skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Time-of-use plans have an app or web portal into which a customer can log into. (Actually, most providers in Texas these days have a real-time portal customers can use simply because smart metering enables it.)

2. Yep, my parents were, and they will never use a time-of-use plan ever again.

3. No. I made a spreadsheet and, based on my math their being bit by this in mid-2019 would have not paid off prior to this event.

Circling back to 2 for a moment, the problem is not so much with the plans, it is with all of the unmet caveats that the author lists in the article.

For my parents, they were pitched this plan on a visit to the State Fair of Texas where the salesperson told them they could "save thousands of dollars" every year by not "lining the pockets of big energy." Sure, they know how Griddy operates now, but what about some new clever scheme another provider comes up with that winds up biting them? That's why they're on fixed-rate plans forever.

Not a single person told them the downsides of this plan, the virtually-unlimited (sorry, but a $9/kWh cap when wholesale electricity is usually $0.02-$0.04/kWh and retail is around $0.115/kWh, is not a cap) cost exposure, and the near-impossibility of taking effective action (it is unreasonable to tell customers to go outside and hit the main breaker in a winter storm).

Texas came up with a system where retail electric customers are willingly offered plans in which they need to be near-experts in the price of natural gas derivatives and spot-generation electrical wholesale rates...and are not told in advance about this requirement.
So negative reinforcement here is the negative opinion about someone so that they would stop doing something. Taking away their “credibility” so that they would do something else.

Positive reinforcement is giving credibility to people who are doing something worthy.
It's been a cash cow since the end of the Civil War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing
Is there a better option? This is software that has to 100% work in order to be trusted. If the software cannot be trusted, additional process has to fill in to verify the decisions the software is making. There's no way to deliver a good solution cheaply.
Switch local storage for IndexedDB. Good library that wraps it is PouchDB: https://pouchdb.com/

It can sync browser db to remote database.
Human synapses top out at <100 Hz and the human brain has <10^14 of them. Single silicon chips are >10^10 transistors, operating at >10^9 Hz. Naively, a high end GPU is capable of more state transitions than the human brain by a factor of 1000. That figure for the brain also includes memory; the GPU doesn't. The human brain runs on impressively little power and is basically self-manufacturing, but it's WAY less compact or intricate than a $2000 processor.

The capabilities of the brain are in how it's all wired up. That's exactly what you don't want if you're trying to coopt it to do something else. The brain has giant chunks devoted to extremely specialized purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area#/media/File...

How do you turn that into a workhorse? It would be incredibly difficult. It's like looking at a factory floor and saying oh, look at all that power- lets turn it into a racecar! You can't just grab a ton of unrelated systems and expect them to work together on a task for you.
Yup that looks like the one I had in mind.
Congratulations on launching.

I don't understand what Lente is and what it does.

The description is very general and the landing page does not have clear examples.

Will I be reading the wisdom Borges or Elon Musk retweets?

The author becoming over-familiar with the product is of the dangers of working an idea to completion before sharing it.

People landing on the page have no context for what the conceptual terms in the description refer to.

Again, congratulations on launching.
The fact that there is a 30pt difference in effectiveness is the actual reason. Any rational person would prefer an mRNA vaccine to the Oxford one.

I know I do, on what basis would you justify not preferring the mRNA one?

The strong anti-British sentiment is also better explained by the false and demeaning rhetoric coming out of the UK directed at the EU. People in the EU like the EU. People in the UK seem to have an irrational hate for it.
I was reading about Griddy, and my understanding is that you can do exactly this with them [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/griddy/comments/lnrxn8/who_is_comin...
I’m not in Texas and not on Gridly but am on a time of use plan.

I am subscribed to text messages when prices go up and they provide a website with the time of use pricing.
Original author here. Cool to see it posted again.

We're still using and investing in rust at Discord. For example, in the past year we successfully pulled part of the core messaging system out of python and into a rust service. Rust has been a boon for developer productivity and correctness of code.

We've also been very happy with the way the rust ecosystem is evolving and the amount of adoption the language has seen.

I'm happy to answer questions here.

P.S. We're still growing and hiring (including remotely). You can find my email in my profile.
To the victor goes history.
I’m fine with calling them ‘monopoly rents’.

Then we can have a meaningful conversation about what to do about them, if that’s indeed what they are.

Tax-like, is not the same as Tax. Even saying ‘tax like’ would be better.

It’s still a dishonest politicization to call them taxes.

If we call App Store fees ‘taxes’, why don’t we also call healthcare premiums, or bank charges, ‘taxes’?
I can't speak for Texas, but in many states a contract that allowed a utility provider to shut off service without adequate notification and other paperwork would be illegal.

