skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like the prices on electric vehicles are starting to become their biggest hurdle (instead of range, availability, or charging which are solved enough).

If you're from California or New York, I'm sure $40K starting for this or a Model Y seems complexly within your means, but there's a large chunk of the US (by population AND land) where <$20K new sedans remain popular and "nicer" vehicles are still in the $20-$30K range (and we're talking about SUVs and other family sized vehicles rather than small sedans).

People love to spam $40K US "average" while entirely ignoring that the average is a highly abusive figure containing $80K+ trucks and luxury vehicles, as well as a few $15-32K vehicles dragging that figure down. It doesn't really reflect anything useful.

Go look at this map[0]. How many of "the most popular car by state" are $40K? Zero. But yet an electric is going to replace a $21K Honda Civic by 2025? Really?

And I'm not dumping on the manufacturers here: From what I understand batteries remain the lion's share of an electric vehicle's total production cost (I've heard as much as $16K/vehicle). So this isn't profiteering, this is the tech not yet being ready price-wise for the mass adoption everyone seems to believe will come soon. Worse still as electric vehicles become more popular the rare earth metals that seemingly remain popular within the batteries may increase in cost offsetting our future reductions.

To be clear: I want to own an electric vehicle. I'd trade my current Subaru Outback ($27K) in tomorrow if I could buy a comparable electric. But those start in the $40K range (and honestly the cheapest trim is just a hero model, they don't intend to sell many, and blackmail buyers with missing basic features accordingly).

[0] https://insurify.com/insights/most-popular-cars-by-state-202...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26891094
Remember when we could buy mp3s on the iTunes store? Why can't we buy our movies as mp4s on the Apple Movies store?

I would have convenience (more convenience than I have now, I argue). They could still have a cloud offering that only lasts as long as they feel like it.

That would be enough to make this lawsuit go away. So, no, it isn't that we are now buying convenience so we must bend our backs to their spying and control. We had both freedom and control in the digital music ecosystem for more than ten years.
NFL teams' pre-draft interviews: Wildest questions and blown answers
I mean, I think it's sufficient to quote the opening of the article verbatim:

> The history of capitalism is diverse. The concept of capitalism has many debated roots, but fully[quantify] fledged capitalism is generally thought by scholars[specify][weasel words] to have emerged in Northwestern Europe, especially in Great Britain and the Netherlands, in the 16th to 17th centuries.[citation needed] Over the following centuries, capital accumulated by a variety of methods, at a variety of scales, and became associated[by whom?] with much variation in the concentration of wealth and economic power. Capitalism gradually became the dominant economic system throughout the world.[1][2](subscription required)[need quotation to verify][3][need quotation to verify] Much[quantify] of the history of the past 500 years is concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms.

> It is an ongoing debate within the fields of economics and sociology as to what the past, current and future stages of capitalism are.

This does not leave me filled with confidence that people know what they mean when they mention "capitalism".

The problem is that there are two broad paradigms of what "capitalism" should mean:

1. Whatever the United States does.

This is what most people seem to be talking about when they talk about "capitalism", but it leaves something to be desired on theoretical grounds. Many aspects of it are not particularly economic.

2. An economic system defined... somehow. Mostly by constrast with "communism", which -- unlike "capitalism" -- has a large body of theory attached.

This is what people want to claim they are talking about. It is more or less conceptually incoherent, being defined only as the absence of policies covered by the term "communism". But all of those negative policies are very old, historically.
I suspect that Google mobility data detects strict restrictions, not moderate ones.
I read it as: existing solutions are too hard for simple people with less technical skill.
Yeah, the oil fields seem insanely bright relative to cities. I wonder if this has something to do with the sensor spectral sensitivity or something...
>"Abject suffering" is relative, too. What you might call "abject suffering," someone in another country might just call "Tuesday." Conversely, someone used to living very well who ends up losing everything financially might feel extreme despair. Think 2008, or 1929.

I don't agree that all suffering is relative. I don't believe that Pakistanis experience starvation less severely than Americans. Maybe human suffering is relative to being a human.

I understand that you think relative poverty causes suicide. That's not important to my argument which (following from the original commenter's) is "there are other interesting variables that affect suicide besides relative poverty".

You keep bringing up how culture is hard to control for. But a study of only South Korea doesn't control for culture. The correlation between relative poverty and suicide is probably higher in SK for cultural reasons (which is, of course, why SK was chosen). My point is that culture (among other things) is an interesting factor in suicide. It could be studied too. It's fine to look for the effect of relative poverty within a country but it's also interesting to look for other things, like culture and absolute poverty and levels of industrialization.
Holy guacamole, I didn't scroll down far enough. Thank you for pointing this out.

"French taxes" is $53k, which is nearly equal to their server fees. Wow.

