skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> People also like to stomp on what the free market would actually have to do to prevent this. For a rare event, the cost of surviving it (i.e. winterizing everything) would have to be paid from revenues collected entirely during the event in order to give providers the incentive to do it.

I highly doubt this. We had the same thing happen in 2011; in theory the increased rates should have paid for winterization then, especially given how another similar storm would have put those who had winterized properly at an advantage in providing a limited resource with increased demand. That's especially true given that various figures put the cost of winterizing gas wells or wind turbines at 10% or less of the cost of the system without it [1]. But that didn't happen. It seems to me that gambling that your plant can produce during increased demand with no additional investment has worked out well for many companies [2]. To me that signals an incentive for power produces to actively work _against_ winterization regulation, as you could potentially make record profits on the backs of others' misfortunes, and if no one else winterizes you have less sure competitors to potentially drive the price down during increased demand.

> So enough to cause some people to turn off their electric heat and drain their pipes and take a vacation to Cancun because it's cheaper than staying and paying that electric bill.

This is predicated on the assumption that people were able to leave their houses, don't have pets / elderly family members that can't be moved, that they could all get flight tickets, that airlines were still actively running, that airline tickets wouldn't see surge pricing due to demand, and so many other factors.

I killed everything in my house save for my laptop to work as best as I could, my fridge, and my gas heat turned down to 62. At the highest rate they posted I would have been paying $180/day just for those. I can afford that, being a two person household who both work full time at significantly above average rates for the area. I would wager most people around here would not be able to pay ~$700 over 4 days just for a minimal amount of power on top of other storm damage costs, nor would it be less expensive or even possible to pack up and leave. Then they would be faced with "do we try to go without water for 4+ days" or risk freezing pipes, or paying hundreds of dollars just for the luxury of not freezing.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I believe if the options are "pay an extra-ordinate rate" or "potentially freeze to death" then the system itself is broken.

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/20/texas-power-grid-win....
[2] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/jerry-jone...
> The cost of diskspace is not as limiting as the time needed to do an Initial Block Download, which would become too burdensome with huge blocks.

The current throughput is 1.5KB/s. Regular users don't even need to sync with the blockchain. Anyone can rent a server for $10 a month that will download the entire chain of the last 11 years in a single hour. What math are you doing where you think the -current- max block size makes sense?

> Transacting on 2nd layer makes a lot of sense as txs are instant

No they aren't, they still have to make it to the main chain.

> more private

Anyone could make a new address and use VPN for each transaction if that's what they want. At least they could if they weren't in danger of transaction fees becoming larger than what is in their address, which essentially disables it until transaction fees go down. Other cryptocurrencies are already much more private if that is what people want.

> don't need the whole world to download and verify them

Very few people actually need to sync with the whole chain unless they want to. Exchanges, payment processors and of course miners. Most people never sync with the whole chain and few of those that do are doing it out of a neccesity. Even so, syncing with the blockchain was never a technical limitation.

There is nothing that a second layer offers that simply using a non-crippled cryptocurrency doesn't already solve. Ethereum and bitcoin cash have already exceeded bitcoin's transaction volume over the last week. Ethereum has had far more transaction volume for a long time now.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bc...
This thread is actually pretty decent compared to the usual thrashing crypto usually gets on HN.
Retiring sounds good right about now.

I'm with you. If I had another skill, I'd give up computers entirely. Maybe have a smartphone, and that's it. But only for limited use.

I wish I could build things with my hands, or play an instrument, or just be good at something else, and let the tech world pass me by. I used to love technology because it was fun and interesting. It's no longer either of those things.
Sorry, what fork? What happened?
Mars soil is usable for plants. Or should be at least. So no need to bring soil from earth.
The fastest program is in C, c.002.rawio, but it reads 32K at a time rather than a nebulous "line" - as the benchmark authors point out.

If it read 4096 bytes at a time, which is the max fgets() size for the fastest C program, would that be considered a fair comparison?

In my own attempts at high-performance work, I find it best to ignore the concept of lines and switch to block reads, with some state information to figure out what you are. Which is what c.002.rawio does.

It's not as easy to follow, agreed, but it is faster.
This is a good summary of my own feelings on the whole darn thing. I also design circuits and the whole thing is just fucking magic to be honest. The fact that this works at all is constantly baffeling me.
Not necessarily no evidence left behind, just no "smoking guns" that can be trivially discovered by private citizens without power of subpoena or warrant.
Macs have always had tons of these (such as the command-option-p-r to reset the NVRAM, option to show the list of bootable drives, I can’t remember which one to invoke OpenFirmware, etc).
The author's blog post is quite enjoyable: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/projects/turbo_pascal_compi...

