skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’

https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricit...

New solar is now often cheaper than keeping a coal plant running

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new...

And we should expect solar to get even cheaper.
The woman I was flirting with was in Morocco XD
Q&A with Laura Edelson, the researcher at the center of Facebook scandal
Why do we need sharper weather and climate models?
> RSS used to have the concept of media enclosures or something.

Yes, and 'show notes'. What you can do in theory is embed advertising there, or in the audio itself if you need to monetize.
You have to specify how many miles per year you're going to drive - that £400 a year insurance is declared for 10k miles. How many more do Americans drive? 20k? 30k? Aren't those very silly numbers quickly? I thought even in America people drive no more than 20-30 miles a day on average, no?
I don't know how evident it is in the West, but what you mentioned for the US is very true, not just for Arab countries but also South Asian and African visitors. Around more than a decade back, when our school had planned for a trip to NASA, I remember the teachers and the visa guide aggressively asking all the students who had applied to scrub anything political off their social media and their public profiles elsewhere. The US visa officials are also the most hostile lot, and while I didn't experience much hassle during my interview (I guess because I worked in a white shoe firm which was sponsoring the visa), I was witness to seeing a Sikh family get intensely rattled and rammed during their process.
One day style gan will be used to recreate pornography and with all its weird anomalies the outcome will be truly horrifying.

Goodness knows there’s plenty of porno training images out there.
Or just ran with the joke. Likewise I'm sure somewhere out there is a codebase containing

int random() {
return 4; // randomly chosen by roll of a fair dice
}
> NCMEC's database already contains non-CSAM.

How do you know?
Both yes and no. If renewables and buffer storage become raw cheaper than fossils, then they will just be adopted.

But as of now coal is cheaper. And nuclear which is the natural bridge gap tech is politically unfeasible.
I certainly wouldn't put it past them[0], and then we can look forward to “The logic behind more than three random words”

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27021377
Ask HN: Works of fiction delving into advanced scientific notions?
What works of fiction do you know that delve deep into advanced scientific notions?
For example, I can think of books by Neal Stephenson (especially Anathem which delves into the intricacies of some (far-fetched) quantum theories), or Blindsight by Peter Watts.
Root doesn't mean you give root permissions to any dumb app. I implied proper permission management and authorization, of course.

Then it's just like a secure castle where the user can go into all of the rooms, to some with a special key. You don't have to go into those rooms, but you have the option to at any time.
And, depending on the implementation, you may change the special room, but if you return after the next reboot, it will be reverted back.

Actually, the castle analogy goes further: Unfortunately, many seem to interpret "verified boot" and "most secure" as "protects the dumbest user from shooting themselves in the foot on purpose by locking them into that castle.
That is exactly where the recent apple scandal is coming from: The user is subservient to the OS vendor, and the OS vendor can abuse the user as they please.

Security is very important. Why? In order to not be exploited by strangers (criminals, spys...) against my interests. If security enables exploitation against my interests (by whomever, be it the OS vendor, the movie industry, or the government), it is not the security I want.
This one OS is different than all the other evil ones? That's what Apple said before...
Picture on the cover of the book “Introduction to Analytic Number Theory”
Uhm, in the UK you can only pay for the test if you want, no actual training is strictly required. So....like £99 or there about?

But of course majority of people pay for training because they want to learn somewhere, and not everyone has parents willing to risk the family car. Surely even in US people pay for training and there's more to the cost than just the $25 test fee?
I for one am happy that the EFF are making noise about the broken patent system applying to software inventions and I hope they are able to change the patent system. A real uphill struggle no doubt, but important work. Thanks EFF.
>would it start straining all the wrong places?

Weight lifters often wear shoes with a definite incline while squatting, so do not worry about that (though my guess is it will not solve the basic problem you described).
Do Dropbox not automatically flag ‘correcthorsebatterystaple’ any more?[0]

[0] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/08/13/correcthorsebatt...
What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
I am not wanting to be a contrarian just for the heck of it. Some of the goals are hard to live by while having a fulltime job that demands attention-span fully and is only asking for more.

Could you explain your point a bit more though?
The minimum required from any insurance in the EU is €5M in 3rd party liability, no vehicle insurance can offer less. The ones offering 20/50/100M are doing it mostly for advertising, there's no appreciable difference in cost.
Turns out a side effect of the internet giving everyone a voice is that humans are pack animals and mob rule is in our nature.
> 1. Vote with your feet - Put your money in the pockets of the people aligned to your values.

As much as I dislike this invasion of privacy, I still trust Apple's products, ecosystem & stewardship over the alternatives (for use by whole family).

