skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone with significant experience of using the rail networks in both the UK and Spain, I strongly agree with the last point regarding the hybrid reservation model. In addition, there's one further point which I don't think he mentions: the fact that in the UK you can buy a ticket at any station to go to any arbitrary station A from any arbitrary station B (notwithstanding the complexity of determining the best price).

In Spain, by contrast, you simply cannot get a train ticket for the long distance network if you're at a commuter station, nor can you get a ticket to cover a route between two arbitrary stations if the route would combine long- and short-distance trains. You need to buy long distance and regional tickets separately, and cannot buy tickets for commuter services from outside the specific region. And they are all run by the same state-owned operator Renfe!

Meanwhile, in the UK, you can go to Stalybridge on the outskirts of Manchester and ask the ticket office for a return ticket from Edinburgh Haymarket to Bury St Edmunds and they won't bat an eyelid even though it covers God knows how many potential operators.

Note this is not in any way an example of the UK system being superior due to privatisation. The reason it works this well is because it already worked like that under British Rail.
My reply: https://twitter.com/gregmozart/status/1574139558102716416?s=...

Previously there were 10?

The Hebrew calendar always used 12 months I think. What are you referring to, and where is your evidence? Happy Rosh HaShana!
Then they, as you, have entirely missed the point of my comment, which had nothing whatsoever to do with any exercise plan. I was instead cautioning against unnecessary reliance on affectation.
I think that may be a red herring. We normally don't link to name mangled C++ libraries, anyway. Most libraries export their useful symbols in de-mangled format for linking to other languages. That way you can basically dlopen and look for the symbol. There are some libraries that are really only intended to be called from C++ and I don't expect anything other than C++ to use those libraries. I'm not sure if Ruby or Python (for example) can deal with mangled names. I think there are some tools that will generate wrappers to make them callable from things that don't understand mangled names, but if you want to make your stuff interoperable - make it C callable.

It isn't that hard to define something like MyType_t which is a pointer. Then some C code to allocate to wrap the MyType so the type is usable from any language.
Well, unix timestamps are still tied to UTC, which has leap seconds for some reason...

I would prefer if we had a few seconds of an offset with Zulu "GMT" Time (pardon the double acronym).
> I should urgently get a) my mails out of my personal (non paying) Gmail account and b) get my associated photos out of Google Photos, mainly because of baby pictures which I cannot fathom to lose.

I highly recommend it. It feels like pure freedom, putting a price tag on my personal data. The migration is something done in two steps: set up your alternative service, but also keep the old one (gmail/gdrive/calendar/...) running. Then start to use the new email service, while keeping the old one.

There are enough affordable options and you do not have to migrate everything at once. I started with my emails - gmail is still running and forwards all incoming emails, so I wont miss anything. I already updated all my accounts/logins to the new email address.

The next step was copying all my files from Dropbox, GDrive, and so on to {service I am using}.
The data in the other clouds are still there, but I am going to delete it all soon.

There are things that are not perfect - like accepting appointments, which I still want to show up in my Google calendar. To those mails I still have to respond in google mail. But I am getting there, one step after another. The win so far is much bigger than the loss/pain.
What Is the Fed Doing?
Hi!! I like it and I am eager to learn it!
However, one thing that I dislike most in a programming language is the slow compilation. How long it takes to compile more than 10.000 lines of code?

I find prolog very intriguing and for sure I will check it out tomorrow!
Progress in packs is weird. I still have a Karimore Jaguar from the early 90s (back when they were made in the UK) that seems to have most modern features you could think of.

It weighs 1600g for a 66L pack which compares pretty well with modern rucksacks too.

I’ve mostly replaced it with a modern OMM Classic 32 trail running pack. At between 430-630g.

Again, that’s a design that originally goes back 1973. I think they got design nailed back then. I haven’t see much in the way of innovation other than slightly better materials.
And you can just as well use it to vouch for change. If you don't understand why a change is being pushed for, maybe try to understand it first before trying to tear it down so therefore 'change is smarter'. Hopefully that now makes clear the ignorance and clickbaitiness of the title. Pretentious titles and articles never fail to show their faces on the daily here.
Ask HN: How and when to ask for money for advice?
Long story short: a company has been asking me for advice. I enjoy giving it, and I'd like to make it a monthly/weekly or whatever side gig with pay. How would you pitch this in an e-mail or call, and what would you think reasonable pricing is for this?

First, some context:

Through an investor in the company I am engineering manager of, I got asked to give some advice to another company they invested in. They were having some issues in their development team, and a non-technical founder had to take over management temporarily and was genuinely motivated to do an excellent job of it and make the development team feel happy and productive.

We had an excellent talk, and I was able to give some clarity to some concerns and provide him with some good insights.

