skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's do the math. Embodied energy for aluminum is apparently at 211 GJ per tonne[1] whereas wood has a caloric value of 19.2 GJ/tonne dry matter [2], but let's say our wood has 50% moisture -> 9.6GJ/tonne => embodied energy at about 1/22 ratio

An iPhone 12 has 164 g, of which 24% is aluminum. [4] => ~39.36g of aluminum in one. Ergo, your, presumably wood torch, would have to weigh 865g in order to be able to have the same embodied energy as an iPhone.

Of course, this is highly simplified and silly and full of wonky napkin math, but at least I expect we're in the same order of magnitude range for the estimation.

Regardless, doing the math, it is lower than I expected. Also, the greatest issue I took with your claim that "If you think an iPhone requires less raw materials to make than a torch, please go ahead and hand-sculpt one from raw sand." -> that sentence makes no sense and fails to prove your point. Maybe the point is correct, but it is NOT proven in any way by that sentence. I don't even have a stance on the torch/iPhone comparison (although the effort I expended on the napkin math might show otherwise, that was just a fun little exercise for me)

And the wider point is that inovation might be better for the environment than lack of innovation. I am convinced that if we could move to a sustainable world if everything we bought would be higher quality and had more thought in it, abeit more expensive. The consolidation of purpose, as you nicely phrased it is one of the critical components that work for this "techstenance".

And the stronger point, related to the iPhone specifically is that

[1] https://theconversation.com/the-trouble-with-aluminium-7245

[2] http://www.woodenergy.ie/frequentlyaskedquestions/

[3] https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_12-10509.php

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-metal-in-an-iphone-...
Thanks! Our plan right now is to do a perpetual fallback license for $50 when we can prove the browser is something people want. We could make the browser free later on if we can provide paid features that require us to run servers.
Disobeying laws can become very costly, especially when you have something that can be taken away.
the 1980 one is a bit disingenuous though, as climate scientists believed that we were going to move into an ice age unless we did something to stop it.

I'm probably wrong, though.
Copyright enforcement is actually quite expensive, both for the litigant and the defendant. The only way for it to be actually profitable to sue someone who is stealing your work is if they immediately settle, which is how copyright trolls operate. Everything else is a massive money pit for everyone involved, even the lawyers. Since this is an international enforcement action, the costs go up more, because now you need multiple legal teams on the bar in each jurisdiction, translators qualified for interpreting laws in foreign languages, knowledge of local copyright quirks, and a lot more coordination than just asking your local counsel to send a takedown notice locally.

(Just as an example of a local copyright quirk that will probably confuse a lot of people in the audience from Europe: copyright registration. America really, really wants you to register your copyright, even though they signed onto Berne/WTO/TRIPS which was supposed to abolish that regime entirely. As a result, America did the bare minimum of compliance. You don't lose your copyright if you don't register, but you can't sue until you do, and if you register after your work was infringed, you don't get statutory damages... which means your costs go way up.)

Furthermore, every enforcement action you take risks PR backlash. The whole fandom surrounding import Japanese comic books basically grew out of a piracy scene. Originally, there were no English translations, and the scene was basically reusing what we'd now call "orphan works". There used to be an unspoken rule among most fansubbers of not translating material that was licensed in the US. All that's changed; most everything gets licensed and many fan translators absolutely are stepping on the toes of licensees. However, every time a licensee or licensor actually takes an enforcement action, they get huge amounts of blowback from their own fans.
You can use any lightning wallet in El Salvador. There’s no need to use a particular provider, or even a provider at all. If you want to buy the requisite hardware (I think a raspberry pi and a USB SSD is the budget approach) you can completely self-host.
Curious what that means for society if the trend continues. The single people I know are only interested in finding someone in the same education bracket.

Does this lead to many more unmarried people like Japan?
One year of Defector (indie paid sports blog)
Missing from the title: "from 3000 *business* accounts"

Can we get the title changed?

Apparently Coursera has B2B division, and it brought " $136M+" revenue from "3000 different companies". Public team pricing at [0] $400/employee/year, so that averages out to at least 110 employees/company (lower bound because they likely give discounts if you have lots of employees).

[0] https://www.coursera.org/business/compare-plans
As I understand it, the category "tech" was invented by stock traders. The applicable definition of "tech" company is a company whose share price movements correlate with the share price movements of other "tech" companies, which in turn tends to depend on how stock traders view the company, so the definition is circular in at least two ways. But it's probably still a useful concept. For stock traders.
Downloaded it, installed it, and loving it!

