skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "energy" crisis in Europe is a fossil fuel crisis, not a general energy crisis, the same as so many energy crises in the past, but this time the fossil fuel companies excellent PR engines have been able to cast it as the fault of energy sources that are not dominant on the grid.

The MacKay report was hopelessly and fruitlessly pessimistic on renewable energy, while embracing fraudulent technology like "clean coal" that has proven over and over to be a scam. It's not a fair shake at the world, and much less at the UK. I've been revisiting it since your comment, and though I thought it useful when I first read it, I no longer think it is helpful in understanding the scale of what we can do, and what needs to be done.

The RethinkX report I linked is one sort of model about a future energy grid, using very rough details. Christopher Clack's modeling is far more fine-grained, and his latest models are using historical weather combined with modeling down to the distribution node to run cost optimization strategies. I don't think he's fully published his latest yet (which shows huge cost savings by doing massive storage and solar deployments to homes and businesses within the next five years). But other reports are here:

https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/media/reports/

IMHO, 90%+ renewables by 2040 is a foregone conclusion for 90%+ of the globe, unless governmental corruption requires that people are bilked by the coal and natural gas industries. The key design question for grids is going to be about the amount transmission & storage versus and amount of excess generating capacity from renewables nearby. Transmission is expensive, and not falling much in cost, if at all, so I have a feeling that future and new grids will have much less of it. Looking at those curves from Naam's slide deck should make you think about where we will be in another decade, or in two decades. Our current energy system has costs are split roughly equally fixed capex and fluctuating opex (based on fuel costs). The future grid will have nearly zero opex, and drastically lower capex. For the extreme outliers like the UK, they may lay down a few dozen GW of high-voltage DC to higher resource areas.
DDG is making progress but it's still far away from being good especially for local, non-English results. I'm worried whether advertising at this stage is a good idea as it could make people try it, be disappointed and leave a bad impression.
Are you implying the decision to be vaccinated for covid-19 should lie elsewhere? With the state?
Thank you very much!

I feel like inherently hydrogen production via electrolysis is just not that complicated a process: it's a bottle of lyewater with some sheet metal or graphite in it connected to a DC power supply, the sort of thing you could plausibly rig up if stranded on a desert island if you happened across some metal. So I'd think that, although you can surely improve efficiency in lots of ways that increase the cost of the electrolyzer, there's some kind of electrolyzer you can make that has an optimal cost/efficiency tradeoff when you know you're going to run it at a 25% duty cycle. Maybe it isn't cost-competitive with more highly optimized always-on nuclear-powered electrolyzers, but (as the article points out) they aren't cost-competitive with steam methane reforming, either.

It's wonderful to see RMI cited as "major industry analysts" next to BloombergNEF. Nobody deserves that title more.
> Have people never heard of a naïve algorithm or solution?

I have a fairly recent PhD in algorithms and I haven't heard naïve used this way. When I hear naïve, it usually just means "does the immediately obvious thing".

For what you're trying to say, the term I'm familiar with is "oblivious", e.g. "oblivious routing" or "oblivious local search", occasionally with modifiers such as "cache-oblivious".
Not a neurologist, but my hunch is that even if we had perfectly working brain implants, this would be impossible the way they do in the movie - or at least would require lifelong monitoring of your brain structure before it could be done (which, arguably, would be feasible for people spending their life in a tub like in the movies - but infeasible for us)

As a start, what "data format" would that downloadable knowledge be represented in? It would have to be interpretable by your brain and able to reference knowledge and other concepts you already know about - not just explicit knowledge, but also motor memories, etc. Unfortunately, all this stuff depends heavily on the experiences and learnings you personally have made until this point - so this is probably completely unique for every brain.
Fair enough, creating an asset which 20k people with access to a collection theoretically might use is more attractive than creating a unique asset for a unique token. It does seem strange that the supposed "killer app" for NFTs in exchangeable game stuff wouldn't have any use for their core feature (uniqueness on the blockchain) though.

