skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great news. Wind turbines make a lot of sense for the windy UK.

The problem of energy storage when the wind isn't blowing, remains.

The energy storage section in "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air" [1] gives a good overview of how storage could work in the UK.

What I don't think it covers, however, is creating hydrogen through water electrolysis, which Siemens Gamesa are looking at, even integrating the process within the turbines themselves. [2]

The hydrogen could be stored, or used in the UK's heating system that currently runs mostly on natural gas. There have been some pilot projects introducing a hydrogen mix into the existing gas system. [3] Lowering dependence on natural gas would be good for not only the environment, but also for energy security, thinking about the recent issue with getting gas from Russia.

Hydrogen-blend boilers are already on the market. I don't know how much work it would take for an 100pc hydrogen gas system. I hear there would be issues with the smaller hydrogen molecules escaping from our existing gas pipe infrastructure.

[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_186.shtml

[2] https://www.siemensgamesa.com/en-int/products-and-services/h...

[3] https://www.energynetworks.org/newsroom/hydrogen-blending-wh...
Glad to see Gobo getting some attention.

Some people are asking how it compares to some cross-distro package managers.

The answer is, it doesn't – but it does seem to me that it would be very cool to see Gobo contain support for Flatpak, Snap and AppImage.

This would alleviate its shortage of apps somewhat. Keep the distro simple, and just don't package apps: outsource that to the cross-distro package formats.

Secondly, ISTM that Gobo would be a natural fit for a desktop that already treats certain specially-structured directories _as_ apps. I only know of 2 of these: GNUstep, which uses essentially the same `.app` bundles as macOS, and the ROX Desktop, which has !AppDirs that are closely modelled on Acorn's RISC OS. This, incidentally, is the internal format of AppImage.
But did not also many James Bond movies feature car chases prior to this? Or do their car chases differ perhaps?
> How do we know it's not money in a brown paper bag/briefcase

One of the problems is that some of these checks can only be performed much later.

The most common currency of choice, for modern bribes, is the promise of a fat gig in the private sector when the political career ends. As the public demands younger and younger political classes, with lower and lower salaries, while maintaining an appetite for career-ending scandals and relatively short terms in office, it's inevitable that individuals will tend towards ensuring their future survival. Such promises need no paper trail, are trivial to keep, and are effectively invisible for years. When they're realized, it's typically too late to do anything about the original source of corruption, and the new guys in power have no incentive to cut that income source for them; in fact, they now know it works and are more likely to tap it for themselves.
Have we solved the problem of propellers breaking a lot and being nob recyclable yet?
I still have a vague hope that the United States Postal Service could be "pivoted" into being a PKI provider and distribute physical tokens to citizens. They already have substantial procedures and infrastructure for verifying identity. There would be problems, to be sure, but I'd much rather get my ubiquitous PKI for citizens from the USPS than the banks or "tech giants".
A first year is a pretty harsh deadline to set yourself to know what you’re doing. Most people I know’s PhDs only came together in the last 18 months of their degree.
I started working remotely about 7 years ago. After I'd been with the company for about 3 years they trusted me enough to move into an RV and drive around the country. We took 18 months and drove all over the Western us and parts of Canada. You can read about my story on https://therecklesschoice.com
There are plenty of sites that use the github.io domain, though using a custom domain makes a lot more sense. Especially in conjunction with Cloudflare.
I also use Github gist to generate individual landing pages.
I have to say to anyone that's put off, the audio really doesn't seem to be that bad. There's a crackle maybe twice a minute when the presenter moves his head, but as someone with audio-processing issues, I have no issues following along with headphones.
Same thing happened to me (east coast), was looking to upgrade to a single family home but pandemic bumped up the housing prices and demand. I spoke to a realtor while out on a walk one day who mentioned that houses were selling at $80K+ above asking price and to just sit tight for a bit. So that's what we'll do...I'm not in any rush. What can you do anyway? No sense in paying inflated prices.
> These competitions can be useful in case of limited availability (e.g. number of places every year in an elite engineering college), but also just as a signal that you're dealing with the best of the best.

When you're dealing with actuaries, you're definitely not dealing with the collective "best of the best" (although individuals may happen to be excellent). You're dealing with people who were willing to memorize and practice and grind a very specific set of exams because they had no other options or didn't want to do anything else.
Maybe I'm just odd. I've listened to no more than a handful of podcasts in my entire life.

If I want to learn something, I'll read it. Which I can do 20x faster than listening to a podcast.

So I don't have a favourite podcast episode. And certainly not for 2021!
As an employee you should never think of yourself as having skin in the game. The company pays you for your time and expertise and compensates for your time. How successfully they leverage that time and expertise is on them, not on you.

