skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Star-Builders/Art... just came out and is a very accessible explainer.

The maybe-tldr version: we can make fusion occur, but it currently (well, until today) takes more energy to make it happen than we get out. We have good models that predict this relationship, and it mostly boils down to maximizing the "triple product": temperature times plasma density times confinement time. The two most popular broad approaches are "magnetic confinement" (holding a plasma for awhile with magnetic fields) and "inertial confinement" (taking a capsule and rapidly mechanically compressing it, with lasers or a railgun or something, which is what this NIF thing is), and each chooses to maximize the triple product by leaning on different multiplicands -- inertial confinement is much shorter time, but higher density as compared to magnetic. For both, the other factor is plasma instabilities: plasmas don't like to behave, and like to leak out of their enclosures or not maintain the shapes you want them to, and lots of research seems to be about controlling those.

Beyond that, what the challenges are depend on the approach you choose. For inertial, bumping up the triple product seems to be mostly about building bigger and more powerful systems, and managing plasma instabilities. NIF also uses an "indirect" approach where the lasers get (inefficiently) turned into X-rays which then compress the plasma, and "direct" inertial fusion has even bigger plasma instability problems to solve.

For magnetic, the most mature technologies, tokamaks, have well-understood properties in terms of plasma management, and the main still-to-do work had been thought to just be making the machines bigger, which is what ITER is doing, but the recent change is the development of high-temperature superconducting magnets, which might allow for much higher-strength magnetic fields, which would allow for success with smaller machines (that's what, e.g., Commonwealth Fusion, is pursuing). In either case, the goal is just bumping up the triple product until we get to net gain. Other magnetic approaches (stellarators, etc.) are probably at a somewhat-earlier stage of understanding plasma behavior.

For both inertial and magnetic, there will also be development needed after net energy gain to get enough of a gain factor that the economics actually make sense and things can be mass-produced (current thinking is that to actually be economical, we need to get to ~30x energy out compared to what went in), and also likely some materials-science innovations needed to keep the reactor from wearing out due to high neutron flux, and possibly some work producing tritium, the likely fuel, from lithium.

Beyond those MCF and ICF, there are also a bunch of other less-mature technologies that startups are exploring that might also produce good results, and (the founders think) might do so more efficiently than the big approaches, but they're not as far along, and the work still to do is more basic-science-ish. This would be things like Z-pinch, fuel cycles other than deuterium-tritium, etc. etc.
This causes me to ask how secure is this?
Why is it not open source?
Can it be trusted with your personal credentials?
Find small companies with a web presence and buy from them. They type that ship their own product. You will pay a tiny bit more, but because they know their product, and so the description on the website will reflect that. We have 4 different devices that will work, here is why you would choose each. In depth reviews. If you still have questions someone will answer the phone when you call who knows something about the product in question and so can direct you to the right one for you.
I'm no economist, but companies putting their cash away into assets like this is a bad sign right? My understanding is that money flowing indicates a healthy economy of people unafraid to spend.
That link doesnt seem to support your claims about wind lulls, stating almost the exact opposite but let's stick to nuclear anyway as thats far more interesting.

So in this alternative you propose, with the modern peaking nuclear reactors. What kind of capacity factor do the nuclear plants hit overall and what are you using to fill the seasonal peaks? Nukes that run only 1/12th or less of the year? It all sounds very costly if we're building lots of nuclear plants that run below their rated max. That's really going to put the price per kwh up.

Maybe we could build HVDC lines to carry the power long distances from the plants. If you had two cities with a plant each but seperated by a few tinezones you could send the power from the one with the night tine lull to the one with the daytime peak. That would bring costs down I suppose.

Or use the excess power for making hydrogen. Its not super efficient, but if your only alternatuve is a nuclear plant that could be generating more then it'll probably work out financially.

Or use the excess energy to generate carbon free fuels for airplanes.

This is starting to sound like an actual plan.
from what I've read, it's not really mRNA that gives Moderna any advantage, as much as being able to raise broadly-neutralizing antibodies (BNAbs) against HIV membrane protein.

but.. it's still not a polyvalent vaccine, it's only targeting one such highly-conserved region, and there's HIV out there that evades BNAbs (5% of HIV+ patients have BNAbs after all, and they eventually progress.. though maybe after changing tropism or something.)

so it may not be all that effective as a strategy, but there's at least some monkey data suggesting it delays or sometimes prevents infection.

More info here: https://www.aidsmap.com/news/mar-2020/hiv-vaccine-generates-...
There is no meltdown risk with modern fission reactor designs. But there is the waste problem.

If you follow the links my Op-Ed, you’ll find articles describing the radioactive waste and proliferation risks that will accompany any fusion reactor. Not as great as fission, but far from zero. And there is the problem of production and transportation of tritium, a very nasty substance.

