skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From that article (which is astonishing):

> Between 2007 and 2021, Eskom invested R680 billion to increase its generation capacity. However, after this huge investment, Eskom produced less power than when it started.

The power plants started in 2007 with initial budgets of R79 billion and R81 billion and were due to be completed in 2012 and 2014. Neither are fully operational, produce far less than the design capacity of 4800MW, have significantly overrun their budgets (R145 B and R161 B respectively), and require another R33 B to finish! Is this all corruption or ???

edit:
Here's another article: https://archive.ph/LctJi . tl;dr: mismanagement, corruption, and a very long history of pricing power below cost and borrowing to cover. Plus handouts to inefficient coal suppliers creating that bad cost structure that wasn't passed on to buyers.
Oh open floors is even worse. The best is tiny little rooms - offices.

Cube farms at least you can customize and claim “your space”.
Because maybe it’s validating as a project to know a large commercial entity uses your code? Maybe the exposure Stockfish gets if ChessBase complies with their requests is worth making sure they can continue to survive? Maybe Stockfish is delighted that their project reaches so many users and is focused on making sure that remains so?
This might be unpopular, but the Google/Nest WIFI pucks are pretty decent. I'd wish for a configuration other than the crappy mobile app, and better family controls, but compared to anything than a self rolled DDWRT it's really good out of the box, and it does its own FW upgrades.
I think 'anything can happen' needs to be extended to the C standards committee's bank accounts.
The real concern is that you can fire 75% of the parody site workers and still have it keep humming.
Particularly in the USA and childless. Especially if you don't need access to the best public schools, there are so many extraordinarily vibrant metro areas with really cheap housing.
Not surprisingly, 7 of 8 are in California.

I'm more curious about the bottom 8 of the list, however; the cheapest cities in the US.
Just wanna say this app saved my family and I when we went on a cruise. Normally, we would had had to pay to use the chat service via the ship's paid-only Wi-Fi (since we get no phone reception on the seas). Without needing to pay for the Wi-Fi, we were all able to use Briar to communicate whilst connected to the network, which made coordinating and finding each other on the ship way easier. It was great and worked really well. So thanks, Briar!
I think that this move isn't so much about privacy. I think that French government is beginning to realize that these types of products and services constitute critical IT infrastructure for the country. As such, these products can not be offered by a foreign country, no matter how friendly. I suspect the government offices will be next. I am not actually sure, what alternatives are out there for MS Office and Google Docs?
True. Putting a website online available to anybody to visit does not mean I’m acting in Europe, though.
Avaya maybe?
to a significant extent the modern environmental movement is not only a rebellion against the actual environmental destruction wrought by things like the cuyahoga river getting so polluted it could catch on fire, damming glen canyon, and ddt pushing the bald eagle to the brink of extinction; it is also a rebellion against the unrestrained power to destroy that brought them about

when people move to off-grid solar cabins in the mountains, support laws that make it impossible to build nuclear power plants, or take up organic farming, they're not just trying to save the planet; they're seeking refuge from that unrestrained power of destruction, which they have come to see as malignant

they are seeking autonomy in which to construct a harmonious life

but the power to destroy, pouvoir de nuisance, overlaps greatly with the power to create; you cannot build a hydroelectric power plant without destroying the land upstream, you cannot build pruitt-igoe without bulldozing poor neighborhoods, and you cannot invent nontoxic firesafe refrigerants without taking the risk of destroying the ozone layer

so, when these 'environmentalists' seeking autonomy look at high-modernist 'cities of the future' visions of towers in a park whose polyhedral geometry is a boast of the architect's rationality, they correctly see them as the epitome of central planning with the unrestrained power to destroy

which, to return to the alternate history imagined at the beginning of the article, really doesn't have a great track record, even aside from environmental damage
Ask HN: Software for interpreting analog music chords?
Greetings,

I happened to get into music (specifically guitar) during the pandemic and have had a blast recording my riffs. However, I leave the music recorded on my iPhone and have a hard time remembering or reconstructing the exact notes/chords I discover.

Does anyone know of any chord/notes interpreter on the web or for sale? I’d love to feed in the guitar lines and have a time-dependent output of the notes I had been fooling around with :)

Thanks in advance! -Joseph A.
It’s a real loss when we lose tribes like this because we also lose 50,000 years of accumulated knowledge.
Deleted my message to your og message because you posted this here, but you're basically basing your whole argument on one person in a cable leak.

