skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More than 50% personal devices are phones and tablets. They are using ARM CPUs notable for power efficiency (because battery powered).

More than 50% of computers being sold are laptops. Guess what, these mobile CPUs are notable for power efficiency, because battery powered.

Only a minority of users (myself included) have desktop computers with FLOPS/watt figure that’s worse than massively multicore server-targeted AMD64 processors used by cloud providers. Clouds are slowly transitioning to ARM64 as well (I have personally shipped a cloud app working on Ampere Altra CPUs) but still, so far majority of them are using faster but less efficient AMD64 CPUs.

Another thing, moving data costs energy. Inside each CPU core, you have like 400GB/sec bandwidth to the caches with no energy overhead. Moving data to/from system RAM takes way more electricity. Moving that data to/from a server on another end of the world takes way more electricity than that: the wires and optical cables are long, and there’re many routers/amplifiers/other hardware in between.

And another thing. Personal devices have limited compute power. This creates incentive for developers to optimize their code. If your stuff is too slow, users with low-end devices will be unhappy. With unlimited compute power of the clouds, it sometimes makes sense to neglect that and just throw resources at the problem.
What are the bigger fish? Could you elaborate?
Printers. Yeah.

Herewith, my standard advice.

Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile.

If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done at a higher quality, with better ink and good paper, than you can do at your office or house -- unless you are big enough to utilize a whole flock of printers, or you are a professional. If you are a pro, you don't need this advice.
> Glass-contained milk delivery seems great.

Not sure where in the world you are, but Sprouts in the US sells milk in glass bottles. You pay a fee, and you get that back when you return the glass bottle the next time you come in to buy more milk.

It's not delivery, but it's a whole lot better for the world than more plastic.
Utility services start off as luxuries, and are private and unregulated. This was true with telephone and electric companies. When these services get to a certain point where there are real consequences for not being able to access the system, they need to have public regulation to ensure access and customer service. ISP internet service has definitely reached this point, and I think that there's a strong argument that Google & FB accounts (particularly for businesses) have reached this point as well.
This is not a good comparison at all. The better way to describe it is this: when you want to write a book, do you write paragraphs or you just write quotes from other authors? Writing your own text is similar to write your own code. On the other hand, pasting quotes from other people is not a good way to convey your ideas, but it is much quicker for those who don't want to write themselves.
Also, I consistently hear NPR play the same game as the NYT: reach out to mythical "real America" voters, interview them, be tolerant of their perspectives even if the overall context is unfavorable towards conservative/reactionary/regressive viewpoints. You can practically hear the hosts' backs crack as they bend over backwards to try to be pleasant to both these interview subjects, and/or their intellectual leading lights.

But when was the last time I heard NPR interview an actual bona fide leftist? I don't think I've ever heard this on any of the flagship shows. Democracy Now, out of WNYC does, but that's not an NPR production. There's an almost complete absence of left politics on NPR (as on American media in general), whereas "due consideration" to equivalent positions on the right appear to be part of journalism's civic duty.

So yeah, they don't exact coddle red-leaning politics and people, but they do seek them out and try to let them have a voice amidst the stories that suggest that they are probably wrong.

Left-leaning politics? Forget that. You're not hearing that on NPR or pretty much anywhere else in this country. BTW, MSNBC is not even the exception that proves the rule.
> The UAV will reportedly support hypersonic armaments such as Lockheed Martin’s High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW), making the SR-72 a potent tool for delivering precision strikes against agile or otherwise hard-to-reach targets.

Let the Taliban and other ne'er do wells beware: your stand-ups are not safe.
Wow! Thank you for this well done reply!
SEEKING FREELANCER: for a no-doubt underpaid (but guilt-free and potentially highly satisfying) automation job :)

- Who: Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef (non-profit) | Cairns, Australia (it's REMOTE) | citizensgbr.org

- What: we currently need help with: AUTOMATION(!)

We're a 21st century conservation organisation for the Great Barrier Reef. Or at least that's the idea. We're involved in a broad range of activities[1], but the big picture is a global conversation about climate change.

Our current go-to is a citizen science / research effort called the Great Reef Census[2], currently in its second year. The project incorporates a whole range of (relatively lo-fi / glue-together yet novel) tech solutions, from remote / vessel-deployed offline servers, spatially aware data submission portals, 3d planning tools[3] (we like mapping), plus an ML/CV angle being developed from last year's data[4]. It's an open project, so all data is being released under CC, similarly code open sourced (as soon as time permits). Everything we can build in house we do. We need a few extra pairs of hands for delivery of the project this year.

Last year we successfully trialed the use of edge servers for collecting data, offline, from remote areas of the reef. These were developed at speed with hardware donated by Dell. Config is currently completely manual and stack is a mix of ubuntu / netplan (captive wifi w public dns + 4g) / haproxy / offline mirrors of our web properties / mapping tile server. It is in dire need of some devops love and automation.