Job hopping is the most effective way to increase your income and position in tech.
That as may be, the issue here is freedom of speech.
Do you mind telling me how? I looked in the manuel other people linked, but the "mac" key controls (using u,i,o,j,k,l) don't work. The directional keys (up, down, etc) work but then I can't use combat because I don't have a numpad.
There are advantages to living in cities! I live in an expensive major city (working remotely) and find it hard to imagine life outside of it (at least in the US). All of my friends/family are here, I have restaurants from practically every cuisine in the world, there are plenty of interesting cultural events, and best of all I don't need a car in order to do things.

Rent sucks, yes, but I live here because I like it here, not because I need to for my job.
> If the United States is to solve the houseless crisis then we must first get the highly compensated and wealthy to face the fact that their lives of privilege and excess come directly from the exploitation of billions of people and then accept the necessary concessions to allow everyone to live a dignified life. We can provide a clean and safe home, food, healthcare, and mass entertainment for everyone.

When people stop risking their lives and the lives of their children to leave counties with marxist governments, I’ll consider your argument. Until then I am just going to assume that the Marxism brochures were really good at taking the pictures from the right angles.
Amount of paid sick/parental leave depends on the company. Overtime laws are if you work more than 40 you get paid time and a half or double for wage workers, and minimum wage is probably the federal minimum wage.
It's a bit facetious to say that when most white people in America are "American" culturally which is quite clearly what they meant.
And the one who tell me sway ... I respond him https://packages.debian.org/sid/libwayland-server0

So no Wayland does not make anything proper that just works.

They make something that works for their own community, not for the community.
I’m not a voter in Germany and I didnt say I didnt like it
> it is guaranteed to need an equal amount invested in renovations

Unless you mean that as a hyperbole, I doubt it very much. Prices for flats, I believe, range from 400.000EUR up, and investing that much into renovations would bring you a marble, teak and gold leaf finishing house.
The semantics of "time X at point Y" are different from "time X in time zone Z". Sometimes the former may indeed be what you want, but it's uncommon for the user to be providing precise location information for a point in time far in the future. If you're told "time X, Eastern standard time", then the semantically correct thing to do is to not guess a point in space, but instead preserve the time zone as provided.
Show HN: StoryChopsticks: Children learn Chinese online with their own stories
Good points made in the article. Siloed services like Slack, etc. do have an advantage that you don’t get SPAM. I prefer E-mail and SMS person to person communication but there is the SPAM…

Most people in my family and closest friends prefer SMS, even texting large image and video files (not really what the protocol was designed for, right?). Anyway, I tend to use what my people use.
> Are there insurance products that people are really satisfied with and trust will pay out in case of event X? I feel like I’m self insuring when it comes to car and healthcare at least.

If you mess up in your car, and kill someone or turn them into a quadriplegic so they need a 24/7 nurse, do you have the several million that it would take to 'pay off' the victims for the suffering you caused?

The most important part of auto insurance is not the cost of fixing/replacing any cars involved in a crash, but the liability component.
A supporting tidbit that I didn't see mentioned is that these seem to appear not long after the switch to a 12 month calendar. Julius Caesar made the 12 month calendar official in 46 BC, and the earliest of these cubes appears around the 2nd century AD (though I saw a couple sources mentioning the first century).

The abundance in military sites still seems consistent. Up until then, the calendar was held in alignment with the seasons by adding months, nearly at random (for example, they were sometimes used to extend/shorten the tenure of politicians). They basically ignored 50 or 60 days a year, and made months up to cover that. If you're away at war, you don't get those messages, and your calendar no longer reflects the seasons or anything.

If I were taking a wild guess, I agree it's a calendar, and I would specifically guess it was used for pay schedules for the soldiers. Rome started paying its soldiers around the end of the 2nd century BC, and they paid monthly from what I can tell.

The evolution seems natural. Rome starts paying soldiers. Soldiers get upset that while at war, their months don't line up with Rome's months due to not getting the memo about randomly added months. Rome institutes a standard calendar for many reasons, one of which is to stop having hoards of armed people angry about not getting paid correctly. Now that the calendar is standard enough to follow while away from Rome, a device is invented to track the months so that soldiers get paid on time and it feels more transparent than the "just trust me" of old.

I think it also provides an adequate explanation for why they were made of expensive materials. The calendar was not just for tracking time, it was directly associated with the wealth of the Roman empire, their ability to pay their soldiers. It's more reassuring when they guy with the brass calendar says you'll get paid on time than when the guy with a wooden one does it.
100% agree with number 2. A PhD is a job. 5 days a week, 9 to 5, or you’ll never finish in 3 years. Fastest I saw was 2 years, which was a guy that put in all the hours. Slowest was a guy that took 8 years, ‘full time’, though he was never there, but clearly didn’t have a job. Goodness knows how they supported themselves for all that time. In the uk you had a grant for 3 years when I did mine.
The value in formal education is mostly reading, writing, and thinking skills. How to express and communicate increasingly complex ideas to others. PhD is not much different.

