skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How are solar and wind not sustainable or efficient? We've just recently hit the 20% mark here in the US.

I'm all for a smart blend of nuclear/wind/solar/etc to achieve clean energy

https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electr...
Actual title is "Crude Oil, Treated Less Crudely", but, while cute, that didn't seem very informative.
I found rrnoise to be okay; not great. Surprisingly heavy on resources, even on my M1. I use and pay for Krisp now, which is much better
In terms of statistics the interesting thing about the power law distribution is that it models extreme cases: blockbuster movies, billionaires, etc.

As controversial as the "Bell Curve" book was, something it didn't point out is that the ability to create wealth is not normally distributed at all. That is, if there was a normal distribution of wealth there would be no Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Walton, etc.

Ordinary books, ordinary people, etc. might well be modeled better with a normal distribution than with a power law distribution so setting out looking for the "long tail" may be a certain way to not find it.
Engineering topological states in atom-based semiconductor quantum dots – Nature
> OpenOffice continues because the Apache project chairs in place hate the GPL

LibreOffice isn't even GPL. It's Mozilla Public License (MPL). Still copyleft, but much more weakly so, because only MPL source files are required to stay MPL. You can mix MPL files with even proprietary source files, and you only have to distribute the changes to the original MPL files.

Though I suppose that might conflict with the Apache foundation in general. Don't they require Apache license for all their software?
> production value, allure, niche, etc all plays a huge factor

Production value = hard work. Finding your niche requires marketing skills and work. Etc... So really the key is that even if you have talent, you need to put in work.
Where did you come from then? Presumably an EU country?
It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users
I already knew Google didnt offer email or telephone support to users, but I pretended to not to care about it.
Now that I'm in to a real problem that needs support (a conflict caused by Google algorithm that does not allow me to use my account), I found out I haven't any option to ask support to Google. It only redirects me to Community Forum, when people already told me they have no solution for my problem.
Let's say it is not acceptable that Google does not provide any form of support. I am pretty pissed about that.
How does failed economic policies show that "Trickle down economics" works? We've had a long period of stagnate wages results in a real reduction in buying power for a large portion of the population, objectively the "trickle down" part is not working.
> while to stop warming we need to get to zero human-caused CO2 emissions, so clearly natural gas is not a viable solution.

Currently an immense source of greenhouse gases is offgassing by landfills. Burning that is a great way to turn those short hydrocarbons into carbon dioxide, which is comparatively benign.
"Plenty of supply" and "peak oil" are not mutually exclusive
It's free in Spanish too. The word has a Latin root.
I tried that, but the button didn't do anything. Maybe I should have just waited a few secs more.
Smoking is actually profitable for the government. Social security and medicare make up about half of total expenditures, so the best thing you can do from the perspective of government finance is die younger.
Just a note, the comment is quoting from this:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-experience-yea...

BTW many people go (back) to school after obtaining some professional experience. Not sure about the context of this part of the poll though.
Archived: https://archive.ph/eGtFC
On why digital photos aren’t reliable records of anything (2013)
Then why only ban Juul and not all e-cigarette products? The article points out that the company is no longer the most widely used among children (Juul is now fourth in market share among high-school-aged users), and I can assure you that Puff Bars are inferior in quality and probably less healthy.
How does solar work in the winter in northern latitudes?
I stepped back from a lead to a senior dev this year. I was open about it to recruiters, saying my intent was to get back into being an IC.

No one was even slightly put off by my resume or career direction. I'm not sure what "no one would hire me" means, precisely, but I didn't have an easy time – it took many months and near 100 applications to find the right spot.
World Design Systems Week – Sep 19-23
Hey, Founder of Thin here. Thanks for mentioning us :)

On RethinkDB: The post-mortem of RethinkDB is a good read https://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.htm...

If anyone has questions regarding Thin I'm happy to answer.
Why is there no resposnibility on the part of the user?
> Yes, and I stand by that. Chromium being open source changes the situation completely.

This is just a ridiculous assertion. Blink being Open Source does not change what Google does with the engine. If the web was Blink with a handful of irrelevant Blink forks then the web is Blink. That means whatever stupid specs Google puts forward like WebBluetooth or WebFacialTrackingAttentionMonitor become de facto web technologies.

No one outside of Google will affect the direction of Blink. Even if Microsoft tried, Google still has an overwhelming number of deployments and overwhelming influence with search and advertising.

Part of the problem of IE dominating the web was Microsoft using that domination to push their ecosystem and nudge out competitors. If things like ActiveX and VBScript had been more popular there would have been no room for Firefox to make inroads against IE.