Although this is the first time in recent memory where not having a viable alternative to consider is irksome as I don't see where the negative push back will come from to prevent further user hostile invasions like this - can only hope it ends here and it's not the start of a slippery slope towards govt surveillance.
Learning to Live in Steven Weinberg’s Pointless Universe
Regardless of whether it is effective or not, something weird is happening around it policy wise.

E.g., in Israel, it is explicitly contra indicated for covid, and has in effect become a “dangerous drug” requiring a district doctor’s approval (of which iirc there are less than 10 in the whole country) even for indicated use such as scabies —- with 14B doses given world wide, and a safety track record significantly better than OTC paracetamol / acetaminophen.

And yet, a 3rd Pfizer dose, of a drug that has only ever received an EUA, and said EUA does not include a 3rd dose; with basically no safety or efficacy data for that 3rd dose - has already been administered to 300K people (at a rate of over 50K=0.5%pop per day), is highly recommended - close to being coerced.

Regardless of whether of what one believes about the efficacy and safety of either, policy wise, something is very weird with this picture.
Was a little too theoretical for me, so I like something a little more simple about habits...

>...habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment. - Jason Hreha [1]

>Whenever you face a problem repeatedly, your brain begins to automate the process of solving it. Your habits are just a series of automatic solutions that solve the problems and stressed you face regularly. - James Clear [1]

The point that was interesting about habits, to me, is that they are unconscious. So this means that you don't necessarily know that you even have them. And they guide a large part of your life. So, if you are not in a spot in life where you want to be, look at your habits... it takes some effort because they are unconscious... but then you can work on changing them.

The unconscious part is important too, though, in a good way. They are programs running in the background that allow you direct your attention to new things that you don't encounter often. Kind of cool when you think that humans have a way to auto-program an auto-pilot for things they encounter often, so that the brain can be better prepared for new things.

[1] https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/habits-maketh-the-man
By self-sufficient do you mean learning life skills to become that?
Planning for Servers in 2022 and Beyond
C is not a difficult language. I know a lot of electronic engineers that know how to program in C but don't know a thing about informatics, for example what is DNS, or what is JSON, or how to access a FTP server, and things like that. But they know how to program their microcontrollers in C.

> C programmers need to learn about many different forms of UB: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1520. Most take years to learn these rules. Many never learn them.

UB really don't care that much in real life. When you are targeting a particular platform, that for most C programmer is some sort of 8/32 bit microcontroller, the only thing you care is the datasheet of the microcontroller. Of course you do things that in general are undefined behavior, but in the particular case lead to a perfectly predictable result.

In reality you only have to care about UB if your goal is to share code between hardware platform. But let's be realistic, most of the time you don't. Even if you do, some UB are these days standardized, for example integer overflow is UB, in practice you know that on every architecture 2 complement arithmetic is used and thus is well defined.

The real problem is that compiler for a misinterpretation for the standard started treating UB as "you are allowed to do whatever stupid thing you want since the condition will never happen", that is the real problem. In reality if you compile without optimization and with flags that avoid this stupid decisions it's not a problem.

> Most real world C programs use some nonstandard language extensions on some target platforms. C learners trying to read production code have to navigate these.

Again, it's a problem only if you are targeting different hardware platforms. But if you only program on ST microcontrollers (for example) why should you care?

And you must use them in some situations, for example in C there is not a way to control how a struct is packed (to decode efficiently data from a serial connection for example you define a packed structure and access individual fields). Or inline assembly is not in the standard (what if you need to use an instruction of the microcontroller that is not exposed by the C library?).

> The C compilation and linking model is complicated and platform dependent. Compilation is a major stumbling block for students who have to learn Make or CMake at the same time they learn C.

It's. But most of the time you stuck on whatever the development environment for the target hardware platform is setup to. Most C programmers doesn't even know what CMake or Make is, I care about it and do things by hand, most other people use IAR or Keil or whatever proprietary software that integrates compiler, build system and IDE.
There are plenty of alternatives but they're not cost effective...
Nokia 8110 4G
Did WFH Hurt the Video Game Industry?
I made the switch a couple months ago and its harder than you think. There is a lot of convenience you take for granted in the smartphone age.
Best Laravel Themes and Templates
Apple has caved to china many many times, a quick googling of it will give you a list.

The difference between the "old" content scanning and the new is indeed that they are now willing to "use" the results of that. Facial recognition was client-side only (or so they said), the results of which never left your phone.

Now they're doing content scanning and sending it to themselves as well as others.

In parallel Apple is starting up a growing advertising business, hiring aggressively and expecting that to be a big part of their future revenue. If they're now "allowed" (by its users) to do content scanning _and_ sharing the results, why wouldn't they use those results for themselves to target you with ads?
> But as of now coal is cheaper.

do you have a reference for that? Citation needed as to where and by how much coal is cheaper.
> For the CSAM detection this wouldn't do anything at all because you aren't uploading it to iCloud.