We're looking for help in other areas too: on the web we are primarily vue / node (db is firestore, cloud is gcp / cloudflare). At the same time we do a lot of data-wrangling. We also need to prepare the project for open sourcing, to drive further tech engagement and resource. If your skills lend themselves to any of this, it would free up hands.

We are busy and under resourced and find it difficult to recruit / compete in the current landscape. That said, the work can be rewarding plus we're willing to accommodate any measures that would make it work for the right person. Tech is currently a one-person show, but we're trying to fix that. The role would likely suit a senior type with some days spare and a passion for the environment. It is a paid position. If you're in Australia, we also do a lot of diving and there's the opportunity to certify & spend some solid time on the reef as part of the project.

Role: Hyper casual over 3-6mths+ (what can you do, how long will it take) / flexible schedule to suit budget (we value skill set over availability) / no juniors, interns at this stage unfortunately.

Questions / expressions of interest to hq@citizensgbr.org ~ Thanks!

[1] https://citizensgbr.org/explore/atlas
[2] https://greatreefcensus.org
[3] https://lab.citizensgbr.org/census-map/v2/
[4] https://greatreefcensus.org/api
If you're asking if I took a time machine back to the 1700's to use an imaginary algorithm, to enslave people, I assure you good sir I did not.

This is indeed one of the potential problems with inventing an algorithm to sentance people, as I mentioned before, is that it would be written to match the biases of the time period.
Do you have a project(s) you're working on?
The source of that image is the Wikipedia article on Machine Identification Codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

On that page you can see that on the caption of the same image the printer is identified as an "HP Color Laserjet 3700". The BBC journalist or whoever wrote the captions simply wasn't very precise and probably didn't mean to imply that the yellow dots are produced by black-and-white printers.
I do not. Do you have a link to more information about this?
This was originally reported by Bloomberg and then the Boston Globe, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/29/business/wealthy-amer...

To my knowledge, Bermuda Post is not a real journalistic organization in Bermuda (the major paper is the Royal Gazette). Instead, checking their about page reveals:

'BermudaPost is a non-profit, private and self-funded, commonly-created News and info-sharing platform that enables everybody to share valuable content such as local and global news updates.'

Besides two suspiciously barebones property listings, there are no references to Bermuda.
> Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’

His foresight around mortgage backed securities is legendary. A genuinely brilliant mind with respect to financial instruments. If he ever points to another financial instrument and says it's fishy, you'd do well to listen to him. But this doesn't make one an expert in everything.

I wouldn't expect Burry's predictions of Tesla's future prospects to be any more reliable than Linus Torvalds predicting the future prospects of some novel financial derivative.
I spent several minutes trying to get my AirPods to connect to my phone today instead of my iPad. Ended up being late for a call because of it. Happens a few times a week. More than irritating. First world problem, to be sure. But still the whole “it just works” line irks me no end.
I think for many people, especially parents, they feel an obligation to at least read texts immediately to see if some action is required, and for whatever reason they are not up to the task of setting up different notifications for their kids and spouse.

In my circles text is generally for when you want to get the message to someone right away, and email is for when they should read at their convenience.
They're supposed to but there's unscrupulous people in every industry and these could even get sold to middle men who take them out of the country for processing.
Why not just go back to the Julian calendar? You'd avoid a lot of software bugs.
Besides being (I would guess) slightly more crime-friendly than other places, I'll bet part of the problem is the expense of catalytic converters in CA. They are probably worth a lot more as spares than as raw materials.

It seems to me that CARB forces people to buy OEM parts, or at least some kind of on-a-list part for $$$.
I love the writing style in this essay. It reminded me of George Carlin's "modern man" monologue[1].

[1]https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/25390-i-m-a-modern-man-a-ma...
The Wireguard team are simply brilliant. It's incredible how they have developed low-level, cross-platform solutions across Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and now Windows.

I think they are truly exceptional programmers. It's hard to think of people who have come anywhere close to such an achievement.
We subscribe to a local CSA as well [1]. We chose to pick it up about a ten minute drive away rather than have it delivered. But we collect it in re-usable cloth bags so there's nothing disposable or recyclable. It's just food, and the trimmings all go in the compost.

I highly recommend it to everyone. I get incredibly excited when I pick it up; I feel pretty ridiculous to be honest. But the food is so much fresher and more flavorful than what's in the grocery store, it's relatively cheap, and it's environmentally friendly. It's nice to know our groceries are coming from a farm just outside the city, not from a barge that crossed the ocean. The only problem is that living in Canada, it only runs for 17 weeks since the ground is frozen the rest of the year :(

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agricultur...
This man (err, bot?) contracts!
> ...have you never, ever had that happen on a Linux or Windows desktop?