> My friend Fredrik Fatemi and I spent the summer after high school (1989) writing graphics programs in Turbo Pascal on his 286 PC (with EGA!) in his basement while watching The Princess Bride again and again on his VCR. He recently found some 3½" diskettes with our programs on it. I couldn’t find a good way to run them on my Mac, so naturally I wrote a Turbo Pascal compiler. It’s web based and you can try it here.[1]

[1] https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/projects/turbo_pascal_compi...
> And how do they plan to overcome the initial hurdle of "getting enough people to use it that the token itself becomes desirable"?

Tribler has been around for almost 15 years by now I think. Don't think they suffer from having to get enough people to use a token, just like torrents. People use Tribler already because they like to use Tribler, and would probably remain doing so even if there wasn't any cryptocurrency involved. Adding the money stuff to Tribler was a later addition, if I recall correctly.
It’s not entirely subjective. For the majority of languages with a `let` keyword, it creates a binding which can’t be reassigned. JS is the only major language I’m aware of that breaks this expectation, and uses `const` instead.

In fact, I had assumed Sabre followed the more common pattern, and was quite surprised to discover it doesn’t later in the docs. I think that’s a pretty clear case of “bullshit” in the sense described in the README.
There are a lot of cost savings to be made in a move to a national digital currency. Just settlement alone could be made way cheaper. Swift could be cut out as the middleman. It would be a good cost saving innovation.
DNS, SMTP, finger, git, HTTP, Napster, ssh, Torrents, eBGP I guess.
Reading this reminded me of of big reason that I really like Slate Star Codex: When Scott disagrees with someone, he describes that person's opinions fairly.

Scott would summarise David Duke's writing in such a way that David Duke himself would say that's a fair summary, and only then disagree. Maybe that's being "rather more receptive to neo-nazi rhetoric" to quote that eruditorumpress page, and maybe it is. Maybe today's etiquette is best regarded as that which most people to doday. So when Scott doesn't misquote or put strawmen into anyone's mouths, he's just out of touch.

A few lines down from the "rather more" quote is a statement that Scott "is someone who […] openly advocates eugenics." He is? I hadn't noticed. Scott would have inserted quotations to support such statement. Which may be out of touch and may make him seem receptive &c, but I like it.
Thanks for responding. I’m the author of a Pinboard browser extension! I’d love to make it full featured, not simple, but don’t have the time.

Others I’ve used just get abandoned too, and as you mention perhaps the API is what’s holding them back.

The reason I thought your own client(s) may be on your todo list is that developing a great API is easier when you’re dogfooding.
Implicit declaration is bullshit. It allows new variables to accidentally be created out of typos.

Sabre should have gone with var. Without knowledge of existing languages, the meaning of let isn’t exactly obvious.
so bite labs in french means penis lab in slang. seeing the context of this startup that is a really really smart name pick
That's true but that is to offset the really negative aspects. How many places never let dev's actually design systems that stand up to scrutiny because the execs don't care if BS is pumped out because as long as the business floats then it doesn't matter.

Then the code base becomes a mass of spaghetti that at this point the revolving door of devs have to both figure out and keep alive in ever increasingly stressful situations until they either burn out or move on for greener pastures perpetuating that cycle.

So far in my career the split is 60:30:10 places who don't care about actual engineering and run their business on crap, those who recognized things are biting them but the amount of inertia you need to counteract things and rebuild is huge and then the very fine percentage of places that actually have a good culture around engineering.

The first is horrible because you're a fungible asset and the job is miserable the second is better but still bad because at this point they do see you as valuable but you're going to be spending your time digging them out of a grave and then the third is just a magical experience where you're valued and the codebase isn't constantly a light breeze away from collapsing.

The majority of the industry is in position 1 and I guess we'll see if it ever makes it to 2 or 3.

Worth noting that I made high salaries and could work from home in every case but it would be correct to say I continue to enjoy programming in spite of the industry.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that companies who are in group 3 are typically leagues ahead of 1 and 2.
I'm used to this treatment by the media and by people I interact with as a professional software engineer

Are the actual groups of people they’ve painted which doesn’t make for a particularly broad brush and certainly doesn’t include “most of the US”.

It’s unfortunate that you spend 7 paragraphs explaining a basic concept most children are indeed aware of while the person you’re replying to complains about that exact behavior. I hope you can see the irony there.

I suspect you’d be much more effective if you were less concerned with acting out a stereotype, and focused on reading the comment you’re replying to and addressing their point about bias in the media, and software industries.
And yet shorting exists and is hard, yet quite profitable. Sometimes the market gets it wrong because humans are fallible to herd mentality.

The question to ask is, do the fundamentals you mentioned justify the valuation?
Eliot Higgins: 'People accuse me of working for the CIA'
I think there's definitely a "responsible consumer product marketing" angle to this. Companies shouldn't be able to market products deceptively, and some products are too risky to be offered to the general public rather than qualified professionals.

