skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hacker News has an extreme problem with cognitive dissonance as the collapse of industrial society becomes harder and harder to ignore. Pandemic is just a mild symptom of this, the increasing impact of climate change is a much more severe one.

The trouble is that tech and the startup community in general derive much of their meaning from the idea that "tomorrow will be better". Nearly all programmers that I know, got into the field because of what they dream it could be tomorrow. There is an implicitly understanding that the things we build today are just the foundation for a brighter future.

In a more practical, less ideological sense, the entire startup/VC ecosystem depends on tomorrow being better and brighter since everything we are doing is leveraged against the future, literally. If the future were to be worse than today, that would ultimately fall apart.

However, as the signs that the future is dimming become more apparent, the vast majority of the HN community are forced into a position of existential angst that they are not prepared for.

This leads to a general increase in hostility about any topic related to a changing world. People will lose their minds in discussions about remote work (especially people who want to return to "normal", discussion of pandemic is filled with people who don't want to vaccinate or wear masks as a means of denying the pandemic is happening, climate change articles are filled with denial comments almost immediately, and very offend flagged off the home page very quickly.

Many members of this community are under extreme stress and anxiety because a reality they don't want to see continues to creep in. The result of this an angrier more agressive, more scared community.
s/VR/Smartphones/g and you could've logically written this in 2006 when people thought $200 was an obscene amount to pay for a phone.

I'm bullish on Oculus since I think they'll get the software and exclusives right (also I have one and I'm impressed by it) but I don't think Apple being an upmarket brand is going to slow them down at all.
Yes there will be many nonlinear factors which combine to a maximum efficiency speed, which can, to an extent, be chosen by design.
You and a few others have commented on popularity but do we have numbers for this? Is HN more busy than it used to be?
It depends. If you give a reason why, it opens up the door for people to argue about whether the "why" is a valid justification. It also can make people feel like the "why" does not apply to them.
Yes, that is what I said. You'll find that the internet is full of people who don't care what you think, and fairness is either enforced (cat and mouse) or nonexistent (top-tier play is bots).
You know what they say. Regulations are written in blood.
If we are continuing with the generalization about this 'type' of person, you can point to just about any controversial topic posted here. The mental gymnastics these people use is as old as history. They take edge-cases and statistical anomalies and use those to generalize about entire groups/categories. Other people jump onto these shallow 'statements of fact' and continue to expand the generalization until the conclusions are as absolute and as wide as possible. These wide conclusions appeal to rigid minds as they have wide bases and are airtight, with no room for context nor nuance.

This is just one example of how this type reacts to particular issues, the full impact is pervasive throughout the whole site.

Yes, I know there is an irony in me generalizing about this type of person, but I'm unsure how else to talk about it.
When I gave $60 about 10 years ago, I expected that I would have played Squadron 42 by now. At least there's something I can play in Star Citizen.
Been on here since 2009 and it's always felt the same: vaguely rude but overall quite productive. However, I know better than to click on the comments section for a certain type of article.
You can play the same game if you wanted to, it's an LLC away.
It is unfortunate that the one useful thing I have found about blockchain to be true is that it is great for gambling
> In general when Trump said the right thing it seems like the media didn't go too far overboard.

I'd say those aren't the problem so much as the borderline cases where there are true and untrue interpretations of a certain statement, but of course they ran with the most uncharitable possible interpretation because they're convinced Trump is a ruthless dictator in the making.
I'm from the US and I was shocked they needed 400A plus propane. We draw more current then you guys because our voltage is lower but still, 200A services are pretty standard for large rural homes.
> Older pickups and cars have no engine braking.

So what did they do on long downhill mountain passes? Just ride the brakes? Were the brakes designed to accommodate being ridden for so long?

Asking 'cause I downshift all cars I drive when going down mountain passes...
This is most evident in any post that mentions cryptocurrency or anything in anyway related.
I kind of wish the world would just move on from “star reviews”...they have so many problems that make them impossible to depend on, and yet psychologically it is hard to ignore whatever they say! They doom good products, promote bad ones, and generally do not force reviewers to even write something relevant to the product (cases like this). On top of that, they can literally be “bought” by the thousands.

Worse, stores do not encourage customers to follow proper channels for things like support or feedback. People clearly can’t figure out any other way to communicate so they use that giant “review” text field to vent about anything and everything.

