skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently got in a fight with GitLab of all places. I setup SSO on my self-hosted instance so people could sign-up and report bugs in my applications.

I never even noticed that a bunch of accounts was created until GitLab wrote "we noticed you are X licenses over your limit. Will will charge your credit card on <todays date>". I didn't know it worked that way, and I honestly didn't think users with no permissions to do anything would count as a full license.

I nearly shit my pants. It was a lot of money. I contacted support and asked them to remove my payment details. They declined and forwarded me to a sales person.

I told the sales person about my issue, but she said I accepted their terms and conditions, so now I had to pay. But hey, if we had a quick call with some sales executives, then maybe we could resolve the matter...

Suffice to say, now I use one-time credit-cards for all online services. It is not the first time I've been hogtied by an online service with no recourse.
Without Hot Air and this blog are polar opposites. Without Hot Air uses costs from 2008 and assumes that they won't improve.

The costs of solar have reduced by 90% since 2008 so McKay's conclusions are horribly wrong.

OTOH Casey Handler is betting his company that the costs will improve from current values.
Can you comment on the communists of Quebec? As a Canadian, this is what I find lacking in debate on American sites like Reddit or HN.

Canada is very similar to the United States, another way of saying that is that Canada does things slightly different yet the results seem to be profoundly different than the States.

Why is that, and what are we as Canadians doing that Americans and others around the world should attempt to copy and improve upon?
> the quasi-periodic pulsing explanation is a lot more understandable

Whenever I see something may be periodic, it makes me think it just lives in the Complex plane - maybe time is imaginary :headexplode:
> Djelibeybi

Is obviously also a reference to Jelly Babies - the rubbery sweets that were preferred by the fourth Doctor Who.

I have to say that Pyramids has always been one of my favourites, it doesn't have the depth of Nightwatch due to less history with the characters, nor does it have the biting satire of Small Gods, but as standalone "typical Discworld" novel it is outstanding.

I should re-read it again soon. Having moved countries I didn't transport all my books, but once I arrived here I made damn sure that I bought the complete set again. They're great comfort-reads.

For me the line that always sticks in my memory involves Pteppic getting dressed "and then he turned and slowly fell over". (I love the "Ptraci" lines too. Always paying off to be slightly foreign.)
> Same for Lemoine.

Lemoine got a lawyer invovled and they started filing lawsuits on the AI's behalf.
I'm not shocked he was fired.

https://fortune.com/2022/06/23/google-blade-lemoine-ai-lamda...
You say this like it is not a big deal, I trust Apple much more than I trust Meta with my messages. Apple has made privacy a cornerstone of their sales pitch, Meta not so much. N=2 is too many.
Dictionary definitions are of limited utility in philosophical discussions because they often make very broad assumptions. For example computers can certainly sense things, they can detect inputs and make decisions based on those inputs. What is the difference between feeling and sensing though?

In this case by ‘feel’ we might implicitly assume various capabilities of the subject experiencing the feeling, like self awareness. If we’re being precise we can’t just say feeling is enough, we need to state the assumptions the dictionary leaves unstated.
3D-Scanned Stones Create Vessel for Human-Made Interventions
None of this coverage has convinced me in the slightest that we've encountered a sentient software. But it has really highlighted for me how incredibly cool human language is that we can use math to generate it, and it makes sense! I really should look into this technology more.
TSA urges passengers to do their part to speed up checkpoints
Prof. John Baez: Unsolved Mysteries of Fundamental Physics
Reciprocating Saw Attachments You Probably Didn’t Know About (2019)
Whenever I see somebody detailing the scope of a mistake at their business, I mentality add the words "at least" to any quantities.
The turtle moves!
I'm a little tempted by this one. One thing that makes it even more tempting is that the LTE card can be removed and replaced with an SSD. Was curious about Linux on it and found this very useful post on Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/tk6hdp/evolv...

Looks pretty feasible other than the WiFi driver annoyances.
> More importantly it's not the state's business to override the desires of citizens to end a domestic partnership.

That's just the liberal view. There are alternatives.

> For some reason Americans in particular who won't shut up about "my freedoms" completely forget about it when the opportunity to play relationship counselling at gunpoint comes up.

