skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Electricity generation efficiency from coal is only 25-50% according to [1].

Heating efficiency of modern home furnaces is typically way above 90% according to [2].

Power transmission efficiency across the power grid is around 94% according to [3].

I'm treating natural gas the same as coal since, while the direct emissions are about half the CO2 per thermal unit produced, its production is much more problematic (esp. emission of methane) [4].

I've taken these numbers and the numbers given at the link you provided and calculated that probably (lacking numbers for the mean efficiency of coal->electricity production) only 10-15 states out of 51 satisfy your claim that heating with electricity (via resistive heating) is making lower use of coal than burning coal locally (as mentioned above I'm treating natural gas as an equivalent). I've put my spreadsheet here [5].

Note that the situation would be much different when using heat pumps instead of resistive heaters. (Aside of the coin generation, cryptocurrency mining rigs are resistive heaters.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal
[2] https://www.pickhvac.com/gas-furnace/most-energy-efficient/
[3] https://www.ceicdata.com/en/united-states/energy-production-...
[4] https://group.met.com/fyouture/natural-gas-vs-coal/66
[5] http://christianjaeger.ch/electricity_production_in_the_US.o...
> Algorand created the world’s first pure proof-of-stake foundational blockchain designed for the future of finance. Beyond the elementary requirement of an open, public network, Algorand’s technology enables a set of high performing Layer-1 blockchains that provide security, scalability, complete transaction finality, built in privacy, Co-Chains, and advanced smart contracts that are essential in a FutureFi world.

Crypto has a serious marketing/comms problem. I work in tech, have dabbled in crypto and I still do not understand what half of this means.
> It has been the equivalent of money for 10 years now

Can I buy my groceries with it? I haven't seen an option to pay my rent, either. What about my water bill?

I wouldn't exactly say it's the equivalent of money.
It's interesting that various folks decided over history to re-write or clone BDB, I suspect sometimes to avoid dealing with Oracle. e.g. LevelDB, RocksDB, Tkrzw.
Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop
Did that same ride (starting from DTLA IHOP) and had a similar experience.
Thanks for the reminder.
It's like Notepad++, but with fewer features and less stable...oh and java.
This is most definitely not like piracy. If you try to make that argument in a courtroom I'm pretty sure you'd get laughed out of the court.
It’s acquired taste (like coffee).
For me personally it's not even physical, and I don't even drive long routes, 400km roundtrip at most. But I'm just mentally numb after doing that. I think it's because I drive fast on the highway so I'm alert all the time, super taxing even after < 3 hours on the bike.
TIL: linux also implements SIGPWR. Using "kill -PWR `pidof dd`" killed it with "power failure".
Sometimes I find myself reacting sharply to things in a way that I'd rather not, which I did in this case. My stance on animal rights is an easy button to push to get a majority riled up, and I regretfully reach for it in my worst moments. I was also feeling cranky this morning haha

Seriously, thanks for taking the time to come back to this. You made my night better.
Just a little warning: multi cursor can fxxx up your code and data in unexpected and horrible ways if you forget to ESC
The running joke when my son was younger was that he didn't like to try new foods he hadn't had before.

Fortunately he grew out of it in his mid-to-late teens.
DAOs, a Canon
I agree. That year was the only one in which I completed all of the puzzles the day they came out.
> and getting billed 30 minutes of call time by the phone company for the privilege

What bank doesn’t have toll free dialing numbers, and what voice plan in 2021 doesn’t have unlimited voice calling minutes?
>key testers: the red keys are less noisy

You get red silents too, which end up not just less loud but also feel wise a little closer to traditional keyboards (which might be seen as a negative by the hardcore mech crowd)
i know common lisp can be called by a maxima program. can maxima be used as a library in common lisp ?
Jet Brains: I love your products so much except for one thing. Keyboard lag. Going to a bare metal linux terminal on 10 year old laptop feels orders of magnitude faster. The joy and pleasure of typing is robbed by keyboard delay :-(
Comparing means to medians and modes from 2M+ trivia responses
>What they deplore is the idea that some "freeloader" could benefit from their taxes.