Google's Web* specs they push are their equivalent of Microsoft's proprietary extensions of the web. No browser written from scratch can hope to catch up to Blink without billions of dollars of investment. A Blink fork disabling the most privacy invading Web* specs can't meaningfully compete with Google's install base and promotion.

What you're missing is the fact a project is Open Source doesn't mean it's governance is in any way open. The governance of Blink is not meaningfully open. Nothing a non-Google contributor says means anything to Google. They already add in half-baked and poorly thought out Web* specs to Blink with little concern for standards processes and there's at least some competition from Firefox and Safari. If Google doesn't care now it's ridiculous to assume they would care if Blink completely dominated in the browser space.
>"In other words, you can put dilute crude oil on one side of the membrane and, by applying pressure, drain off what is more or less gasoline from the other."

If that works, then that technology sounds very promising!
Now we're being told what we can and can't do in random ways in America and it's a really strange form of hypocrisy. From talk about regulating the size of big gulps to mandating paper straws to legalization of marijuana and the banning of smoking products, this country is going insane.

We still live in a country where illegal drugs are prevalent in all settings of life. All of the moral legislation doesn't change the underlying narrative that the people we task with serving this country are not doing their jobs right, and simply voting does not fix that because of the deep seated agendas of non-tax-paying corporations and individuals influencing our political systems.

It's not about Juul products, it's a hostile bid to take their market share...

There are literally 20+ other vape product companies, and many other non-legal suppliers that will step in regardless of what laws are passed, many adding harmful chemicals to products as well, while the FDA is not focused on making vape products better and safer. It's meant to be simple nicotine, that's been around since America was inhabited by native cultures. What's next for elimination? Brands of Alcohol?

Are we going to limit blood alcohol content to 2 sips per outing? Who is driving all of this? Name the specific people pushing these rules, and then follow the paper trails, and you'll find that in a country where health care companies give major contributions to legislators to keep the market deregulated that it's all about money, not our best interests, and we fund it all every year, mandatorily, when we pay taxes...

Everyone is getting prodded and pushed around by the legislators we're mandatorily funding. I'm not advocating protest or overthrow of government and corporations at all, but the ones we have in place are not helping us by any means right now, and they're overreaching into our privacy and lives and driving policy based on agendas and profit at our expense. People smoke mostly because they are stressed and burdened within their lives, reduce public financial and emotional stress factors first, then they'll have no excuses left for smoking.

We need to be more vocal about the harm in moral legislation, even if smoking is eliminated, we still don't have free health care for being citizens, and we pay an extraordinary amount in taxes every year with cost of living that threatens to kill most well before smoking ever could.
There's always the chance you discover frugality, when you stand back, account for the expenses in time and money, and what you've gotten in exchange.

Maybe you'll see how that $20k car is twice as expensive to maintain as the $10k car. Or maybe you'll get a taste of life in a city with public transit that is faster than walking. Or maybe you just move to a cabin in the woods with satellite Internet and grow your own food.
Related:

Cybergibbons: Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications (2021)[1]

HN discussion here[2].

[1] https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271
A model is only as god as the code that it trains on and the people it learns from. In your example above we can build a custom model on "best practices" code and not the companies codebase. Our work here has focused on working with ISV's like AWS, GCP, etc as they will have best practices for their tech. We then pull that together for a team in a custom model.
Structural Engineering Online Courses
structural engineering online courses
> Then it flipped, and today you have a hard time to get simple iron at all.

Very true. Simple elemental iron is extremely hard to find; possibly because nobody wants it. (Whenever you see phrases like "wrought iron" or "cast iron" or "ornamental iron" today that's all steel, not true iron.)

The best source I've found for true iron is wagon tires. These are the metal bands that were wrapped around wooden wagon wheels in the 1800s, and many of them are pure iron. Sometimes you can find them at antique stores or in a farmer's field. They survive long after the original wagon has rotted. They're always very rusty but that's no big deal.

Why would you want simple iron? Because it's very soft and much easier to work than steel. And if you cut into it slightly and bend it at the cut, you'll see the marvelously beautiful huge crystal structure that only true iron possesses. It's wonderful stuff; just not very durable compared to steel.
Manual for Old Volkswagen Beetle
> But some people don't want to get into video,

fair

> I'm pretty sure there is no such thing. Positioning things in OBS is a mess

Huh. Could have sworn there was. There's center horiz/vert but no corners. Maybe I'm thinking of Streamlabs' version of OBS or something.
To be honest, I don't understand the push for electric vehicles either.

