skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As long as our markets correctly price in externalities

This is a little like saying "if unicorns ate hay..."

It sounds reasonable on the surface, but it's also never happened and probably never will.
Most of us knew in advance that she had died because we recognised parts of the protocol.

The big news anchors called in early and wearing black suits and TV schedules suspended until 6pm, road signage removed from the front gate at Balmoral and fences put up, parliament suspended, the whole Royal family travelling to Scotland…

plus a BBC journalist accidentally announcing it at 3pm on Twitter and then giving the most cagily worded retraction I’ve ever read: “I tweeted that there had been an announcement about the death of the Queen. This was incorrect, there has been no announcement, and so I have deleted the tweet. I apologise.”

Personally, I was pretty sure she was gone two to three hours before the formal announcement. Plenty of time to do quite a lot of Wikipedia updates and just click “Save” when the announcement finally breaks.
I love this movie, a staple of music childhood. My sister and I still make references to it.

The various shooting locations around SF are cool, the meeting where he figures out they're not NSA is outside the Wharton building on the Embarcadero, my wife and I bike by every week.
I sort of wonder if the problem might actually be that it isn't enough of a football. Infrastructure is seen as a generally good thing. This means that every politician will of course say "blah blah I'm going to fix the water blah blah." But when push comes to shove, it isn't a wedge issue, it doesn't excite their voters in a partisan manner. Nobody is opposed to it, it can't be used as a concession.

I imagine the response, in most cases, to a party asking the other to sacrifice a core interest for an infrastructure win is "you can't use 'providing basic services to your constituents' as a bargaining chip, you should want to do that anyway."
watch this space.. they're coming.
Yes, what's the point of learning to play the piano when someone has autotune?
What makes the grid rickety is air conditioners.
Market forces will take care of this, if needed. If battery price goes up, hydrogen vehicles are favored. What hydrogen vehicles need now is cheaper catalysts for their fuel cells.

Hydrogen-powered vehicles are much, much lighter than battery-driven, so consume less energy in operation. Balanced against that, electrolysing hydrogen has some losses, and braking doesn't regenerate hydrogen you used.
> April 19, 2018 / Global

Yes, original post needs a (2018) in the title.
The only thing the anti Microsoft speech always misses, like the anti-FANG nowadays, it that the competition also has themselves to blame.

Bad management, bad products, not willing to reduce prices.

You see it nowadays on the Linux Desktop, instead of uniting, everyone goes do their own little thing.

No wonder it doesn't work out.

Linux won on the server room, thanks to being a cheap UNIX clone, and now with cloud computing and managed language runtimes, it hardly matters if it is there, or they are running on top of a type-1 hypervisor.
Clearly not! But I could be, with a little feature gating.
> lead-acid batteries (batteries present in ICE cars),

Minor nitpick: they are still present in EVs as well.
Drink replicator – thousands of drinks at the touch of a button
It did, but for their prices and hardware requirements I would rather use OS/2 instead.
Yeah, when I was in the solar business more than a decade ago funding was tough and so I used to refer to it as "wireless fusion power" in the hope that those two buzzwords would make people more interested.

Instead solar did fine with a not-so-slow-but steady path.
HP Support Assistant Has a DLL Hijacking Vulnerability
I have numerous scripts in production that rely on fgrep. Not sure about egrep. So I'm happy there's a warning before these commands are eventually removed.
I think that’s true but those numbers are inflated, falsely IMO, by those who disagree on what’s effective/who should be compelled/what’s the root cause.

For instance, if you say that we should both give twenty quid to a homeless bloke we see, and I disagree because I genuinely don’t think it’s a good way to help, you (if you were so inclined) might call me uncaring but that wouldn’t be true. Then you argue that I should be compelled to give the money and I’ll fight you on that, for several reasons, and before you know it you’re casting me as evil.
We could use cars a bit less. Moving to better mass transit systems, walkable environments, remote working, etc means we might be able to cope with just using less lithium, and then we'd be able to mine less.