There was just a Reddit post saying that 54% of US adults have a reading level equal to or below a sixth-grade level according to the US Department of Education. Many communication problems can be attributed to differences in prose, document, and numeracy literacy.

"If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological
society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and
statistical thinking." – H. G. Wells
NSO Pegasus was used by Polish gov against opposition during 2019 elections
PiS, the party ruling in Poland since 2015 used Pegasus spyware about 30 times against Krzysztof Brejza, senator and chief of opposition party electoral campaign during 2019 elections.
The article says that users will never get 64-bit time_t on 32-bit systems on glibc.

However, glibc documentation (https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Feature-T...) says:

> If _TIME_BITS is undefined, the bit size of time_t is architecture dependent. Currently it defaults to 64 bits on most architectures. Although it defaults to 32 bits on some traditional architectures (i686, ARM), this is planned to change and applications should not rely on this.

So it sounds like glibc plans to change the default, just like musl has done.
I spent the past 2 months in the Tampa area. I was really pleasantly surprised. There are so many nice little communities in the area.
Tibia was very popular in my country, I know people that are still playing it, but back when I was younger, like 10 years ago I knew a few guys that were making regular income out of it by selling gold coins and items. Good times, games like Tibia taught me something about the market and demand/supply distribution.
Hi HN!

Over the past year we built StoryChopsticks - an online Chinese learning service to inspire children living in non-Chinese majority environments.

As a Chinese parent (by race, not nationality) with young children living in a heavily Westernised Chinese-majority country, Singapore, we learnt first-hand how important it is to have highly engaging content, creativity-based pedagogy, and teachers who build upon our learners' imagination.

Our own children have very low interest in all Chinese (non-English) content. Most Chinese language content are of low quality, tell traditional stories in a staid manner, and built upon the foundations of rote memorization.

To convince our own kids to learn Chinese, we make up our own stories and materials and, through play and acting, convince them to gain interest to learn the language. We refined our approach by experimenting at preschools, public libraries, and in-person classes.

We now deliver our pedagogy online to more than a hundred students every month using our own original stories together with physical books and flashcards built-in grammar to their doorsteps. Our young learners love our service and we have > 90% retention rate consistently.

Technology-wise, we glued together a marketing and course delivery system with Wordpress, Moodle, Zoom, Gather.town, Zapier, and a lot of hard work with a team spreaded across Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Egypt, and Indonesia.

As a second time startup founder (the first back in 2008 with a NLP startup [1]), it feels surreal to be able to focus on the problem and the customer together with domain experts (ex-preschool teacher with 20+ years of experience as cofounder), with so much of the tech stack already taken care of by somebody else (eg DigitalOcean, Closte, Stripe etc) and achieve five digit MRR within a year.

We are currently trying to solve a few challenges:

* How do we get children to learn in a highly-motivated self-directed manner? If you have seen how young children pickup and learn Roblox, you will be amazed by how second-nature it is to kids.

* How do we deliver online learning off-screen?

Thank you for checking us out. Any feedback, critique, or ideas for (online) early childhood education will be super for helping deliver better online lessons (on/off screen).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JamiQ
Better job prospects. I'm not even being facetious. I manage remote teams and see the same, people apply/join whilst residing in rural areas but almost invariably migrate to cities, attracted by the job market (and by nightlife etc but not as much)

There is the occasional outlier, that is someone who prefers to freedom to work from anywhere and keeps on the move, hopping about the globe whilst working remotely, but they are rare.
Seal Team Six Founder Richard Marcinko Has Died
Yes, we moved from a location that was:

high tax,
dry/cold,
unsafe,
expensive,
crowded

to a location that is:

low tax,
wet/mild,
safe,
normal price,
not crowded
Consider? Yes. Pull trigger? No.

But we’re established here. Family and friends are close. Jobs we like. Own our home.

We might buy a second home in the mountains and split time. But we were considering that before Covid and holding off now because inventory is low and prices went insane.
They have been trying to sabotage it for two decades, they can't because it is distributed.

Just like HTTP/1.1 can't be deprecated because too much infrastructure depends on it.

These protocols are simple and as complexity fails we all need to go back to them!
And this makes everything else in the survey easier. Topic sentences and presentation skills are useful but most important is having something original and substantial to say. The rest follows and is easy by comparison.
Yes, it'll take many decades to replace all of the ICE's, but those 70 year old tractors that are still used on small farms, but those tractors are only used for dozens of hours each year. It's the big tractors and combines on the big farms and in the big custom operations that are used for thousands of hours each year that do most of the emissions, and they're all less than 10 years old.