Well, they also don't shut up about family values. You can value more than one thing.
I didn't imply being white was bad -- and not sure how you came to that conclusion. I was referring to OP's usage of "farang tax". I was pointing out farang is usually used for white foreigners. So it's more of a general "foreigner tax" than a "farang (only) tax".
Well... this thread took an interesting twist
it's like 800x what an ARM SBC gets you. fuck ARM, mass incompetency. (new Qualcomm Wear 5: a 10 year old Cortex A53... get out. how is an ancient design the "low power" go-to?)

i'm so glad x86 has a basic self respecting low-end that does ok. i have a Chuwi Lapbook 12.3 that- 5 years ago- was a similar-ish kit for <$250 (but a 2k screen). everything worked out of box in Debian. it's just absurd what a dumb stupid awful terrible just-emerging rk3588 costs (much worse A76 cores+puny cores), by compare, to these much much much better x86 systems, that have keyboards, storage, displays to boot. risc-v is no better. i detest the lack of real competition. how has this marketplace rotted & ossified in place so, been so noncompetitive for so long?

there's just no one to keep a reasonable low end other than Intel. i love love love & wanted wanted wanted to get some AMD 1-liter mini-pcs, but they just never became available, and prices spiraled up and up and up. there's still no competition for a reasonable computer compared to what Intel offers us. this world is in huge denial.
I really want to try something new but many of those shells are not POSIX compliant enough to be a daily driver and that's kind of a deal breaker. I often run external shell scripts to install various things and the fear that the new shell environment might muck up something I didn't notice is too real. Would have otherwsie moved to fish long ago, so for now it looks like zsh is as good as it gets (unless my concerns are unfounded of course).
"Your margin is my opportunity." ~Jeff Bezos

Private is cheaper if there is competition. Monopolies are always more costly, public or private.
There are also perverse incentives in play here. For example, "use it or lose it" water rights.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtxew5XUVbQ @ around 8:30 mark.
I just signed a lease on an apartment to do something very similar. House out in the country, apartment in a very walkable town just outside a major metro area. The motivation was to help a family member in that town but I’m stoked at the prospect of having both.

It’s definitely a bit of an indulgence but i could downsize both once my youngest is on her own.
It's not a YC company. "Launch HN's" are one of a couple of perks reserved for YC companies. "Show HN's" are open to all comers, but only if you have an app people can play with right away (this is more of a landing page), and they're not ranked the same way normal posts are --- this post is doing great on its own, so their choice not to do a "Show HN" has paid off.
This is sort of begging the question, because the only beings broadly considered sentient right now are humans. We’re the type specimen. So when people say something does or does not seem sentient, they’re basically opining on whether it seems like human behavior. While a rigorous physical definition would be incredibly useful, it’s not necessary for such comparisons. We make a lot of judgments without those.

It’s also sort of irrelevant that we have not clearly defined sentience because we have clearly defined how these large computerized language model systems work, and they are working exactly as they were designed, and only that way. Sentience might be a mystery but machine learning is not; we know how it works (that’s why it works).
Couldn’t disagree harder on every single count. Humanity will adapt. We could sustain 10x population (70 billion) with the correct technology - the vast majority of land on earth is totally empty. There will be no resource wars and no migration. You are thinking delusionally.
I don't know if I quite understand this idea, but why road and not rail, or something more purpose built? High production locales and high demand ones are most likely to be spread across long distances
And what follows more practically is that even if we are all brains in a vat, it doesn't matter. Because it can’t.

I’m somewhat surprised this discussion got so philosophical in the first place. Sure we can question the nature of sentience and argue about its definition all we want, but the unsettling problem is that we can’t prove anything. As time goes on, we are only going to encounter more, definitely sentient, people who, like Lemoine, are absolutely convinced they are communicating with another sentient being (whether Lemoine is or is not acting faithfully here, in this instance, is besides the point). What do we do?
Looks like hopium peddling around their new invention which will solve climate change (spoiler alert: it absolutely won't) and generate limitless energy at the same time (spoiler alert: we have effectively limitless energy in the form of fossil fuels, and even if you ignore climate change, we have already used it to basically destroy our own future by treating the earth as a garbage dump / shithole to be asset stripped of everything of worth to convert it into worthless landfill while basic human needs are still unmet).

Let me know if you're interested and PM be because, gosh, do I have the investment opportunity of a lifetime for you. /s :)
Alan Dershowitz’s Martha’s Vineyard Cancellation
Naturally, it started as a joke. My buddy had a pile of machines that the school board had decided to throw away. Being avid /. fans, I of course said “can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of those?”

So then it’s 2am and his basement closet is really warm…
macOS Catalina is still receiving security updates and supports devices from 2012 and later. Not receiving new features after 5 years hardly makes a device e-waste.
My favorite is a variation called first-person tetris:

https://www.firstpersontetris.com/

It's fun to give someone without telling them the whole view rotates whenever you rotate the piece because it's extremely disorienting if you're not used to it, but after a bit of practice it becomes easy
I don’t know, there’s a ton of horrific bullying every time I stumble upon the site. I think you’re downplaying it. And loads of less-than-legal activities, like sharing videos of former porn actresses purely because they’ve tried to scrub their old content from the internet (copyright infringement), revenge porn, etc.

Just as the edgy comments are their “right to free speech”, I think it’s completely fine for XenForo to exercise their right to speech by not providing them service. It’s not like they’ve had their license revoked; they just cannot get support or software updates past when their license expires.
> Like, real Linux, not some weird virtualized or translated environment.

