile. Some of them think they'll get rich. Some of them think they're changing how the world does business or exchanges money. Perhaps some of them are right; perhaps none are right but a successor that learns from them will be; perhaps they'll solve a novel problem or perhaps they won't. The world needs room to experiment with interesting ideas.
That’s really cool. I’ve been thinking it would be really nice to do that. How do you print? Laser? In what size? What kind of paper?
Takes 100yrs on current processes to break a particularly weak bond wire.
The faster you can accelerate them the more dV you get out of each chunk so you want to get them moving as fast as possible. If you're barely tossing them off the asteroid you might need to throw away a majority of the asteroid's mass to move it into Earth's orbit.
I do not understand this argument. The fact that bitcoin mining is profitable inherently means that society has already deemed it useful, no? Users would not pay for it if it were not useful.

> Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated

Who should do this evaluation? If not users freely allocating their own resources on the free market, then who?

> the incentives should be updated to support things that are consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not.

Please define useful. Humans have different needs and value things differently. What is useful to one may not be useful to the other. Any system that picks winners will also pick losers.
Building a tool is an ethical choice. Technology has no inherent right to exist. This is a bad project.
> then the mining did improve someone's life

On net, was it welfare enhancing for our species though? If I make $1 off of emissions that cause external harm worth $2 distributed among the 7 billion people on this planet, I'm basically just laundering money through a loophole in what the law today considers to be harming someone else.
Add Country C into the mix: It doesn't produce carbon but doesn't have tariff's on Country B.

>It's pretty simple, this has been thought out

You and others alike have clearly not thought this out as the scenario i have layered out is already happening with other tariff-able commodities.
No, they famously shut down the ability to use PS3s for this and got sued for it.[1]

Not ever having the functionality in the PS4 and later doesn't imply they didn't remove it in prior cases.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
Country of origin rules still kick in that case. This is tour de force for rules around tariffs, know you nothing about how these work?
>I imagine keeping lots of spare train cars around isn't a big engineering task.

The solution I've seen in person is the "coal pile", with Caterpillar bulldozers on it, keeping the surface from combusting, and moving things around. They are proven simple technology, and work in winter.

Keeping the coal in the train invites disaster, as rail infrastructure has issues with icing conditions.
Has anyone ever argued against using the right tool for the job? That advice is unfortunately not very actionable. The whole discussion is about which tool is right for which job.
See the founder of Coinbase fail to name a single specific way that bitcoin makes anyone better off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1073&v=Iiny6KBekSc.
Charge rich people more than poor people. Cut them off sooner. They have bigger houses that use more energy and they have more blankets and supplies. Poor people with fewer options deserve the power more.
That all may be true, but that's unfortunately the state of the market. If you want to keep developers, you need to be cognizant of this fact and adjust accordingly.

"Today, architecture feels more like technology shopping than tinkering."

That's because most web development jobs are maintaining glorified CRUD applications. Real actual software engineering jobs are hard to find, and don't pay as well as web development (or it's open source software that doesn't pay).
China’s state broadcaster applies to France for right to air in Europe
Kodi V19 is going to give dyslexics readers like me shivers :P
Thanks for sharing. I'm curious how much do you and your spouse make as that's the main factor.
Also analog devices, I mean even light bulbs, have a very particular flavour of colours. The blue, the yellow.. they're somehow more .. i don't know .. interesting than the most precise IPS or OLED panel.
> China manages to transfer 10+GW of power over 3000km with losses of ~3%/1000km just fine. [0]

Against how much power usage? California has 10GW[1] of north/south transmission capacity against 80GW[2] of installed capacity.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26187166

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California
PSA: scratched and scuffed DVDs can almost always be restored with a few seconds of buffing on a machine ( or a long time by hand).

The reflective layers are in the middle of the medium, so unless it's a very deep gouge, it's probably fine.

I've also noticed that laptop (and by extension, slim usb units) DVD and Blu-ray drives are much less capable of reading marginal media. I had one disc completely unreadable in a slim drive that played just fine in my set top, and also read out with a modest number of retries on my desktop.
For me the recipe is simple: Buy index funds every month. Keep doing that for decades. It doesn’t need to be harder than that.

(If you live in the US, you probably want ETFs from Vanguard.)
I watched this mesmerizing sci-fi in my childhood in the early 80s, nearly a decade after its original release. It left an indelible mark on my psyche and it might be the reason why I hate the "system" so much.
* Aggressively taxing GPU sales, with exemptions for some sectors and hard monitoring of commercial flows.
That website is next to useless in most of europe. Too few data points and too much noise apart from a few big well known companies.
Well, you don't need a lot of money. The exception would normally be medical needs but those are generally covered if you're in the system. You may want things that cost a lot of money, but this is a different problem, with more than one solution.

(I'm not advocating curtailed wants or frugality. My life is pretty comfy and I like it that way.)
Don't use the Facebook app
Given that bitcoin would also work without a Proof of Work, yes, it's a more stupid way to burn resources than pretty much anything else. Bitcoin without the ridiculous amount of energy consumption is possible, though I'm personally doubtful that will happen.

As an example Cardano and Tezos are two blockchain based on Proof of Stake, they both require a very low amount of energy compared to bitcoin or ethereum (no mining rigs, a node can run on a raspberry pi 4).
Is the Group Chat Sacred?
Why do people think "enforcement is impossible" is such a strong argument against taxes?

If your argument is that tariffs don't disincentivize behaviors because the government is just that bad at collecting taxes, you're not really in step with reality.
Lots of good reasons to use NoSQL. All pretty much hang off what sort of data access pattern you need.

If you have an application that retrieves an works on a top level entity then NoSQL fits very nicely. When you have a dataset that is shared and aggregate information is needed not so much and you are likely better of considering a SQL database of some sort.
No - M2 increased by 20% in 2020.

There is no connection to USDT issuance. As Michael Saylor, famed Bitcoin bull, says: no institutions and using Tether. Tether are printing it out of thin air.

Bitcoin bulls know this and they rush to hand wave away Tether at every turn.
"Many things" is not specific enough. Can you be more specific?

This used to be true of a few models of ham radios, but A) the manufacturers have largely fixed that situation, B) those were mostly sold as ham radios and we're talking here about COTS FRS radios, which are easily testable and there are no complaints I could find online, and C) these are also 2W LOS radios which cannot legally be sold with a numeric keypad or be fitted with a new antenna. Not exactly a threat to local amateur operations... Oh and D) In years of operation I've never had a single problem from either others' spurious emissions affecting my operations or FRS users on the ham bands.
> I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists

I think it very much depends on how one experiences life. The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible to each other.

Your point about "the next Newton" is unrelated, and IMO misses the mark. It's not coincidence that Newton, Hooke, Boyle etc appeared in the same place at the same time, and it's not because there'd been a crippling shortage of randomly arranged characteristics before that. The right characteristics aren't enough, you also need the leisure to develop them (which implies material surplus) and a society that makes sufficient use of scientific discoveries to value and propagate them. Nobody would have heard of Isaac Newton if he'd been born a subsistence farmer. I'm sure lots of potential Isaac Newtons were, and in many ways that's a tragedy.
Why Jeff Bezos’s Consumer Revolution Is a True American Success Story
I appreciate your support in this discussion, but please don't assume my gender. My pronouns are they/them. Thank you!
The paranoia-disaffiliation hypothesis: How shady geeks put others off security