What’s better? Remove all reviews. Publish real numbers, like: downloads, time spent using, time installed on device (I would love to see scam apps fail once everyone can see they have an “average time on device” of 30 seconds). And, make proper support channels much more obvious on store pages (not to mention, enough gatekeeping: let developers interact with their customers much more directly).
I've left a few accounts behind over the years due to frustration with the community. So I'd say it's always had its problems. It's very hard to quantify whether there's been an overall change in any direction. Feels about the same as always to me.
Weight, the longer wheelbase US trucks haul less total tonnage than the shorter wheelbase EU trucks purely due to regulations? Or are you talking about rare cases that hit the limit? Because I would never have suspected that.
Neumorphism in CSS
Not sure about the political and USA-centric part of this, but "People are self-sorting" really hits hard.

I feel like people on Reddit, and to a lesser extent on HN, are trying now, more than ever before, to label and sort themselves into "us" and "them".

Commenting on a post didn't used to require as a compulsory first step announcing which "us" you belong to.

In a nutshell:

us = rational and fact-based

them = irrational and emotion-based

All sides think they're "us" and that other sides are "them".
Make it so that it would always have the latest Facebook features and sell it at/below cost. Market it heavily and you would see a lot of people buy it because it is the cheapest available phone.
Clickbait: it's Resizable BAR
Could be, HN gets more angry if a topic HN dislikes gets more hype in the media.
I've observed less flagging but more downvote brigading. In my own comments I've noticed they tend to pick up a lot of votes in the first hour but by the next day they'll be in the negatives.
I had the same reaction (European too). If it's in Canada the supply voltage is 120V, so roughly half what we have in Europe, apples-to-apples it's comparable to 200A in Europe.

Still, it's a very high amount of power (48kW) that would not even be subscriptable in France for a consumer (the max is 36kW).
Looking good so far!
Without right to repair we throw away the first two "R"s in reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Unfortunately right to repair allows competitors including patent ignorers to duplicate, deceive, and dilute. Look at wireless earbuds in a rechargable jellybean case, anyone remember the first company to build them? You can find a hundred knockoffs.

Right to repair is great for consumers and businesses will need to be more ruthless and secret to survive.
If this sort of thing interests you but you can't afford a multi-million dollar build I'd recommend checking out Theron Humphrey's work building a modern lakeside home in Montana (https://www.thiswildidea.com/casa). He built a simple, modern and affordable (think low 6 figure) home and did a good amount of the work himself while sharing info on the process. Apparently he's embarking on a new build this year in Arizona and sharing more in-depth info on his youtube.
FWIW, there's already a $10/mo minimum monthly charge, and a $0.02-$0.03/kWh non-bypassable charge for all energy consumed from the grid in NEM 2.0. So even a net-zero solar customer always pays $10-15/mo or so.

The only reason why some solar customers pay zero is that they _significantly_ overproduce (export more than they use) and overproduction is compensated at the wholesale rate (typically $0.03-$0.04/kWh for PG&E), not the retail rate ($0.11-$0.45/kWh for PG&E).
If they don't have bread, then they should eat cake.
Definitely interested. Thanks for sharing.
App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
You really think that owner operators repair their own trucks? That doesn't make any economic sense. This is not a hobby, they need to drive to make money not to play truck repairman.

I've known several owner-operators, friends of family mostly, and yes, they routinely strip and repair their own kit. It's a lot cheaper and very often faster than taking it into a shop.

I'm always astonished how US Americans try to justify poor engineering with...

O_o
From an information theory standpoint, prices are a very simple summarization of overall costs that throws a lot of information away.

This is useful to do because supply chains are complicated and understanding them would impose a burden on consumers. But it also means we remain ignorant of how goods and services get to us and what the system constraints are.

Also they aren't just about cost, but also about expected demand, and competition to capture that demand. This makes the information about costs a muddy approximation at best.
Another option is kit homes. I've been looking at First Day Cottage and Shelter-Kit. They are designed to be assembled by homeowners, but some people hire contractors. This FDC on Reddit looks extraordinary.

https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/sibihx/first_d...

https://www.shelter-kit.com/patrick-kit.html
That frame of mind assumes that there’s only two camps, the Racists and Non-Racists…when there’s a third: Parties that want to sew discord for thier own interests, be it civil discord, ad revenue, or ‘user engagement’.

You Could NOT escape the stuff towards the end of the Trump administration. It wasn’t only Reddit.
That was totally the hype. I had multiple friends, living in SF, telling me how they'll finally ditch Comcast and use Starlink. I also had other friends telling me how SpaceX is going to bankrupt all ISPs in the world, and they'll make trillions of dollars in revenue. And even here, in comments to this very article, you can still find people waiting for Starlink, to lower down their internet cost, while they live in suburbs of big metropolitan areas.