It's not much of a base.
I just fixed some neural-net code to use #7. I hate passing pointers to layers that have a fixed size, and passing an array causes problems sometimes that require too many cats. Typedef array pointer to the sized array is precisely what I needed.
More housing lowers housing prices and makes the city better, which attracts more people, which raises housing prices. It's hard to separate the two effects, but if you compare a city that builds more with a city that builds less, building less has little to recommend it. And yes, Tokyo is a good example.
Oh no. Now what should I use? I can't believe something that's actively in development is considered dead these days. Surely there's a better alternative with as good or better community support, right? Right...?
I tried Tabnine and had mixed feelings. It can make sensible suggestions and save my time, but Tabnine forcing said suggestions to top priority means I’m spending time to press down key to find the obvious autocomplete. And this can’t be turned off.

Not sure about Kite though
You list out a lot of propositions in your comment about what Matrix's role model can or cannot do compared to Discord's, but only some of them are actually true.

To attempt to distill the real deficiencies:

- Non-monotonic roles. You can't have Deleters (who can only delete things, but not ban) and Banners (who can only ban, but not delete things) in a single channel (room).

- Auto-joining rooms upon joining a space.

- Room roles/permissions inheriting from space roles/permissions.

- A permission to control which members of a space can see a channel.

Luckily all of those except the first one seem easily built upon the current protocol by relatively tame extensions.

The last two in particular stem from the fact that spaces are too "weak" to support this at the moment: unlike in Discord, a room can be in more than one space at once. This means you can use spaces to define your own private categorizations, which is something Discord doesn't support at all. However, to be able to support those last two use cases, we'd need to define a mechanism by which a room could designate one special space as the owning space for that room.

On the other hand, Matrix does have:

- Categories. These are simply modeled with spaces within spaces. Spaces can be infinitely nested.

- The ability to make roles behave differently on a per-channel and per-space basis.

- A role which can only delete things but not ban people, or a role which can ban people but not delete things. You just can't have both at the same time.
So don't?

At the very least write an explicit unit test for whatever it is. If someone breaks it, at least it will be on your landmine and not at deploy or worse. If you setup a potential for improvement, protect the functionality and ensure it is successfully the next persons problem, but can situationally identified in the future.
For me it was the bedbugs. Maybe I am too picky.
Thank you .. exactly

A team that spends all its time grooming the backlog is not spending time on reading code, logs inputs, output, data etc.

We have fooled ourselves into thinking ticketing systems represent living documents but they don't - a high functioning team can have "hey I will fix the foobar by adding a cromulent adjutant" in a office (!) call or even an email.

A low functioning team knows no one will get round to fixing it
Elizabeth Warren wrote a book about this called The Two Income Trap [0]

[0] https://a.co/d/iA9xxIX
>women naturally flow to careers more in line with their strengths

Explain what you mean by this, without making a hacked butcher job of it.

I’ve got a fresh drink and plate of snacks, I’m actually giddily excited to see how you do (and of course have the X-posts drafted out already)
I feel like you're being a little myopic if you feel that all of programming is logical. Look into the probability stuff like machine learning. Read books from Nassim Taleb like Antifragile to understand that it's very easy for us to convince ourselves that logic and increasingly complex models solve everything. In reality there are many meta-strategies you can use like "via negativa" to still be rational, but make the world appear less crazy, and make the crazy in the world look more obvious, and avoidable.
> The cloud has it's place but I've never been happy with the underhanded way that Office 365 "encourages" users to save to the cloud.

What does it do?

I use it on my Mac and nearly all my documents are just local, except for a few I've specifically saved to the could so I can easily access them from other devices.

When I make a new document and save it, it defaults to the save it locally dialog. I don't notice any encouragement, let alone underhanded encouragement, to save to the cloud.

It is possible that when I first installed it the default was to give the save online dialog when saving a new document instead of the save local dialog, but it seems to remember which one you last used and give that as the default the next time.

Have I missed some other encouragement to use the cloud?
We had 8 systems in the Top 500 list at Weta Digital back in 2008 which were liquid cooled HP servers for rendering Avatar. We used one of the techniques mentioned in the article: liquid to liquid heat exchangers. Each rack was fully sealed with its own heat exchanger which pumped in cool water and sent off warm water to chillers on the roof. Actually the warm water condensing would attract seagulls in the winter which was a problem since we were right next to the airport. The datacentre was designed by an engineering firm which usually built dairy factories. Every once in a while something would go wrong with the cold water delivery system and the servers would overheat and shut down in about 30 seconds.
Serratus (https://github.com/ababaian/serratus) is an OSS bioinformatics project created by a passionate group of volunteers. Short story is we're re-analyzing all of the world's DNA/RNA sequencing data to find new viruses that other people have missed. It works surprisingly well, but there's a ton left to do.
Yes. DOS itself came with several TSRs, for example keyboard drivers. They were absolutelt commonplace and, if written properly, nowhere as unreliable as claimed.
> If you never have to come back to “fix it”, was it actually wrong to begin with?

