skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s not just a boogeyman. It’s the real reason. Regulations are responsible for most of the cost of nuclear power.

In a counterfactual world with fewer regulations, I can believe that construction would be cheaper. But regulations don't explain why new projects have drastic cost and schedule overruns. The United States started building new AP1000 reactors in Georgia and South Carolina in 2013 [1] [2]. There were no regulatory changes/increases after 2013. But the projects went drastically over the budget and schedule numbers that they had in 2013.

The South Carolina project was ultimately canceled and the SCANA CEO ended up in federal prison: https://www.powermag.com/former-scana-ceo-will-land-in-priso...

Following the project's demise, an “exhaustive and multi-year joint investigation” was conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office, and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. Marsh’s sentencing is the result of that investigation.

“Kevin Marsh deceived regulators and customers to financially benefit SCANA,” Susan Ferensic, special agent in charge of the FBI Columbia Field Office, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Marsh’s and other executive’s actions resulted in South Carolinians bearing the financial brunt of the failed Summer Nuclear Station.”

“Due to this fraud, an $11 billion nuclear ghost town, paid for by SCANA investors and customers, now sits vacant in Jenkinsville, S.C.,” DeHart said.

The Georgia project is still in progress.

https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-united-state...

"Georgia nuclear plant’s cost now forecast to top $30 billion"

A nuclear power plant being built in Georgia is now projected to cost its owners more than $30 billion.

A financial report from one of the owners on Friday clearly pushed the cost of Plant Vogtle near Augusta past that milestone, bringing its total cost to $30.34 billion.

...

When approved in 2012, the third and fourth reactors were estimated to cost $14 billion, with the first electricity being generated in 2016. Now the third reactor is set to begin operation in March 2023, and the fourth reactor is set to begin operation in December 2023.

It's reasonable to say that a pacemaker costs more to develop than an MP3 player because medical devices are heavily regulated by the FDA. But it's not reasonable to say that a project to develop a new pacemaker is 100% over budget and 7 years late because of FDA regulations if the FDA regulations didn't change in the mean while. In this case, the regulations didn't change. So earlier estimates were due to fraud or incompetence (either execution-incompetence or planning-incompetence). I tend to blame incompetence -- after all, many megaprojects end up horribly late and over budget, not just nuclear ones -- but in the case of South Carolina's VC Summer there was outright fraud too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...
I've used it. It's great. Pretty easy to learn, and output looks nice. Mind you I'm an enthusiastic amateur not a pro user. I've used other video editors before, like pinnacle, premiere elements etc, and while Shotcut is not as slick, it gets the job done with minimal fuss. And hard to argue with the price.
Agreed on there are no friends in business.

Yeee there are some I find who are really nice.
I'm already trying, and with somewhat success I'm declining.
I just need to fix up my speed of declining.

But ye I need to explain how I'm busy with other work that pays me etc.
Is this due to "citizen voice" or is it just that all of the land is now someone's back yard? A century ago most of the land around cities was forest, plains, or sometimes farm. Building out rail, transmission lines, or pipelines was relatively easy because barely anybody lived near where you were building.

Today there are people scattered all around and they will absolutely complain when you start building something near the property they bought specifically to be away from other people.
The Apple comparison is invalid because if you losing a key is equivalent to losing a password. I haven’t lost my password here.

A more apt comparison would be that there are 2 security keys, one you have and one you are expected to store for recovery purposes, in event the main key is lost. You lose your recovery key but still have your primary key.

At some point without your consent, however, it becomes Apple policy to intermittently require your recovery key in addition to your security key. This is a new policy and no consent process was established. They also make it so you cannot validate your recovery key and replace it if necessary, including no communication of the new practice for user review (which establishes a higher precedence for securing the recovery key).
I take it back. Safari definitely does the same thing when you get to 3GB of swap. What's worse is that Apple has a pathological aversion to transparency and just can't admit this is a known issue and that a fix is coming, so we can only assume they don't know about this (this issue has existed for at least 2 years now).
Being process orientated. Results come from sustained effort over long periods, so I focus on making the process sustainable and enjoyable.

I build Conjure[0], a habits and goals platform, solo and bootstrapped, and have worked on it for 496 days in a row (at the time of writing) and have tracked over 3000 hours of development on it.

I have a daily habit[1] to do at least 1 minute of work a day (also known as a 'Habit Emergency Mode') to maintain a sense of momentum and progress. This helps me through my 'off days', have no 'zero days', and reduce negative emotions associated with the process.

Starting off, I had to manage my expectations and accept it may be a 2 year journey before I started getting any traction, and would commit to 1000 hours before I allowed myself to second-guess myself. I used objectives (within Conjure itself) to track these various time-based objectives.