Basically, they've become economically viable due to gas prices going up. Gas prices are up due to Peak Oil. Peak Oil does not mean we are running out of oil yet. It means we are running out of cheap oil.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory
What Is Robotics-as-a-Service? A Practical Guide to RaaS
I'm using tabs. Explains a lot...
You can tell immediately that Austin wrote the post because of the FREQUENT use of CAPSLOCK.
It is true...I personally regret choosing Django for a project, just because I was more familiar with Python. Libraries are hard to find, and best practices are hard to uncover.

Rails to this day can't be beat, and I don't even ruby that much.
To paraphrase a classic Lily Tomlin punchline:

> "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Tech Company."

This is why unregulated industries and monopolies are bad.
Fair has nothing to do with it. Contracts don't need to be fair, and often aren't. They just need consideration. If we sign a contract whereby you give me your car, bank accounts, and house, for $1, that's a valid contract.

The only part which wouldn't be valid in a contract was the first-born child. That was a joke.

Indeed, if the GPL were a contract, courts might compel compliance.

However, the GPL is not a contract, it's a license. The FSF bent over backwards to make sure the GPL/AGPL licenses wouldn't be viewed as a contract, in part to limit liability / damages / risk.

Confusingly, some EULAs are framed contracts, contrary to the acronym, and do expose users to much more risk of liability than the GPL.

The relevant part of the GPL is:

You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or
run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work
occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to
receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing
other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify
any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept
this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you
indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.

Although we often like to take a plain-text read, but that's misleading; this is legal jargon. It's one of those bits of text which needs to be explained by a lawyer, and one who specializes in both licensing and in contract law.
I mean if your code is already hosted on Github, your builds done by github actions, and/or issues managed by github issues, it's not like giving MS that same code back is going to increase "liability" at all.
There are several options but the Levene test should be appropriate: https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda35a...
> centi-billion

10 million
Agreed, but in the start-up space I so often see this "If you build it, they will come" mentality, when a huge piece of the puzzle is sales/marketing. 80% of what goes into success is the boring stuff.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Because of what’s been highlighted in this article I found it super difficult to figure out a good alternative to MS Office, so agree 100% with the article. Now a happy LibreOffice user.
Americans gave a near-record $485B to charity in 2021, despite inflation
The mandatory link on true financial costs of nuclear.

https://m.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-dea...

Germany's nuclear waste disposal will end up costing over 100 billion, the companies themselves shelled out a mere fraction of it, and the public is now officially on the hook for the rest.

I really don't get the nuclear argument. We are in a crisis, and yet it's being argued for a very expensive solution that will come online ... in a decade or two. If all goes according to plan, which currently is not really the case. We do not have the funds to go 100% nuclear now, so why not do the cheap and fast version that reduces the carbon footprint almost immediately? If it turns out 100% renewable is not possible, then build nuclear. Like I said, they won't all built in one go anyway.
It's particularly dangerous to hire an agency to do development because of the agency problem. I hate working for an agency where the customer is asking "Why is my project late?" and the real answer is "I've been working on a project for another customer" but I have to be cagey or lie about it.
Bitcoin mining currently consumes less that 0.2 % of global energy consumption. Smartphone use and the associated radio infrastructure use somewhere between 1% to 2% of global energy.

How much energy do central and commercial banks, auditors, accountants, corporate currency hedge trading desks, and the armies that back fiat currencies use? Way, way more than bitcoin... and they don't provide a way to pay electric grids to build out renewables the way bitcoin mining does.
The peak oil producing month so far is November 2018. With COVID-19, and now war in Ukraine and an impending global recession combined with the progress of electric vehicles and solar production, it is entirely possible that this record will stand.
You're thinking about spending incorrectly. You're thinking about per year healthcare spending which is higher for smokers. You should be thinking about lifetime spending which is lower for smokers.

Smokers die in there's 60s from a heart attack or lung cancer. Healthy people die in their 80s after collecting Medicare and social security for 25 years having spent the last 10 years in memory care.
At some point you need more than what markdown gives you. I know, encountered it recently.

The formatting equivalent of... "640k ought to be enough for everybody".
>Students claim to have 4.86 years (on average) of professional experience. O_o

You've heard of "5 years of experience" entry level jobs, now meet the "5 years of experience" students
So you are suggesting to implement more stuff with scripting (otherwise that would be horrible to use with page reloads in between, no?). Why go all the trouble when HTML can store all the semantics just fine?

I also use Confluence via plain HTML because their editor sucks, especially when copy/pasting. They have something even worse than MS Frontpage but implemented in JS, and my subconscious keeps me wanting to switch to CoffeeCup.
Ukrainian Dining and the QR Code Vortex
It depends on what elements you take into account.

Demolishing a building and re-building it in terms of total energy (and/or emissions) is not free of costs, maybe you don't pay them directly, unlike heating or air conditioning, but they do exist.