Suggesting that we have to mine lithium because the alternative is fossil fuels shows a belief that we should be continuing our current lifestyle and making it a little greener rather than modifying our lifestyle and making it radically greener.
You just add more plumbing risers and put point of use water heaters in the units. You might need to upgrade the building water service to accommodate higher water usage, but it’s literally just adding pipes and pumps in an existing mechanical chase or core drilling thru each floor to add plumbing risers. Some really tall buildings have tanks on top of the building to provide water pressure at the top via gravity.

You can add drainage the same way, you just don’t need pumps for the drain stacks.
That puts a lot of trust into the government correctly pricing in externalities. Otherwise, coal would steamroll everything since it is very cheap and abundant.
How do you ever factor in all the externalities? The pollution of coal, the storage of nukes, the offshore child labor mining of battery materials, the everything-is-built-in-China-and-dumped-in-even-poorer-places of everything we touch every part in every part of the supply chain...

And what about the externalities of subsidized farmland? Of different states' property tax schemes? Of humans displaced due to lack of housing development, of habitat loss from any sort of development... there are a million variables to look at and no easy model.

Globalized capitalism IS the story of externalizing costs to further profit, isn't it? Our markets cannot price in all the externalities, and when they do, they end up commoditizing essential things like energy and healthcare and subject basic needs to capital manipulation and financial markets that just skim off the top. We shouldn't be gambling with basic infrastructure on the off-chance that it might allow the rich to get even richer. Not everything is fixed by market forces, and some things can be made worse once you introduce perverse financial incentives to game the system.
So do you disagree with my definition of a bug?
SQLite originates from the same author and is hosted in fossy which is similarly concise and beautiful.
Ask HN: What does fantastic programmers do differently than the average one?
How do extraordinary programmers work? Have you worked with any of them? Or maybe you are one of them?

How do their minds work? What is their workflow that sets them aside from all the other programmers?
iPhones are sold as water resistant, and it’s not covered under the regular warranty: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204104
it's always good to consider the existing before throwing it all away
Don't focus on the network, focus on the users. They are the most important 'network' you'll ever need.

Your professional network will arrise organicically just by exercising things you are passionate about.
You can simultaneously believe nothing matters while also not enjoy the sensation of pain. That doesn't suddenly mean avoiding pain "matters". It just means you have physiological response that makes you avoid pain.

Your response, any many others here, seem to take "nothing matters" as "life is bad, so you should just die and be done with it". Which is a weird redefinition if you think about it. The real redefinition should be "life doesn't matter, so it doesn't matter if you happen to die". Which is not the same as choosing to take action to kill yourself, or even choosing to deal with pain.
Back in the 90s I enjoyed Nethack and Perl sources, had a hard copy of both. Both looked somehow human, with witty remarks and outright quotations from holy texts in case of Nethack.
I have shared this with Tanj.
I had the privilege to work with him in Microsoft!
Hot take, but that guideline is just bad. It removes necessary context and may even obscure relevant developments in a public dialogue. Original posts make sense only if the repost is not adding to the dialogue or otherwise making interesting contributions.

(If you disagree, this may the one time I will actively ask you to flag this post, so a mod can respond to this point)
you can't fight stupid. besides stupidity, these people have no shame either.
50 full time gardeners, 26 green houses, 55 acres of garden. That's quite the operation, incredible work!
They would get fired with cause since they aren't doing their job properly.
But those are different, because it’s the same stuff over and over again.
Everyone that says “vote” as some action that will definitely all your ailments really just means “I’m an ideologue and you had better join me”.

They don’t actually care about voting participation.
Yep. pcwalton, a proeminent rust user who is mentioned in that twitter thread, made this reply to me yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32782656

> It's perfectly reasonable to take the position that it's deeply problematic for a language aiming for wide use in 2022 to not be memory safe. There's no requirement that you "focus on tradeoffs", especially since real people get hurt by memory safety problems.