Props to them for however they manage to get $400k/yr for a free project with no business model, and no intended business model. (I'm serious; it's a wonderful thing for the world, and a tremendous example of what people can achieve without having a monetary focus.)
lmao love me some Aussie humor
I don't own them?
In my utopic world, we wouldn't need "ICMP won't fragment". IPv4/IPv6 would have the MTU of exactly 4096 bytes.

Why not a higher or lower level protocol? Because this is the lowest level protocol which is end-to-end and has a path MTU. Lower level protocols would need to somehow handle the MTU and higher level protocols would need to fit their segments within the MTU.

Why 4096? Because this is a common page size on computers. Multiple of this would likely bring little benefits, due to GRO/GSO.

Also, it's my utopic world, so if you don't like it create your own. :))
Recent and related:

India's massive COVID surge puzzles scientists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898889 - April 2021 (146 comments)

India’s second wave - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886829 - April 2021 (438 comments)
Why would they? Apple likes vertical integration, it's not advantageous to them to sell off a differentiating part of their product, the hyped processor, so that others can use it, often competitors.

Back in the 90s, when Jobs was gone, Apple licensed its OS and almost went bankrupt as you could simply get a cheaper clone of Apple's computers with the OS on them. They won't repeat that mistake again.
Isn't this short term thinking? That is the upfront cost. What about the total lifetime cost of the vehicle?
Probably what they mean is that they want to be able to host the maps as static files that are served to the web.

So that you can FTP some html, js, css, images and map data files to a web host and call it a day.
I've seen this while reading text, but does anyone have examples in any other sense? Verbally?
You want understanding from us and understand our perspective but our approach is hysteria?

> I've been reading a lot about how NZ's health system is overwhelmed too.

What has this got to do with covid? There isn’t any in the community. It’s eradicated.

This is an odd thread and it isn’t contributing anything, altering prior comments also makes this hard to follow.
I’m not an AWS pricing expert, but you should be aware you’re still on the hook for S3 requests even if you can get out of paying for bandwidth. Is AWS direct connect a pure peering arrangement? I wonder what their requirements are for that. Guess I’ll read the link :)

Idk what your team’s expertise is, but I’d advise avoiding the cloud as long as possible. If you can build out an on-premise infrastructure, it will be a huge competitive advantage for your company because it will allow you to offer features that your competitors can’t.

Examples of this:

- Cloudflare built up their own network and infrastructure and it’s always been their biggest asset. They set the standard for free tier of CDN pricing, and nobody who builds a CDN on top of an existing cloud provider will ever beat it.

- Zoom. By hosting their own servers and network, Zoom is similarly able to offer a free tier where they are not subject to variable costs from free customers losing them money on bandwidth charges.

- WhatsApp. They scaled to hundreds of millions of users with less than a dozen engineers, a few dozen (?) servers, and some Erlang code.

IMO defaulting to the cloud is one of the worst mistakes a young company can make. If your app is not business critical, you can probably afford up to a day of downtime or even some data loss. And that is unlikely to happen anyway, as long as you’ve got a capable team looking after it who chooses standard and robust software.
Newton’s second law?
Malaria affects far smaller population size.
The insanity started with the Pentium 4, specifically the HT versions. HT made the CPU slower, it was quite the anti-feature.
One of my particularly patriotic neighbors has a big US flag atop a pole in his front yard. And he's following flag code, making sure that since he leaves it up at night it is properly lit. With a couple great big floodlights aimed straight up at it from the ground.
the time will come when cities will stop allowing using so much public space for the sake of one person/family’s comfort.
You must describe, in detail, every purchase you want to make, to a 3rd party. You cannot make that purchase until that 3rd party gives permission. It will then sell your transaction history to countless other private and government entities, for purposes unknown to you.

That is cashlessness.
They're also big on doing things themselves if they can't get a supplier at the right price.
It seems will all "standards" there is the published standard as written, and the standard "as implemented" - and many of the unused corners quickly become "here be dragons".
I'd be surprised if the documents for any sufficiently large project did not include a "Getting started" section designed for beginners.

Everyone of your users will start off as a beginner, it behooves project creators to ensure that beginner documentation is great.
Wow, this is mind-blowingly prescient.

> Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

Shoutouts to the UEFI secure boot fiasco.
yeah, especially given the leaps AMD has made.
1. Shrink your data. That's just an absurd amount of data for a start-up. Even large organizations can't quickly work around too much data. Resource growth directly affects system performance and complexity and limits what you will be able to practically do with the data. You already have a million problems as a start-up, don't make another one for yourself by trying to find a clever solution when you can just get rid of the problem.

2. As a general-purpose alternative, I would use Backblaze. It's cheap and they know what they're doing. Here is a comparison of (non-personal) cloud vendor storage prices: https://gist.github.com/peterwwillis/83a4636476f01852dc2b670...