You're on to an idea that the article doesn't cover: If you want consumers to constrain their utilization during periods of high demand without using price shifts, you might require they install suitably "smart" thermostats and appliances along with their smart meter. These could allow the utility to forcibly curtail power use without rolling blackouts. Some utilities already offer a softer version of this, with your Nest offering to tweak your schedule to marginally lower your bill.

Of course that kind of invasive control would likely not go over much better than $16,000 power bills.
We could use a name for "standard JSON-over-HTTP stuff that's implemented in a variety of frameworks and libraries".

So what shall we call REST without HATEOAS[1]? "RESTless"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS
Most code is not CPU-bound, and for code that is, a hot spot is all the usually needs to be optimized. Today .Net Core is remarkably performant, and the fact that just by writing code carefully, or using Span<> etc., you can get close to bare-metal perf with w/o resorting to FFI to unsafe code is a good thing. This is much easier than trying to keep your friendly Rust borrow-checker happy even for moderately complex data-structures with varying lifetimes.
1. If you opt into modules, $GOMODCACHE is used for go mod downloads. It defaults to $GOPATH/pkg/mod.

2. If you don't use modules, $GOPATH is used.

3. If $GOPATH isn't set, it defaults to ~/go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumiracoxib -- Approved in Europe, not the USA. Withdrawn from sales due to side effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimelidine -- Same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolrestat -- Approved in Europe, failed stage 3 clinical in the USA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimonabant -- Approved in Europe, failed in the USA, withdrawn worldwide because the side effects were so bad.

Thalidomide is just the most famous because it was the most disastrous, but there are plenty of others. Like I said, the FDA has a strong many decades track record.

This is nothing like opposing nuclear plants.
NASA live stream showing the video of Perseverance landing
The best solution to the problem is to hold developers personally liable for the software they write, as well as the owners. That could mean criminal penalties for negligent violations of industry standards and processes but will mostly result in civil penalties.

The second and third order consequences is that developers will insulate themselves behind licensing and proofs of practice like every other industry.

Until people actually advocate for real penalties for such harmful violations they don’t care. All their temporary whining and crying is just blowing smoke up our asses.
Frankly, I'm surprised the opposite isn't the case, given the technical novelty of the mRNA vaccines. Anyone who says mRNA vaccines are proven technology is being dishonest. They're very promising and I truly hope they succeed but we are running a massive public health trial and I doubt anyone will be surprised if we encounter some unpleasant side effects at scale, whether from the vaccines themselves or as a consequence of administering a new drug protocol at massive scale. I'll happily take less effectiveness for less risk. Germans must enjoy living on the edge.
> But then you need to provide some kind of query ID in the the HTTP request? And if you many concurrent clients, that can be expensive in terms of RAM?

A query ID is super easy to implement, and yes, for any application you run you have to be aware of the resource requirements. Tune your eviction policy, and this is totally feasible.

Deduping and tombstones is messier to implement IMO, and hitting a cached result for the next page (e.g. a redis LIST) is probably less expensive than a "query" (whatever that means for your backend).
There are some interesting details here but let's be suuuper clear, nobody in the residential sector consented to a 12,000% increase in power costs or a $5,000 - $16,000 power bill this month. I think the article tries extremely hard to forgive everyone involved aside from the residents who have now been completely devastated by this.

The only real acknowledgement that residents have truly suffered something they didn't deserve is sandwiched between statements completely clearing Griddy & ERCOT of wrongdoing:

> The point is that while Griddy customers should definitely be entitled to relief, Griddy is not evil. Nor is ERCOT.
That doesn't address what I said.

There is an argument to be made that various strains are different viruses, and that we have herd immunity to some of them. It wouldn't make sense to invent an English name for each one, but that doesn't mean they should be treated as a single thing in all contexts.

And I even stated it as ambiguous depending on how you count strains, I'm not arguing that there is only one way to look at it!
That’s like saying that failing to stop your car before you crash means you shouldn’t bother braking at all. Masks have repeatedly been shown to work, indoor dining has repeatedly been shown to be high risk in addition to being an optional luxury, and there’s no world in which we want more spread even if we’d prefer less.
Go was announced in 2009, and went 1.0 in 2012. Sure, it's "newer" than languages from the 90s, but calling it "new" when it's nearly a decade old doesn't pass the smell test. Serious software has been written in both Go and Rust, and real issues with Java, C++, and C that these newer languages address are well known.

Compare Go and C++, and I bet C++ has had more language changes since Go's 1.0 than Go has. That makes large portions of C++ "relatively new and immature" compared to Go.
The overwhelming majority of retail electric plans in Texas are fixed or nearly-fixed rate. By "nearly," I mean the rate changes by bands based on time (e.g. power you use after 10pm is $0.05/kWh where power you use between 12pm and 4pm is $0.21/kWh).

Some plans are so-called variable rate where the per-kWh rate you pay changes per month based on the price of natural gas.