But the ironic thing is that private insurance also works through "freeloading": you pay your premiums so that somebody else in the insurance pool can get treatment. It's just that some people prefer their intermediary be a private company which will also skim profits off top than their government.
An awareness of your point was precisely why I mentioned "quietening down verbal ticks" (ie 1 minutes gives you back 1 minute but with the ticks removed/muffled)

To me this seems like it could be worthwhile even if it results in silence or less prominent umms and other filler - I've sat through enough conference talks by technically gifted people who I very much wanted to hear but who unfortunately make their talks much harder to follow due to the ticks. It might even help relax some nervous speakers if they knew any of these that creep in were being suppressed.
It’s wishful thinking that NFTs solve any real problem. For one, “digital watermarking” (if you can call it that) is useless without DRM.

They do provide another mechanism for signaling riches, so cryptocurrency holders, who tangibly profit from the inflow of money into the pyramid, are understandably all over them.
I really want this for vscode, but I've never seen an extension like it.
socioeconomic status

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status
Well its philosophical isnt it. Individualism means that people with different priorities are not arbitrary subjected to what the collective wants - and relevant to the post, maybe what nobody actually wants but everyone is disincentives from opposing.

Through human history, groupthink has led to lots of horrible things - maybe there are examples where individual rights have too, or maybe you could argue the benefits of collectivism outweigh the cases where it has led to trouble. It really depends on what you're trying to optimize for - which again depends on individual priorities.
ICOs disappeared because the SEC stepped into what had been a kind of legal gray area and said “Lol, no. All of this is illegal.” They didn’t really go away on their own.
> Dall-e is a better artist than 99% of humans.

Really depends on whether “art” means “making drawings of things” or “making people feel something”. It’s also a very narrow domain. Dall-e can’t sculpt clay (for example), even if you attached a robot arm, without essentially replacing a bunch of the training system logic. Out of the box Dall-e has no provision to manipulate anything to produce art.
How long would it take to charge the batteries?
How far are we away from gene editing that will allow humans to be born with working gills or wings? Animals have these things, so we know it's possible. But having the technology to do that is very far off, if ever.

The same is true of AGI. Of course it's possible. but right now no one has any clear idea how to do it without extreme brute force.

Personally, I think it's more likely that we'll have a working Alcubierre drive before anything approaching general intelligence
It's basically the who's who in business. I find it very hard to avoid and I'm not actually on Facebook, Twitter etc...

I never post anything but when applying for a new job you can't really do without. A HR rep will not blink twice if you're not on Facebook. But no LinkedIn? They just won't take you seriously or think you have something to hide.
Yep, it's super important for musical instruments.

I recently bought a Hammond XK-5 organ. It has exactly the same control layout as the B3 which came out in 1955. Physical drawbars, dedicated on/off controls for percussion settings, a real knob to select which chorus/vibrato setting to use. The keys on the bottom octave are inverted black/white to select presents. It even has the separate switch for the leslie which gets tacked onto the front of the organ because Laurens Hammond didn't want leslie speakers used with his organs and wouldn't allow a built-in control so they had to do this as a hack. Totally unnecessary now, but still better than a button because you can swipe your hand quickly across it to change between fast/slow mode in a split second. It's just fantastic.

While you're playing, and want to adjust settings on the fly (a common thing in organ) you don't want to be going into menus to adjust things.

They made a few small affordances to cater for extra functionality like the fact that you can (optionally) program presets to include arbitrary settings; there's a menu system to customise, but you rarely need to touch it. The switches on the B3 (e.g. for percussion) are now buttons instead, since the on/off status is part of the preset and they use indicator lights for status. But this is a minor tradeoff and doesn't make a material difference IMHO.

Before I had the XK-5 I was using the B3 simulator in Logic and trying to adjust all the settings with the on-screen controls, and trying to play with a regular MIDI keyboard. It just wasn't pleasant at all, esp. trying to adjust drawbars with a mouse.