3. You need to know how the architecture impacts the storage costs. There are costs for incoming traffic, outgoing traffic, intra-zone traffic, storage costs, archive costs, 'access' costs (cost per GET | POST | etc). You may end up paying $500K a month just to serve files smaller than 1KB.

4. You need to match up availability and performance requirements against providers' guarantees, and then measure a real-world performance test over a month. Some providers enforce rate limits, with others you might be in a shared pool of rate limits.

5. You need to verify the logistics for backup and restore. For 10PB you're gonna need an option to mail physical drives/tapes. Ensure that process works if you want to keep the data around.

6. Don't become your own storage provider. Unless you have a ton of time and money and engineering talent to waste and don't want to ship a reliable product soon.
Lichess is _impressive_ in itself. I was blown away when I found it was FOSS. Kudos to Thibault.
Saltwater is the enemy of moving parts. We've been sailing ships for millennia and we haven't figured out a way to reliably solve that problem. Saltwater boats are constantly fighting a battle against corrosion and take huge amounts of maintenance and they are basically just painted hulls with a few little moving bits sticking out.

This isn't a problem with a magic answer or a problem that will benefit substantially from incremental improvements to materials and designs.
I don’t worship celebs either, nor Musks nor Zucks.

So I say again, you may need these things, I don’t.
You're right. I'm wasn't really serious. Since I'm in the middle of calculating costs of own servers in rented racks in Poland (you're right labor is more difficult than hardware) let me imagine the rest of the infrastructure (probably not all) for this "projects", just for fun:

- network switch Juniper EX4600 (10Gbps ports) + 3rd party optics ~$11k

- cheap 1Gbps switch for management access <$1k

- some router for VPN for management network - $500

- 1Gbps (not guaranteed) internet access with few IPs ~$350 / month

- 100Mbps low traffic internet access for the management/OOB network.

Time to get the hardware - 2 months. Time to rent and install hardware in rack - about 1 month. I don't count configuring the software.

This setup is full of single points of failure so I would consider it one "region" and use something like CEPH + some spare servers in each "region". That way you don't need to react immediately to hardware failures. Just send a box of hardware from time to time to the DC and use ~$20-40h/h remote hands service to replace the failed drives or whole servers. You could also buy on-site service from the hardware vendor for 1-3 years adding some cost.

I think the most important thing would be have a cleaver person who design a fault tolerant system, automatic failover, good monitoring and alerting so that any on-call and maintenance job is easy and based on procedures. That way you could outsource it. Only then it might have some sense.
I came here to say this. After so much experience, I just learn the technology. It saves so much time.
As others have said, it’s a complicated question, but if you have the resources/wherewithal to run Ceph but don’t want to deal with co-location, you can get a bunch of storage servers from Hetzner and get a much better grasp on cost over S3.

For example, at 10PB with every object duplicated twice (so 20 PB raw storage), you’d need ~90 of their SX293[1] boxes, coming out to around €30k/mo. This doesn’t include time to configure/maintain on your end, but it does cover any costs associated with drive replacement for failure.

I’ve done similar setups for cheap video storage & CDN origin systems before, and it’s worked fairly well if you’re cost conscious.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx293/configura...
It’a a bland assertion and hyperbolic. I’m not sure there’s more to be said.
>I don't want a Tesla is that they all look the same to me,

In my eyes, practically all new cars look the same. The badging is the main way to tell them apart. On the other hand, I can tell a 1967 from a 1968 Camaro (hint: the running lights/turn signals in the grill are round vs. a rounded rectangle on non RS cars).

But they always did. If you come to it with a fresh eye, most cars of a given class/size in any era are pretty similar.
> What has made the auto industry particularly vulnerable is its reliance on just-in-time delivery, where parts are brought in when needed, rather than being stockpiled.

This idea has gotten a lot of play lately. But the unstated alternative is to somehow perfectly forecast future demand for parts. That's very difficult in general and doubly difficult during a global pandemic. And, in fact, well-practiced lean outfits are better at knowing which inputs are potentially most disruptive, because they already obsess over lead times for everything.

Without lean practices you just wind up with giants piles of almost random inventory. That you'd have wound up with a giant pile of CPUs is a total crapshoot. But you would absolutely positively have a bunch of stuff you don't need and never will. And that inventory would choke the whole company to death.

The whole idea that JIT destroyed some glorious, flawless past is the Nirvana fallacy. "Oh, supply chain disruptions happen at all, therefore JIT is entirely useless". It's just a silly idea and needs to be mocked at every opportunity.
Facebook's Subliminal Scroll Stoppers
Electric, Self-Driving Cars and Ride-Hailing Will Transform the Car Industry
VW is pretty far behind Tesla in battery technology.[0] Still, this seems like a good car for a large number of drivers. The VW charging network is building out rapidly (I've noticed that VW's chargers are largely in the same locations as Tesla's superchargers. Wonder why?)