The other day I received an e-mail from them again, thanking me for the advice. They said it really helped a lot, and they already saw results. And they had a different question related to some payment things and asked if I wanted to talk to their CFO. They also said they wanted to respect my time, which was evident from our first talk.

Coming back to my question:

As I said, I enjoy it; I can spend an hour here or there per month or some other interval which I think would provide them with some good value in exchange for a fee, and I could learn from it myself as well. How would you pitch this idea?

I got this idea from listening to an episode of Art of Product with Rob Walling, in which he explains he does this consulting once a week for an hour with several companies. I am no Rob Walling, but I can share some good advice every now and then.

Are there any people here with experience with these types of consultancy arrangements? Any advice on pricing? Any ideas on the pitch?
Dramatic Question.

Boring but sensible answer:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...

> Russia is one of the world’s biggest producers of oil, gas and coal. Continuous reliance on fossil fuels and delays to clean energy transition benefit Russia.

> Following on from this the Commission has put forward an additional proposal to speed up transition to clean energy sources by amending the directives on the Energy Performance of Buildings, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy[3].
> but there are some things that really shouldn't corporatized, like health care,...

I agree with your list generally but I believe private sector has a huge role to play in health care. Incentives are nicely aligned between advancing cutting edge healthcare solutions and rich people wanting to live a long healthy life. For example, COVID vaccine was developed by the private sector and rolled out for the US and a few rich European countries, since they were willing to foot the bill. The vaccine wasn't developed by some socialist regime with universal rationed healthcare.

Said otherwise, public sector is great for putting a floor on the healthcare available for someone. But private sector is essential to raise the ceiling which will benefit only the rich at first, but everyone else in the long run.
Every end is a new beginning, according to an old aphorism.

This would imply that a Weekend and a Weekbegin could easily coincide.
Yep, one of the reasons US construction industry sticks to feet and inches instead of using decimal system.
Well modern designers deliver mockup filled with Lorem Ipsum so no one notices that the text is hard to read.
Won't you just need 10x capacity spread over a large area with good transfer connections.

Maybe, a but if pumped hydro, some batteries, and power intensive industries running only when power is cheap?

(Not that nuclear wouldn't be nice, it's just never quick fix)
Who decides the meaning? You?

---

Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum - 2nd edition - London 1736

Pirate: one who lives by pillage and robbing on the sea. Also a plagiary.

https://books.google.ch/books?id=O50-AAAAcAAJ&pg=PT181&lpg=P...

---

Daniel Defoe's The True-Born Englishman - First published in 1701, the quote below is from the explanatory preface added in a 1703 edition

Had I wrote it for the gain of the press, I should have been concerned at its being printed again, and again, by pirates, as they call them

http://www.luminarium.org/editions/trueborn.htm
To your point, assuming you're a Westerner, I quote you:

"female circumcision wouldn't be questioned as the mutilation that it is"

Maybe your traditions are blinding you to the fact that male circumcision falls in the same category.

I agree with the sentiment though, and the italicized part of your comment is quite an elegant way to put it.
> take hundreds of trains a year giving lots of opportunities to get delayed,

The problem isn't taking lots of trains. The problem is N. About 20-50% of the trains I take are delayed, and another 20% are overcrowded due to... previously delayed or cancelled trains. If N is <10 that just menas I'm unlucky. If n > 200, that means I'm paying >£5000 a year for trains that don't work.
> the minute you want to do something that doesn't fit the mold, it makes things a lot harder

This is not my experience at all; it's been extremely helpful for doing things outside the mold:

In a work codebase that is millions of lines of first-party Rust code with thousands of third-party Rust dependencies from crates.io, we're building with Buck not Cargo because that is what the rest of the monorepo uses for C++ and other languages. It's fantastic for this that all the third-party projects describe their dependency graph in the same standard Cargo manifest format and follow a standard project layout, even though our builds do not use Cargo, because we can programmatically translate them to Buck targets.
> You most likely did not descend from people who worshipped the sun, just people who used the sun in art and recognized its benefits to them.

a. You don't know my parents, don't be so sure.

b. You're right, I should have gone with "washing hands before surgery" to avoid these low-effort rebuttals.
We wrote a C++ front-end from scratch that is quite de-constructed. For example, it will show you the parse tree before type disambiguation. You can visit the templates, or the templates instantiated. It has not been maintained for a while, but here it is:

main page: http://dsw.users.sonic.net/oink/index.html

github repo: https://github.com/dsw/oink-stack/
If we're going to the effort of having dual-service to each home, we could have the "essentials" service of 500W or something that we'd try to make very reliable, to operate the fridge, medical equipment, communications, or whatever the residents deemed essential. Then the other, regular service could still have whatever capacity was already there, but would be subject to intermittent blackouts as necessary to keep everyone's essentials on.