The Viscount Legend is another B3 clone that takes the same approach and from what I've seen looks just as good. Other clones have physical buttons too but don't follow the original layout and seem a bit more awkward.
Why bother installing Mathematica? You get all the functionality for free in their cloud notebooks.
I did 900km (~560miles). No... I did 560km (not miles) one time (350 miles) in a ... car - (LA <-> SF) alone (hence less distraction), and I was ... tired, and this amazing athlete did 50% more on a cycle... I'm a worm.
The Turing test employs interview, not artistic creation, to distinguish the human.

The mechanisation of knowledge work has been ongoing (at least) since human accounting with beans - before writing; before number; maybe, even before language.

The humans' real fear will rise when they meet with superior argument.
I don't have a problem with them not wanting to support a coin. The thing I have a problem with is them having a huge buy button where I can buy a coin, but I can't transfer the same coin in to the system to sell. That's the same (opposite, but still manipulative IMO) thing that Robinhood did with GameStop and the online sentiment seemed to be that it was bad.

It's kind of a moot point for me anyway because I don't think I'd sell. By the time I'd pay an accountant to do my taxes, plus the taxes, I wouldn't end up with much. I just wanted to point out how the whole "you can buy, but you can't sell" thing exists in crypto and no one even blinks.
Your logic is literally flat earth level sillyness. There's tons of evidence in medicine/biology of consciousness arising from matter.
> The example I like to use is that a dragonfly brain uses just sixteen neurons to take input from thousands of ommatidia and track prey in 3D space, plot intercept vectors, and send that data to the motor centers of the brain.

Human optic nerve can't send more than ~10Mbit/s. Yet, somehow, 60fps at 640x480 screen isn't best possible movie watching setup for one-eyed people, even though it delivers uncompressed 9Mbit/s.

Lots of calculations (like aggregating data to lower-quality image; eg. input of human rod cells is aggregated through interneurons) happen around of body. 16 neurons that you are referring to are likely fed with carefully processed input, not raw input.
Whether or not it needs defending, your comments just keep dragging it down.
A touch glass cockpit is perfect in a spaceship, good in an airplane or a boat, and an abomination in a car.
Way to play the victim card. What you are saying is that she hasn’t suffered as much as you so therefore she has no right to talk about her personal experience. Really? So somebody who has suffered for 46 years can tell you to FCK YOU because you haven’t suffered enough to know what you are talking about? Have you been raped and molested as a 12 year old? If not then you obviously should not talk about suffering because you are a privileged non-raped person. Really? Is that your logic?
Also highly recommend listening to this - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/12229... about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Van_Deren
Syrian Christians Were Quietly Warned Before the War
> It’s a marketplace for digitally watermarked digital art.

I think you deeply misunderstand how NFTs work, as most people seem to. They're not digitally watermarked.

The only thing you buy with an NFT is the watermark itself (so to speak). It's very similar to buying a trading card of a certain work of art. There is no ownership involved (digital or otherwise). You just get your "name" on a list of "owners" that is public and non-editable.

Among the problems with NFTs is that you can copy the art bit-for-bit. It's not like the Mona Lisa -- you can't take a real painting a copy molecules that are 300 years old.

Worse, you can also just copy the list of "owners"! You have no way of knowing if you "own" the "official" NFT or not.
Meh, if the boosters are right, it’s very very early in the space, and we see turnover in frameworks, languages, and operating systems in regular tech all the time. Ethereum has a big first-mover advantage, but at least when I dabbled in Solidity a couple of years ago, didn’t seem very well-run?
Precisely, how many people are really interested Gemini because it's an HTTP like protocol over TLS+TCP instead of HTTP over TLS+TCP? It seems gemtext files are the real draw and those would be a lot less hassle to just do over HTTPS in the first place (for both browsers and custom applications).

