skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This seems absurd. Being able to have a conversation is orders of magnitude more effective than the mimicry and hand signals that must be resorted to when you truly don't speak the same language.

How does my point contradict that? I am saying that knowing an additional language takes nothing away. I speak English to you because I understand that we both understand it. That hasn't made me forget my mother tongue. That is to say, knowing (and using) an additional language didn't have the effect on me that I couldn't communicate with people that don't understand my mother tongue.

> Right, but politics and aesthetics are also ideas that are transferred via language.

Point is that language itself can constitute a political message or an aesthetic expression.

> What was lost when most European languages adopted the Latin alphabet? Or when the Chinese empire standardized the writing system?

Writing is an expression in itself, hence things like calligraphy and type setting. We perceive it and meaning is derived from our impressions of it. What was lost, insofar that writing systems were actually lost, was probably many lifetimes' worth of calligraphic tradition, especially in China where calligraphy is considered a very important art form, though I'm sure many of these traditions are still maintained by enthusiasts.

> What additional information is transferred in a rhyme? What meaning?

I don't see how this question can come from anything but a position of total philistinism, so I probably misunderstand it. Rhyme and rhythm in general is rhetorically and aesthetically useful so as to make an expression impactful, evocative and memorable, or simply funny and delightful. You may have heard of music and poetry. What happens when you take away the meter and rhythm from song or poetry? Information is definitely lost. If I hear a limerick, and you here an prosaic retelling of the exact same circumstances, I know something which you don't. Whether this information is useful or actionable to you is another question.

Have you heard of puns? They get lost in translation. Perhaps to Siri and Alexa it didn't matter in the first place, but it did to me and (hopefully) you.

> What can you do with language that does not constitute the expression of a thought or an idea?

You misread me. My objection isn't with the notion that language is a tool to express thoughts and ideas, but with the notion that it's a transparent protocol for doing so rather than something that is inherently part of the expression. The thoughts and ideas can be—and frequently are—colored by the language itself. Because there is music and poetry in the English language that is basically inexpressible in other languages without great artistic license, if we forget English, that work is lost.
> I mean Spaniards killing each other.

This is not really what happened. My city was bombed continuously during three years by the Italian navy and air force. No "spaniards" bombed my city. My grandmother was 10 and she was wounded and half her schoolmates killed by an Italian bomb. Through her life she had a huge scar on half her body and many pieces of shrapnel deep inside her. She considered all humans her brothers, as well, not only the ones that had the same passport as her. Yes, including the italian guy who killed her friends.
I like playing with the modeling tool at

https://model.energy/

It lets you play with combinations of solar, wind, batteries, and hydrogen storage, and optimize for a minimum cost system that can provide "synthetic baseload" for an entire year for a region given high cadence historical climate data.

When I apply that to the US, for example, the storage needed is typically maybe 6 hours of batteries and a week or so of hydrogen. To put that last number in perspective: there is a salt formation in Delta, Utah that could supply enough hydrogen storage capacity to power the entire US for 30 hours.
The paper has a great figure where they illustrate areas of the overhead vs false positive trade-off space where each filter type performs best. Cuckoo filters make an appearance there
Resisting brain shrinkage: reminds me of a somewhat different but related report I heard in the past of a group of nuns who seemed to age very well such that their cognitive functions remained seemingly strong into old age. They donated their brains to research, and upon study significant shrinkage was found similar to some degree of Alzheimer's. I think the conclusion was that because they kept themselves so active and busy, whatever synaptic connections were necessary for their daily functioning were kept strong, alongside important life memories. Another strong case for how "retirement" is harmful.

Generally, the rate at which memory synapses weakens is similar across the general population (stability of a memory synapse), so for super-agers it is probably genetic.

I may not have a super-ager brain, but as a lifelong learner and brain-health lover I've placed all my significant memories into a spaced-repetition program I use for everything, and thus am able to recall at will all sorts of important memories in life. I'm keeping my important synapses strong.

There's another category besides super-agers: people with hyperthymesia: "a condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. It is extraordinarily rare, with only about 60 people in the world having been diagnosed with the condition as of 2021." There's a documentary about these people. You ask them: what important event happened in your life on January 7th, 1980, and they can answer it accurately.
I had the same in Italy (Tuscany) with Google Maps. One way it recommended a longer normal road, on the way back it was a shorter dirt road through fields and forests. Had to stop once to let a fox cross the road (it didn't seem to care much about me). In the end it took as much time if not more.

Those rental Pandas can take you everywhere though.
This code of ethics, like all others, has limitations. Here, it has failed to consider all cases, namely the case where the entity whose confidentiality is being protected doesn't exist anymore. That doesn't necessarily mean your quote isn't relevant, just that it shouldn't be given the final say until we've balanced it out with the rest of the document and looked at the tradeoffs involved.