Anything that's coming from Musk has a huge hype, for better or worse.
My mental model of how alpha opacity works is wrong (2020)
Spotify CEO defends Joe Rogan deal in tense company town hall
I always wondered how people claim that. Did they have two pcr tests or something else telling them what variant they had?
Free courses from EU on creating urban mobility visualizations
That's how it is for electricity in Texas. You pay a delivery charge, and then usage charge, both based on kw/h.
Can't speak for crypto projects. I used it to verify some incredibly complicated security fixes I made; you can find my models here:

https://gitlab.com/xen-project/people/gdunlap/tla

And the security advisory here:

https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-299.txt

A description of the issue, sketches of the attacks, and the fixes can be found in the individual patches.

TLA+ was obviously very powerful, but it is incredibly quirky in so many ways. The scoping of variable in PlusCal is really strange: it looks like you can make variables with local scope, but then they turn out to have global scope.

You have to fight the tool to be able to use it outside of its special-purpose IDE or make it something that could be sensibly collaborated on over git. (See some of the makefile runes in the above repo to see the kind of thing I did.) Getting it to do parallel searches was difficult.
> The reason is that by having distributed solar and storage, you can massively reduce other fixed cost parts of the grid as they age out.

The article also completely ignores the concept that distributed generation can actually reduce infrastructure needs. If you're generating the power at the "last mile" and sending it to your neighbor, that power doesn't travel through a substation, it doesn't travel through long transmission lines that need to be maintained, it's just generated (roughly) where it needs to be, saving you a lot of infrastructure. So it certainly seems "fair" to offset that infrastructure cost at least somewhat - you are providing value to the utility in terms of infrastructure they don't have to build themselves. And they sell that power that you feed back to customers paying for "green energy" at a premium as well.

(note that despite regular peaks occurring later in the day, annual peaks almost always occur during periods of high solar production - it is aircon during summer heatwaves that blows the grid, not cooking dinner. So you are delivering huge value in terms of peaker plants that don't have to be built to run a few days a year during those heatwaves.)

I don't live in California but in 2020 we had heat waves and my local power company blew up 2 substations in my area from the load. That wouldn't have happened with more distributed power generation, solar production is at its peak precisely during those heatwaves that strain the grid so badly, but the utilities were actually making a big push at the time for net metering to be abolished and solar production to be reduced.

And of course we still pay incredibly high transmission costs - we have 8-9c per kWh electricity but my transmission and delivery charges are approximately 12-14c, for a normal suburban area (I'm not out in the boonies), so obviously that money isn't making it into the infrastructure where it needs to be anyway.

(Compounding this issue, of course, is that there are plenty of people who are out in the middle of nowhere, and I'm sure a good chunk of that cost is going to subsidizing them. If we want to talk about market distortions and ignore the greater social good - how about we move away from these hidden subsidies to people living in the middle of nowhere? Make them pay the actual costs of their roads and electric and other services.)

Big picture it's hard to see the pushback against net metering as being anything other than rent-seeking by an entrenched industry. They're charging huge delivery fees and not maintaining the grid, and they're pushing back against remedies literally at the same time as their infrastructure is failing. They're paying you nothing for electricity fed back into the grid, while charging other customers a premium for "green" electricity. Pick a side, it's either valuable or it's not.
Maybe rename it to linklurk? ;)
And you took no pictures, and wrote no words, and took no memorabilia? Where would you even get a stamp book up there?
do you have a demo or a gif or this? would love to see it
Because it's storytelling. I'm sure you can look up the 'facts' on Google News like everyone else. But personal experiences don't lend well to such summarizations
How is that a joke? It's just looking down on someone because of where they live, eat and their politics (assuming very lose definition of "racist"). And when did the role of journalists start including dunking on random people?
good idea - but that's alot* of drivers
Beijing's bullish bridge to Taiwan and the age of 'Great China'
You say it yourself --- "but, we've got to fight to ..." basically not fight.

No, we don't, it's that simple.

EDIT: If you have to fight in order to not fight, you have already lost the fight to not fight. Cute, ain't it?

The situation is somewhat reflected in the phrase from the Trainspotting: "I choose not to choose ~whatever~. I choose something else".
I never meant to imply the entire economy is a command economy. I am stating there is a command economy for currency (and parallels in some other nations), and that weaknesses in that economy on which the greater economy may depend can create subpar results in other markets as well as the market for currency itself.
Wait what? You specify a username and at least one user-chosen "challenge" in order to verify ownership of it -- phone number, email, password, TOTP, public key which is stored with Signal. Then when you register a new phone you verify the username exactly like you verify the phone number but with the user's challenge.