I've been using Windows since before Windows 3 and Linux since Red Hat 4 or 5. I've had plenty of crashes, but work-losing crashes? I sincerely can't remember a time where I've lost much work, if any, on my workstations.

In the last decade, I've hardly had any crashes at all in Windows. Maybe one or two. In the last 3 years of running Manjaro Linux on 3 different workstations though, I can honestly say that I haven't had one crash. I've had power outages, minor bugs (once or twice) and some problems that I've caused myself, but zero operating system crashes. I've tried other desktop distros many times before this, but this is the first one that never crashed on me. Last time I setup a Xubuntu desktop, an update made it unbootable within 2 weeks. So if you're not using a distro based on Arch yet - I can understand your frustration.

I've easily had way, way more problems, crashes, limitations and annoyances with macOS in the past decade than I have in the past 3 years of Manjaro Linux or Windows. Especially after each major macOS update. Software stops working and even some of my hardware never worked on it. I have Macs that refuse to recognize certain common items like USB keyboards, mice and displays.

> I didn't need to do it to try out Linux. I was trying to cheap out and use the same machine for gaming and for work, ideally without dual-booting, so Windows wasn't an option (for the work part, that is).

So, what I'm hearing is that you consider Macs to be overpriced, non-gaming machines that crash maybe every other year. Otherwise you would have just used your existing Mac or bought a new one to solve your problems. Alright well, I can admit that all three of the major desktop systems have issues. But Macs have just the worst types of issues that can't or won't be fixed because Apple will pull the rug out from you at any minute if you try to stray from their plan for further enslaving you.

Anyway, I don't see why anyone has to "choose" between one or the other. It's not expensive to have more than one computer. I have some Windows boxes for entertainment. I have some Linux machines for work and I have some Macs for iOS/Mac things.

IMO if you can't keep Windows running, you're doing something wrong and if you can't keep Linux running you're either not picking compatible hardware or you're running the wrong distro. Maybe give Manjaro a whirl and if you do, don't try and do things the way you're used to in some other distro - find out the Manjaro way of doing things first (and use their guis to do things, especially the Add/Remove Software gui - and restart when it says to) and the Arch way of doing things second and after that you can apply your existing Linux/bash/whatever knowledge.
You did it and it turned out OK, but that doesn't mean it was a safe thing to do.
Same. I’ve found the key to not cutting myself is to make sure the blade is reasonably sharp (never more than 2-3 shaves with the same one) and apply very little pressure.

It’s a bit more of an art than my ol’ Mach 3, but I’ve grown to really enjoy it. Also, invest in some fancy shaving cream and aftershave for a close-to-barbershop feel.
Just came back from the Dollar Tree!

Yes, everything is $1.
(Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite.)
What's the long term plan?
There's a bit of a story behind this. Oculus is owned by Facebook, but the Facebook website and the Oculus headsets/software are by different teams working in different states. When Facebook bought Oculus, they decided to get rid of the Oculus-specific account system and use only Facebook accounts. The Facebook account requirement took effect with the launch of the Oculus Quest 2, which launched in October 2020.

October 2020 was the month before the US election, and the peak of both disinformation/influence campaigns, and of Facebook-the-website's efforts to combat those campaigns. So the spambot detector sensitivity was turned up to max that month, and if you tried to create a new account, there was a large chance you'd be mistaken for a bot and banned immediately. So a bunch of people who weren't Facebook users got fancy new VR headsets, tried to create Facebook accounts in order to be able to use them, and got immediately banned. The support department for Facebook-the-website was not at all up to the task of dealing with this. This kind of wrecked their product launch; instead of the press coverage and public reaction being about how great their hardware was, it was about all the people who couldn't use their hardware because of account issues.

So now Oculus has a completely separate support department for Facebook account issues, which acts less like it's supporting a free website and more like it's supporting a $300 piece of hardware. And if you have an account issue with the website, and you want to use that support department instead of the bad one, then buying a Quest 2 is not such a bad idea.
Nah, the progressive DAs are really reluctant to prosecute property crime, this discourages the police from making a case for prosecution.

I know a filmmaker in Oakland who had thousands of dollars of electronics stolen from their car (and receipts/insurance to prove the value of the electronics). One of the items stolen was an iPad that was phoning its location home, the filmmaker tried to direct the Oakland police to the house with the stolen iPad (itself worth >$950 dollars) but the police said they didn't think the case would stick and declined to go address the situation.

It may be 'in fact' that theft over $950 is a felony that police should take seriously, but in practice, it's really rare to see a thief prosecuted.
34.4M this past month, now.
What are you talking about? The literally outsource all their manufacturing.

They didn’t even write their own OS or browser or compiler. Microsoft at least does that.
> …so if you are into your environmentalism then milk is the SaaS for you.