As you can't always control the outcome, but you can control the process, I focus on making the activity the reward and enjoying the process[2] as best I can, even if I have to go slower at times.

Keeping in mind "you are a product of your environment, " I generally try to consume material and be around people with similar values and ambitions for motivation and peer accountability. I have tracked personal KPIs at various times to ensure I do this enough.

[0] https://conjure.so/

[1] https://conjure.so/guides/time-based-habits-and-objectives

[2] https://whelton.io/same-for-less-and-85-percent-rule
Niche knowledge sites don't use a lot of bandwidth, and in a lot of cases can easily survive on the donations of niche knowledge fanatics (especially after the rise of patreon and substack.) The real niche knowledge sites who can't survive without advertisement are trade magazines, and if the ads are specific to the niche (rather than generic intrusive ad auction chum), their readers value the ads almost as much as they value the content.
You won't solve the broken and unusable programming model of threads by trying to emulate the programming model of threads.
You have cost and a profit margin. Talking about doing business is just that. “Let’s talk business” is a great sentence and tells the other party there’s going to be a quid pro quo.

And don’t undervalue yourself, find out the equivalent prices in your area or what figure out what brings a profit and set that bar.

A 50% efficiency increase could add value to your customer, why not make it an premium product/subscription/version? So keep your old clients on the base version for instance, or offer them the premium.
Are you under 25? This "suite" style of World Wide Web tooling was quite popular at the turn of the century. It may not be your style, but I'm surprised at the surprise.
> I disagree - if content cannot survive without advertisement, then we're better off without it anyway.

So radio and TV should have never existed?
Yes, being able to understand and apply algorithms and data structures requires some intelligence.

I know we try to stay away from the “we’re smarter than you” vibe here because it’s gross, but pretending leetcode style questions don’t require some degree of complex thought is absurd.
In heavily IO bound workloads for a compiled language like Rust and Go the bulk of the time will be spent waiting for IO. In that world the optimzations of the compiler for CPU bound operations will fade into the background so it's not suprising that Go is competitive with Rust for that kind of workload. If your workload is this type and Go is equally supported Rust then Go may be a better choice.
Despite not being open source, I appreciate that Vivaldi lets you customize its UI and behavior to a reasonable degree. It's the closest thing we have a browser for power users, unlike Chrome and Firefox who actively remove useful options and features in an effort to cater to the lowest common denominator (passive content consumers).

The built-in mail and calendar functionality looks very nice and I'm definitely interested in trying them out.

The main thing I disliked about Vivaldi when I tried it last was that a lot of websites actively try to prevent automatic saving and filling of passwords, against all reasonable logic. Firefox is much better at skirting those efforts, Chrome-based browsers, not so much. Has Vivaldi improved in this regard lately? (Or is there an extension that can help with this?)
I think you should ignore some of the negativity around you, like people saying you’re “stupid” or “being used”.

If I were rich, I would spend my time doing exactly what you’re doing: having fun working on cool software, with interesting people, and contributing to projects that get used in the real world. And I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about the messy side of handing money and invoices.

Of course, we all need to eat, and so you should work on learning how to handle the business side better. It can will be painful and frustrating at times, but some of the other commenters have great suggestions, so I don’t have anything to add.

But don’t be negative about what you’ve done so far! It sounds like you’re doing great at the most important parts of the job, which is finding projects and having the skills to pull them off. Like Paul Graham says, it’s easier teach business to coders, than to teach coding to businessmen.
Ye I agree on walking away - I'm gonna try doing this to future people. If I find they just want stuff for free, I'll just try cut to the chase.
There are only three things I like fast: cars, computers, and women.
CryptPad – Collaboration and Privacy
Nope, 45. I've seen this come full circle. Hated it the first time around too.
Late to the party but:

Bose noise canceling headphones and Instrumental music: Mostly techno (jungle/house), jazz sometimes.

Random thoughts go on a list (pen and paper--no context switching on my computer).

At end of day, make a list of things to do first thing the next morning.

Once a week, go through all my notes and condense/backlog; ensure my roadmap lines up with my tasks and re-prioritize as needed. I try to have all my meetings on this day also, which gives me large blocks of time to focus on other days.
You've hit the nail on the head. Most people (at least in my social circles) don't like Linkedin, but are on the platform all the same. If an external service becomes the go-to validation for one metric or another, people will use it to try and get an edge, and eventually it means that you need to play the game to get your foot in the door. As an anecdotal example, I once didn't hear back after applying for a role, and when I sent them a followup email they said they didn't think I was a real person because I wasn't on Linkedin. Cue me now being on Linkedin.

Given that Stack Overflow has shut down their (very popular) jobs board along with the relevant developer profiles [0], this seems like a great time for Github to try and grab a part of the pie.