This would require some additional infrastructure, but might be worth it if the blackouts are going to be too frequent.
I suspect someone was making that complaint by day two. Every community (online and offline) has a tendency to talk about how the community has changed, typically in a derogatory manner.
Not sure what you are trying to say with your quoted phrases.

There was an issue with the standard for the Kilogram, which was recognised then corrected by introducing a definition which is based on physically measurable phenomenon. The new approach allows independent experiments to derive the value of the Kilogram.

That seems to me like a process that works, and I struggle to think of a better outcome.
My wife is Iranian and she says that something people in Iran fail to understand about the US is that the US media is not controlled by the US government. I’ve wondered if it stems from the fact that Iran media is strictly controlled by the Iran government to the point where they are indistinguishable. I can assure you in the US this is not the case.

> Any news has a usage for whatever political agenda there is in the US administration.

If the previous administration was not sufficient proof to you that this is clearly wrong, then what proof could dissuade you?
Y'know, oddly enough, both of these things can be true at the same time, for different regions and types of poverty.

The point is, universal vegetarianism is not practical, either voluntary or enforced.
Extraordinarily difficult, judging by GP's cynicism. Personally it is appalling just how little people are motivated to be nomically tech-literate in this extremely tech-driven society.
"Even if we grant that there is a non-zero value in the timing flexibility provided by use of capital, how does this argument answer the claim that the profits flowing to investors are outsized, distorting the housing market?"

Does it have to?
Couldn't we find another answer? (Like maybe: we humans are driven by our desires and its society's obligation to prevent/reduce/limit the damage we do to others as a result)
Yeah. Who thought using decimal was a good idea? We should be using dozenal. At least 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 so doing thirds and quarters is messy. Being able to do fifths isn't as useful as thirds and quarters and you can multiply 12 by 5 and use 60 if you want to divide by fifths, like clocks do.
I'm more interested in hiring freezes, i.e. locking people out of the industry vs forcing them to switch jobs
> I would be surprised if store owners willingly replace those with LEDs due to the longevity of well made neon, which is easily 10 to 20 years.

Commercial LEDs need to be replaced about every 7-10 years - closer to 10-20 if only run at night.

Their power usage is about 1/10th that of neon. Their failure mode is also a lot more graceful - they tend to slowly dim.

Replacing LED modules is also quite a bit easier than replacing neon - instead of charging up a glass tube (or worse, patching broken glass), you show up with a box of inexpensive modules - an afternoon's work for any electrician. Replacing neon tubing with LEDs is also quite easy. Unfortunately, neon requires specialized skills.

The TCO of LEDs for signage is significantly lower than neon, the installation cost is significantly lower, it's much easier to find someone who can install LED lighting than it is neon, and you have a much wider array of options of color for LEDs.

Which is a huge shame, because I really like the way bare neon tubes look - even with dense LED packages, you can't get anything close to the ephemeral glow of classic, glass tube neon.
> Boa is an experimental Javascript lexer, parser and compiler written in Rust. Currently, it has support for some of the language.

> Boa makes it easy to embed a JS engine in your projects, and you can even use it from WebAssembly.
> Ok, but what does that actually mean?

1. Sanctions: check

2. International isolation: ~check

3. freezing foreign assets: check

4. Bringing freedom to Iran by liberating them (successful operations like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, ....): LOL, never gonna happen
a good book indeed, hope it will have an updated version for c++20/23, which arguably is the most important release since c++11, new stuff such as ranges, std::span even concepts could be added now. I think this book is a bit tough for beginners though.
> Sunday = 1

Animals. Absolutely barbaric.

Everybody knows we should index lists starting at 0. /s
Would be cool to have an expert mode where the keyboard is used to select lip tension and the slide works as on a real instrument. With a simple physical model, would make hitting the right notes easier since there's a natural 'pull' to the resonances.
Richard Carrier is an extremely fringe figure regarding the historical Jesus. The overwhelming majority of scholars in the field from conservative to liberal historians dismiss his ideas as fringe, and his methodologies as inconclusive, at best.
Indeed! More secure that way than trying to do it locally, probably, and now BST is somebody else's problem.

But since it's been around since the late 70s, clearly you can do this without needing too much advanced tech - which is what I interpreted as being the perceived problem. (Perhaps incorrectly, but it looks like I wasn't the only one...)
> One of the interesting things about the ARM instruction set […] is that ALL instructions, not just branch, were conditional, which meant that you could avoid the need for branch instructions in some cases - rather than conditionally branch past some instructions, just make them conditional and "execute" them regardless. Smaller code and faster execution!

I think both can be debated. It took 4 bits out of each 32-bit instruction to specify those condition flags. That’s 12.5% of the bits in each instruction that could have been used for other stuff such as supporting more registers and larger immediate constants, both of which could speed up code.

It was an interesting idea, though. Simple to implement and useful at times.
I didn't appreciate until recently that the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar.