But an increasing majority are these time-of-use, rates-can-move plans, of which Griddy's is the logical extreme.
You make an excellent point i just wanted to correct your usage of "unsafe" in rust: It does not signify "im writing c" now as many invariants are still upheld in Rust even with the usage of unsafe. Id say its still much "safer" than using unmanaged memory in go as you have far more facilities you may use and more invariants are upheld.
I think you're missing the point. We use Elixir to solve one class of problems which its excellent in doing (notably: real time distributed systems.) In this area, there is nothing even remotely close in terms of capability. So, we choose the runtime over the language (elixir is a pretty cool dynamic language though!). Also, due to the unique nature of Erlang/Elixir, a lot of problems that exist in C/C++/Rust/Go don't exist in that language. Of course this has meant writing a lot more tests to test things that a typechecker should be able to catch. But it is what it is. We're following Gleam though to see where that ends up.

BTW, here's some places I've spoken about Discord's Elixir usage:

- a podcast: https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s5e8-nowack-hei...

- interview with José Valim (elixir's creator): https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
Deploying a 2.7 PB System
Databases and traffic is going to have your lunch anyway. Good developers cost a good deal more than extra infrastructure. Adding people to help you cut cloud cost is easier and more predictable than re-implementing.
MBA and business students are taught the rule of three:

"The Rule of Three applies wherever competitive market forces are allowed to determine market structure with only minor regulatory and technological impediments."

https://iveybusinessjournal.com/publication/competitive-mark...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(economics)

The costs here of developing the platform and substitute services / features is high and all investors want some return on the investment. Third place companies are often stuck in the ditch going nowhere. Microsoft has deep pockets and years of experience, but ultimately bailed on Windows Phone because #3 is not a good place to be.
I agree with you, developers do get excited when are using newer technologies but the question is what if a new problem arises and they might not be able to find a to it solution.

Just like how they did in this case completely switching from Go to Rust
> the JIT needs warmup just like java

That doesn't sound right. .Net has good support for caching of generated native code. It's well ahead of Java in this regard.
With both travel restrictions and lockdown, It takes about 6 weeks to get to (effectively) zero new cases. Not forever.
Re: Conways law at Facebook

I was at Facebook when GraphQL was invented, maintaining a backend storage service where a core assumption was that storage should be reorganized based on access patterns and that predicates should be pushed down to storage where they can be executed more efficiently.

GraphQL was hard to push predicates down, because you don't know which of the edges were written in PHP.

My response was fquery[1], which is like what's being discussed here but with python as the source language instead of swift and amenable to preserving the largest possible query structure for backend optimizers, including SQL optimizers.

It has some early demos converting a GraphQL/fquery into SQL where possible. It should be possible to add enough metadata to fquery to identify if an edge is non-trivial (calls into another microservice) or trivial (can be optimized to a storage backend or SQL).

[1] https://github.com/adsharma/fquery
Yep - this is what 99% of electricity retailers do.
It’s cool. I tried reading the code but man, the HTML file is over 2k lines since everything is inline.
I understand your motivation to implement this without build tools and frameworks but you could have used at least stylesheets and put JS into separate files. Or even use ES modules to split functionality into modules. All of these are native to modern browsers and do not need any build tools.
Publishers have good information on a per ad slot basis telling them how likely they are to be initially on screen. It's not yes/no, the way it would be if everyone's screen was the same size or on a physical newspaper, but percentages are still useful.

Mostly people use viewability instead: https://headerbidding.co/mrc-viewability-standards/
I think you have this backwards. This isn't the power company shutting off your power. This is telling your agent (in this case Griddy) to stop buying power under some conditions that you define.
You're still not adjusting for actual life (solar ain't making nameplate power 15 years in, for instance).

No one claimed an order of magnitude better. Nuclear looks somewhat more sustainable than renewable, and it can do some things renewables can't.

We should be doing both.
In states, counties and cities a lot of contracting basically has the purpose of pushing money to well connected people. They don’t want an efficient and cost effective solution.

I know somebody who audits municipalities. We did a graph that showed relations between different players. It’s basically just a big insider club of usually 20-40 people and families that give contracts to each other at the expense of the tax payer.
What's wrong with PBKDF2-SHA256? I use PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 for an almost-stateless password manager.
> an item is removed

How common are concurrent removals in practice though? I can't think of a single instance off the top of my head where this is problematic and you can't just go back to the previous page if you're really paranoid or confused that something is "missing"

> it can put a lot of load on your backend if you paginate over 10 of thousands of items

Look at it in aggregate. Fiddling w/ URL params to paginate (instead of clicking pagination links) is a power user move. If I want the date of first commit in a repo, I'll only look at the last page (vs paging through the entire history). For guessing, I can click a page, and if I went too far, binary search from there (again, vs linear search). Etc.