The big thing I'm missing most is LastPass. Without access to my passwords, I can see myself falling back to Chrome. In fact, I need to keep Chrome running so I can look up my login names and passwords there in order to copy them over to Bonsai when I'm being asked to log in. If you could support popular password managers inside your browser, that would help a lot!
I never argued it doesn't provide relief, what I'm arguing is that relief is somewhat of an illusion if you're suffering from persistent mental health issues, hence a crutch.
I have a much simpler definition.

1. If a company sees its technology capability as a profit center, then it's a tech company.

2. If it sees technology as a cost center, then it's not a tech company.

It's a bit of over-simplification, but it usually works for me and people I speak with.
> "HERE is Your Boycott List of All of the Liberal Agenda Corporations"

That's apples and oranges. Conservatives can boycott all they want, but they don't have the same cultural power to get people fired for ideological transgressions like this. I read somewhere that while conservatives have been very effective at achieving and maintaining political power, it turns out that's not a substitute for cultural power, so their strategy ultimately failed.

Ultimately, they can probably blame their allegiance to free market capitalism for that weakness. It seems that, when conservatives actually achieve economic power, making money takes priority over their other ideological commitments.
Consistent Fitness – Get Six Pack Abs in 16 Weeks
Centaur Labs (YC W19) is hiring back end engineers
"Prolog as a library" => Given "functional" constraints => $CONSTRAINTS.prolog( "query..." ) => results

...many languages (similar to regex / state-machine) can benefit greatly from offloading a portion to something prolog-ish, but it's unfortunate that prolog knowledge isn't as widely distributed.
This is fair but is your average person setting up plex servers? My guess is no.
Allow me to include my mandatory comment about how other languages need to (re)discover Common Lisp's condition and restart system.

The condition system from Lisp gives handlers the option of running before the stack is rewound; other languages put various amounts of state in their exception objects, which only gives you a portion of the power of just not destroying that state in the first place.

Restarts let callers communicate down the stack what to do when certain conditions happen, which removes the need for second-guessing and allows for better locality of code; having the "When X, Y" closer to the code that is responsible for the decision rather than the code that just happens to be closer to X is almost always a win.
You might be interested to read about IBM's OS/400, aka IBM i. It's... sort of like that. Essentially an OS built around DB/2.
Elon Musk's top-secret 'full self-driving' AI car software leaked to hackers
Hey HN!

This is Joe (nezaj) and Stopa (stopachka). Both of us are Clojure hackers [1]. For the last few years, we’ve been on a journey to “get six pack abs”. To do this, we hired a personal trainer, created a mini-community within our friend group, and built custom tools for ourselves, to create a sort of “Datadog for our fitness”.

3 months ago, we had a realization: what if we tried to create a company that did this? A combo of a nutrition coach, personal trainer, community, and custom tools that helps you get in the best shape of your life.

We weren’t experts, so we started off by launching a free cohort, and signing up 20 people. So far, folks have lost an average of 5LBs over the last 2 months. Over 43% said they’d be very disappointed if Consistent stopped to exist.

It started off with an Excel spreadsheet and a Slack group. But very soon, it turned into (a) a Slack bot, (b) a mobile app, and (c) a curriculum, that progressively sets you up with the habits to reach and maintain the best shape of your life.

Solutions in the space are fragmented, have poor technology, and rarely deliver. With Consistent, you get a bundled set of curriculum and tools to help you learn what you don’t know you don’t know, and make progress.

The program is 4 months, and costs 799 (200 dollars each month). This is equivalent to 2 sessions with a personal trainer a month. To keep us aligned, we’re also offering a 100% money-back guarantee. If at any point you choose to leave the program (even 1 day before close), you can get your money back.

There’s one catch though.

We require you weigh yourself everyday, log your food everyday, and log your exercise everyday. In addition you need to send a reflection once a week as well as a shirtless progress photo.

if you start missing days we’ll send you an automated follow-up. Miss those follow-ups and we’ll manually intervene. If you continue to be non-compliant, we’ll dismiss you from the program and donate your payment to the charity of our choice. This way, we only get paid if you succeed, and the money can work for you as an accountability factor.

This is early stages. We want to sign up 20-25 people for the Cohort, which starts in October. If you’re interested, please let us know!

[1] The story: https://consistent.fit/posts/founder-diaries/
This is the default for any motivated reasoning where people are interested in a specific outcome (regardless of what's true): https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-pl...

It's hard work to fight against it, but the first step is recognizing it all over the place and in your own thinking.

Recognizing it and trying to correct for it is one of the core bits of the rationality community (imo).
It seems their monetary policy is remittances.

My guess is ppl will quickly cash out to dollars. But how will the dollars get back to the local exchanges unless people are buying bitcoin there?

This seems like a disaster in the making.
That’s most likely the trade off between the queue and a log. The property of the log is having to look at every message.