Dairy isn’t know for being great for the environment.
There's a long and terrible tradition of western media refusing to expose Stalin's crimes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
Depending on which part of CA you're in, you would be lucky to only get jail time. People that have gone through wildfires won't take kindly to firebugs.
They are not doing this for anti-monopoly reasons. It's purely because they thought the tech companies had more data, and therefore more power than them.

One of the examples I've seen over here, which I can't seem to find in English, was an infographic created by Didi. Either stupidly or some tech dick-waving contest, they made a chart of the most hard working government agencies in Beijing. They had all this work habit data and they released it as a fun little thing.

Suffice it to say, it's hard to find now and a smaller part of a overarching data issue that has gone out of the government's hands.

Totalitarians are gonna totalitarian, but now they've learned to do it effectively and use the terminology the free world does to make it sound righteous.
Many possibilities for why this is apparently the case though. Could be a miss-match in who people identity/affiliate themselves with and where they actually land. Lot of talk of the "window" having moved in the passed decade. Possible middle-left bias ate up a bunch of those who would have been middle-right? A lot of moderate right pundits have landed at left biased orgs over the past years. Would be interesting to see what this chart would have looked like 15-20 years ago.
This seems like a great idea. However, I'd argue we do already have one institution that resembles the ideals of a PBS for the Internet: Wikipedia. Is any other institution not driven by a profit motive and also even a tenth as valuable to the public? I'd say not.
As former Slack users, threaded messaging is huge for us. I wonder if teams who landed on Mattermost before using an alternative which used threaded messaging feel the same way?

Note: you do need to flip the feature flag to try it out:
Account Settings > Display > Collapsed Reply Threads (Beta).
Doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Lead acid batteries can be sold second hand.

What if I can’t afford a new catalytic converter? Why should the least advantaged suffer disproportionately for a societal problem?

What other secondary markets should we ban for the same reasons?

Why would this prohibition even prevent catalytic converter theft?
> I don't know what David Allen recommends, but if everyone is left with the impression he recommends TODO lists and he doesn't, it might be because the alternative is hazy and vaporous and poorly defined.

He actually defines a specific framework in detail. But most people can't be bothered to read the book.

> Consider grocery shopping. You have 20 products to buy. Does a shopping list help? Uhm, heck yes. Otherwise you'd need to go to the store 10 times and not one time.

A shopping list works because it very much isn't a TODO list - it's a well-scoped list of things that you are going to do in a particular place at a particular time. If you started dumping random non-shopping tasks on your shopping list, it would be a lot less effective.
Yes, the "and" pattern is common. I've seen plenty of "ensure this exists before operating on it" chains, where it even goes if ( pointer && pointer->otherPointer && pointer->otherPointer->member == value )

I've never seen someone use an "or" pattern in a non-confusing way.

That is, I've seen "and" patterns that act as a safety/early out. I fail to see the use of an "or" pattern where you want to stop executing if the first value is true (ignoring using nots to invert the logic of an and pattern, and I would criticize that).
As a sibling comment alluded to; the _crossover_ cable was obsolete, not the the ethernet cable. You can usually use a straight ethernet cable with modern devices, you don't need a crossover cable. The auto-sensing they were talking about is what's built into the NIC, and it detects how the pairs of pins in your cable are being used.
I don't think it works like that. Vxlan can tunnel ethernet frames over UDP, but that doesn't make Ethernet an application layer protocol.
Yes, it makes a substantial difference, particularly in child mortality.

Hans Rosling has been dead some years now, but used to do great talks going through the basic data and trends.

I'm not sure why you're adopting a tone of debate/rebuttal. Every problem you mention is something I think we should address exactly under what I said originally, whether its inequitable access to healthcare in the US, or straight up lack of modern facilities in low income nations.
The entire store is the warehouse. There’s nowhere for them to put it that’s easily accessible to the staff but not to customers, except maybe in a locked cage on the floor.
I hate FB and Google, but I don’t buy this argument. It doesn’t pass the duck test for me — doesn’t look or quack like a utility in my view.

I am sympathetic to the argument though. Getting locked out of your existing Gmail account could be really disastrous. Maybe there should be regulation for email extrication — if you’re going to ban me, you better allow me to update all of my accounts to not use your email service first.
What is the attitude in the healthcare industry towards FOSS, and what are the barriers to greater adoption (of any open source)?
The US offers unlimited resources for pursuit if one is willing to venture after them with resilience. Having said that, it always comes down to passion and willingness of pursuit and this is why many with lesser means can still achieve greatness and even better in a country with the resources available.
With the death of the Fairness Doctrine, and its non-applicability to anything other than broadcast media, what mechanisms would you say Americans still have to "stand up" for journalism and to wage war on the evils of Fox News and its brethren?