And my message was already about someone else calling Zig users irresponsible. Talk about toxicity.
We definitely dig pretty deep into our suppliers' supply chains. For details on that, I strongly recommend the Twitter Space we recorded with Kate Hicks (one of the authors of this piece)[0] -- and in particular, how we engaged with Sanyo-Denki (our fan supplier) on one such challenge.

[0] https://share.transistor.fm/s/dd64f79a
Celebrating 10 years of Guix in Paris, 16–18 September
The question is whether we're pricing in externalities appropriately. We've had the market do it once with ICE cars and it is painfully obvious that the pricing involved was only a fraction of the true cost to the environment.

Planning to 'just mine more' of whatever and completely replace all of private transportation infrastructure sure sounds like another path to environmental disaster.

That's not to say we should drop EVs or anything like that. But we should at least think twice, especially when there are perfectly good alternatives.
The one that I didn't have to read.

A mistake i see many engineers commit is obsess over their code and how "pretty" it is. What they seem to forget is that code is only read when it isn't doing what it's supposed to do. Granted when you do have to read it there are good and bad examples, but the question you should ask yourself is not "how can I make this code easier to read?" But "how can I make sure noone has to read this code". The code that performs this job is not always pretty. If it is impossible to make the code bulletproof then the best bet is usually to just make it really simple. Good code is nonexistent and if it has to exist it is boring.
Lol. The Wire!
You mean the UX where everything is flat and we don't know where to click any longer?
I have a 5 yo that is very enthusiastic about Legos. It turns out that both directed and free play are good.

He gets new kits and starts by following the instructions. He learns techniques along the way. How to interlock to make things that are strong and won’t fall apart. Patterns for building subassemblies like body panels or spoilers.

As soon as he’s done following the instructions he takes the whole thing apart, and starts building his own creation with the pieces, applying the concepts he learned.

It’s kind of like music. You don’t learn to play piano by composing songs, you start by playing other people’s music to learn the fundamentals. Then you can start riffing on it.
I love working alone. You get to fully express yourself, and to work on what feels right, even if it's not the top priority right now.

If it's a side project, working alone is a great escape from design by committee, sprints and other pressures.

I'd add to this that you can also build something wonderful for you alone. No need to please others, no need to scale. Just build it for you.

This article was almost revelatory to me: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Noted, I haven't seen any of those, thanks.
You solve this by making sure every unit has part of it along the curtain wall, the units might need to be more narrow vs more rectangular, but most office towers have a 20k sq ft floor plate where the curtain wall is never more than 50-70 ft from the building core (elevators and mechanical/electrical rooms)
D-Galacturonic Acid
Thanks for the lineup! Seems quite the waste that this would change every five years. So removing seems a good option.

I didn't like the arg0 magic, so I'm happy that is gone. Funny to think I had to be in the right time window to even notice that.
Twiggy Forrest

[1] https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/forrest-pens-...

[2] https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/09/05/twiggy-green-hydrogen-r...
Not that I understand any of the organic science behind it, but Timothy Stiles' Poly is some of the most beautiful Go code I've seen: https://github.com/TimothyStiles/poly

Blew my mind reading through it, honestly. Just perfect.
Protection of earth is a reason to deny mining permits. But it isn't a reason to delay mining permits.

Delay is just beauracratic inefficiency.
This should be the way. Make really connected public transportation and discourage private vehicle ownership. This is the only way to beat global car emissions and climate change.
I deeply believe UNIX only surviving and grew into the cultists that you mention, because AT&T was forbidden to sell their Bell Labs research, and so it widespread as free beer everywhere.