Not breaking the NDA is an issue w/r/t:

- 1.2 "Well-intended actions, including those that accomplish assigned duties, may lead to harm. When that harm is unintended, those responsible are obliged to undo or mitigate the harm as much as possible."

- 2.2 Maintain high standards of professional competence, conduct, and ethical practice.

- 2.7 "As appropriate to the context and one's abilities, computing professionals should share technical knowledge with the public"

- 2.7 again "a computing professional should respectfully address inaccurate or misleading information related to computing."

Lastly, since the company's actions were clearly in violation of the Code and potentially causing harm, I could simply argue that the public is the ultimate appropriate authority (since none seem to be more appropriate in this case) and that not breaking the NDA would have been unethical by the very passage you chose to quote.
They are also unelected, because they are so virtuous there is no need for people to change them.
This is true in a lot of places. However, in the places that I am most familiar with, energy consumption is MUCH higher in the winter due to heating . . .

This may be where the international HVDC lines come in (that a sibling comment of yours mentioned), I suppose.
Extremely rare != never, though. So it's useful to have a very low capital cost "black swan" backup system. The name of the game here is extremely low capital cost, even at the price of terrible efficiency (which is ok since this system will almost never be running.) Hydrogen stored underground and burned in turbines could do it.
Is this the case?

This seems to take the view that pre-colonisation these countries were modern functioning states; and that it was the coloniser which "destabilised them".

However this seems to be rarely, if ever, the case. Colonised countries were extremely pre-modern compared to coloniser-states, and as far as I'm aware, routinely the purpose of colonisation was to establish such thing as a functioning state -- for the sake of enabling trade and commerce to be conducted reliably.

Here we should also distinguish the activities of a coloniser-state (eg., the UK) vs., eg., that of an individual eg., Leopold.
Yes, I remember the Alpha ads. Thanks, and that is aimed specifically at new Christians which seems laudable.
Assuming you last at Amazon and are not hire to fire and can navigate safely through their codebase and you have a good manager and...

I've had my fair share of good and bad gigs-- I am willing to trade a considerable amount of Amazon's upside in exchange for employment I can predict.
Thank you!

Currently decisions can be tagged and you can search through them, but we’re thinking about integrations to other tools, like Asana, or filtering and clustering options, as well as UI improvements. We’re aware that the current version is more of a refined MVP but we won’t stop improving.
> Pretty scary thing here for me is that basically all the lessons from 1910 to 1950 are being forgotten.

This becomes even more scary when you realize that the 1910-1950 happened because people had forgotten all the lessons of the 1800. Every generation feels that they are above repeating the errors of the past. Yet every generation does.
Although things are re-opening now, I think the shut down in central london was more than you are saying.

I live in central london on a main road and traffic has been really low (relatively) for the last year. Normally even at 4am in the morning there is queueing traffic outside constantly, but even now at 10pm up to 10 minutes might go by without a car. It is a very clear reduction.

I do not believe that you could ride through London in April of this year or last year without seeing a mask. Right now maybe - back last march when the government said we shouldn't wear them maybe.

Things are re-opening now, but during the major lockdowns behaviur changed a lot. I say changed not stopped.

People were allowed out of the house to excersise, so any easy excersise routes (parks, paths, nice walkable streets) have a lot more foot traffic than normal. There is a canal near my home where typically outside commute hours people rarely pass - during deep lockdown it had foot traffic like a commuter station with people queuing to walk down it. But this is a sign of 'lock down' - it is people doing the only behaviur they are allowed to do outside their house.

In terms of open shops during major lockdown - I noticed that in Soho, people would gather with supermarket beers outside the closed nightclubs and street drink together. In fancier areas of town, I saw wine bars selling mulled wine covertly through a crack in the door - looking both ways up and down the street like a naughty school kid selling weed. But again these are changed behaviures that show that the normal version is banned. But I didn't see ice cream shops. Maybe now?

There was a huge uptick in the number of undeground raves - and I also heard this happened in manchester. There were several raves in the mile around my home and we'd find out about them when the police turned up in numbers. These were "break into a shut down shop and turn it into a club" events with hundreds of young partiers, not 8 people turning up for grannies birthday.
Two QA tools that have received less notice than they should have, in programming:

1. The Ada feature of being able to specify the legal range of your type independent of its machine representation. Maybe it's stored in a system sized integer, but you want its legal values to be between 2 and 53. In Ada you can tell the type system this, and it will be enforced statically. You simply can't assign a value of 1, 0, -1, and code that could will be rejected as illegal.