The whole point of this change is that they will scan content "before" it hits iCloud. (the verbage says "before" as if there is going to certainly be an intent that it goes to iCloud but that's not a given at all, sounds like Apples marketing speak to "assume the sale" so to say).

CSAM scanning of photos uploaded iCloud photos has already been in place for quite some time.
I once found myself implementing Ulam's spiral in J, and was so taken by the (one) line of code it required, that I made a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBC5vnwf6Zw
Can easily be, if you compare comparable. I buy BMWs for cca 25% of the price of new (that means 6-7 years old and up to 100k km). Last one lasted 11 years and still counting. Maintenance costs are almost 0, apart from mandatory stuff (oil, brakes & pads, wheels every +-5 years).

Hell will freeze sooner than we will be buying a new car - its just such a stupid waste of money, when the price drops so rapidly and you still get 95% of the new car. ICE cars, especially diesels, just age so well compared to electric ones. I know we will be buying our next car as used ICE, for next maybe 10 years. And so do people around us, in richest country in Europe - Switzerland.

Electric car on level to say well equipped BMW 5 wagon series is what... Tesla model S? Not really, BMW has much higher quality of literally everything that matters in car while sporting much bigger trunk (necessity with kids and active lifestyle).

One should not ignore the price point - most of the world simply can't afford buying electric cars. Its great that western democracies will lead this transition, but when considering whole human population this is a tiny sliver at the moment.
And if the landscape is changing then the sliding has already started.
I mean, it kind of is, and that's okay.
I know a lot of people who play video games, but need me to help them build a computer or reinstall windows. Despite interacting with tech all the time they have zero desire to understand how it works. Also they didn't say that they don't play video games too. They are just also interested in tech.
I think your proclamation of it all being futile is a bit premature and can be disheartening for those that do want to act. It may even play a part in negative change, leading to some people dropping their original intention because you successfully convinced them that nothing can possibly change.

Yet, I'm not convinced that you can reasonably know this. So if we can all agree that what's happening here with Apple is a bad thing, perhaps it's for the best to refrain from posting pessimistic takes?

All actions have consequences, even posting to a message board. I think it is wise to formulate an intended consequence in mind before you act.
> buffers and windows

How is this different from tabs? You have global search to open files in new tabs, you can opt to leave a trail of new tabs as you follow links through your code, you create arbitrary new tabs and plop snippets in, and have an option to persist to a file whenever you wish. You can reorganize your tabs layout, create an arbitrary number of rows and columns, move tabs back and forth between different groups, splitting and merging groups as you need.
Also note that much of the pollution in India and China is created in the process of manufacturing goods which are then exported to the west, so it’s not like you and I have no influence at all.
Solved one this week on Linkedin because it seemed like a one off occurrence.

Next time I see it I'll just fucking leave.
Even with the most secure alternative Android, you always have blobs from the original manufacturer that you have to use for some hardware-related critical functionality. And of course, the baseband that usually has full access to device's memory using DMA.
That's where the backdoors go, I'd suspect.
In this regard I'd trust Xiaomi way less than Google.

However, Google phones have been subpar for a long time. E.g. the storage was too small and non-extendable. Makes sense from a Google point of view, as you're supposed to store everything into their cloud. But not well suitable for offline-first and privacy-first.
This seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the nature of quantum entanglement. It does not mean that anything affecting one of the entangled particles has an effect on the other one.

Rather, once two particles have been entangled by essentially syncing the vibrations in their atomic spins, a measurement made on the quantum state of one of them implies the quantum state of the other, even if moved far away.

Imagine spinning two baseballs in space so that one spins the other, which then rotates the opposite way. If we move ball 1 away from ball 2 and only look at 1, we will still know which way ball 2 is facing based on which way 1 is facing. At least until random fluctuations and gravitation effects cause our ”particles” to disentangle (lose coherence).
One Man Changed the High Jump Forever – The Olympics on the Record
Ask HN: The ideal direction of humankind in the next millennium?
Many of us here, myself included, often examine the many shortcomings of our species and the projected consequences.

I’m hoping to tap into some optimism here and ask about what positive visions we each have for the future.

What should the goal be? Can it possibly be achieved? Where do you hope we have progressed to by 3021?
Crypto community slams ‘disastrous’ new amendment to big infrastructure bill
"Impossible to confirm"? No. It's wrong. You googled "how many bones does a parrot have" and copied the first answer, which was wrong. This isn't some kind of scientific mystery. 13 is just not a reasonable number.