Right now 100 years old houses (the brick or stone ones, not the wooden ones, nor the reinforced concrete ones that are usually more recent) already exist and can be restored/upgraded (though of course with some limitations) with a minimal amount of work (in terms of energy and emissions).

More or less the "if ain't broken don't fix it approach".

Now, if we had some building material lasting only 100 years that could be manufactured with little expense of energy and low or no emissions, that would be another thing.

If we imagine that (hypothetical) there is a form of (say) square section bamboo that we can grow at little or no cost and that we can assemble with (still say) some vegetal cement or similar, so that the results of the periodical demolitions can be reused or recycled or that is however biodegradable, then a short lived building would make much more sense.
NHS is struggling with wait times and staff shortages, no? I have heard a lot of them is in radiology departments. These diagnostic improvements will help there as well, and for a state funded healthcare like NHS, more automation is good.

As much as I don't like for profit companies monetising this, I am not sure if I know of a better path to innovation.
Or there are optimization opportunities, but new language features are rarely for that, it's usually for developer comfort.
A lot of people don't let you bring your own IDP. They offer a few choices: Google, Microsoft, Okta, etc.

I can foresee this eventually being a revenue stream for a lot of companies where they charge payola to be listed as an IAM provider, sort of like the browser CA inclusion or browser default search engine list rackets.
Isaac Asimov
The experience is great, and I will continue using them.
Not saying there is anything wrong with AirBnb, but they seem to be steering away from the "rent a room in my house" target audience.
> "Mocks are for integration tests only"

as opposed to what unit tests? how are you suppose to "unit test" that you properly increment a varibale before inserting into the DB without mocking the DB? I disagree, mocks are for unit tests only. mocks allow you to isolate the unit to be tested.

integration tests is when you start integrating dependencies together. so maybe you have a dummy database like an in-memory db, but you're certainly not mocking it.

system tests is where you would use the actual db.
If the nick bot is down, there's no registration.

It's just a bot that runs on IRC just like the bots I made when I was using it.
Ask HN: How do I take more ownership?
I've been given this feedback at three different appraisals now but no specifics (2 separate companies.)

If anyone here has any advice or books/resources on how you improved in this particular aspect then I'd really appreciate it. It would also really help if you could discuss specifics and context.

I'm at an important career junction where I feel that this can either make it or break it for me. I'm a b2b saas marketer but im sure advice from any departments will be valuable.
I agree, but as many already have commented, I think believing "I'm wrong and someone else is right" goes against self-preservation for most. I have been working for years on my own mental-emotional health and I still get caught into patterns of destructive ego. I think this is mostly an evolution problem. Our minds are built, layer by layer over time to incorporate certain patterns of thinking that helps perpetuate our species. But now with our current technological achievements, the mammal part of our brain is an actual detriment to human progress, at least to a certain extent. Until we evolve past those part of our brain that have a hand in creating these blind spots, I'm guessing we are going to be subjected to the problems like cognitive bias for a long while, at least a couple of more generations.
>Definitely cheaper than StarTech's offering

There are other brands of VDSL extenders. This board seems to be $300 for a pair.

This product, for example, is ~$271 a pair if you buy them at the same time:
https://www.netsys-direct.com/products/vdsl2-ethernet-bridge...

And they come with an enclosure and power supply. And a better sort of "step up / step down" bandwidth based on distance...see the chart at the bottom.
> You'll have to start with a decentralized protocol without server admins

This is all or nothing thinking. We could design centralized protocols that have, for example, voting. We could design centralized protocols that call together digital juries[1].

Yes there may be powerhungry mods at the very top. They might be able to throw the votes or what not. Abuse is possible on centralized systems. But there's so vastly much we could be trying, could be doing, to alter the gerontocratic imbalance of power, even on centralized systems.

[1] http://digitaljuries.com/
Just note that this isn’t anything new. I highly recommend the book “How to become a Federal Criminal” that shows 200 years of code and statute for all kinds of odd rules.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Become-a-Feder...
Brave Search passes 2.5B queries, allows users to choose search rankings
Neither do many founders and executives of American companies. Snapchat is a prime example of a company/executive neglecting Android for years, at their own expense. Their international growth was extremely hampered until they finally refactored their Android app pretty heavily.
Good point, and I bet that's what happened, but it's interesting that he didn't really own his greed, he's just fishing for sympathy.
Especially books in genres where the norm is very short books—like intermediate-grades kids' books (Goosebumps, Boxcar Children, Animorphs, Nancy Drew, The Baby-Sitters Club) or romance novels. Bonus points if you can re-use the same two or three chapter-by-chapter beat-for-beat outlines over and over.

Of course, that quality also makes those sort of books the easiest to have ghost-written.