Had it been a commercial product from the get go, and history would have gone quite differently.
Combine it with a high gain drone mounted antenna/magnetometer
The context is in the part "corporate overlords".
The popular music uses autotune ad nauseam.
Have we really gone from a public debating if smoking causes cancer to people thinking only smoking causes cancer?
I use socialchamp to publish small updates about my work. They're a mix of design details, things I have learned about the topic of my website, small PSAs about that topic, new posts, and building in public.

It's very effective on LinkedIn, and it feels good to talk about things that are not the final product.

Out of it, I got new friends, a few business conversations, some newspaper articles and a bit of goodwill from the users.

That's on top of regular networking, which I learned is a lot more about growing other people's business than growing your own. It's a "I give you free fish if you give me free bread" kind of deal.
Some Thoughts About Synthography
I love how you fixed it lmao.
Luxury apartments are often more affordable and attractive than the alternatives, which are: low density homes nearby, low density homes really far away, old as hell medium density homes nearby since nobody has been able to build anything new for decades.

I haven't been interested in buying any of the available houses in my city for 10 years now, but recently they've been developing medium density townhouses and apartments in locations that aren't the CBD, but also not suburbia. That's a fair middle ground for the middle class that we have today.
> i think it's clear that digital goods are things that don't have any physical manifestation

That's debatable

> The more money paid, the more utility that goods have.

This is just false

> The gist of my argument is that those claims are wrong, because utility can only be demonstrated by the person paying

This is quite a stretch, as any Ponzi scheme will demonstrate.
On top of that some areas outright collapse and are left with a bunch of infrastructure they can't support. The US doesn't really have any good mechanism for dealing with the "single-industry town where the industry collapses". There are a significant number of these in the more rural areas of the country, mining towns and such where the mines dried up and left town. There's no method to un-deploy infrastructure and in fact in many places there's intentional barriers to "right-sizing". Sometimes you can rip out paved roads and replace them with (cheaper to maintain) gravel roads etc but there's just a lot of miles to maintain regardless, suburban sprawl is a problem but rural/ex-rural sprawl is massive in the US.

In these areas, what is left is often essentially government welfare. The area runs on social-security checks (which go a long way with cheap cost-of-living, as long as gas prices aren't too high) and government jobs - prisons, military installations, civil positions. And I'm not talking about farm areas etc - that's a local industry too, there are a lot of ex-rural areas where it's almost completely unimproved, the types of places surrounding national forests etc.

What's more, these regions tend to be extremely infrastructure-heavy, there are a lot of miles of road and power-lines per resident, and while sure they don't have sewer, the US's road and power and communications infrastructure are heavily state- and federal-subsidized, state and federal governments chip in a lot on road and power spending. It's effectively a massive transfer of wealth out to regions that are economically unproductive, and while you can argue for or against that as a position, it's pretty unquestionable that money flows out of urban centers and into rural ones, both from government spending and also from service mandates that benefit these uneconomic operating areas (eg in power/telcom).

It's another whole layer on the "growth ponzi scheme" - sometimes the ponzi doesn't just lose its growth, but the market can collapse underneath it too. And it's exceedingly rare that the government entities themselves ever are dissolved as a result - the expectation is that government services are a one-way ratchet.
Hello, Glad to know about your liking towards Zoho and We strive to make it even better for you everyday. Regarding the Spam filter, we do have customisations available in Spam Control which can be set as your prefer for your account/Organisation. Hence, it would be of much help if you could share more details about the Spam Filtering concern you have mentioned, as an email to support<at>zohomail<dot>com. We will have it analysed and suggest the best solution possible. Looking forward to hear from you.

Regards,
Zoho Mail Team
No, pyflakes will catch that and always would to my knowledge. It did have a bug or three where it would miss an occasional issue but they were bugs (not impossible to detect) and fixed years ago.

The error message is slightly obtuse, says something like "variable only used once." But is clear after inspection the first time.
So you call silencing tactics a form of freedom of speech as long as it's not by the government? I find this a really shortsighted way of looking at freedom.

