skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you need to substantially reduce your standard of living

California's per capita electricity consumption has stayed flat since 1970. That's in part due to strict energy efficiency standards. By contrast, per capita electricity consumption in the rest of the country has increased 50%, and that's despite California's standards indirectly improving efficiency elsewhere.

Today per capita consumption in California is nearly half that of the rest of the country, but the standard of living (modern conveniences, etc) is hardly less than elsewhere. Note that California's temperate climate does not explain this away. Home heating is still largely fossil fuel based in most of the U.S., including in California. And most of the population growth in California since the 1970s has been in the Central Valley and Southern California, places where air conditioning is as ubiquitous as anywhere else. Shifts in industrial makeup helped some, but the same industrial sectors also became more energy efficient. In general, most of the relative improvements are a product of better energy efficiency. And that was accomplished primarily through non-politicized regulators quietly and steadily mandating marginal efficiency improvements over the decades.

See https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ca-success-story-FS... and https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/5/31/1864690...

Suffice it to say that there's alot of pandering to the environmental lobby among Californian politicians. And lots of tension about the cost and viability of various environmental efforts. But as with politics anywhere, the importance of the objects of these fights is usually blown way out of proportion. The most consequential and productive regulations were quietly working in the background for decades, and didn't come with huge price tags.

EDIT: Apropos HN, one of the key personalities working behind the scenes to improve energy efficiency standards was physicist Arthur Rosenfeld. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_H._Rosenfeld and https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/10/the-cal.... His research work gave rise to the eponymous Rosenfeld Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenfeld_Effect) and Rosenfeld's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenfeld%27s_law). The latter states that "From 1845 to the present, the amount of energy required to produce the same amount of gross national product has steadily decreased at the rate of about 1 percent per year".
Huh, curious that there hasn't been nationwide Covid-economic-slowdown-related anarchies yet, or maybe I'm not paying attention? In places like India and Indonesia there's currently severe economic slowdown and not enough government intervention.

A lot of Covid skeptics call it a plandemic, i.e. manufactured crisis, I don't believe it myself, but if I were running a government I would be asking if we should have a permanent state of emergency (like in the book 1984) to prevent societal collapse...
Why is "being modern" a concern? Luckily, embedded is not the web, where 5000 frameworks sprout over lunch. I've never heard of anyone in embedded caring about being modern. Only about solving the problems efficiently. So i am curious: why do you ask?
> We have difficulty with biological distinction, but we can still confidently categorize something as being a 'Horse' and 'Not A Horse'

A paleontologist might disagree with you.
This is one of the most outrageous things I've seen in a while. I really think the academic institutions are hammering the last nails into America's coffin.

America is a failed state, the majority of Americans just don't know it yet. The founding mythos, and ideological bedrock of America has been replaced by something toxic and subversive. The ideological upheaval of the last few years has left behind a broken and confused country. One that will inevitably fracture into smaller parts, or devolve unequivocally into a mess like South Africa. If you go to the former USSR (for one example), you can see monuments to the country's tenacity in the face of absolute peril. Statues, monuments, and architecture which proudly memorialise their heroes, and their history. Meanwhile, delinquents in America have been tearing down any statue or monument with a European-sounding name. America will end up a country with no history, and no future.
> This study just drives home the point.

Where does the study say this?

It is important to distinguish your interpretation of the data from what the study write-up says.
But I don't see the business case. Take the furniture - Ikea can assemble their flat pack furniture for me ... in front of the store. That's exactly where I don't want it assembled. In fact we are back to the value of the robot being in the home not the factory.

On suoermarkets, yes Walmart and Tesco made a sensible decision to use their existing stores as feeders for delivery. But as the number of people taking food deliveries goes up, that starts being a commercial disadvantage - there are things you can do to improve a warehouse that you can't do if customers are walking around in it, there are car parks that aren't needed now, smaller stores in expensive locations. It's not like Walmart's going bust next week but the world is changing. Even Amazon will feel this - a fleet of international transit and drivers designed to drop one package off randomly is going to find that model under threat if I get a food delivery every three days - 99% of the time I will just have the other stuff i order come in the same box.

For every house, it makes sense that only one delivery company visits that house. If they are delivering every couple of days anyway just roll it in together. Place tour order and it will be with your regular Tuesday drop off - that's convenient mentally for most people, whereas "expect a knock on the door anytime in the next 36 hours" is less easy to manage - especially now we are not all locked indoors.

I think i have wondered off the point but it's always much simpler to change the process than to build a human-analogue robot.

We all have huge shifts in how we will live in the coming decades - to stave off climate change, to take advantage of what software can really offer. Making already efficient factories more efficient is the equivalent of looking for your keys under the lamppost- the big wins lie elsewhere.

