skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If there are better ways to invest effort in instead of the bottomless pit which nuclear power plants are, why bother? I’m not anti-nuclear in principle, but building new plants just doesn’t make sense. Takes too long and ties up too much resources. Money is just a proxy for those two things.
It doesn't matter what you do, because it's not a problem you, the consumer, created.

It's a set of misaligned incentives that create a hole where ships like these fit. No amount of your individual do-gooding will fix that incentive misalignment.
Debug was not designed to always be left on. That's why you need to enable it in the first place.
I deal with a number of devices and applications that don't support SNMP traps for notification but do support email. The couple times I've been "mail-bombed" by a device sending hundreds, thousands, or more notifications in a short period of time have been frustrating.

Has anybody heard of a rate-limiting SMTP proxy or MTA? I've thought about writing such a thing, but I'd gladly use something already-developed. I'm thinking of a simple token-bucket that uses to/from (or perhaps to/from/subject) to limit duplicate notifications and/or collapse duplicates in a manner similar to a syslog daemon logging "Last message repeated xxx times".
Watt is not a unit of energy, but of power. Did you mean TWh? What are your sources?
My limited understanding is that (this is France and Spain FWIW) nuclear centrals way back were built to provide energy as a first source, non-stop.

Wind and solar energies are not stable and can grant all the supply. So, at least in France, there has been at least one nuclear central that was adapted as "backup energy". It could start/stop in one minute and increase every minute the amount of energy by a lot, but I do not remember the numbers right now, sorry.

All in all, and, as I said, with my limited understanding, nuclear energy could be ok as a backup of energy if the centrals are adapted or built on purpose for it, favoring clean energy when possible.

In Spain, a windy day a few years ago could give you around 40% of the supply for that day. There is also solar energy. But do not forget, these energies are not a panacea: some days are windy or sunny but others are not and the supply is much lower.

It looks to me like there is a lot of politization around this and people keep repeating "wind, solar" as if that granted the supply. That is factually wrong, I am pretty sure since I consider my sources of information reliable (people close to me having worked around 16 years in the energy market exclusively).
Poor road design is mainly a political problem. We know how to make good roads, on the technical side it is a "solved problem", but we lack the political will to do it. So setting the proper framing did solve the root problem
It is not yet possible "to create a git commit that has the exact same hash as another git commit" in the sense that if someone else has already done a commit you can make another commit with the same hash.

What is possible now is something that is much easier: if you have enough money and time, you can create 2 commits with the same hash, which start with some different parts, which may be chosen arbitrarily, then they have to include some parts that must be computed to ensure that the hashes will match and which will be gibberish that might be disguised in some constants or some binary blob, if possible.

Then you can commit one of them and presumably you can later substitute the initial commit with the other one without anybody being able to detect the substitution.
It's ironic that you seem to be a victim of misinformation yourself. Trump never came close to telling people to drink bleach. https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020...
If you define far future as far enough then it may well be coal or oil. The same thing with lignin is what made coal - it was a hydrocarbon "plastic" of its day that bacteria hadn't figured out how to consume.

Of course if we assume a remotely industrial era progression of advances oil reserves may be near-worthless. Why dig down say fifty feet for enough oil to fill the shelves of a Walmart camping section?
> This could allow someone to silently modify a git commit history to e.g. inject malware or a known "bug" into a piece of software.

You need a collision. You also need it to be syntactically correct. You need it to not raise any red flags if you are contributing a patch. And ultimately you need it to do what you want.

That's a pretty tall order.
No, not really. [1]

[1]: https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-m...
How carefully worded! It implements a "core subset" of data types and "key parts" of the SQL dialect. It does not sound like they've made it trivial to just silently swap your RDBMS with Spanner. Still, it's come a long way from the days when Spanner did not even have SQL DML.
Not arguing for or againts something, this is just something I wanted to say.

Framing matters here, the API of Promises in js maps almost nicely to the common monad API of bind (then), join (implicitely done by the runtime whenever possible), and return (Promise.resolve). Learning any monads is unlikely to be harder than this as these operations are indeed quite intuitive.

What is often referenced with learning monads is instead Learning All the Monads, sometimes adding a touch of Learning All the Monad Transformers and interactions of different monads. This intrinsecally needs to be done in a generic/parametric way and is way harder.