Like not by some forgotten technocrats incidentally during his time, but Julius Caesar himself as a subject matter expert, as a side-project. With consultation, certainly, but by his initiative, from long-standing engagement with the problem in one of his early jobs from long before he was a main character of the Roman story.

Digestable and entertaining (fragment of a) video on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD-R35DSSZY&t=1312s
Solar alone won't do anything to make it more reliable as the inverter will shut down if the grid goes down. This is a safety feature, as if the grid is shut down for maintenance you don't want inverters feeding anything in.
You forgot on-going operations, maintenance and so on. Also, you assume all terminals are in use and paid for every month.
This was the original plan by Korolev and co, before the moon speech by JFK, and before the conditions on Venus became known. They wanted to figure out orbital assembly, and then circumnavigate Venus as the first step in the Solar System exploration. Hard to say how realistic it was, but modular orbital stations were an offshoot of that original vision, so it's been partially implemented.
The decimal system should have been the dozenal system but good luck getting people to switch from decimal to dozenal.
Sunday is the last day of the week in crontab.

Last index in the array, 7.
Global Assessment of Functioning
> "WIND" or "Solar" is not going to replace 3,500 MW of nuclear power without damaging a LOT of land.

Well, let's see. Wind uses negligible land if incorporated onto farms, so I'll assume it's all solar.

Nuclear capacity factor (fraction of the time it's operating): 0.9, call it 100%.

PV capacity factor 0.2

PV nameplate panel production per square metre 200W

PV land coverage fraction (access paths beside PV panels take up space) 0.5

Total land needed for PV to deliver equivalent power:

3 500 000 000 / (200 * 0.2 * 0.5) = 175 000 000 m^2 = 175 km^2.

Switzerland's population is 8.5M. Assuming it is 80% urbanised and 20 m^2 per person in cities (less than in Dhaka, 8.9M / 306 km^2): then Switzerland's cities take up 136 km^2. In reality, probably several times this figure.

So the land area is probably less than Switzerland's cities.

If Switzerland wished to accelerate the development of two-layer PV cells, increasing production per area by 50%, then the bulk of the 3.5GW could be provided by rooftop solar in cities.

In reality a mix of wind and PV would be used. Wind is highly compatible with pastoral farming, leaving 90% or more of the land area it "occupies" free for grazing.

The real challenge at present would be sourcing enough storage for the daily usage cycle.

Now, damage. Covering land with inert PV panels does indeed change the soil ecology, but not irremediably. Remove the panels, and the soil would be back to normal inside a decade. Contrast with coal mines and ash piles, and uranium mines. And, as above, the PV could all be on rooftops, which have already damaged the land. Get rid of the buildings!

TLDR: the "LOT of land" is not much, really, and the damage is minimal.
The good ones mostly leave those shops after a few years. Beware of anybody who looks back on them with fondness.
I enjoy reading old texts on how to live. Recommendation: Epictetus’ Discourses.

This article was interesting enough but I couldn’t find any of the cited texts online. Is anyone aware or examples that you can actually access?
I gave it an honest try, but I found it much harder to adapt to than the calendar. I could just about do head-conversion for dates between Gregorian and Revolutionary calendars for things like appointments, but found it much harder to do it for both dates and time. I still have a love for the system, though.
> I remember a project a long time ago that used Objective-C to implemente a genetic solver. It was unusable due to just how slow it was. I re-coded it in C.

Quick question. Why would you do such a thing? How can you square this with your claim that switching languages is never the answer?

I agree with you that a good development process is essential. The thing is, some languages make for a worse development process, because they inhibit automation of important steps in code review. I expect you wouldn't trust the weaker type systems of Forth or BLISS, or the unstructured control flow of COBOL, for a job where you could use C instead. If there are analysis phases that C can automate and these other languages can't, isn't it obvious (given only a moment's thought) that there could be other languages that improve on C?
> We can't have change without change.

Agreed. But what to change? If the right solution requires changing only A but you end up lumping changes to B and C as well, is that really helpful?
I've never been struck by lightning, but I was about 15 meters from a tree that was struck at the end of my cul-de-sac. My brother and I were huddled under a large cement garage carport watching the thunderstorm with a perfect view of the tree. Lightning struck it at the base and immediately split parts of the tree off. I've never seen or heard anything more awe-inspiring/terrifying.
(Friendly reminder to always observe lightning under the comfort and safety of cover).
> Well since we are getting political, how about the left-wing tactic of always needing more money.

And if government had ever been funded to the point that the left wing actually wants (note: not "to the point that politics actually allows in compromise budgets, either with the Republicans or with the fiscally conservative parts of the Democrats"), over the past few hundred years, and it had still failed to solve the problems that are trying to be solved with more money, you might be able to derive a valid criticism out of this.
The 12 makes sense for being divisible by 3 and 4.
60 does the same but also for 5.

The rest is chaos.