Edit - the big five future changes

- urban planning (see Tokyo, or StrongTowns)
- Buikding energy efficiency (solar panels, heat exchangers)
- Transoortation (Food and people) & transportation (other)
- ?
The last of the Intel macs have real Esc keys too (eg the 16” Pro)
Maybe an unpopular perspective, but IMO its not that hard to be top 10% even with people gaming grades. Source: went to one of the top public high schools in Texas, graduated top 1%, am not that smart and didn't go to any great lengths for school. I payed attention in class, did (most of) the homework, and reviewed for final exams.
Memory safety, build system, dependency management, the usual
I fail to see the merits of your argument based on some handwaving interpretation of "exactly the same".

Merely speculating that FFC interconnect is "probably just a USB-C" says absolutely nothing of the fact that Acer's system is neither truly modular (because it's fundamentally constrained to specific I/O interface by its own case) nor externally reconfigurable by the user. Nevermind that Framework's design appears to sensibly apply what was intended to be floating interconnect (USB-C male) to a fixed peripheral module interface on both sides, which is a huge value add from a user configuration perspective on the merits of being able to choose what side your charger port is installed on alone.

So what about the enclosure being custom made?? Oh I don't know, nevermind completely disrespecting mechanical design considerations and effort applied towards targeted maintainability which have a direct impact on internal layout, user ease-of-self-service considerations that quite frankly the rest of the consumer laptop market clearly hasn't given an ounce of attention. That Framework completely own their tooling alone tells me substantial work was done.

Without even critiquing layout, Acer didn't even so much as give its prospective customers the courtesy of a fuckin' reach-around by soldering memory directly onto its motherboard and left a substantial amount of internal volume on the table. I suspect comparing display maintainability would be a complete joke of an exercise.

Basic understanding in laptops and modern electronics...yeah, sure.

This practicing hardware EE is far from convinced.
People are focusing on the pettiness and timing but the US government had very good reasons to do this (and other countries should follow suit):

1) The increasing commercialization of spaceflight provides many opportunities for unscrupulous grifters seeking to con scientifically illiterate millionaires, potentially at great risk to human life. Governments really should clamp down on who is and isn’t qualified to call themselves an astronaut.

2) As someone who supports companies like SpaceX being involved in space exploration: it is extremely gross for the focus to the on the personal feelings and childish fantasies of three billionaires, one of whom is notorious for blatantly abusing his employees, the other notorious for blatantly lying to his customers[1]. Branson seems by comparison to be an ok person... but he’s not an astronaut, and it’s disrespectful to real astronauts to suggest otherwise.

[1] While Bezos at least seems to acknowledge that he bought his ticket, the fact that Elon Musk still calls himself “Chief Engineer” at SpaceX is an embarrassment, and a slap in the face to all the engineers who actually show up to do work at SpaceX.
> What would it take for functional programming languages to cross the chasm?

> (eg Elm, Rescript, Haskell)

Here is what it would take:

- An actual use case. An answer to "why use Haskell instead of Java? Why use Elm instead of TypeScript?" "Superior in prod" is not enough, I'm sorry but it's just your opinion. I've used all of these languages, and IMO Haskell is definitely more fun, but I actually felt a lot less efficient and encountered harder-to-find bugs.

- A good IDE. This is a big reason why new projects use Java even though it's so verbose. I've used many IDEs for Haskell and none come close to JetBrains or VSCode Java/Kotlin/Typescript/C integration. The Haskell IDE even has spotty code completion - no matter how much faster and easier it is to write Haskell than Java, it's not really faster or easier if I build my project and get 20 spelling errors.

- Good OS support. Good libraries. JavaScript sucks as a language but it's the only language for the web, and it has NPM. Haskell actually has good libraries, although idk about OS support. But Elm doesn't and it's a walled-garden, which is a weird and IMO bad choice, especially considering that it competes with NPM / JavaScipt.

I'm sure there are more that I didn't mention, like a big company to adopt and promote your language.

Look at some of the new-era languages which did succeed:

- Rust. Rust is sometimes used for everything but it has a very specific niche: efficient, safe embedded programming. No well-known efficient languages (C, C++) compare to its safety, and no well-known safe languages (Ada, Java?) compare to its efficiency. Rust has amazing libraries, and an amazing package manager. Rust compiles to LLVM. And Rust has decent tooling (although IMO on this aspect it could be better, it's still decent)

- Kotlin. Kotlin compiles to the JVM, so it supports all Java libraries and targets. Kotlin has amazing IDE support from JetBrains. Kotlin is the official language of Android, which means people "have" to use it.

- Go. Go is a great language and has great libraries for web services. Try writing a service in C vs. Go. Go also has great IDE support.

- Julia. Julia is a typed scripting language, particularly good for data science. Its data science competitors, Python and R, are untyped. Also, Julia has good IDE support and it's starting to get good libraries.