Like it's more effort, but not some intractable problem, at least stated like this.
This was quite debunked last time - they do have reserves because in case something really bad happens (eg. people stop donating), they don’t want to go down instantly. I really don’t see how having a few years worth of reserves a bad thing - people really held open-source/non-profit companies to impossible standards.
$433,799,090 and counting.
A few months ago I filmed the long lines of trucks in Georgia (the country) waiting to cross the Russian border. Here's lots of Euro-style trucks if you're interested.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUIvO1fIfFV/
And to pull the camera back; all those big money words you just used are in no way necessary for people to have a good experience, because software can be free and open.

Obviously, we are well past the naive idea of "just making everything FOSS and all will be perfect," but hey, if I'm not the one making money, then from my user point of view, I will be cheering and helping on the "less money" or perhaps even "no money" projects that are threatening to eat your business model.
Hey HN! It's been a while since our original Show HN [0] and we've accomplished a lot since then – we raised a round of investment and grew to a team of seven engineers!

We've got a lot of features coming down the pipeline. This is just the first of many and the tip of the iceberg, especially when it comes to importing data. But it's an easy way to play with Splitgraph, reducing the complexity of creating a "data image" to simply uploading a CSV file. We already support much more advanced use-cases from the command line, but we're starting to bring this power to the web.

Perhaps the coolest feature here is the repository sharing – you can now configure private repositories with fine-grained access rules, so that only those you invite can query the data, whether through the web interface or any Postgres client.

Along with this blog post (which technically qualifies for Show HN since you can upload straight from the post!), we have an accompanying Twitter thread [1] if that's more your thing.

We'd love to hear feedback or answer any questions! You can also reach out to me directly – my email is in my profile.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23627066

[1] https://twitter.com/splitgraph/status/1489082905724952582
This would be excellent to see, but I fear it's in direct conflict with the incentives of running an app store.
> Where was the discourse on t-cells shut down?

What countries accept a recovered infection on par with a vaccine? That will tell you where the discourse was shut down.
Not in the demoscene per se, but I used to be part of the music scene. I was the creator of Nashmeja, a tiny internet label that was into IDM[1].

I also created Traxer (later called Traxernews) which was a music release news website. It was my very first attempt at making a website, and it eventually led to me being a full time freelance developer.

I still plan on making music again some day, but between work, having a kid, and video games, I just don't take the time anymore.

[1] https://files.scene.org/browse/music/groups/nashmeja/
The manufactured home thing is really interesting. Do you have more information regarding that? I Googled a bit and found much info about "Mobile home", is it the same thing?
This is common in the US as well actually.

A-10 rates for example in PG&E land have a demand charge -

https://www.pge.com/en_US/small-medium-business/your-account....

Basically, based on breaker size. If you have a 400A breaker you might pay $2,000 / month demand charge. Usage might be small (sometimes these loads are spikey). It's not uncommon for folks to then pay more attention to peak load if you pay based on breaker size effectively.
Cyclists ("bikers" is an ambiguous term) enjoy a 30% reduction in required power output to move at typical race speeds when within a reasonable size peloton compared to riding out on their own.
I know it's an outside view, but at this point the Star Citizen things feels more like a cult than an actual game. Some of my friends have sunk over a hundred dollars on ships they can't fly yet seem to be so deep in their sunk-cost fallacy that they keep saying that the release is soon and sending me YouTube videos of "next-generation" gameplay to try and get me hyped up.

Yes I know about the beta, but it still seems like an extreme opposite version of the "no pre-order" movements.
Requirements will change. This is a fact of life and must be solved with a combination of soft skills and business acumen. It must be known to the project/product leaders a change in requirements may impose rework and as such will invalidate any prior estimate. Furthermore it will require a new test plan. In a mature environment these things are clear before the changes arrive to you. In an immature environment these are risks and consequences that must be communicated back.

Sometimes poor development environments are a reflection of culture. If that is the case only a leadership solution will set things on a more productive direction. In cases where leadership is present and engaged a poor development environment is the result of missing technical guidance, which is likely due to a disconnect between a plan and actual implementation reinforced by developer driven decisions. Developers should never drive the direction of a product unless they are stakeholders with liability.

Just to be clear I am not a software leader. I am just an individual contributor, so take this with a grain of salt. I am a military officer though, in a secondary line of work, with director level responsibility and a large staff.
The article brings all of this up, as well as the prevalence of "sleeper" cabs in US but not EU. This all seems pretty obviously likely to contribute.

One non obvious thing in article; apparently up until 1986 both US and Europe had a strict limit on length of trailer + truck, which is a clear incentive to shorter cabs (gets you more trailer). In 86 US relaxed this, correlates pretty well with the fall off on cab-over designs.