The origin of "13-25" is interesting - it seems to be a commonly cited range for how many neck vertebrae birds in general have. This is the kind of category error that Google's "answer engine" is notorious for. I wonder if the author of that wrong top Google result also got it from Google...
This. And to be honest, luxury solution discussions and their waste of public discussion bandwidth are part of the problem. Financially support the building of thorium reactors in china and india- is part of the solution. Solar at home- is nice, but not part of the solution - as most of the carbon cost in the west has been carted off into the east.
I wouldn't call myself waiting until FI. I do spend a disciplined amount of time on a daily basis with things that I've mentioned I love doing. But as I become more experienced, the responsiblities of job demand a lot of attention + time, that it's hard to mentally switch off / say no to extra work. Basically this leads to long times before I complete a book / course.

But broadly about the "stuff I wish I could do", I think it would require a lot of personal exploration / life experience / reading and much more to know what I want to do and how I can do(if I could). This is defintely not possible with a full time job(same reasons as above) IMO.
I'm using a 43" 16:9 4k monitor. It's the most screen real estate you can put in front of you without having to move your head.

I would love to see more 16:10 or even 3:2 monitors in bigger sizes (Huawei has started shipping a 32" 3:2 monitor recently, but they seem to be the only ones interested in that market).

The 43" monitor is too big for any single application, so I'm using xrandr to split it into two 4:3 displays at the top for development/browser/chat, and three terminals side-by-side at the bottom.
Fun fact, it's also the only place that I know of where you can get fined for calling a German a Nazi.
Sure, but by that reasoning, any system that has updates is by definition 100% insecure, and nothing else matters anymore…

The world is not just black and white.
Nope, v4 are
just random with a version tag.
Before that I thought about dumping Pixel phones for a iPhone. Now I gonna try out CalyxOS on my Pixel 2. Once I finally decided on an upgrade to a Pixel 5 I'll probably give GrapheneOS a shot. Hoping that makes a difference, otherwise it will a dumb phone again.
Around 20 years ago I found it quite difficult to find anyone actually interested in computers. I mean not for gaming but rather exploring cool tools and software development. And even among those interested only few had that much interest that they would go and learn a programming language or install Linux. Of course that was a time when Computers and Internet access were rather expensive and documentation was usually only available in books. So naturally most kids using computers had parents with some sort of engineering/mathematics background or were themselves really interested in that.

I think this is now changing in unexpected ways, one is that devices are becoming really locked down. (On the other hand you can now install a full-featured GNU/Linux as a app... FWIW when I tried Linux the first time it was with Winlinux or so on Win95) On the other hand documentation has become extremely good, it's more common to see devs with no engineering/math background at all.
Yeah, I mean pop sci infers that it can actually be demonstrated to work.
Seems that was just v1. There's a link to the 2nd iteration of the project, and the images, to my eyes, are very much improved with respect to realism.

https://github.com/l4rz/scaling-up-stylegan2
Weather isn't felt in a vacuum: you have to account for centuries of architecture and customs.

Weather in London has become nicer in the last decade, with winters that are milder on average and summers that are warmer and sunnier (except this one). However, inside of London's thick stone houses you don't notice any difference in winter while you also are cooked alive in the summer heat.
These doomsday prophecies are always conveniently distant. You can tell people any scary nonsense as long as it's far enough away that everyone will have forgotten the details of your prediction by the time it fails to come to pass.

It's just the same as how we can show people today any number of doomsday prophecies from the past about how the world was definitely going to be wrecked by 2020, or 2010, or 2000, or 1990, but somehow nobody thinks they were serious back then... but then they take the doomsday prophecy about 2030 seriously.
The final section of the article about ‘password diversity’[0] is interesting to me; allow me to think aloud for a little bit.

Whilst I appreciate the recent shift to advising passphrases (and password managers, but that's a different topic) for normal users, the I've noticed that received wisdom tends to be that the words need to be unrelated, i.e. don't use a quote from a book (although I notice that the NCSC's own guidance[1] does not state this).

However, surely this would be an acceptable workaround for those who would struggle to remember (or, as you say, conjure up) an assortment of random, sufficiently-complex words? Password diversity would be enhanced if the text-based authentication ecosystem included traditional passwords, random passphrases AND semantically-meaningful sentences, more so than with only the first two?

Of course, quotations have their own strength problems (i.e., in a language like English any sentence will contain a lot of 1–3-letter words), and perhaps ‘it was the best of times it was the worst of times’ would just become the new ‘123456’, but perhaps the ecosystem-wide strengthening effect could mitigate those?

[0] https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/the-logic-behind-three-ran...

[1] https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/top-tips-for-staying-secu...
Mixed views on new DNS top level domains