[0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...
"Don't worry. We'll fix it when it goes bad" -- Dolittle (Dark Star)
This is great advice. Also can help to deflect "so and so computer shop does a good job with that sort of thing" if you don't want the work/don't have time/etc.
I like how this is the most upvoted comment
Another one:
https://github.com/gbonacini/nuclear_random_number_generator
Vivaldi is my android browser, because Firefox has several bugs and anti patterns there.

If I were reinstalling my desktop from scratch I would consider Vivaldi desktop as well.
The ideal case is that SMRs are not the end goal, but a way to rebuild the supply chain. As soon as we have SMRs in prod, rather than building more of them, we should attempt to increase the size of deployments with minimal falling back on in-situ construction.

SMRs take the supply chain metaphor a bit too literally: we do need practice but assembling prefabbed parts at a larger scale is fine too. There is a spectrum of options and we just need to avoid "special snowflake boondoggles".

Given the US's fucked NIMBY culture, it well may be that SMRs are the best route despite these inefficiencies. Just don't expect the "solar model" where we just shit out lots of lousy product and that's it.
Yikes! True - it depends on timing :) I did have some urgent stuff - I'm so dumb to not charge :( Oh well
> No reasonable interviewer is going to hire you or not hire you simply due to your fluency during the interview alone.

> With that in mind - relax! Imagine you are explaining things to a friend rather than being examined.

+1 to this. This is why I recommend that people take the time to go through the interview process every 6 months or so, even if (or especially if) they aren't actively looking to switch jobs. Being relaxed is a huge part of performance. Interviewing when you're not looking to switch means less pressure, which can lead to better performance in those interviews, in turn which can build confidence in one's interview abilities down the road.
Hey, thanks so kindly for bringing that to my attention! I'll probably migrate my system to NextCloud. :)
in a number of ways yes, depending on the amount of 3rd party attention devoted to the files, in my neck of the woods a 1 terabyte drive is worth ~ 100$
You don't have to transition completely in decades. You can start today. Meanwhile building a single nuclear reactor is a "decade-long" project, you can't start today and in the end you're still left with an old and expensive tech while the green tech moved ahead rapidly during the same time.

Germany managed to replace almost half of their generation in 2 decades: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-renewable-powe...

When they started out the technology was terrible and managed to do all that despite a just recently retired government which did everything to stop further expansion.
Some great advice already. I would also add that you can do "1 free complimentary session" and then charge for rest. That way, you can always help someone the 1st time with a time limit and then if they come to you again, you can let them know that it will be billable. This takes care of the freeloaders while you still get to help someone occasionally for free which you like. Win win.

You could start with "Hey I would love to help you and just for full transparency, I am happy to offer this 1st session complimentary but I do charge for subsequent sessions if you will need my help. Does that work for you ?". Then Pause and let them respond. You have made your process clear. Now it is upto them to accept or reject. If they say Yes sure, then next time you know that you are not doing work for them without a proposal/invoice upfront.
> In theory (and usually in practice even more so), buying back the $1bln increases the value of ongoing remaining stock holdings by $1bln.

That's absolutely wrong. (If that's - in some sense - correct, it will also be true that distributing $1bn in dividends the company increases the value of ongoing remaining stock holdings by $1bln.)

Anyway, the question was if the tax treatment of dividends relative to capital gains gives investors a strong incentive to prefer 'growth' companies that do not ever return capital to the owners rather than 'not-so-much-growth' companies that pass a substantial part of their cashflows ot the owners. And the answer is 'not as much as you implied' because there are also companies that distribute money using a mechanism that is not affected by the tax treatment of dividends so investors can avoid dividends without being restricted to 'growth only' companies.
I have a solid 2-3 years worth of work assigned to me in my issue tracker, with new issues rolling in every day.

All I can do is prioritize and hope nobody gets too unhappy that their pet features is never going to happen.
Declining share of GDP is irrelevant. The EU is a market of half a billion people, and as long as that number doesn't decline, the Brussels effect will continue.
Merit must be determined in a way that includes known risks. Anything otherwise would be fraudulent.
He hits 75-80 on the highway in this 4 speed but never opens it up all the way and never tries to light it up on the streets. I too am curious but maybe he shows that in another video. I will poke around and see if he did anything more with it.
love it! thanks for the response. So the state synchro is not possible in Ably? Trying to understand what liveblocks does on top of what Ably/Pusher provides
It may not be preparation for that particular interview or task but there is preparation elsewhere that's paying off here in the interviews. Perhaps even sub conscious preparation.

One such preparation happens at school when you prep for debates and speeches. This may not be apparent at that time but I see those who are very coherent in interviews have had some debate prep in their schools or colleges. Just quoting an example. Any public speaking prep actually helps in stitching together multiple ideas as you are talking and as you converse and do it in a coherent way.