- TypeScript. TypeScript is literally "JavaScript with types". No other language integrates with the web as well except for JavaScript. And TypeScript is better than JavaScript (for many people) because it has types.
I think the biggest selection problem is the Minority Report UI problem: hanging hands are not precise tools, nor are they comfortable to hold up for > ~a minute. In particular, it is very hard to do even one pixel-perfect point+grab+release in 3D space, let alone do it over and over -- in large part because you can't easily lock a dimension or the position and rest your hand. Touch-screens are hard to get precise-clicks on for a similar reason: with a mouse I can line it up and hit fire, with touch I'm firing until I let go.

If someone gets the right metaphor going there, I think it could work great, but the naive solution of 1:N direct scaling the position of your hand to a co-ordinate in space isn't it. I imagine it'll be something like direct correlation to get 'in the neighbourhood' and then an easy modal toggle to a 'precision' mode, where you move something in small increments along just 1 or 2 dimensions, using a comfortable binary gesture.

Or maybe AI will get really good at guessing what alignment the user wants.
It's not an elaboration -- I never elaborated because the previous person was confused about what I was referring to.

Essentially the US does a lot of things well, like freedom of speech and private property. What it doesn't do well is genocide/murder/starvation, just like DPRK.
If this happens, maybe the device should become unsellable since you could sideload unremovable adware and then sell it to an unknowing buyer.
The richest 10% of the world population is responsible for almost half of all carbon emissions. The global median age is up and expected to continue rising. The global fertility rate is dropping. Population growth is projected to flatten in the next century.

Why would we waste time on population control, much less prioritize it?
>Going one step further, I'd say that it would be better if everyone realized that they can't do anything on their own because that might actually get people to work together,

Do people actually believe this? ie. "everyone will just buy a tesla on their own, so we don't need government intervention"?

>that's the very reason why the common message is that "everyone should do their part": because that's how you keep people from working together.

That's awfully cynical. During the pandemic there were multiple PSAs telling people to "do their part" by staying home, wearing masks, etc. Was that also some sort of conspiracy to keep people from working together?
Both Twitter and Facebook had much more open and developer friendly APIs in their early growth stages, which they slowly reduced as their reliance on 3rd parties diminished, as they in-housed features and killed off third party integrations, and in FB's case, after they got fucked by their permissive APIs and open standards in the Cambridge Analytica debacle.
"Yes, that button, push it now".
You’re wrong, please stop responding. And I know your downvoting me. Your accounts over the threshold and my top comment is flagged, so it’s you.
Thousand-drone swarm forms enormous rotating globe over Olympic opening ceremony
I only read to page 8 or 9 but I don't think the author did a very good job of refuting anything.

In particular the author points out that we are eating about 20% more calories than we were 1970, but then argues that 20% is not all that much and no big deal. They then cite some papers where people ate more and gained weight, then stopped eating and lost the weight.

But 20% is a lot, its huge. Do that every day your whole life, then yeah, your body is going to be different. You stomach is going to be larger, your whole body is going to be different. An yeah, dropping your calorie intake by 20% is going to be hard, really hard when all you have know your whole life is more!
Wikipedia says they're a space tourist. It used to say spaceflight participant.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos (/ˈbeɪzoʊs/ BAY-zohss; né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American business magnate, media proprietor, investor, and space tourist. [0]

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 18 July 1950) is an English business magnate, investor, author, and space tourist. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson
Branson's flight was not above the Karman line. But I think you're missing the point, the point isn't to say who is an astronaut or who isn't, that's childish nit-picking and more about bragging rights. There, however, needs to remain a distinction between people who are intensively trained and are flown to space to do exploration or accomplish scientific missions and those who happen to be on a ride.
> As proof of its bright future they also mentioned Amazon is building a giant fulfillment center out by the airport.

Who's gonna tell them?
As far as I understand, the average person is not deficient in most dietary nutrients. It doesn't take a lot to get to sufficient levels, if you eat an orange here, some tomato sauce on your pasta there, one small salad or serving of vegetables with your dinner every couple of days, etc. you'll mostly be fine.
What are you talking about. The corporations, man, are not responsible for the zoning apocalypse American cities dealing with. You literally cannot live in a walkable high rise in most of Brooklyn, SF, LA, Austin, etc., not because of BIG AUTO, but because literally the neighbors there don't like tall buildings and want more free street-parking spaces for their cars.
It's pedantry. FAAG is not an acronym in common usage (and is uncomfortably close to being a slur), so the more easily understood, less correct word was used instead. To point out that one of the companies doesn't produce consumer hardware doesn't invalidate the underlying point, so what is it,
if not pedantry?
Also no lawyer wants 30% of virtually zero actual damages. If you aren’t willing to just spend ludicrous amounts of your own money that you’ll never recover, you better have a case with substantial statutory damages or an excellent shot at a jury awarding punitive damages.
And who defines what is false? Medical history is replete with examples of "settled science" that turned out to be sub-optimal. Leaches aside, how true and false is decided is not an area for government legislation or administrative provision to be adjudicating.
>But what happens when you need something more than they need to sell it?