Ah, no. It is very much specifically in a container inside a VM. Now, full credit where it's due: You're unlikely to notice. Performance is good, they've done work integrating it (filesystem integration, forwarding windows to the host display servers through Sommelier). But native it is not.

(Details: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con...)

EDIT: I guess I should mention; this does come up occasionally in ways that can actually matter. IIRC I got bit by the (default?) container setup not allowing you to ptrace, you can't mount filesystems or loop devices (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con...), and you can't touch the kernel or hardware (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con... and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con... ).
Which is weird because articles about him from when he was convicted describe him as pagan.

He was sentenced to jail time for being in the armed forces and refusing to follow orders.

Not "charge that hill, soldier" types of orders, or "pilot this drone and kill people" types of orders. He's certainly trying to sell that story, telling papers he "served" in Iraq.

He was a mechanic.

Working a desk job.

He just stopped working.

How the hell did Google hire this clown? Even a dishonorable discharge is usually radioactive and this guy was not only dishonorably discharged, he served time.

Why did he refuse to do any work? Because he was a conscientious objector.

It takes a really special kind of stupid to not figure out you're a conscientious objector until years after you've voluntarily signed up for service.
Well, partially because I've never heard anyone making that argument actually define sentience so that evidence could be presented to prove the case.

Instead you just get people pointing out that it isn't quite as good as a human at a lot of things and of course it's all algorithms under the hood.
Utah gourmet cookie maker Crumbl files lawsuits against 2 rival companies
Honestly, it sounds like the DMV in california. The DMV locations in populated areas have long lines and wait times, but the ones in outlying areas are less crowded and even pleasant.
This reads like an advertisement and the constant comparisons with Apple products is weird. I can only assume the comparisons are being made because he or the people around him use very expensive Macbooks, but It doesn't help that this thread was written by the submitter and that he happens to be an engineer at Google talking about how great this cheap Chromebook is.

Looking past that, It's good for developers to have some low end hardware to test their software on and I think that every web developer should be required to test their applications on hardware comparable to this, if not even less powerful.
Agreed.

We are born good at crying and sucking nipples. Everything else we learn.

You have to stick at something through the awkward ‘not very good’ stage too.
Tesla dumps $900M Bitcoin amid pressure from factory shutdown
in the EU

159EUR ... 250EUR ...

https://geizhals.de/?fs=Chromebook++Celeron+N4020&hloc=at&hl...
When I head out to my father or father in laws (Saskatchewan) farm, I usually ponder the vast empty field for a while. One time when I was at my father in laws, I said "it's kinda eerie how quiet it is" and he told me a story.

A Japanese man had been working at a nearby oil town and had befriended my father in law. He wanted to be left alone in a field to enjoy the quite so he took him to a spot and left him there for a few hours. When my father in law came back, the Japanese man was sobbing.
Even the smartest people in the world are still human and susceptible to all human failings and illnesses.
Thank you for linking this article! It answers a lot of questions I'd had after reading some poorer coverage of this initiative last year.

I'm definitely not talking about LCOE; I'm just talking about up-front capex. Conceivably nuclear plants could be cheaper to build than PV farms, but still have a worse LCOE, but I don't think they're even cheaper to build. Even for China, which is the best in the world at building things.

This article says the PRC plans to build another 147 GW for a total of 200 GW by 02035, over 14 years, averaging 10 GW per year. Total PRC marketed energy consumption is on the order of 6 TW (6000 GW), though I'm extrapolating that from a figure of 28 PWh/year in 02010 and an increase in energy consumption of 90% since then, and I'd be delighted to have more reliable data.

So the plan is to add an additional 2% to their energy supply (assuming capacity factor 90%) in the form of nuclear — over the course of 14 years, during which time their total energy consumption will presumably roughly double.

In that context this doesn't seem like a huge bet on nuclear to me.

The article says, "China keeps the exact costs a state secret, but analysts including BloombergNEF and the World Nuclear Association estimate China can build plants for about $2,500 to $3,000 per kilowatt." That's roughly six times the cost of PV plants—barely competitive with PV in polar and cloudy regions where PV capacity factors are 10-15%, completely unviable in sunny regions where PV capacity factors approach 30%.

I don't have figures yet for 02021 (do you?) but in 02020, looking only at electric power generation, they installed 48.2 GW(p) of new solar, 71.7 GW(p) of new wind, and 38.4 GW(e) of new coal. If the capacity factors are average for the energy source, that would be 6.3 GW(mean) of new solar, 16 GW(mean) of new wind, and 19.2 GW(mean) of new coal, and yes, PRC's average coal capacity factor really is reported to be just 50%. Solar and wind have been rising much faster.