The grid is sized in kilowatts, not kilowatt-hours. With time-of-use pricing that cost-conscious farmers will definitely take use of to charge batteries while the price is cheap, the grid can handle a lot more energy than most think.

And local solar is a lot cheaper than grid expansion. Pretty much every farmer I know is putting up solar already. And they need the energy in the spring/summer/fall while the sun is shining, they need much less in the winter or while it is raining, so it's a good fit.

I agree with you about synthetic fuels. I predict that in 10 years time or so they will be price competitive with fossil fuels, but massively more expensive than electricity.
https://archive.is/VOzvt
Narcissists have admiration for themselves but they need others around them to mirror these feelings - to say they're great basically, because they're a bit broken inside. To do this they go to extraordinary lengths to keep people in their orbit tied to them somehow, and they can be very good at making people feel inadequate so they stay in their orbit and to convince themselves they are better than everyone else. if you haven't experienced it then consider yourself lucky they have a talent for warping reality so that everything revolves around them. The site talks about children of narcissists and how they are screwed up to make the parent seem better - the phrase "you're always a disappointment" or an embarrassment is something a narcissist parent would say to their child for example.

Edit: psychology today has lots of interesting info e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/articles/200601/field-gui...
Do banks create value?

Governmental spending is a loan (to society) repaid thru taxes.

Call taxes an interest payment if that makes you feel better.
In Judo one uses the momentum of the aggressor against them, and I wonder if the west could do something analogous in this situation.

E.g. quietly accept the new oppression, but actively seek out and assist anyone in HK who wants to leave to gain access to high quality human capital and good will.

The resulting collapse of HK as it empties could be shown to everyone interacting with China that this could be their future.
Paywall Removed: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsoccermatics.medium.co...
Yep, this was my attitude - I was technically done in 2.5 years but my uni wouldn’t let you submit until 2yr 10 months - so I started my first company in those intervening months.

To anyone reading this who is considering a PhD, start writing up your thesis as soon as you can, like 6 months in if you can and have enough to start. You can always go back and change when you’ve written but it makes life so much easier if you’re “always writing up” then you’re not terrified of starting.

Oh and yeah: 9 to 5, full time, give yourself a standard holiday allowance and stick to it.
Yeah, it does seem pretty bad indeed, especially for older or less tech inclined people. What would be a better solution? Perhaps Estonia's system. I guess many countries are starting their own experiments, in 10 years we may know what works well and what doesn't.
MySql fixed their 2038 issues with UNIX_TIMESTAMP() and FROM_UNIXTIME(), fairly recently: https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=12654
I took a great paying remote job pre-pandemic when I was around 26 and initially planned on moving out of the city to lower COL areas (think 30-40 mins outside of a major hub). OP nailed the piece about living in true middle of nowhere adds more hurdles than value it creates, so that was always out of the question for me.

Three things stopping me from moving that haven't been mentioned yet were:

(1) I had to run out my lease (had signed a 1-year a few months before getting the job)
(2) Friends and professional network (all in the city)
(3) Fear of losing the remote job / not being able to get another one and having to move back into the city for a job

1 & 2 are fixable with time, but 3 always felt like too big of a risk. Granted, this was pre-pandemic so finding remote opportunities that paid well was harder. Not sure if I'd feel the same way if I had a similar choice in front of me today.
Reading the title and before I saw the link, I thought this was referring to games like Armored Brigade or Red Dragon (always be reconning, find a weakness to exploit, execute, or conversely stop enemy recon and conceal your weaknesses). Both kinds of wargame require a similar process to be successful, even though OTW's wargames are more relevant to computer security (and a great place for beginners to start! Highly recommended).
this is true — as an analyst, I was severely reprimanded for writing data cleanup scripts since they couldn't be reviewed in vanilla Excel
I like the photo showing the blades labelled A, B and C. Makes it look like IKEA-style assembly, but with a massive Allen key.
The knitting theory is falsified by the existence of the icosahedrons, isn’t it?
If this is what your job is encouraging then just wow. The engineers that I've seen be most productive are the ones pushing the design approaches and identifying gaps in the approach and tasks etc.
In Praise of Swarming
Writing is how I work through hard problems. If I'm going to think through something and come up with a solution I may as well share the solution with other people. There is very little reason to keep it to myself and setting it up as a potential revenue stream is unlikely to generate any real meaningful income without serious work that I just don't want to do.
Most people I know made fun of this book from the very start. It was the book version of a clickbait article with obvious pseudoscience.
Very cool. Its not by any chance open source, right? Does it work with FCM?