A commercial fusion reactor would be fantastically expensive and complex, and require a huge infrastructure to support it.
We had a non-zero chance of stopping covid, even considering vaccines would take a couple of years to get to everyone, it didn't matter (much) if variants happened. The chance of zero covid comes from vaccines coming out fast enough to drop the R value below 1.0 for a significant amount of time for the virus to go away.

However, in hindsight, with animal populations being able to get infected, I think it probably was zero, although that gets well beyond my armchair "skills" ;)
"Helvetica® Now Variable builds on the groundbreaking work of 2019’s Helvetica Now release."

I am so far out of touch that I cannot believe this is relevant to anyone outside of designers who build their career on constantly changing to the newest thing?
From a nurse's point of view, having an intelligent helper like Atlas doing lifting of heavy patients etc. means saving her back from injury.
https://outline.com/mnmpqx
If you collect the tick itself, is there a way to check the tick instead of checking the person that's bit?
browser validation keeps honest people out.
SAT solvers applied.

You can now solve unsolvable problems, like practical formal verification in big C/C++ codebases. There's no need anymore to write test cases, as formal verification tries all possible input values, not just a few selected. It also checks all possible error cases, not just the ones you thought about.
https://archive.is/4WpXO
Moneyness: What happens to the Afghanistan central bank's assets?
Isn't printed inflation exceptionally low from 2011-2021?
Gold as a hedge against inflation always confuses me.

Why not buy a productive asset instead? Maybe even your own shares if they’re actually good?

Why would you sell your stock if you have no need for the cash? If I wanted to invest in gold, then let me do that myself. I have many better options than Panantir.
Fusion still has to deal with waste, just not high-level waste. Through the process of neutron activation all of the parts exposed to neutrons eventually become radioactive enough to be treated as low-level waste. In a reactor large enough to produce energy for the grid these parts could be very large (and expensive) to deal with (not to mention replace).
who doesn't send data to US? (google, apple, facebook?)
Sir, are you aware that you are leaking coolant at an alarming rate?

https://youtu.be/z7U3x3uRmi8?t=57
> 30+ years ago ... I was still a kid with a lot to learn (and still am).

We should all strive to stay young at heart like this. ;)
3dfx Voodoo – Retro Gaming PC Build
Multiple cities in China didn't spend any time in lockdown this year either, so that's not a conclusive argument.
Ah, fond memories of Compiz with Wobbly Windows. Wonder how they’ve done it here, whether it’s resurrected Compiz stuff or implemented the same concepts from scratch.
> Which UX problem do you think it fixed?

You can join a call without signing up
Yeah, that's also obnoxious. The Data From Text wizard lets you easily import the data... but if you do that then the first row no longer defaults to headers. So if you open it that way and want to filter or sort the data, your headers will disappear. You have to go into full blown Power Query to do both prevent reformatting and use column headers, and you have to reassign the data types on a much more complex interface.

We have now changed a 1 second automated process that anybody could do, into a 2 minute manual process that requires knowledge of data types. We've gone from a non-technical task to a highly technical task. To open a file without completely munging the data.

It also will sometimes do weird things like exclusive lock the file on disk until you close every open window of Excel because it creates data connections to the file.
That’s just makeup over the underlying commingling, no?
Pedantically, yes. Ubiquitously, no.
> The whole NIF building has the ability to switch modes between classified and unclassified.

Interesting, can you explain this more? What gets hidden?
When Zoom first came onto the scene, the other technologies you've listed had more friction than coarse grained sandpaper. Zoom was the very first to let people join meetings without a) signing up; and b) downloading anything. I don't know about all the solutions you've listed, but Google Meet for example still requires an account whereas Zoom still does not.

As more and more people use Zoom, the friction of using it decreases as well, since you can more safely assume that people have used it before and are familiar with it - if not, they can still use it without making an account, and without downloading anything (though this has become a bit harder now).

Furthermore, Zoom was also one of the first solutions to let you simply call in with your phone (and put that option front and center), which also does not require accounts or any downloads.

There are probably many other things I'm glossing over here - UX is a holistic phenomenon after all, and requires many small things to feel right. I'm not sure whether you're arguing that Zoom did not have 10x better UX than anything out there when it launched, but if you are, I can't help but think you're being willfully ignorant.
There is no scientific consensus. It's a moving target and science is too slow.
Not always. I've worked on all sorts with different companies.
People can have more or less talent at technology, although it's usually called "intelligence."
Here's a great complimentary nugget of wisdom Elon Musk shared on the tour he gave of Starbase recently that intersects with a closely related concept.