A dead simple and effective heuristic is to improve code a little bit each time you touch it. The code you touch a lot gets love and ends up nicely designed. The code you rarely touch won't be as nice, but that's fine, because you rarely touch it.

If you're going to make a big functionality change or addition that will take a while, that's a great time to significantly refactor the existing code. The change will provide additional design context for the refactoring, which you wouldn't have had earlier.

Of course this strategy requires you to have good tests. If you do a refactoring followed immediately by a functionality change, and you don't have good tests to verify that the refactoring is solid, you'll have trouble attributing bugs to the refactoring or the changes. If you don't have good tests and basically test in production, then you'll want to refactor ahead of time so you can deploy the refactored code and shake out the bugs before you start building on it.
We've been building tiny houses for the past year and a half (4 houses total, two of which we've sold). After talking to a couple of hundred people interested in tiny houses, here's what we've learned:

The wheels/trailers are "dumb" because almost nobody wants to move them once they get them in place. So as far as we can tell the only reason to build on a trailer is to avoid regulations in many locations throughout the US (an example: where we are in New Mexico if you build a house on a foundation you need to hire licensed plumbers and electricians whereas if you build on a trailer you can DIY; needless to say licensed professionals are far more expensive that doing it yourself so there are significant savings when you DIY).

The people interested in tiny houses seem to fall into three buckets (maybe 4): 1. people who want an Airbnb on their existing property (these are usually well-to-do folks who don't bat an eye at the pricing) 2. older folks who don't have the means to retire in a normal-sized house 3. younger folks who don't have the means to live in a normal house 4. if there's a 4th, it's younger folks who want a vacation house that they can Airbnb when they're not using it.

These 4 markets seem quite large based on the number of people who have reached out to us when we do pretty minimal marketing. And the reason we started doing this in the first place was to build below-market-rate housing (i.e., targeting groups 2 and 3 above), but there's a bit of a paradox going on here that we're trying to solve: groups 2 and 3 do not have the means to buy houses (tiny or not) outright so the only way we're going to crack this nut is if you can finance the purchase. We think we've found a way to do that, at least in our local market of Northern New Mexico, and we're just going through the proper channels with our local county to test this concept because lenders of course require that what you're building is legitimate. We're still hopeful that this will be a good solution locally, if not more broadly. Btw, we have never given a thought to trying to do this in an urban area. Doesn't seem sensible given land values where cheaper housing is almost by definition multifamily (i.e., >=2 units on a lot).

Edit: Oh, duh, here's a link to the house we build: https://santafe.craigslist.org/reo/d/el-prado-brand-new-full...
The article specifically refers to the free edu versions of office and workspace. What about the paid ones?
Honestly, I would think that after the code injection fiasco for popular Atom editor plugin that their brand would have been forever tainted.
Huh? Multi-story is the best thing for aging; an apartment block full of single floor apartments with a lift is easy and natural, a house without stairs is pretty hard to make viable.
Where do they rank in terms of being an industrial power? If they’re spying and that’s the best outcome they can muster…I don’t blame people for assuming they’re not peak-spying.
Here in Spain we observe the same. Having dozens of harvesting olives manually or with the help of small machines were worthwhile while big olive harvesters were rare and salaries where lower, but now we have the opposite situation.
The GDPR is explicitly not the same as those laws, claiming that it applies to anybody anywhere who puts a website online for any reason irregardless of any trade agreements.
Oh wow, I love this use case. I'd imagine it's also quite useful on a plane as well
If you have time to fix the hack independent of modifying that code for a specific need then you should be asking what else you could be working on. Fix it later implies resource availability which is an alien concept for project managers.
A coworker of mine uses it, it almost seems like an unfair advantage but I can also use it too if I want to. Specifically writing hard to decipher code eg. functional composition but Copilot will spit it out.

I haven't wanted to use it personally. I'm also not a senior dev or anything so my opinion is not worth much.
That would only seem to confirm my point. There are plenty of non-US firms competing with FAANG comp in London.
You should still be able to find the free (on discontinuation) Fender Riffstation Pro software out there. That’s what I’ve been using for a long time now.
The Fraudulent King
From what I have seen, the "tiny house" trend typically is located in the middle of nowhere though where there is plenty of space to build a much bigger one.

A small apartment is pretty good and workable when it's in a city where you can make use of external facilities. I just don't see the point when you have space for 50 houses on the land but you build this one shipping container sized one right in the middle.
Pretty upsetting that some Universities find the solution to the moral dilemma of encouraging gambling is to continue doing it but siphon off some of the profits for DnI.

It speaks to the prevalence of the idea that the ends justify the means in our culture. DnI just so happens to be the latest goal that is difficult to argue against without being characterized as a bigot or racist.

The same holds true for state lotteries and their advertising. The fact that some funds go to support education does not negate the fact that the state is promoting and engaging in Behavior that is destructive to many individuals.