Even for the most degenerate use case (e.g. some jerk trying to crawl over the entire dataset), the load is smaller with a single request than the overhead of multiple requests. Paginating is not an appropriate mitigation strategy against this type of traffic, and you arguably can implement detection/caching/blocking mechanisms much more easily for naive huge queries than if you need to differentiate regular traffic from bots.
> Big Tech monopolies controlling news and information: Twitter, Facebook, Google

I think you mean NYT, Wapo, Fox, CBS, Zeit, Asahi "control" the news...except there sure are a lot of them.
I think the "each new member can enhance creativity of existing members" vibe can exist generally among "scenes", and scenes definitely can use technology that directly taps into this.

I like the "scenius" term for this from Brian Eno: https://youtu.be/0qATeJcL1XQ (54:15 in that talk)
To be fair, I have found Java’s JRE to be relatively painless. It’s fairly simple to have multiple installed and choose which one to use as a command line option.

Python OTOH...
What do you do if you're away from home one day, and you get a text message that electricity prices have increased 100x? Can you cut power to your house?
high cost of food or a high cost of a hair cut is absolutely a tax on life costs.

it might not be a tax that goes straight to the government but what are you going to do, not eat? how will people treat you if you stop maintaining your hygiene and look like a caveperson? its a tax because it is a necessity.
Understanding Deep Learning (Still) Requires Rethinking Generalization
If you think the current relatively mild upset of the status quo in any way constitutes an "anti-white sentiment", you've been living an extremely sheltered and privileged life.

White men still hold the overwhelming power in the western world, in politics, business and culture.

The fact that minorities are making their voices heard and demanding their rights be respected does not discriminate against white people. Various minorities have been politely asking for their rights to be respected for decades, even centuries at this point. Now they're demanding to be heard, which shouldn't really surprise anyone.
Most of the common examples are mathematical widgets. For example, for any two vector spaces V, W, there's a vector space of linear transformations from V to W. Given a vector in V and a transformation W^V, you can get a vector in W -- I think categorically this is called the hom-tensor adjunction?

It's a long-standing desire of mine to find categorical examples closer to software engineering. The usual example is the family of cartesian-closed categories corresponding to simply-typed lambda calculi -- "first-class functions" is exactly saying that you can take and return functions themselves as values, which witnesses that the morphisms of the category are "internalized" as elements of some type. I've never found it to give a very visceral intuition for the concept though.
You need to host it somewhere. S3 won't set off any IDS/Firewall alert. IDS would pick up calls to China or Russia. Payment details are probably stolen credit cards or credit cards setup with fake/stolen identities. They'll be a dead end.
That is the access problem he talks about in the notes. He is right. All the number that we see from the industry shows that there is a fuckton of capital. But it is really badly distributed. That is probably a far bigger problem right now and one that need to be solved if this industry want to maximise impact.

There are interesting things happening in that space, but they are still at the fringe.
I don't think refactoring tools are that useful for refactoring, most of the time you are doing non-obvious refactoring tools can't help with anyways. Depends what we call "refactoring", tools are mostly useful for what I would call "housekeeping".
The first electric car worked perfectly in 1890. 11 years is nothing!
I made a comment further down that your comment jives with. It’s the idea that abundant capital doesn’t necessarily mean it’s evenly distributed through the various stages. In particular, seed stage seems not to have seen the effect yet.

Hard data on aggregate seed funding through the years would be interesting.

Also - hang in there! 30% MoM is no joke, sounds like you’ve done one the hardest things (made something people want).
The EU is fairly popular among young brits - thankfully we've been "saved" from it by people who will be long dead by the time it hurts.
Imho that wouldn‘t cause quality to go up. It would just make it more expensive to develop and to fix bugs. Even more cover your ass would go on.

Or at least a huge share of that burden needs to be on the client so that they define and then test and control the SW they receive properly.

The problems with the software sound like typical big software project problems. Trying to cover a huge breadth of use cases with lots of very important tiny details and released in a big bang (one migration). It sounds like more of a project mgmt problem than a software problem to me.

But maybe I am just a hammer and see nails everywhere.
Why is not the answer to all probability questions 1/2 (2014)
They aren't perfectly safe, they are a lot safer than COVID.
I didn't see this mentioned in the article, but there are many time-of-use plans that offer variable rates without exposing the consumer to additional risk.

For example, my electric plan has different rates for "peak" (4pm - 9pm), "super off-peak" (12am - 6am), and "off-peak" (everything else). But these rates are fixed, so I know in advance how much I'll need to pay.

This still incentivizes me to shift my usage to lower-demand times, flattening the demand curve under typical conditions. But it doesn't expose me to tail risk.
Scroll does not support that out of the gate. But there is a dead simple "API" (a Scroll is just a folder with a plain text dumbdown file per article). So someone could certainly write some code to generate single pages, in addition to the one scroll page.

I may do a startup around offering higher level professional services for Scroll users.