17:29 Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist.
And say, well, why would you do that? Well, everyone has been trained in high school and college
that you gotta answer the question, convergent logic. So you can't tell a professor, "your question is dumb",
or you will get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone is basically, without knowing it,
they got like mental straight jacket on that is they'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist.
https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1049
I remember listening to an episode of the Exponent podcast, in which Ben Thompson said something like (paraphrasing from memory):

> People who love "native apps" can complain about Electron all they want—but there's simply no replacement for the real-time collaboration offered by web-based apps like Figma!

As someone who's not exactly thrilled with Electron and its memory usage—is there a reason the two go together? Is there a reason we can't build collaborative apps in Cocoa and GTK? I think these systems are awesome, I just think they'd be even better if they weren't also running full web browsers!
Lots of people in mid-career who are technologists are experts in use of systems that are declining in importance. The question is, can those people learn skills and become experts in systems that are in greater demand?

But what does "reluctance among workers to learn new skills" mean for people whose jobs are not as technology-related?

Are they referring to auto and truck mechanics whose skills are with maintaining and repairing combustion engines being reluctant to learn the skills for EV vehicles?
When Palantir buys $50 million in gold, it means that $50 million dollars has flowed to some gold broker, who will now spend it buying something else (labor, inventory, market research, sales, etc...)
We will know when CFR/IFR goes down among unvaxxed people who haven't had COVID before.
Also, realizing I didn't answer the "money" question. Fusion enthusiasts definitely think so, and personally (just random interested lay-person) it seems like for tokamaks in particular, the physics are now well-enough understand that it's probably just a matter of money/time, but it's hard to say for sure.
Yeah, HAART is not side effect free, but one has come a long way from the initial retrovirals which had way more severe side effects.

As for the CD4+ T cells, you are right that their numbers decrease before it's called AIDS. In some individuals the counts can successfully recover to "normal" levels. According to studies, it depends on how early you start treatment.

https://www.aidsmap.com/news/dec-2018/cd4-count-recovery-fre...

https://www.nature.com/articles/mi201558
Well down from the 110% mortgages of the pre 2008's 95% loans still plentiful in the UK - only need to put down 12k to buy a 240k property - probably went on holiday with the rest of the money.
I don't think that's a "transparent lie", but you sound like you fall within one of the groups mentioned in my original comment.

To me, I can see it being a reasonable response given the nature of the situation. That said, I can also see it being a coverup. There's no details that are very illuminating here, but hopefully an investigation filters out the mud for those interested.
I haven't been to Phoenix in twenty years, but it's hard for me—as someone who is not a civil engineer—to grasp how this is the case. I remember walking around there in the summer and being shocked to see a higher concentration of lush green lawns there than in Ohio where I lived at the time. Homeowners had spigots poking out of the corner of their yard, which they'd turn on to literally flood their yard. Flying into the airport you could see the profusion of green lawns, private backyard swimming pools, and expansive golf courses. Is there a good resource where I can see how that opulent water use squares with having a 100+ year native supply and is actually a net water contributor?
It's been about a decade since I last used OKCupid but I remember really enjoying it. Wacky quizzes and questions, fun usernames, long profiles, trying to find people who had both a high match percentage and enemy percentage for potentially hilarious but exhausting conversations and dates, etc.

Sad to hear that now it's a Tinder clone with swiping, forced real names, short profiles for mobile, and such.
You both raise an interesting point - the most common reason cited for not getting the vaccine is safety. People say that it hasn't been tested, that we don't know what it does, that people "shed the spike protein," etc.

Which I think reinforces my point about the bias of this source, actually: if they were genuinely worried about "safetyism," they would be interested in trying to figure out why so many otherwise-well-adjusted adults seem afraid to take this vaccine, afraid of other people "shedding," afraid of attacks on civil liberties if they wear a mask, afraid that businesses will go under, afraid of a New Normal, and so forth. They would be asking how to make people less afraid of all these things; as they say, progress is impossible without physical or emotional risk.

But they have concluded, a priori, that the problem is public health officials being too "safetyist," and they're interested only in research that supports that conclusion.

I do, actually, think both of you should be prohibited from participating in society if you refuse to take the vaccine, and I think that this position is at least as justifiable as anything CSPI believes. I do think that both of you are making bad cost-benefit analyses in refusing to take the vaccine, and this is a problem for society that should be fixed.
No, this has nothing to do with those of us that choose to live here being stuck because of our professions, what the heck gave you that idea?

Everyone I know who lives here LOVES Livermore. It’s decent commute distance to most places in the Bay Area, is surrounded by beautiful hills, 40+ wineries, an award winning downtown, and the friendliest people of any biggish California city I’ve lived in.

It’s a joke, but related to the awkward sounding and looking term Livermoran.