The prefixes can be somewhat done with a custom partitioner, the lookup requires another technology. The only way to know the final value under the key is to look at the complete log.
That's great. You can really make people look like dicks by deleting half the words from the conversation.
Thank you for illustrating my point so nicely, in response to absolutely no assertions about cannabis.
Great, so to get the full picture of your point, one must read the entire thread.

My actual point, was why in the world would you not post the name of the company in the original post? What thought processes occurred that suggested you shouldn't provide the name in the first place?
My local library has had the same service for about equally long. The only difference is that instead of ordering them to my house, I order them to the nearest branch and then I walk in and pick it up whenever I feel like it. Then I drop them off a couple weeks later. No need to mess with envelopes and shipping. And it's free!
What kind of «digital humanities» research has been, or could be done, based on one or more of these datasets?
I didn't downvote you but that's a bit silly. I assure you your lawn equipment can handle brisk walks for years.
Perhaps Netflix has shifted. In the beginning, I think you could have made a good argument that technology was their moat, but I don't think you can say so today.

Today, their best attempt at a moat is content, and it's a poor one at best since they can only make so much original content and it's not as if they can do so in a way that is inaccessible to other services.
Because the president has fallen prey to the 1% fallacy.

He’s on record at a Bitcoin conference saying “BTC is worth x billion dollars, if we can attract just 1% of that to El Salavador as investment…”
He must have done a lot a victory laps from his reading material:

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/features/bin-laden-s-bookshelf...
What types of things do you run in your OS that you think would be useful to group like this?
I guess people can just freeze, or use the wildly less efficient electric grid to heat their homes (seriously, resistive heating is the least efficient, moreso considering the waste in generating it with heat and then inefficiencies with transmission.

If you're going to use electricity to heat, at least mine bitcoin or something.
Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media and Future of Humans and AI [video]
They are different in the same way that debts between departments in a company or mental accounts of one person are different -- they mean nothing externally.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/recommendation-that-presidents... notes

> Most economists agree that the debt held by the public is what really affects the economy. As the Congressional Budget Office stated in its June 2009 report on the long-term budget outlook, “Long-term projections of federal debt held by the public, measured relative to the size of the economy, provide useful yardsticks for assessing the sustainability of fiscal policies.” In contrast, “gross debt . . . is not useful for assessing how the Treasury’s operations affect the economy.”
The part that's equivalent to what you'd use for your regular awk isn't very different. Sure, you can do full-scale OO programs, but that doesn't have a large impact on small string munging. I get that you might not learn it to fluff up your CV.

Also, it's usually the same kind of Perl, so you don't have to worry about whether awk is the "one true" one, or mawk, or gawk...
I found this to be relevant: "Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
Did Apple invent much of its early tech, or did it just lift it from Xerox Park?
I would say strategy evaluation is more valuable on the investing side than real-world.

Investing in companies with strategic advantages is much more profitable that trying to find the one commodity company out of thousands that are able to escape from the fires of intense competition.

Strategy is also how you avoid having to delight your customers to be profitable. Just get a new law passed that is inconvenient for your competitors to follow.

Delighting customers is also hard because people are unreasonable and unpredictable. Try selling an app. Even if your app adds lots of value over your competitor, people aren't used to spending money on apps. I would guess the vast majority of apps that make money play into people's addictions and get 1% of their users to buy pay-to-win items or custom skins for their players/items. Only the unreasonable people actually make these companies any money.
I think it used to be, but has become a form of more regular employment for older people over time.

People are now busy forcing their kids through various pre-college resume polishing activities/clubs/sports/courses/etc rather than making some minimum wage over the summer..

Anyway one could do a little google instead of just replying in the negative without backing.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/07/during-the-...

"In 2019, 35.8% of teens worked over the summer. As recently as 2000, more than half (51.7%) of U.S. teens could expect to spend at least part of their summer vacation lifeguarding, selling T-shirts, dishing up soft-serve ice cream or otherwise working for pay."
> Try factoring this with the quadratic formula x^5+5x^4+10x^3+10x^2+5x+1.

But this is not a trinomial and, of course, quadratic formula is not applicable here. My objection was specifically for section 4.3, which does not provide any clues how to extend the described method to more complex polynomials anyway.

> The issue with formula's is that they constrain the space of the problems and ones mind especially.

That I agree with - teaching only to use formulas is bad, - but how to find polynomial roots is not relevant here. The proper way to teach factorization is IMHO to show relations to roots first - which are not necessary to be found by quadratic formula, it may be the same trial and error method, - instead of introducing a special method that works only in very limited cases.

> Algebra is taught poorly not because kids don't learn the steps but because it stunts people into viewing math as if you only had the formula its easier.

Err... learning some steps (without explaining where they come from) is not a proper way to tech math anyway, and I surely do not advocate that. My point was different - instead of teaching some steps to solve particular problem (factoring trinomials), the better approach is to teach the underlying theory and real methods used in modern mathematics.