If a developer wanted to market games by offering inducements to players of other games in the form of unique content it seem like a lot of other solutions would be more attractive than the blockchain. Partnership with other developers or platforms like Steam gives you an actual marketing channel to hype the special add on for Tomb Raider players, and to a lot more than 20k people. The only case where I can see them preferring to attract small numbers of players of a third party game who paid that developer for NFTs rather than every player of that game is if their game is pure pay-to-win bullshit and there's no point in targeting the sort of player who doesn't buy NFTs...
> They recently labeled the vaccines with a warning about myocarditis and other risks.

CDC is monitoring, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...

2021 news reports of athlete injury, https://airtable.com/shrbaT4x8LG8EbvVG/tbl7xKsSUIOPAa7Mx
If reliability and other features don't suffer, why do you care? Just don't use it.

Though I do wish they'd prioritize editable messages and formatting before stories...
But uploading content is ? hm? even when hatespeech may be seen as an expression of speech, the: "'190 visitors'(-rule)", 'viewed the content' -so it became a threat or worth to be 'investigated' is still such a thing (painting it as such) ?!
I still struggle with sleep, have for years. I have tightness in my chest and the negative thoughts come up too. I think it's worse in the wintertime for me. I'm trying a new thing to just get outside and get 15 minutes of sun right in the morning with my coffee... not always easy though.
Big firefox user here, but I had never seen the keyword bookmarks thing before. Thanks! I'll try that because yeah I'd love to just have the direct request rather than a redirect.

EDIT: WOW it's right there in the search field when you right click it and choose 'add a keyword for this search'
!!!! thanks.
Japan has one of the most heavy social conformity cultures in the world. Not comparable at all.
If it only had backup within the interface, would that cover most of your wish?

Reason being, I always have troubling thinking about backup AND restore, but mostly because restore is a complicated mess (Especially when you start thinking about going across versions). Just achieving backup within the interface (Of database and uploaded files) is much more feasible.
The linked article discusses the issues - the storage size when encoded as char, as 16byte values, as well as the impact on read/write locality.
I can't say I've had much issue with this in postgres, but even still, this is easily worked around by having a pkey/cluster key of a monotomically increasing int--which is useful for other things such as data migrations, as you can pick defined start and end targets without worrying about new things being inserted in between.
And you can get one day off a week so long as it is Sunday. Good luck being Shomer Shabbat if that was the law. These burden people with particular religious beliefs.
James Webb Space Telescope Deployed
The James Webb space telescope has finished unfolding its mirrors, completing its deployment phase.
> Why get an EV if a newer one that's better in almost every way (range, cost, etc) is constantly just around the corner.

It's just the nature of the beast when you're looking at a rapidly developing technology. Think of it like buying a cell phone in 2008.

Buy it when it makes sense for you as it exists, and accept that anything you buy today is going to seem like old news in a few years.

That said, the real developments as I see it have been in battery tech and fast charging. Unless you really care about the infotainment system or nonsense claims of the vehicle driving itself I can't say that I consider really any 250+ mile fast charge capable EV to be "obsolete". A first-gen Model S is still a solid EV almost a decade later.
> Google on the other hand has a page of ads before the real results.

I've become almost dependant on uBlock Origin for adblocking. Thus this isn't a problem for me but I agree with the general problem.
The voices and apparent influence of the hyper-online (in general) has been amplified by the social isolation imposed by pandemic response. People spend less time with others "in meatspace" and a substantial portion of their online socialization is on social media platforms where the hyper-online dominate.
It's not about "justice" or "fairness". It's about "correctness". An "honest" agent with stale data is as unreliable as the "dishonest" one.

When dealing with Byzantine-style problems, there is no such thing of "who is more truthful?", just "what is the consensus that should be agreed on?"
Why? There are far fewer parts in a car than an OS.
> Other nations would do well to follow Japan’s lead

In English we have the adage, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease."