To my knowledge Haskell is the most mainstream[1] language only typed language that allows expressing the categorical definition, most other type systems are significantly more limited in how much maths/category theory they can express and often focus on specialized functionality with practical implication like Rust's ownership system or Typescript's Capitalize<StringType> that only exists to allow nicer typing of some common API desings[2]

[1] most mainstream typed language at least, you can implement Monad is JS/TS but the language cannot express it the same way C cannor express generics even if you can manually implement them in it.

[2] https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/utility-types.h...
This makes sense to me and I think can be considered decentralized. How common are completely immutable contracts though?

It seems like for any contract that holds significant value it would be insane to make it immutable, particularly when it's written in a turing complete language like Solidity.
Doubt is it well intentioned at all. Governments want to quash unapproved speech. This makes it easier for them to do so.
Stock options are almost unheard of in Europe. It's changing but very slowly. It's a different landscape too: very few European startups IPO, compared to those in the US, so people aren't as pushy to get stock options when they know well it's just a pie in the sky.
How can you complain? I borrowed plain old clean water and returned it with extra biomass, for free!
_Any_ database can be foundational, digital money if you get the enough people and their governments to agree that it is. The database part is not the hard part.
I live near this kid and I'd offer them an internship on the spot if they came forward...but I fear they'd just be bored.
2kW still seems like a lot compared to just putting the cameras in a lightless cardboard box, which will work just as well.

This is energy spent because it looks cool, not because it's effective.
I know of such a person! He's in his 20's, has most of an Environmental Science degree, but is taking the next year to work at an apiary (beekeeping?) and then a cider orchard. Permaculture has become his interest, and doing the job with his own hands is the leverage he uses to make his education meaningful.
What’s with “Squirrel AI”? Did that seem slightly out of place?
Does "Book of Travels" run on the same infrastructure?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1152340/Book_of_Travels/

I know it had some server issues on launch - too popular it seems.
I graduated high school in 2015. I remember similarly poking around a network drive until I found a file in plaintext which contained everyone's student ID and whether or not they had a nut allergy (protected by HIPAA), for the bus system.

I didn't think much of it, but some other students caught wind. Before I knew it, the superintendent threatened to have the police involved and press legal action for "hacking confidential student data."

It's CYA all the way, usually at the expense of the person in the chain least equipped to cover their ass (the student).
Heard an npr story on how Facebook posts are being used to promote violence against tigrays in Ethiopia. I suppose the engineers may have reduced hate speech and if it wasn’t Facebook then another network could take its place… but the way Facebook provides an easy platform for disinformation and hate and is detrimental to the psychology of many of its users is a tough pill to swallow. I really don’t see them doing enough visible action that the issues morally warrant
It’s a lot easier to absorb when you scalp half a dozen items on one account vs a consumer only needing one
> All the rules and regulations were created because someone was bad enough for people to agree on a rule to prevent something from happening again.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Current KYC/AML regs that you're referring to in banking, and are being applied to crypto, actually come from the Patriot Act, Title III.

Why this is relevant: KYC/AML have stuck around as a perceived common-sense thing to do, and your comment is good example though. However, that evaluation deserves some inspection with the knowledge that it comes out of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act is known for some historically challenging overreach and various parts of it have been overruled, repealed, deemed unconstitutional, and generally disliked by all aspects of the political spectrum. That's not to say that a few good things came out of it - perhaps KYC/AML is an example. But, I think specifically because of the Patriot Act ties, it's a bit of a misnomer to call KYC/AML as a sort of bland, unambiguously good thing that's just always been around. The Patriot Act is very much "not that," was passed in a fairly turbulent time in US history, and has not aged well. As current KYC/AML came out of that time period and law, perhaps it should be shaded by that.
TS =/= statically typed languages

Static typing can be a very useful tool especially when the language is designed around it, in TS it is a painful kludge.
When your political opponent is an unintelligent charlatan who can’t speak two words without spouting a lie, then perhaps some caution would be warranted where public health is concerned.
> presumably you can later substitute the initial commit with the other one without anybody being able to detect the substitution.

How? Which operation would be involved? Will it not show anywhere else(reflog)?
after reading the article and some comments, i thought i would comment my own grievance with the article. i think there is a disconnect between the quantifiable trust a blockchain offers and the authors interpretation. specifically, he mentions that "the code these nodes are running is available for anyone to inspect (trust)" and that "smart contracts can be trusted to a large extent because they operate in the open, are kept in check by the ecosystem, and even often have voting protocols in place to govern changes."

yeah, that's actually a good enough explanation of what's going on there. yet, this doesn't seem to be enough for the author. i guess my biggest annoyance is that they seem to think a smart contract is just a series of if/else conditionals that can be ported onto an AWS instance.
This has been a known problem for years, but so has Yemen which we've successfully ignored.