The fact that someone else's bound to prey on these individuals doesn't make it right for you to do it.
Lol for you to truly believe this. German officials were still complaining about French spying in the wikileaks cables.

France has partically cornered the market on datacenter infrastructure (everything from the racks down...somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 is made by French companies).

If you think 300+ years of strategy/tradecraft suddenly ceased functioning 40 years ago (and because why?) you'd be sorely mistaken.

It's more likely the case that manned airframe deveopment has been fairly stagnant around the world since the 80s for political/budget reasions (which is true), so you haven't been able to see their blatant wins. France has seemed to keep up with the rest of world in UAV development (Parrot) despite much less investment....
> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.

I’m an individual developer and I pay for tools all the time. They just have to be of value to me. If developers weren’t paying for your tool, maybe look within.
At the risk of splitting hairs, I'd point out that 'malice' usually refers to someone hurting people with the intention of causing pain. I feel as if what you're describing is selfishness, not malice.

I definitely think SBF should do jail-time. The read I got from his Twitter interview, after the fact, was that he went into this with the goal of personal riches and glory and ultimately failed, not that he went in with the intention of making people poorer. Do you agree there's a difference? In short, I think:

Incompetence + Selfishness != Malice
Churn doesn't create new jobs. In depopulated places like the rust belt, the problem isn't that all the jobs are filled by people with stable 20-year careers, the problem is there aren't any jobs period.
https://archive.ph/nCyhM
My wife reserved a house, six months into the future. Her health took a bad turn and she tried to cancel, four months before the rental date. Zero refund. Really shitty business practices “leaving refunds up to the owner.” Screw Airbnb, I hope they crash and burn.
> Within a matter of years we will begin seeing famine; in a nation with some of the best and most abundant farmland in the world.

Meanwhile the Netherlands thrive, despite barely even having land - most of what they have, they had to take from the sea. There are countless similar examples - it seems resources and land quality have precious little to do with prosperity.
My wife and I use Briar for household communication because of subsidiarity rather than any direct privacy concerns. Out of all the messenger projects that we've tried, Briar actually works for local communication. It's actually instant messaging without any client hiccups or latency (looking at you, Signal). We've tried a ton of other options, but we keep ending up back at Briar.

There are points of UX friction in the name of good opsec that are inconvenient but totally understandable given the project goals. The big ones being that you have to manually login after any reboots and notifications are intentionally sparse, so good luck using a smartwatch for reading or replying. Otherwise, the forums and blogs are great for managing household projects, IM is a dream, and as a bonus, anyone willing to install and use it probably has a large enough values overlap that we can use it as a social pre-filter for close friends.

The only other option that has come even remotely close to being as functional as Briar is DeltaChat. The only issue that stops us from using DeltaChat (or email in general) is that we both have email hosting in Europe while we live in the US, so neither of us, being frugal in principal, wants to send information to Europe and back in order to tell the person 100 ft away to come help bring in the groceries.
Code I archive. Todo items I delete. If it's important, it'll come back up again.
Yeah, where it seems very good for me is just writing flask or fast api boilerplate, esp if I have a good function sig + doc string.

I kind of hoped that it would propose good tsx for my components (react+mui) but instead it’s basically useless. Maybe problem is that I chose “filter out exact code reproductions.”
There are presumably countermeasures already within striking distance from adversarial satellites. Kinetic, laser, radio jamming, clandestinely placed surface mines...

The DoD has been thinking of space warfare since the 60's. The space shuttle program was built for defense purposes. Now they have X planes to carry out these missions, and they're continually launching classified payloads.
What about a plain old email server set up in house? Maybe it would cost more and have less features, but it sounds like a good price to pay to avoid Google and Microsoft. Email after all does not have to be centrally managed because of the way it works.
Vector Similarity Search
Then don't make it "stray" - parse the code for todos and other lintable items - and yes some grooming is needed - but don't make the ticketing system drive the development- that's the tail wagging the dog, or looking at the receipt at the restaurant and thinking that's what caused the chef to cook the meal.
> You just don't get it.

Your missing the point on the fact that IRC is all text. All you could ever do send links. It worked but sucks from now future on.

Nowadays where do you host those links? Github? Sure. But the FAFF of setting up a github static wank account. find some lets encrypt cert bot owned by google which expires every six months. Your going to do all that for one IRC Link?

In the days before tumblr, the simple days of MSN/Yaho. When IRC was active and flourishing. You could just send a link from your own server, a server in your bedroom. Sitting on your home 56k IP on a http server without needing any cert, any annoying messages, cookie banners to a user.

Those days are over. I know, but it hasn't gotten easier. IRC it's sitting right there, the diamond.
What was the school quality in other African countries, without apartheid?