2. The testing technique I saw in Haskell, where you specify the contract of the function to the testing tool, and it fuzzes inputs across the whole legal range of the type, trying to find corner case inputs that break it. This seems to be a more advanced version of informally specifying the contract by explicitly programming out every corner case yourself.
To take your obvious oil and gas example, it would be like them setting their own wells on fire. Oil companies are very keen on avoiding this, the same way a space company would try to avoid trashing earth orbit because that would destroy their business.
But is it good enough? That is the question.
"The only hard problem of electric vehicles is the battery - which is third party in Teslas".

No the entire system efficiency is whats hard and is why Tesla is way in front of the competition with regards to performance and range. Batteries have so far been a commodity - 18500 & 21700s, its only now that Tesla is starting to focus on that part of the system in reference to Battery Day.
For solar you need sun. I live in a region where the sun does not shine so often.
In Germany solar power has a feed in tariff of 8 cent per kWh. The operator of solar power can therefore feed it in at negative prices and still make money. Germany has an extremely perverse system called EEG. The feed in tariff is paid by a fee called the EEG surcharge. Large industrial users are exempt. Meaning retail consumers pay for the electricity bill of industrial companies. Therefore the cheaper the electricity on the spot market, the more expensive the retail rate.

Hypothetical scenario: We have a persistent -8 cent spot market price. Industrial companies get paid for consuming electricity. However, retail doesn't benefit from the negative pricing. If the spot market is -8 cent and the feed in tariff is 8 cent then the EEG has to subsidize 16 cents. Thus electricity for retail gets 16 cents more expensive to get back to the original 8 cent. However, this isn't the whole story. We still have to pay for industrial consumption. If 33% of energy usage is industry and is exempt then every retail kWh has to pay 0.5 industrial kWH. So we now end up at 24 cents for electricity. If you were to add taxes (yes you pay them on top of the EEG surcharge) and grid maintenance costs, etc you would probably end up with 40 cents per kWH.

This was just an extreme example but it explains around 16% of Germany's extremely high electricity price. Getting rid of the various taxes on electricity would lower the costs by 20% without changing anything about the grid or making it less profitable.
> Li storage is currently only really used for grid stability style installations at the gird-scale level (ie, as an alternative to gas-peaker plants).

Yeah, in the latest Lazard's:

"Lithium-ion chemistries continue to be the dominant storage technology for short-duration applications (i.e., 1 – 4 hours),"

The last one I talked about on hn with someone else last year [1] was from 2018 [2] and the costs in this once for PV and PV + storage seem in line with that (or more expensive in the new report at the high end, but this new report only really covers PV and not anything else like the 2018 one, but at least this one really breaks down the storage).

Their nuclear costs then were $112-$189, and their solar thermal tower + storage were $98-$181 (I'm assuming 2021 costs would be lower here from all the low cost stuff that has came online since, but haven't seen a high level report yet).

Baseload (which i think nuclear really falls and I think what they would consider BTM? but maybe theres a whole sale market for it? hard to really tell with their storage definition capping out at 4 hours) still seems far away:

"The economic proposition of C&I behind-the-meter (“BTM”) projects remains challenged without subsidies", ranging from $214-$292 for C&I (no storage), $392-$507 (PV + storage), and $489-$662 for residential (PV + storage))

> This excludes the (huge) further price reductions in PV noted in the linked article.

Not sure we can consider panel costs (Perovskite, Bi-facial Panels, Doped Polysilicon and Bigger Wafers, Better Cells) speaking for storage costs, and the article really seems to be addressing panel costs. Though improvements in panels are always great.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588691

[2] https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
If someone from the company is checking in on this thread, it’d be interesting to know what’s being done physically. Is this a chip-based approach like lightmatter and others or something different?

Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I couldn’t find it on the site.
Piracy has only become a supposed problem because corporations expect every consumer to purchase the product separately. I can't buy a game or album off ebay - I must buy the real thing.

As far as videogames go, you can't blame piracy if your game doesn't have a demo version. No, I'm not paying Steam 100 euros for 2 hours that I may or may not get refunded.
If we are talking about "cloud-native", I would really recommend taking a look at nsq or nats. I am really big fanboy of NSQ [1], it is simple, easy to setup and conceptually easy to learn.

[1] https://nsq.io
> E. Ethiopia is currently a divided country. But when it comes to the dam, its people are 100% on the same page.

If I was an unpopular regime, I would see this, and feel pretty good about my chances of exploiting it. A war you can probably win against a much more powerful enemy, over an issue you have broad support for, is like a golden goose for an unstable government.

You can be as obnoxious and intransigent as you like, because the negotiations will be behind closed doors, and you'll still seem like you're representing the national interest.

On the other hand, if you're Egypt, a war you will probably lose is also very valuable. It's a good way to rally people around the flag when it looks like it might happen, then if it does come down to it, often 'probably losing' a war is way better than definitely losing a leadership challenge.