But who knows, maybe all of the people hyped about Gemeni are just really excited about TOFU or something and just happen to not be interested in actually hosting non gemtext documents by sheer chance. More likely it seems it's more a form of gatekeeping than anything about the protocol of document format itself. It's almost like if programmers decided .md files should only be served and rendered to markdown clients over an HTTP-like markdown protocol - yeah, it'll keep less programmers looking at it but there is nothing special that couldn't have been done by serving the .md over HTTPS outside the "cool kids club" portion.
Next step: write your local congressional representative with your well-written summary of Directed Attention Fatigue. Unfortunately, your local congressional representative also perhaps suffers Directed Attention Fatigue.
It's also deflationary, which means you'd be stupid to spend it as money if you had an inflationary asset (like, you know, actual money) to spend instead.
Slitaz, A 50MB Lightweight Desktop Operating System
If we continue to move the goalposts of what defines intelligence into mystical/ineffable territory, we may find that humanity no longer qualifies as “intelligent” either.
Funny that there is an old Chinese idiom 凿壁偷光 (záo bì tōu guāng) referring to this exact act. The idiom literally means "to pierce the wall to steal a light" and the original story goes exactly like how a man wanted to read books but was too poor to afford lights, and he just pierced the wall to steal lights from his neighbor.

So yeah, to Chinese, it is stealing. But the funny thing is that Chinese also think the man in the story is keen on studying, and this idiom is actually used as a praise to people who never stop studying even during the hardships.
I'm torn between F# and Common Lisp (maybe even Raku for one or two puzzles). Julia is my fallback, as always. I think this year I want to solve all puzzles (got to 3/4 last year) and have all of them run in under one second, collectively. A tall order but interesting and fun!
I also learned Nim in 2018 with AoC. I found one of the best things was coming up with my own solution, then looking at other people's solutions (the Nim community usually does Advent of Nim where a bunch of people post their solution repos on the nim forum) for more idiomatic approaches or stdlib functions I didn't know about.
I’m not sure I would read that passage as lamenting WFH. It could equally be read as comment on whether is fair to pay people less if they’re WFH. Or equally it could be read as comment that companies should be passing some of their WFH savings on to employees rather than shareholders.
I always envision the Dopefish from Commander Keen
I thought the keyboard was reverted to the old one? I absolutely hate the butterfly ones and their new "Magic" keyboards. I exclusively use apple's old aluminium wired keyboard which were pretty much the same as the ones in MacBooks uit until 2015.

However I haven't tried the post-butterfly models as I hardly visit stores anymore since Corona. So they're not back to the old quality still?
Linux was not able to reset (clean out) those bits?
Mikroelektronik Karl Marx U552C
> ICOs disappeared because the SEC stepped into what had been a kind of legal gray area and said “Lol, no. All of this is illegal.”

This demonstrates that the blockchain promises of decentralization and avoidance of government is generally impossible in countries with functioning governments.
I don't hate Windows 10. Neither does my extended family, nor peer group - who all use Windows. We always disable the telemetry stuff though and it works just fantastic.
I think more because of potential confusion with the Shell Oil Company.
My grandmother is 99 and definitely doesn’t follow news on artificial intelligence. Maybe I should test this on her the next time I’m at her house.
You don't call the bank, check whether it's legitimate, then wait for them to call you again. You call, confirm that they were attempting to contact you, then complete the issue on that same call.
Remembering who's been on your team before
Ah yes, the 'what was I thinking' feeling... That's uncomfortably familiar. I don't remember any scenery from anything past Hindeloopen (on the Frysian side of the trip) either, but it had become dark by then, though I don't think it would have mattered much.

Retrospectively, I was woefully unprepared for that trip, not physically, but gearwise (food, drink, spares). I had planned to stay over in Friesland somewhere and then figured I would rather sleep in my own bed. That was probably a miscalculation, but that first half went pretty smoothly so I totally underestimated how bad the second half would be. Going onto Afsluitdijk that was pretty clear but by then the way back was long enough that I decided to go on.

The lack of spares in the end was probably and advantage because the bike held up perfectly (an old Peugeot 10 speed) and it would have just added more weight. But the lack of food & drink was really bad. I Ended up in an all-night gas station at some point to get some water, they were quite surprised to get a customer on a bicylce.
LAPD: Spy Camera Detection Using Smartphone Time-of-Flight Sensors [pdf]
I'm more familiar with SymPy. How does it compare with Maxima? Does anyone have experience with both?
There are stops involved. A total of 36 minutes in this case.
One of my favorite things about the intcode computer was implementing the extendable memory by just appending an infinite list of zeros using haskell's lazy evaluation.