According to the original Enlightenment ideals, during which the idea of freedom of speech was created, freedom of speech is valuable not because it is inherently so, but because it's supposed to improve society. It creates a Marketplace of Ideas, and through rational debate, the best idea wins. During the French Revolution, Liberté was supposed to be equally important as Egalité and Fraternité, i.e. societal responsibility mattered just as much as freedom.

What is the point if freedom of speech is used to destroy the Marketplace, and if freedom of speech devolves into a form where everybody shouts but nobody listens to each other (i.e. the post-truth society)? What is the point of shouting on an island, instead of reconciling differences?
> How insignificant am I in relation to this vast universe? It doesn’t matter. You’ll be forgotten. I’ll be forgotten. We’ll all be forgotten.

> (1) You can become depressed and lose faith.

> (2) You can become more self-aware and stop caring so much.

1. is our ego speaking, 2. is curiosity speaking.

Universe take me for a ride, show me as many things I can, I'm plenty content as an observer.
I realized this one evening driving under the stary sky. I had a full-blown panic attack. It's been 15 years and I still have trouble driving under the sky. I guess I'm basically agoraphobic, but after some googling it's probably better described by spacephobia, although I'm not convinced that's it either, I wonder if there is a perspective based phobia.
You can drill dozens of 10” holes through a concrete floor in a commercial office tower. The structural part of the floor are the tensioned cables inside the concrete, as long as you dont’t sever those, you can drill a ton of holes without impacting the structural integrity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestressed_concrete
Another is https://www.edenproject.com/

“ We bought an exhausted, steep-sided clay pit 60 metres deep, with no soil, 15 metres below the water table, and essentially gave it life. Into it we brought a huge diversity of plants that we use every day but often don’t get to see, planted in soil made from ‘waste’ materials, watered by the rain, in giant conservatories and buildings that drew inspiration from nature. Behind this vision a dedicated team was brought together – made up of people who wanted to change something, who wanted to be able to say, ‘I’m glad I did,’ rather than, ‘I wish I had.’”

Quite an expensive project, but interesting to learn from.
Managed languages with powerful IDEs and REPL are quite alright.
terrible idea. more pollution, overcrowding, noise
Well, lobbying in other countries means talking with politicians. In the US it means giving them money so they pass the laws you want. While this is seen as perfectly fine in the US, in other countries they call that bribing, which is illegal.
Proper pageviews analytics;

https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...
What happened to the next gen gps technology, I thought it was supposed to be out by now. Centimeter level precision, much better urban (blocked by buildings) accuracy, etc?
I was very much interested in the Mistel models. I wanted a pre-built split mechanical keyboard. I was very much liked what the Mistel MD600 and MD770 looked like. But I ended up ordering a Freestyle Edge instead. The only thing that really put me off was that the Kinesis is programmable with software (or plain text files) and more extensively, while programming of the Mistel keyboard seems more limited. The other more minor worry was that I can probably still get a Freestyle in 10 years (if I like it) and Mistel hasn't been around as long.

If Mistel had better programmable firmware, I would have gone Mistel... Maybe if I need a travel keyboard some day, I'll get the MD600.
Since TeX and LLVM were already mentioned, I will casually mention the comments in Laravel's codebase which are all three lines long with each line exactly three characters shorter than the previous line. The art of computer programming at work.

Example (config file, but the entire codebase is like that): https://imgur.com/UnIUZmZ
I had to jump in and comment, because "pocket glass supercomputer" has been one of my favorite personal (or so I thought, until now) neologisms.

It tickles me to think that there are others who think about (and name) smartphones this way :)
I don’t know about that. I suspect this may be again a case where reality has a liberal bias. Cities in California don’t have these problems, at least not for months at a time.
Option A) Develop a more environmentally friendly technology

Option B) Fundamentally reorganize human society

--

Option B has a poor track record.
Ok, yes, yes it varies based on state. America!