So again, the incentives are to be obnoxious and intransigent. You don't want this issue to go away - it's a really good option to have in your back pocket if you get into trouble.

So the politics here are pretty bleak.
It's not more. It's the same price as a normal sub. It's "up to" because not every song is available lossless. They indicate which are.
It's impossible to be a professional painter or writer without a portfolio. It better be impressive, too.
PHES has been underestimated in the past because people looked only at existing waterways. Allowing PHES to be built off rivers radically expands its potential, to be orders of magnitude larger than necessary. There is still some geographical constraint, but transmission helps with that.

http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/index.php
I can remember technical details from decades ago but often forget that I've met people socially just a couple of years ago.

Me and my partner just had a discussion this morning where she claimed I had met one of her friends, and her friends long term partner, in a bar. We apparently spent he whole evening together chatting. I remember nothing of this evening (and I wasn't drinking).
None of them are.
Knowledge,CVs and Certifications Are No Guarantee a Dev Can Create Software
The goal is to destroy capitalism, plain and simple, and make both individuals and companies dependent on the government.

When one compares the amount of taxes historically paid by corporate customers with budget deficit, it is insignificant (60 year average in the US is just 3.5% of GDP) - any overhaul won't make any difference whatsoever.

I don't know who came up with the observation, but today taxes are merely a means of punishing political oponents, which means those against globalism and socialism.

Also, remember that all taxes are ultimately paid by consumers. Say goodbye to growth.
We're all happy the election (most of it anyways) concluded peacefully. There was a fear of violence that didn't materialize. The results indicate a massive win for the PM's party. Given how popular he is, I was expecting his party to win, but not by this margin.

As for Tigray, people here are really pessimistic. Over the past 8 months, the Ethiopian government narrative was that the people of Tigray and the political party that rules them (the TPLF) were two different entities and that the former needs to be free from the latter (TPLF has ruled there probably for more than 4 decades, they had their shot).

And the TPLF narrative was that it, and the people of Tigray are one and the same. That TPLF was the only power that can protect/save Tigray. And that if it doesn't get its way it will take Tigray out of the Ethiopian Federation.

After 8 month of conflict, the only reason TPLF still exists is because it has popular support of the Tigrayan public. And the PM basically acknowledged as much.

TPLF has been a bad actor in Ethiopian life. I personally will not be okay with 70 year old TPLF cadres and generals continuing the game they played for 30 years. And I believe the overwhelming majority of Ethiopians will not accept them.

So, if Tigray accepts TPLF, and the rest of Ethiopia rejects it completely, then we're stuck.

Just like there are people in Tigray that want to break away, there are people in the rest of Ethiopia that want them to break away (paraphrasing, "nothing comes out of Tigray, their ambition and their actual population size is not matching up and they're not worth the trouble". This is really dangerous for Tigray because, despite their bravado, it's one of the poorest area in Ethiopia. It has food security issues even in the best of times. TPLF seems to be wanting to leverage the threat of breaking away to get concessions. I don't think they realize just how bad public opinion has soured against Tigray.

Of course, take everything with a grain of salt --- I'm not in politics. My sources are just people here (Like my taxi driver from Tigray who was upset and concerned about a youtuber calling for Tigray to break away).
The fraction of the population that's prone to closet authoritarianism also seems to suffer from this peculiar, mutant strain of humor. It's essentially cultists trying to intrude into the health decisions of others, but they seem to think it'll be funny if they make it a song? Maybe they know it's inappropriate and that's why they feel they need to sugar-coat it in some way? There's more to humor than rudely telling someone to do something and putting it to a melody. Would you find it funny if I sang "shut the fuck up about the climate" and strummed a few chords?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27799850

The EEG makes cheap electricity expensive for no reason. The fundamental problem is that retail pays industry electric bills instead of the state subsidizing those like it is the case with nuclear. (nuclear is entirely subsidized).

Yes, the problem with expensive electricity in Germany is that renewables are one of the few unsubsidized power sources. Retail customers pay for everything. Of course they are expensive if they don't receive the same subsidies other technologies receive. With nuclear retail customers barely pay any of the costs involved in constructing and decomissioning the power plants.
I know the word gets thrown around a lot, but “software engineering” doesn’t really have anything to do with engineering at all, and it certainly doesn’t make anyone engineers. Not just because it doesn’t have any formal recognition as an engineering discipline but more importantly because the field is too immature for any such recognition to be at all meaningful. Case in point, all those private certification schemes and how lousy predictors they are of project success.
Google makes money with your data. When the extension is syphoning data, they win.
Gen Z uses siloed crap because they don't know any better. At this rate they'll "free" the world from democracy as well.