So that's the context in which I'm saying the CPC doesn't seem to think nuclear power is economically competitive with renewables. It's already installing more renewables than nuclear, even after derating for the different capacity factors and including these future nuclear plans, which may fail to materialize, and it has been for years.

What's your interpretation?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechang...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26227823
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PV_cume_semi_log_cha...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics#Countr...
In the late 90s I worked for a company that was afraid of the Internet. They had one computer in a common area that had access to the Internet but not the company's internal network for the ~50 engineers to use.

The internal network was coax Ethernet. I was working on a networking project at the time and ran a packet sniffer on the internal network and saw that some MAC addresses could access the outside world.

I'm lazy and I didn't like having to go halfway across the building, sit at a slow ass computer to download a datasheet, copy it to a floppy, then walk halfway across the building back to my cube, and finally copy it to my computer. Ain't nobody got time for that.

So I modified my network driver to use one of the macaddrs that had internet access. When I needed something from the Internet, I'd load my modified driver then unload it when I was done. Much easier.

I thought I was doing it for such short periods of time that nobody works ever notice. Of course I was wrong.

After about a month I got called into the IT manager's office. And of course the the macaddr I picked belonged to the VP of engineering who also was the son of the president.

Fortunately they understood that young engineers are dumb and do dumb things and let me off with a warning.
Wait, Mexico’s share is (as seems from both your comment and the link) specified in absolute terms rather than as a percentage like the US states? Leaving no allowance for that amount not existing?

More specific link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact#Provisi...
Yeah, I switched to fish about 1.5yrs ago and for me it’s defaults are way better, fish script is way more readable and it’s really easy to customize.
But what is it that are we a type specimen of? Like if the definition is circular then it reduces to nothing.
Could go either way.

But it's an easy and quick decision / try: Discworld to me is a bit like Hitchhikers guide to galaxy, where I tell people to just read the first page - either you'll be laughing and hooked, or go "huh?"; either way it's not one of those books where you need to read 27 chapters and get to know characters etc before you make up your mind. It's a specific type of humour that not everybody appreciates, but those who do appreciate it rather quickly.
So what's really funny is that I've done a lot of stuff with older hardware like this. I use caprover on a cloud provider and then add extra nodes at home with cheap laptops that I've collected over the years.
I’m very interested in moving to Mexico City part time. Can you list some nice neighborhoods and their characteristics? Or point me to somewhere on the web with this information? Thanks in advance!
Dell’s XPS series has had a Gore-Tex insulation layer on the inside of the chassis for some time.
'For Less Than a Tank of Gas'.

That's something to think about right there.
This is the side-specific overheating issue mentioned--not sure it really speaks to the reasoning for thunderbolt vs usb-c on one or both sides but the side-specific charging issue was a real thing:

https://www.cultofmac.com/705319/macbook-pro-overheats-charg...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/can-a-simple-charging-mistake-...

https://www.ibtimes.com/why-your-macbook-pro-might-be-overhe...

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find...

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/309802-charging-a-macb...
Unsure if related, laptops are called Note-PCs here in Japan. Asking anyone about a 'laptop' will just get you blank stares.
It isn't, not when there is a better _commercial_ system in the world. If the "invisible hand" was real, great. As it has been a constantly manipulated and managed construct within the world of global finance from the moment Adam Smith shared it with anyone, it completely ceased to have any meaning going forward other than license to savage.

Economics isn't science or maths when you get past the micro level. It is psychology.

If there is a Capitalist society that also has a deep respect for mental health, I say it only exists in Science Fiction from the 50s and 60s.

The goals of communism are pure and true, but insanely unrealistic considering we're talking about humans who still instinctually believe in a reality where scarcity is anything other than a human construct.

On the other hand, naturally, barely restrained capitalism is just going to be a giant cancer where the rich feast off the poor until it all goes down in flames.

What's needed is a shared sense of morality, community and survival across our species.

History says we're fucked.
You know, if I go out and spend my 401K on lottery tickets, I could be rich and then 25 years from now I could drive my jetski down that flooded freeway. You ever drive a jetski? It really is a blast and I'm willing to bet that driving one down the freeway would be even more fun.
I've had two over relatively few years. Both became paperweights. Cheap chromebooks are not worth wasting money.
Diess's vision has given VW a great future in EV. I hope they throw solar panels on utility trucks.

The article hints at 'software production problems', bad relations with the union leaders, and the family with controlling interest being courted by apple/google/microsoft to fix their problems.

I really really hope VW keeps apple/google/microsoft out of their software strategy.
This is great. I randomly stumbled on this scene about 6 years ago and it’s great to see this on the front page.
How are the keyboard and trackpad?

IMO, bad trackpads are the biggest pitfall of cheap (and not-so-cheap) laptops, by far. At least with a bad screen you can still generally read the interface without too much trouble, but a bad trackpad can make a computer really frustrating to use!