There is a LOT more keeping the 100k of us in Livermore than our professions.
Yes this is true of major ad networks, but there is also straight data brokers who "just" buy/sell data.

FB and google used to (idk about now, don't care to check) allow you to upload data you gathered/bought and use it for tracking.

To prove a point, i created a fb ad to target my parents and family (uploaded their email, phone number, identifiers, interests, locations they frequent - only data i knew fb already had) and watched as their ads became "hey vineyardmike's parents. the internet is not private".
If people were (universally) a little more conscientious a lot of costs could be eliminated...
The problem is that Windows is still where the entertainment and hobby project is. For hobby project such as Windows internals or Malware analysis I'm actually better off with a Windows VM for safety, but for games...well, actually, I don't play any new game at all, so maybe a Windows VM can get by if it shares the host GPU.

So yeah, Linux is definitely doable once I get my next machine. Current machine only has 4GB so it's good enough for any VM. I'll probably pick Ubuntu as it's the only one I used.
I'd be super happy with something like this honestly. I do want to see advertisements, especially for things in my areas of interest, while being able to control the list. I would go one step further and make topics opt-in with a pending list of inferred topics.
If you were in Zimbabwe 15 years ago would you rather buy shares in the top 100 Zimbabwean companies, or gold?
This wasn't a problem during Spring's height (circa 2007-2010 ?), when there were a lot more than 3 games regularly played, and they all shared the same lobbies (yes, you could pick the lobby you preferred too), so going from one game to another to a mod of a game (like a popular one a while FPS version) was very easy.

Zero-K splitting away certainly didn't help things...
clickable

https://www.demigod.ai/
Download Odin Tool to Repair Samsung Devices – All Versions
selling stock in a loss making company to buy gold bars? great.
Should we reasonably expect the fruit of anyone's labor to be free? It's a designer's right to voluntarily give away their product, but that doesn't mean it's our right to use just anyone's work for free without their permission.
Previous partner count correlates with likelihood of divorce.

People who sleep around are damaged goods, both physiologically and psychologically.
Plastic recycling is a sham.

We were paying China to take it, and they were putting it in a landfill (probably). China won't take our trash, I mean recycling anymore, so now we're putting it in landfills.

General rule of thumb is if you can get money for scrapping it, it's recyclable (aluminum, glass, steel, etc).

Companies use plastic because it's cheap and the government won't regulate it. I remember when sodas used to come in bottles, and food came in wax paper wrapping, and it tasted better.

From an npr article posted by someone else:

>Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Inflation over the last 10 years averages 1.7%, which makes it probably the least inflationary 10 year stretch ever.
Yeah, that was an unforced error. Fundamental changes to a language can and should rely on upgrading deployed runtime libraries.
Figuring out the cost of climate tipping points
Looks like a user error to me.
If our mindset had been "zero covid", we'd not have gotten the mutants and the v1 vaccine would have driven it extinct.

Please dont abuse the name of a strategy that was never implemented.

What governments did was 'keep incidence below X by means of lockdowns', and 'relax restrictions if incidence is below X'.

This is a simple control system that keeps the incidence at X. Not below X.

Unfortunately X was chosen via hospital bed capacity, so it was quite high, about 500 cases / 100k per week. High enough to generate mutants. With X=5, the same lockdown measures would have been in effect for much the same time (they'd have been started a few weeks earlier). Also, for very low values of X, you might have been able to get away with just contact tracing or travel controls instead of lockdowns, so the average lockdown intensity over time, under zero covid, could have been lower than what we had. The point of zero covid is to have less lockdown!

Anyway, the idea was to buy time until you get the vaccine. Zero covid was never intended to be an indefinite duration program.

This is what zero covid really means (low X). I agree with everything else you said.
This Company Is Selling $4M of Product per Month with Zero Ad Spend
Daily.dev is good learning coding
Definitely the Zimbabwean companies, their debts are about to get zero’d out.
If you don’t think it’s a lie, provide evidence that the precinct was under threat. “Someone could walk there in an hour” isn’t sufficient.

> but you sound like you fall within one of the groups mentioned in my original comment.

I’d prefer if you spared the patronizing attitude, thanks.
> it’s giving away my data for free

It shows that google no longer things owning data is a competitive advantage.

This seems like it should be bigger news.
It’s not more bombs so much as maintaining our existing nuclear deterrent without actually testing warheads by blowing them up, something that, thankfully, is behind us. Warheads deteriorate over time; you can’t just keep them on the shelf and claim that they will still work if used. And our adversaries know this.
5-10 years, every year
LinkedIn posts first $10B year but profits remain a mystery
I would expect dates to show up in large datasets pasted into excel orders of magnitude more often than genes. For the people who use excel, autoformatting is overwhelmingly the desired default behavior.