Just have the napalm ready to go I guess.
> Well, in the simple (and common) case somebody holds the private key and updates it.

I will grant you "simple", and maybe even "common"... but only because most people don't really understand decentralization and many of the ones who do don't care about it.

The "actual" way this happens, for the protocols and contracts that "actually matter" (certainly almost everything you would have heard of, as opposed to the long tail of tiny pet projects) is that, in the case that a bug is found, all of the users have to vote with their feet to move to and accept a new one.

Essentially, this is equivalent to saying "decentralized contracts simply aren't upgradable", but of course everything is upgradable if you accept the idea of people giving up on old software and using new software ;P.

(If this sounds familiar, it should be: this is in a very real sense similar to how Wireguard intends to deal with cryptographic breaks in its chosen cipher suite, as they aren't some centralized power able to upgrade everyone's computers remotely.)

(FWIW, there is something else you can do, but as it would be implemented by still more contracts that themselves might have bugs I don't consider it the answer here as it begs the question: you make a contract--hopefully a simpler one that is less likely to have a bug--that lets people vote on which contract is the current accepted one, assuming they can all have compatible APIs.)
No, the agreement and trust part is.

Bitcoin is the trust machine. That's the problem it solves.
China has won AI battle with US says Pentagon ex-software chief
A blanket ban on incandescents is not at all silly. Your underlying assumption, that 100% is the peak efficiency for electricity to heat, is false.

Heat pumps.
Frankly, I rarely see this complicated math in academic papers to be useful in practice.

Most of the stuff that is valuable in practice does not require much math.

Many people believe math actually hindered the development of AI.
Gross but true. The administration has every incentive and opportunity to spin this into a self-serving story about taking down evil sinister hackers -- and maybe scapegoat a few unrelated problems while they are at it.

I am delighted that these admins had the character to resist the perverse incentives of the system.
That's assuming the anthropomorphic heat is spread evenly over the earth, rather than concentrated and creating a heat island effect.

You probably can drop an order and a half of magnitude off of that number just based on concentration. And if you don't think 'free' fusion will cause us to use several times more power than we currently use, then I don't know what to tell you.
> going to cause pain

What kind of attack on a git repo are you worried about?
> Random collisions in 160-bit space are incredibly unlikely

Just for fun: to get a 5% chance of a hash collision between ANY two numbers in an 160 bit space, you'd have to generate 3.9e23 hashes.

So you'd have to generate 1000 hashes per second for *12 trillion years.*

Formula:

n = sqrt(2 * 2^160 * ln(1/(1-0.05))

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#Probability_o...
the RF noise form computer components is enough to be taken care of by regular metallic shielding, because the amps are low for actual compute operations. an inch of space on its own is an effective barrier. this is very different than having a wire running enough amps to power a space heater, located next to your data transmission lines. even having the GPU in its own external enclosure, you would not want the data cable to be bundled with the power cable for anything that pulls over half a kilowatt.
What data were you looking for? geth provides a JSON RPC interface. Ethereum is general purpose so you'll need to know how a particular contract works to get information out of it but some contracts adhere to standards like ERC-20.

Ethereum launched six years ago, by the way (not a decade).
> Human priors are a feature, not a bug. ... Being forced to learn everything end-to-end, from scratch, is a severe limitation.

They're neither. When performing very human-adjacent tasks, it will certainly put the ML algorithm at a disadvantage compared to us.

But for non-human adjacent tasks, say interpreting what a sequence of amino acids actually means, we can expect the computer to absolutely crush us because our stupid human heuristics take us absolutely nowhere, cause us to see patterns that aren't there, etc. etc.

Regardless, this is irrelevant to the original point that I was making, which is that comparing the performance of DL on human adjacent tasks to the amount of time it takes a human to learn the same task is misguided because you are ignoring the million-year long optimization process to get there.
> we need base load capabilities when the wind isn't blowing and the sun is down

That's not a proper use of the concept "base load".

We used to have plants which are only cost-effective when run 24/7, but are cheaper than other kinds. The concept of "base load" is to build those kinds of plants to meet roughly the lowest daily usage so as to minimize costs.