The CCP's entire domestic legitimacy comes from the economic growth that has come about since Deng took over. They need to keep the wheels spinning as much as the West does.
Nostalgia. I remember in the skinning communities there was A LOT of buzz about Longhorn and the promise it had. I got my hands on a copy of it and the changes to the UX over XP were awesome (I wish I could find screenshots, very sorry that I cannot post some links to support this). Then when Vista was released, it looked nothing like those early builds we saw. Coupled with the performance and stability issues, it really let the air out of the balloon.
Is there anything C++ does better at this point? Outside of compatibility, that is.
Dubai Makes Artificial Rain with Drones That Shock Clouds
Did she get wings posthumously? She was astronaut by training, and people may call her that, but she didn't get the wings as far as I can tell. Bezos isn't even an astronauts by training, definitely doesn't have the wings - but people may call him anything they like.
You did an awesome job on the 5.0 to 5.1 migration, especially in chasing down at least one obscure problem in InnoDB.
It's just overall productivity.
For embedded, i would have said C not C++. C is more prevalent still.

For some industries where security or correctness guarantees are necessary, you see things like MISRA C used rather than Rust (or cpp).
The last time 209 was up for repeal was last year. Elected officials were not involved. It was up for popular vote, and it failed. I think the margin was even wider than when 209 was first put in place.

The pro-209 campaign was outspent something like $27M to $1.6M but still prevailed.
> The point OP is making is it relieves pressure on the healthcare system ...

No. You are misusing the abbreviation. OP means original poster: "The original poster is the person who starts a discussion thread" https://www.howtogeek.com/698508/what-does-op-mean-online-an...
Someday there will be.

Will civilians on vacations to the moon be considered astronauts?

I'm fine either way honestly.
You could not have done this with 1970s tools and CAD.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqv5SjC4s6w
Can you define productivity?
You would, but realistically, a majority of people are not willing to live with significantly less (which would entail a contraction in the economy and loss of jobs). And that includes all the people in countries still catching up. Nuclear was the alternative decades ago, and we could have witched to it until renewable tech was up to scale.

So we decided a significantly warmer climate was better than dealing with radioactive waste. Now it looks like we made the wrong risk assessment.
That's already how it works in IPFS or Freenet. The hash is not for the data itself, but for a metadata document that contains a list of hashes to the data broken up into smaller blocks.
It‘s a good point. Sleep more :-)
People cannot downvote direct replies to their own comments. The person you are arguing with could not have downvoted any comments in this chain except the top one.
Need each other.

Well, yes! I agree. However, when I look around at the movers and shakers capable of the big decisions that lead to big efforts, I do not get the sense I am needed as much as I could potentially be used.

It cost a ton to bootstrap us onto our current technology.

It will cost a ton more to transition to other energy.

For the most part, we have the tech we need. Better will come too, but big costs are not sexy, though the labor to accomplish these things would and could elevate many into a better life. Ordinary people, when presented with a plan, like build this stuff so we can live better this way, leave something livable for our kids... would be in. Large numbers of people need better jobs, and a future that one can look forward to.

What I don't see is the kind of thinking that gets us there. That kicks off the work we could have been doing for years.
Unsurprised. It was just a matter of what scummy behavior the new owners were going to demand, and how egregious they were going to be about it.

It’s simple, at least for me: block the garbage if I can, forgo the site entirely if I can’t. And if I can’t, that means the vast majority of their users are having the same problem and will be similarly fed up.

I hope the new guys are smart enough to realize that alienating the community they just bought is not the best way to manage an investment.
They have lots of tools at their disposal like undercover, snitches, subpoenas, etc.

Cryptos transactions can be traced if exchanges are cooperating. Monero might be a different story.
I spent a lot of years writing C++ code and really enjoyed it, it’s a fun language and you can pretty much do anything with it. But the problem I encountered with it was that it just became so wide in terms of features that you have a hard time keeping up - you can spend years using the language to build real software and then walk into a job interview and get demolished by all sorts of crazy stuff you didn’t even know existed. I remember purchasing the book “Modern C++ Design” by Andrei Alexandrescu and after reading it I realized it was time to find something else to do. It was an awesome book and I loved it, but all I did was work on trading systems and I knew I’d never be able to keep up with C++ interviews if that was the direction they’d be taking. But I still love the memories of working with it, so much damned fun.
The X-15 only has one seat. No one is saying Southwest passengers are “pilots” because of auto-pilot, though.