But it seems that in the United States as long as the only thing you are harming is your own bank account you can take on as much risk as you want? I mean people are trading options on Robinhood with their last $500.
I think we should recycle plastic if we can, or better yet, switch to other materials that are easier to recycle. For example, glass bottles can just be sent back to the factory, washed and reused. This is already done for beer and wine AFAIK. It could be done for milk and every other kind of drinks as well.

However, if we fail to recycle plastic, isn't burying plastic in a landfill, in a way, a form of carbon capture? This is that. much less carbon going into the atmosphere. Again, I think we should avoid that if we can, but IMO, not all pollution is an equally serious problem. Reducing CO2 emissions is clearly the number one priority.
For me, yes complete waste of time and energy
don't have the will/independence ("budget") to implement that change

So, dicks and idiot middle managers. I think you made his point.
Very sensible initiative, but nothing about whether it has any chance of becoming law.
The Rise and Fall of Carvel
The true wizards of today are the AI engineers and scientists.
Airdrop by captchas is miles less egalitarian than making people mine for coins in a fair competition over decades. Worse yet, there's no way to verify that a majority of coins didn't end up in the hands of just a few people
I already answered this. Wiles' proof didn't overturn anything, it only extended what was known. Again, as far as I know, it was celebrated by everyone in the field. No career was ended by the discovery.

Examples of a developments that rocked the boat would be the theory of evolution, quantum mechanics, and irrational numbers. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_number#Ancient_Gree...
You certainly could, but you could also build houses out of stone and cement, like they used to do in the old days. Makes for very durable construction.
We are close to having microelectronics that can function at Venus surface temperature and pressure. Examples tested include smallish circuits like a 555 timer [1] or a 256 pixel sensor array [2]. The Silicon Carbide technology seems very capable.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8782125/
[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8959229/
Game Development is an example of what can happen when there are too many people passionate about their work. I'm not saying that everyone in that industry is taken advantage of but it's a lot more than the broader tech industry even though there's a lot of overlap between skill sets.
I really don't care if someone creates a service to create a custom porn simulator. I don't think society would care either. People have been free to imagine others in sexual encounters since the dawn of time. The human experience won't radically be changed by rendering it on a screen.

There's a possible risk in pretending these videos are real and trying to slut shame people, but I'd bet against those being common or successful.
I can search my E2E encrypted rooms on Signal (Android) just fine.
>whereas some people will think -20°C is lower than -65°C

I believe this can happen in the US, but hardly in any place where people are used to Celsius.

I have experienced -30C in Germany and Norway, and -40C in Russia. Even in the mountain in Spain you can get -20C. People have -18C in the freezer.

It is obvious for people what 0C is: water freezes, and that is something that everybody experiences today just using a refrigerator.

But most people are not used to what K means. Only for scientists and maybe engineers is obvious, but you need a lot of things to know before it is easy to understand.
When I have read about this Texas situation I found that I did not really understand what a "capacity market" for energy was. I assumed it was some sort of futures market, and it sort of is. This maybe clarifies how an energy capacity market works.

https://energynews.us/2013/06/17/midwest/explainer-how-capac...
Code which matters is like mathematics. It can be reasoned about, has respect for formalisms, may be subject to proof or inductive reasoning. It heads to things like type checking. I've never written any code like this. I often doubt I can.

Everything else is either ephemeral, or scripting, or should only waiting to be subject to tests against formalisms. Lots of things are broken in code which should not be btw.
Better to harvest the plastic from the ocean, and power the collection system with the plastic in a plasma gasifier. The slag can be disposed of in the ocean, as its chemically inert.
Classical "liberals" were similar. Believed in free speech, free markets, rule by law. Languages change in interesting ways when people all pile on to a "positive word" that they want to be, but that changes the meaning of the word. It's like iterative word redefinition.
By all means, please do. There's a severe lack of material.
Q: "And if you were not licensed how would they even identify you or track you down?"

A: Ham radio uses a frequency band plan that everyone agrees to adhere to, so if someone shows up on those frequencies who doesn't belong, we will notice.

Hams are also required to broadcast their FCC allocated "call sign" about every 10 minutes, or when starting and ending a transmission, if you're not doing that, then licensed Hams will notice.

If you think you're being "clever" and make up a fake call-sign, we will notice, we know who the regulars on the Ham frequencies are in our geographic areas.

If you're producing "harmful interference", i.e. illegally broadcasting on a licensed Amateur Radio Band, then some of "us" Hams will get together and Track your signal, via triangulation, and eventually we Will find your transmitting location.