The Tesla Model Y Long Range is rated at 326 miles and in my experience that's accurate and completely practical.

As to your criterion of "500ish" miles, that's unrealistic even for most ICE cars. Granted gas stations are more common than EV charging stations but you also cannot recharge your ICE car at home or at your hotel or at an RV park.

Owning an EV requires a mindset switch; if you approach the EV purchase decision from the ICE mindset and all you see is "OMG the range is too low and what happens if I can't find a charger?" then you're probably not ready for EV ownership. If, OTOH you are able to switch to a mindset where you keep your energy status in the back of your mind (and an EV car helps you with this a great deal) then you might be ready.

For me this mindset switch was easy since I've been RV camping for decades; that's another lifestyle where thinking about such things as energy, water, and waste status are necessary. It's not difficult; it's just different. It requires an awareness that assumptions of infinite sources (of water, energy, etc.) and infinite sinks (for waste disposal) are incorrect, and now you must manage them actively.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx1O4kvjn0U
This is true, but movies purchased on iTunes can only be downloaded at 720p or 1080p. To play back in 4k/HDR it must be streamed. It sucks because I don't own a 4K blu-ray player but wanted a few movies to try out my OLED and bought some movies on iTunes. They look great, and comparisons online put them within close distance to 4k blu-rays in quality, but I can never "own" them in full resolution.
Not much of a utopia if all you do is say the same problem is now unsolved at a different layer ;). Nothing special about the layer below IP that allows it to fix the problem in a way IP couldn't be made to - it's just an annoying problem to fix efficiently.
When are we getting good looking electric cars? The only good looking EV thus far is the Honda e but it has issues in pretty much every other department.
The beauty of luck is that it can be used practically any time as explanation for success. Tesla bet big on vertical integration. Who knows what they took into consideration but it was surely bold since they were not as flush with cash as they are now.
The performance figures are pretty optimistic, but hats off if they actually pull this off. Whoever gets a competitive e-plane to this market first is going to drown in money.
Unfortunately HN / Cloudflare / Google still block some Tor users with the privacy invasive software known as ReCAPTCHA. Not sure if they’ve switched to hcaptcha yet.
Not only that, there are entire continents where electric vehicles are simply not feasible. You cannot drive an EV 100km through mud and forests to get to a town just to charge it. Those EVs are not only very heavy and will sink in mud, they turn into bricks when empty. Have fun getting electricity into the jungle. A gas canister can be brought by anybody and filling the car up is quick. So most likely you will be hauling around generators - gas powered of course.

These are problems I don't see discussed anywhere when car manufacturers are claiming to go full EV by 2030.
we just got federal regulations so weak, the one state doing well had to lower their restrictions for fear of getting sued.
They famously maintained production after that earthquake. It's a common case study of how to adapt to supply chain shocks by being good at running a supply chain in the first place. All the things they needed for resilience -- plentiful data, high trust relationships with suppliers, flexible and skillful workforce -- were things they had built up to support their JIT manufacturing capability.
Yes. Also evolution tends to favor making diseases better adapted to their hosts and note virulent, but less deadly.

We have a number of Coronaviruses endemic to humans that cause the common cold (among other viruses.) That's probably how covid19 would turn out, left to its own devices.
Actually the market for new sub-$20k vehicles is quite small. Most people with budget concerns buy used. The median new passenger vehicle is something like a $40k minivan or pickup. So these EVs really aren't very far off the mark financially.
That's really not true, Car parts are heavily interchangeable. Many parts are used across generations of cars, across different models in a make's lineup, and even across makes.
NorCal to SoCal using regional airports (avoid sfo lax etc) can be less than 2 hours door to door. Online check in + no checked bag means you can show up at small airports 30 minutes before takeoff. 50 minutes in the air, 10 minutes to deplane and leave the airport, and less than 15 minutes driving on either end and you have 2 hours door to door (and a lot more leg stretching than driving the 5).
And there is also this thing (don't recall its name) where celebs can post short stories now, answering e.g. questions
Yeah, I think that's why I object much less to Netflix's DRM than to iTunes DRM on movies that I've "bought". Netflix, HBO+, Disney+ never give you the illusion that anything involving them is permanent.
Do you ever need to know how long a command takes? And if you ever need it is it really worth a full line for every command that is ran. And it shows the time that the prompt is printed right? It doesn't show the time your command is executed if I am correct.

I guess you can hit enter before every command is entered to get the correct time but that is a lot of wasted space!

Maybe I'm getting too minimalist but I don't see the benefit to productivity in these over the top prompts.
You don't need a formal proof for the entire system as a whole. You could simply have a formal proof of specific functions of the software. Those functions which will have their data audited, for example.