Unfortunately my implementation was incredibly slow (probably because of the linked lists) and I only made it about halfway through.
400 km on a motorcycle is a lot. At least, in my experience.
About 12 years ago I rode from Kanata (west end of Ottawa) down to Kingston— about 145km, I think. As training for it, I had done a few 80km days and one 105km, but the final ride was still a major step up and similarly wiped me out.

The funniest memory I have of the whole experience was how delicious the dinner was that I had at a little greasy spoon in Westport, about 2/3rds of the way there. Similar to camping or being on a canoe trip, it's just nuts how good food tastes when you're physically exhausted and starving. I went back to that diner later with my then-fiancee, and the food was considerably less appealing without the benefit of having cycled 100km to get to it.
"Climate tech entrepreneurship" is simply about trying to extract taxpayer money. You could be as well selling arms or Covid-19 vaccines.

After watching "tech entrepreneurs" in areas where demand for their products and services is created by bureaucratic acts my lesson learned is "live in a low tax country where they won't impact you".
There used to be decent ext drivers for windows 7/vista/xp64
You’re avoiding the first and main part of my point, though. It’s not your money until they pay you – therefore, you can’t count the interest as yours until then. If you want to be paid daily – sure, why not? Why not by the hour, or by the minute, even? But most people don’t want to be paid daily, and the “loss” of the miniscule interest is more than worth the hassle it would be for all involved to be paid so frequently in so small amounts. And if it’s not your money yet, it’s not your interest, either.
I did Common Lisp last year. It was fun and often my solutions were extremely short in terms of LOC, because of how expressive Lisp is.

I got frustrated half way through because most of my time was spent fighting parsing bugs, since AOC tends to give you the data in very inconvenient formats.
.: Fakescams
Why the Netherlands Is the Best Country for Drivers [video]
I know a lot of people (including myself) that find blockchain/cryptocurrencies to be great for international money transfers and as a way of saving money using stablecoins with better rates than what we could get on a regular bank.

And yes we know about transferwise and such, it would be cool if it could be used in our countries.

No, de savings are not insured in crypto, but the insurance we get at local financial institutions aren’t that safe either, it only protects up to a certain amount and years can pass before they pay you back if they pay you at all.
I Was Illegally Fired for Trying to Unionize Tesla
Please help report / shutdown Covid-19 vaccine misinformation website
Someone is sending anti-vax flyers to SF residents en masse. Several of my friends living in SF have received them. The flyer points people to www.shockingvaxfacts.com which is a domain hosted by an Arizona based registrar called Namecheap. They have a page dedicated to reporting COVID-19 misinformation using their services. Please help by reporting this misinformation campaign so we can get the website shutdown before more damage is done as people find these flyers in their mailboxes.

How to report to Namecheap? Send an email to covidreport@namecheap.com containing the following:
1. Nature of abuse: COVID-19 / vaccine misinformation campaign
2. Method used: Website
3. Documentation/Evidence: www.shockingvaxfacts.com

Pictures of the flyer I am referring to: https://imgur.com/a/VETMW1m

I have also reported them to Vistaprint (company that prints the flyers for them) and Imperva (their WAF).
Long time ago, someone used BDB at work for storing data, and replacing with sqlite we've found it to much faster. I don't remember the details, and I know that even sqlite needs some fine tuning such that it's performant and safe for most of the cases you'll see (for example maybe not durable, but at least would not thrash the database file if the process it was running from crashes). Time to re-evaluate!
> How far are we away from gene editing that will allow humans to be born with working gills or wings?

Impossible due to physics limits. Human lungs have 57 square meters for extracting oxygen from fluid with 21% volume oxygen. 30°C air-saturated water have 0.5% of oxygen, so working gills for human would need surface area of 2394 square meters.