Then we notify the FCC, and eventually... they will contact you, and you Will stop, or face legal consequences.

A lot of Hams enjoy tracking down hidden transmitters, we even set up "games" to practice doing just that, we call it a "Hare & Hound" practice.

I'm quite good at tracking down harmful interference on the VHF Ham bands.

Ham radio has a lot of places to explore, but do avoid the H/F bands, it's full of "rag chewers", and you'll want to poke out your eardrums if you listen to them.

73, KE6---
But that's not really a handheld radio; it's a scanner. An RTL-SDR doesn't transmit.
Oh sorry, I misread.
People continually reference the lack of inflation (as traditionally measured by the CPI price basket) as a reason to not be concerned with the huge increase in the money supply we've experienced.

I think we are experiencing extreme inflation, just not in CPI goods, but rather capital assets. Stocks, bonds, real-estate, all are completely disconnected from any reality right now... traditional valuation is irrelevant and we are now trading purely on sentiment, ala meme-stonks.

Just look at the IPO landscape, and the ridiculous market caps of companies who not only have never had positive net income, but in fact have an increasing loss every year! They can continue doing this because the capital markets basically throw free money at them, it's easy to raise debt at low rates and issue additional shares if needed.

As they say "don't fight the fed", and timing the market is impossible, but I can't even begin to fathom the blood-bath that will ensue if rates were increased to a reasonable level.
To a large degree, simple price signals can incentivize capacity. A plant doesn't have to operate many hours in the year to be profitable at $9000/MWhr.
If by sent back you mean crushed then yeah sure bottles are reused. Oregon for example breaks the bottles when you return them to prevent fraud.
I don't think this comes from them being lazy. I think this comes from them not being aware of (1) the defense; and (2) the mitigation. It's an example of security through obscurity.
See here: https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/03/my_heroic_and_lazy_stand_ag... and here (among others, you might have to ferret around on Twitter a bit): https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/712031809433968642
It's hard to predict the future.

Alan Turing invented neural nets in a little-known paper entitled Intelligent Machinery (see [1]), in 1948. Since, the use of NNs has moved away decisively from inspiration by nature. I reckon, nature's last big win in AI were convolutional NNs: Kunihiko Fukushima's neocognitron was published in 1980, and inspired by 1950s work of Hubel and Wiesel [2]. Modern deep learning is largely an exercise in distributed systems: how can you feed stacks and stacks of tensor-cores and TPUs with floating point numbers, while minimising data movement (the real bottleneck of all computing)?

Not unlike, I think, how airplanes were originally inspired by birds, but nowadays the two have mostly parted ways, for solid technical reasons.

[1] http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20A...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocognitron
OK but the jobs still aren't coming back. Companies are just going to charge Americans more to make up the cost of the tarriffs, or leave the US as a market altogether. If the goal is to encourage domestic manufacturing, most of that work is automated now, and the rest will be competing with child and slave labor around the world.

It would be better to plan for a future where human labor is no longer worth the value of human life, rather than longing for the past.

And the US is never going to ban products that use child labor, because that would ban too many goods manufactured overseas, just as it's never going to be serious about illegal immigration, because the agricultural and service industries depend on under the table slave labor.
Lumi is hiring a UI designer to build the platform for sustainable manufacturing
It was me :)
Shouldn't the title read (2003) not (2006)?
It reminds me of this meme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iMV9XA6t_8
The Gameboys already had this. Wish I had a phone or PC with those screens...
Although you are right, I don't think it is that people don't know this. Recycle is easy, through it in the blue bucket. Reduce requires a complete re-imaging of our society. This won't happen without substantial taxation on plastics and single use packaging. But that is a bad way to get re-elected and how will we get next day shippping?
Ah the unspoken words of most startups. No one will ever admit to it, but too many are conceited in their quest.

I don't see anything wrong with it, but the status quo is that building a company has to be a true calling to change the world.
I remember Pike, I looked at it. It was too far away from C for me. I'm a died in the wool C programmer (I started as a kernel programmer and formed some strong opinions there). I get that C is not for everyone but for me, it's enough of a language to do what I want and not filled with this, that, and the other kitchen sink.

So Little looks a lot more like C than Pike does. And I like it that way. It's not for everyone but C programmers will probably like it.
> [...] build millions of houses

... slowly leaching endocrine disruptors in the environment for generations to come.
Is it different from other transflective LCDs? That wasn’t clear either.
Turns out the radiation level is less harmful to life than human presence. Who would have guessed.
Sadly, all those Kenwoods are now discontinued.
I was referring to billionaires
That’s a very insightful reply. I hadn’t thought about the fact that the number of working computer scientists today probably does dwarf the number of mathematicians around when ZFC was a current topic.
Phthalates damage babies' brains and must be banned immediately, say experts