In Japan there is the adage, "The tall nail gets pounded down."

People in the US aren't declining the vaccine because they are told to. They are declining the vaccine because of misinformation and tribalism.
Hmmm. Wonder if they'll grow in Colorado. I see they are hardy to zone 5.
Idiots, like every one of these type of attacks you first have to install the right software into the computer before you get any communications.

The only time I seen where you do not have to have access to the computer was when someone figured to monitor the modem LEDs for data going thru them.

Do any computers/hardware install software from the optical ports? I do not know of any.
It was a very very small shop (3 in IT, 2 in Accounting, 2 in Sales, 4 in Billing, and the Owner) owned by a dude in his late eighties. He made his son CTO and he set all the infosec policies, until his dad let him go because my co-admin and I convinced him that our practices were bad and outdated.

His health started declining and he got more nervous about changing things and losing control until he passed. So while we were modernizing the server room to virtualize and containerize servers (his son had every service running on its own late 90s/early 00s machine), he didn't want to have his cheese moved (ironically, he made every new employee read Who Moved My Cheese). That included the password to his son's Domain Admin account, which he used to log in to a few things and was the only Domain Admin account he wanted on the network. My co-admin was required to use this account to manage many things and often left his PC locked on that account.

His son inherited the business after he passed and put a freeze on any more changes to "his" network, so our hands were tied until I left.

My coworker and I were both in our early 20s and were naïve to say the least.
> The real answer is because manhole covers are mass produced and manufacturing circular ones is usually easier and cheaper than the alternatives.

My understanding is the primary reason is because circular covers cannot fall into the hole itself, whereas that problem exists with other shapes like squares.
I mean yeah, I want everything on wind/solar, and a pony too. but that was never going to happen. When the nuclear shutdown was announced in 2011 it was incredibly obvious we would not be able to compensate with renewable sources.

We have wasted an entire decade offsetting our drop in nuclear power and a minute amount of nuclear waste with renewables, when we could have kept nuclear on to offset coal and gas instead. Germany "proving that you can go without nuclear without going back to coal" is not a reality-based opinion. Nuclear waste is a problem, but we have chosen one of the few paths even worse than that.
This is a non story, full of anecdotes without getting into the actual problem that home prices have been rising across the country faster than wages, making it harder for the lower income segments and young people to buy homes. That's it.

Look at this hypocritical anecdote from the article:

Back in 2001, Nicole Prince was able to buy a modest, three-bedroom home there while earning $12-an-hour. She lived in the house for a few years, moved to something bigger nearby and kept it as a rental. Last year, Prince, who’s Black, decided to sell and turned to the iBuyers. Offerpad agreed to pay $191,000 — far more than she thought she’d get: “I was like, ‘What?’ You couldn’t say no.”

The sale closed in mid-September. About three weeks later, the house was scooped up by Tricon Residential, a landlord that buys and manages single-family rental homes, for $5,000 more than what Offerpad paid, according to data from Attom. It still nags her that it didn’t go to a young person or family of color — somebody that was starting out like she was two decades ago.

So she got a far higher than expected price, but then has an opinion on who the new owner should sell to? If she actually cared, she could have chosen to sell at a lower price to her desired target audience herself.
I'm positing that any project of sufficient complexity is a good candidate for object oriented, yes.

I don't see how a single developer can reason about an entire codebase of hundreds of thousands of LOC.
Im not sure if I understand this correctly but wouldn’t this prevent other sites from being able to emerge in the future? Basically a forced monopoly on currently popular sites.
Yes I've heard that tip to leave mushrooms out in the sun for 20 minutes prior to eating to majorly boost their vitamin D content!
Confluence import could be a premium feature you could offer.
Two thoughts.

1) The biggest benefit of this is manufacturing speed and cost neither of which affect you, especially since prices have been rising due to demand outstripping supply at the moment would be kind of silly to put off buying a car you other wise need to get this.