I really wish many people had these skills. Most of the meetings I sit in, people take 30 mins to convey what should ideally take like 10 mins. 20 mins is just blabber.

The other counter intuitive prep that personally helped me was GMAT verbal. What started as pure hatred turned into a treasure trove of brevity and coherence. Especially the reading comprehension aspects. A month or two you spend through that exercise really helps in the long run. You get pretty good at communicating your ideas coherently.
In the video he browses to an old website (http://galiaxy.net/), and it displays a design website from Alisa. Is "Alisa" the same as Alyssa Rosenzweig from Asahi? That would be an interesting coincidence :)
Hmmm maybe I should directly ask them "how would this benefit me?"
The problem with this theory is that I have met a ton of engineers who really have a lot of their identity wrapped up in how well they did on leetcode interviews [mostly by memorizing enough of them to pattern match] and heap scorn on candidates who don't do well on them as if they are subhumans.

The ego and status jockeying appeal of leetcode is very, very high and a lot of engineers just eat it up.

I think discussions of this topic which ignore the fact that there is a substantial population in our industry who fall into this trap are basically flawed.
From a thermal physics and material science perspective, yes, bigger is definitely better. But there's a lot to be said of the value of being able to mass-produce a product in a factory and ship it in nearly ready-to-use state to its destination.

There would also be a lot of value in turning off the ability of folks to NIMBY everything from new power plants to housing.
No, you uncharitably ignored the majority of my comment in your haste to make a sarcastic response.
> "constant influx of fresh-faced college coal lumps to burn in the tech debt engines"

made me literally LOL. That turn of phrase is gold.
Part of the problem with Brexit is that the UK has suffered from a right-wing government for the past 40-odd years. While right-wingers say they are for "small government" this is largely performative, and what they mean is "much much bigger government, if you count all the money going into my husband's cousin's offshore company".

It's a scam. Right-wing governments like the Conservatives are run by and for junkies, who will steal anything not nailed down to sell off cheap for a quick fix of cash.
Twitter, Coinbase, others are rescinding lucrative job offers to cut costs
Assuming that one cannot administer their way out of ignorance, there is not much remaining to administer.
.
This was a pretty disappointing take in my estimate. It mostly seems to spend its time scapegoating republicans while ignoring the elephant in the room. CA is building a 100 billion train from Bakersfield (379,879) to Merced (84,081). SF, specifically, is perhaps the most dysfunctional city in the country... spending outrageous sums of money accomplishing very little, and there are ~no~ only 8% devious republicans in sight! The 2 mile Van Ness ~light rail~ bus line took approximately 2 decades to complete!

Some specifics:

> Does anyone seriously doubt that a federal UI system would be better run than the state-run versions that collapsed during the pandemic?

Yes, I do (seriously doubt that)! The last time the federal government took on something like this, it was a train wreck which relied on the industry taking on tours of duty to fix it. The notion that the Federal Government is more competent than the states is belied by the series of articles being written in the first place! Is it better for the feds to something once than for the states to do it 50 times - that's a different question altogether.

> There are simply fewer federal government employees relative to the tasks we ask of them. As a percentage of the population, the federal workforce was 1.13 percent in 1967 but shrank to 0.64 percent by 2018. We see a similar decline with the IRS...

We didn't have computers in 1967. Did human productivity not increase more than 2x in the last 51 years? Why do we need more humans? Did complexity in tax code outpace gains in productivity? Has the IRS not modernized (spending money elsewhere)? I feel like this stat is totally irrelevant to any understanding of the problem and moreover, the suggested solution is perfectly in line with the fundamental problem the author is trying to solve (lets throw money at ineffective governance because that's what we do).

> If my interpretation is right, the Republicans who are creating administrative dysfunction described above are also contributing to declining state capacity by picking judges inherently suspicious of administrative power.

This is not strictly Republicans' doing. We continuously cheered as Trump policies were stricken by the courts. As a society as a whole, we've continually pushed administration into the judicial branch - out of cowardice and opportunity alike.
Bingo! I like how all these arm-chair HNers who have never run a successful company or built a public-facing product used by millions suddenly are experts at how to build a successful company.

Yeah, you know how Search serves 4 Billion people or people created Chrome or gmail in their 20% free time?

Because they could leet code and not use Stack Overflow as a crutch.

Sure, not all companies need leet code. But someone who can leet code has demonstrated skills that has proven to be correlated with creating Trillion $$$ companies.

Now go back to developing your CRUD app used by 20 internal users (because they are forced to) and let companies who are successful continue to use their successful methods
"Steve Holliday, CEO National Grid: “The idea of large power stations for baseload is outdated”"

https://energypost.eu/interview-steve-holliday-ceo-national-...