That is, instead of using factorization as a method of solving polynomial equation, the proper approach is exactly the opposite, using equation roots for the factorization. Well, at least that's how they taught me to do things, and I do believe this is the correct way.
Have you audit their code? Or you truly believe the code is doing what you think is doing based on what they said giving you the impression that is secured and encrypted email? The bent over without a fight. At least old yahoo mail tried that even though furtile. They bent without a sound.
I think that set theory and other analytic can be instructive, but can also obscure what's happening. The exact encoding of numbers using sets is just an "implementation detail", in the sense that there's many ways you can build natural numbers (for example) using set theory and they are all equivalent.

So it's like learning data structures by coding in assembly, which is what Donald Knuth thinks is the right thing to do anyway, but some other teachers would disagree. But if you want to see some high level construction, you could look to eg. Tarski's synthetic construction of reals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_axiomatization_of_t...

Which doesn't build reals using other theories as building blocks; real numbers are real numbers.

Anyway, from the analytic constructions of reals, I'm most partial to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_real_numbe...

Which uses integers rather than sets as the building block, and is simpler than many constructions. And, of course integers themselves can be constructed out of sets, but they can be constructed out of lambda calculus terms as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Encoding_datat... among many other constructions - but when we finally define integers, we can abstract away the implementation details (and that's really the crux of the question!)

Anyway there's a discussion of analytic vs synthetic mathematics in this post, https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2015/02/introduction_to... (it seems that part 2 wasn't written unfortunately)
When one party -- a company, a person, a government -- owes itself by its own rules, that does not mean anything externally.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/recommendation-that-presidents... notes

> Most economists agree that the debt held by the public is what really affects the economy. As the Congressional Budget Office stated in its June 2009 report on the long-term budget outlook, “Long-term projections of federal debt held by the public, measured relative to the size of the economy, provide useful yardsticks for assessing the sustainability of fiscal policies.” In contrast, “gross debt . . . is not useful for assessing how the Treasury’s operations affect the economy.”
Swap placements that I do:

1. choose the fastest HDD device

2. Use direct partition, no LVM

3. partition in middle of spinning platter’ busiest region of hard drive

4. single swap partition only

5. keep swap and hibernate storage separate.

6. encrypt swap (only downside)
The same thing happens with age-plugin-yubikey. You can only generate identities on the device (so you never have access to the private key), and the YubiKey needs to be plugged in and available in order to decrypt, as the core asymmetric decryption operation occurs on the YubiKey. (You don't need the YubiKey to _encrypt_, just the recipient string).

The way this is set up in the plugin protocol, the age client provides the age header to the plugin, along with any identities the user has asked to decrypt with, and the plugin returns any file keys it is able to decrypt. The process of taking the per-recipient encrypted blobs in the header and extracting file keys, is entirely up to the plugin. This falls nicely out of the way the age format's "one joint" is designed: the file is encrypted with one symmetric key, and that key is encrypted separately to each recipient via whatever mechanism their type requires.

If you squint through the layers upon layers of packet complexity, this is the same way GPG encryption operates [0]: the data is symmetrically encrypted with a random session key, and that session key is asymmetrically encrypted to each recipient. Only the asymmetric decryption part happens on-device for GPG; the symmetric part happens on the computer.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4880#section-2.1
Schmidt is somewhat naive about something - it's made into a complex situation when companies like Google/Amazon etc enter the space. They are otherwise largely making feel good stuff. You can't escape the fact that for many people (independent of whether it's right or wrong) defense technology is about killing people and they want nothing to do with it. They want nothing to do with it from an employment perspective or a customer perspective. I think we'd see the same reaction from Ben & Jerry's employees and customers as we see from Google/Amazon.

I don't see Anduril employees upset about their company being in defense.

You can have the tech industry involved in defense, they just need to be companies whose sole purpose is defense. It's simpler - your employees explicitly choose to be in that game and the customers aren't conflicted. Cloud computing makes it a little more difficult, but if Amazon/Google/Microsoft avoid making special purpose defense stuff and it's just the core infrastructure being used, I think you'd see less uproar too.
Pixel 4 to 5 with GrapheneOS, signal, and VoIP for phone numbers. FDroid for apps and at a pinch Aurora market ( installable from FDroid) for play apps. Don't really have a solution for SMS currently.
Estonia calls on Startups to take its new Digital Testbed Framework
It's just a known ASD behavior. What exactly is your point, is it just general hostility to new words?
Yeah, it's a somewhat well-meaning feature (supposed to slow down flamewars) that is extremely unintuitive
Apple Event Announced: 'California Streaming' on September 14
almost every company is a tech company now
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/did-lead-poisoning-c...