2) Despite what this article implies your Y’s rear end is already built with casting construction. The difference in Texas is they are also going to start doing it for the front piece. But again it is not something the end user would notice so unless you are trying to calculate Tesla profit margins it kind of doesn’t matter.
Hi Sudhir,
Love your blog posts. Keep them coming.
> Why should this be discarded?

Well, it's a restatement of the Gambler's Fallacy, but I'll taboo using that as an argument because it begs the question (but for reals!)

I thought about this for a while, and here's the best I can do for right now. It's like winning the MegaMillions lottery on Saturday, and then winning $1 on a scratch ticket on Sunday. You'd go running around screaming on Saturday, but you wouldn't on Sunday. (Would you?) Because the impossible already happened. Hitting $1 on a scratch-off is never remarkable (unless you're 8), including on the day after you won the MegaMillions. It's just a somewhat anti-climactic coincidence.
No reason not to use DDG as your default search engine and if you can’t find it (or learned not to expect it) then there is always !g to search Google, which I do about 50% of the time.

But anything moving me away from the internet octopus the better, even if it’s only 50%.
UK done that, at least that's what Boris Johnson said.
FAA Statements on 5G
Then, based on the number of matches in AROSE (0-5), I use

MINTY MINTY UNTIL LAMPS RAGES FINAL (0 matches - 5 matches)

Remembering all the optimal second words based on the pattern of matches seemed too much like hard work.
I can discreetly share text, images or videos with a subset of my contacts all at once without bothering them in a private conversation. They all appear in order and in full without some algorithmic trickery, they get flushed after a day or so and my friends can decide if they want to give them a look or not.
It's a very nice feature especially for the kind of general stuff that I wouldn't want to personally send to people and clog our conversations.
I agree with you that Fortran is running on more than just legacy here. At the same time, I also think Julia has caught up a lot as far as SIMD, multicore, MPI and GPU.

For SIMD, Chris Elrod's LoopVectorization.jl [1] is an (IMHO) incredibly impressive piece of work (which incidentally provides the foundation for I think the first pure Julia linear algebra library competitive with BLAS).

Multithreading is pretty easy with things like `@spawn`/`@sync` and `@threads for` in the base language, as well as super low-overhead multithreading from the Polyester.jl [2] package (which LoopVectorization also uses to provide a version its vectorization macro that'll also multithread your loops in addition to SIMD-vectorizing them).

MPI.jl [3] has been totally problem free for me, though I wouldn't be surprised if the Fortran bindings still have an edge somewhere, and Cuda.jl [4] seems to provide pretty seamless GPU support which should play nicely with MPI.jl's Cuda-aware MPI [5], but I don't work as much with GPUs myself.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaSIMD/LoopVectorization.jl

[2] https://github.com/JuliaSIMD/Polyester.jl

[3] https://github.com/JuliaParallel/MPI.jl

[4] https://github.com/JuliaGPU/CUDA.jl

[5] https://juliaparallel.github.io/MPI.jl/latest/usage/#CUDA-aw...
Conflict Quickly Emerges Between Top Prosecutor and Police Commissioner
In Italy, wealthy business owners pass down the company to their oldest son/daughter.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/06/07/how-ric...

A similar thing happens in the Netherlands, where family wealth can persist and grow for centuries.

In the USA, people usually structure their will so that all children get a piece of the pie. Generational wealth gets divided exponentially, but businesses don't usually grow at that pace, at least not for centuries. Unless the family has very few children over multiple generations, the wealth per person isn't sustainable.
With strings the same instrument will play, respond, and end up producing a significantly different response profile in respect to both the playability and the harmonic tonal profile [0], depending on the tension of a particular diameter & composition of string and its resulting frequency.

You also have the variable of whether the string instruments simply are retuned before testing alternate standards, or if the full reselection of string gages optimized for the instrument dimensions & current pitch have been accomplished for each particular tuning standard before testing.