It isn't a substitute for "capacity needed when renewables aren't generating".
Perhaps they were not trying to contradict you?
Shannon estimated 0.6 to 1.3: https://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/dissertation/entropy1.html

For the sake of argument I figured I'd be highly optimistic. The linked prize shows practical evidence of 1GB of Wikipedia being compressed below 1 bit per character (& that's with a limit of 50 hours cpu time, 10GB memory, & 100GB disk)
Monads and Promises are not comparable.
The IO Monad fulfills a similar role to Promises and people learning Haskell grasp them immediately.
Haskell also has an equivalent of the async/await syntax called the do notation which makes things nice and easy to read.

You don't really need to understand monads to understand the IO monad or Promises.
If you want to understand monads, look at their signature, mainly the bind operator and try to implement something with it. A logger, a list, the IO monad itself.
It's not that hard, it's just that nobody bothers playing with it and just try to learn the theory without experimenting with monads in code. After a few tests you'll build an intuition for it and you'll get why they call them programmable semicolons.

Monads is just one of the abstractions that can be used to implement IO in Haskell btw, it was just the authors flexing their category theory that got us in this situation.

At the same time, one of the reasons I learned Haskell is that it had a reputation for being hard and, boy, am I grateful for it.
haha now i’m curious why this was downvoted
There's something horribly wrong with your link [3].

"The first study saw a drop of 78%, and the second 41%, in infectiousness — with the large difference in numbers perhaps explained by the fact that the estimates are based on a very small number of vaccinated people who were infected and then infected others. ... The results correspond well with studies conducted elsewhere. One analysis3 of some 365,000 households in the United Kingdom, published on 23 June, estimated that individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 were 40–50% less likely to spread the infection if they had received at least one dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that developed by the University of Oxford, UK, and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, based in Cambridge, UK, at least three weeks previously. A study4 from Finland, posted as a preprint on 10 July, found that spouses of infected health-care workers who had received a single dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that produced by Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were 43% less likely to get infected than were spouses of unvaccinated health workers." (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z)

"The study shows that people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a COVID-19 vaccine than if they haven’t1. But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot. ... Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus." (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y)
I'm not saying it's aliens...but...
This, in a nutshell.
> A higher probability exists that every member of your programming team will be attacked and killed by wolves in unrelated incidents on the same night.

- Scott Chacon
It's definitely not the most efficient. Let's get that straight. Even within the space of "cameras pointed at chaotic systems", it's trivial to imagine less energy intensive chaotic systems than a rack of heaters convecting molten wax.
I think the bigger issue is that everyone feels they need to be an expert on every subject. Look at any of these conversations on nuclear and/or climate. Climate is the most complex problems humans face today yet we all pretty much act like we're experts and all pretend it's purely political will to solving the problem. Even on a tech forum where the average person is much more tech literate these beliefs and actions are common.

The problem isn't that the world is getting more complex. The problem is that we're unwilling to admit it.
“Your justice, how about I come to your house on a hot summer day and open all the windows and doors so the heat from the outside could give more energy to your air conditioner”
Right now blockchains are essentially being incubated by centralized authorities as they mature.

Eventually, we'll see the ideas behind Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) mature and become a viable alternative to centralized authority.

I think that's the plan at least with Ethereum. However, Ethereum 2.0 is still being deployed and what I'm talking about is probably more like 4.0 or beyond.

However, right now there is just no mature alternative. Someone has to own the keys.

Edit: Also, what others have said regarding being able to choose your development team. That's one of the cool things about crypto. Blockchains can be forked with enough support.
Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”
There are labor shortages across the market. Wonder if food and retail are leading the way because jobs further up the ladder are now willing to give those less experience a chance. And maybe some people who were doing retail and food service were doing it because they couldn't find work that aligned with their professional service and now are able to.
In my senior year at Duke, I took her ML class (her first semester at Duke). She was an excellent professor, one of the absolute best I had while there. She focused heavily on both implementation and theory, which I found to be rare.

Her class became so popular within the add/drop period that Duke added a second section and also doubled the attendance for each section. I'm pretty sure she went from being supposed to teach about 70 students to teaching 300. Nevertheless, her teaching was top notch, and I learned more there than pretty much any other CS class, and still rely on this knowledge today!

I too am really glad she won this award.
Changing your behavior gives the cyclists and the road users around you (other cars, pedestrians looking for a spot to cross, etc, etc) the impression that you're a skittish or novice driver and are uncomfortable with the situation. This puts them on alert that you might do something unexpected (you are presumably a novice after all). This takes attention away from all the other things that demand their attention and reduces overall situational awareness.

The best favor you can do all other traffic is to be as predictable and unremarkable in your actions as possible so that they may reliably plan their actions around yours.
"We note that classical collisions and chosen-prefix collisions do not threaten all usages of SHA-1."