Keep in mind that this is quite a task on a full 88-key piano where more than one identical string is hammered per note so there are over 200 strings to replace after 88 optimizations for any given tuning pitch standard. And you will need to have all posible string gages indivdually stocked in abundance, not merely commercially available standard replacement string sets.

To a point, the higher the string tension can produce higher decibel output from equivalent instrument operation techniques, and this is what musicians really notice most even on piano when their fingers and/or bows are not in direct contact with the strings.

And imagine if you will, the look on the face of a Stradivarius owner when the first set of proper steel strings arrive and are set up correctly. Then again you wouldn't want to tighten the stings too much and break the irreplaceable fiddle.

Seems to me the pitch inflation over the centuries follows the technology of manufacturing higher-tension strings gradually more reliably over time, this was a slow multi-generational process but it seems shockingly fast when the advances are applied to established instruments which are considered far more static and fully standardized already.

Eventually if you push the limits to the max you are going to exceed the sweet spot, maybe not for every instrument but the whole orchestra may not benefit, and if you have a good idea of how sweet it was you would know what to go back to.

And this is disregarding vocalists (or soloists sometimes with a Stradivarius) who are often divas that must be catered to at the expense of everyting else.

Remember perfect pitch today would be badly imperfect in any non-440 environment.

And you can only imagine how someone "born with perfect pitch" in a pre-440 world felt after the standard got away from them.

[0] https://www.sharmusic.com/pages/tonal-profiles/
> but dealing with dangerous situations through the series grows into a formidable dueller.

Does he? It’s been a while since I’ve read the books but my recollection is that he never actually develops a ton of deep skill, or at least it’s never seen. His biggest accomplishment in magical terms seems to be his ability to do the patronus charm at an earlier age than most. Otherwise most of his success comes from 1) bravery, 2) friends, or 3) luck. At the end he chooses to be an auror, which I thought was odd because it seems like he’s poorly equipped to do that job.

It’s true that the books do not paint his journey as instantaneous (except his proficiency flying the broom). But they also don’t really paint his journey as ending in a place of impressive skill.
Very interesting project! I'm glad to see that you also support other instruments like Ukulele, etc. Can it listen to what you play (like Simply Piano) and know if you played it correctly?
This only works if you care enough about your future self unfortunately.
To my knowledge, Apple has never tried to force a user to use it's cloud services. You just skip any step referencing a cloud account during setup.

This is not true of Microsoft.

>Windows 10 users are annoyed that Microsoft has hidden the local account option when setting up a new PC or reinstalling Windows 10. A user on a popular Reddit thread notes that the local account option is now invisible if the device is connected to the internet.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-users-fume-microsof...
To be more precise, you don't need a mandate if 80% of the population got vaccination with encouragement only.
God fucking dammit. I literally just put my reputation on the line with family last week that we should all switch to Signal. All I want is a decent E2EE messaging app.

Between this and their upcoming crypto payment system, I’m thinking I made a huge mistake switching from Telegram.
It could also be that cloud accounts on local computers are a bad idea and implementations will be bad no matter who does it.
It's going to depend on the database. This article is primarily focused on InnoDB and goes over the read/write locality issues with a uuid.

That isn't always going to matter (or can be a very good thing). For a KV store like dynamodb a uuid is a great key because it'll distribute nicely across your shards.

It also depends a lot on your query patterns. If you have a uuid primary key but you're partitioning by some other value you may end up significantly reducing the number of pages you have to look through.
A good time to buy an EV is when you can afford one and it fits your needs. I don't regret buying my first gen i3 years ago. I also got a model y recently and it's a much better ev but the i3 is still useful.
I’m totally in agreement that they shouldn’t hide the option to create a local account, but I’m relatively sure this isn’t true.

It’s entirely possible that something like this did exist in some earlier installer version but I don’t know that from a vague statement like this. Feels kinda like throwing Windows under the bus unnecessarily.