skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Details on data centre water use by both modality and quantity are ... curiously difficult to find. I'd turned up several blathery but largely uninformative posts.

This one describes use in cooling, and by reference to closed-loop water cooling as an alternative, I suspect that open-loop evaporative cooling towers or systems account for much of the usage. Which would suggest also that the water isn't discharged, per se, but evaporated into the local atmosphere:

Data centers that are located in central cities can use water-cooled chillers that work with the CRAH. It is also most effective for a low-humidity environment with higher temperatures and adequate water sources. It is installed within the facility that is connected with the condenser water loops. In the water-cooled chillers, the water evaporates through the cooling tower. This results in consistent demand for water to replace the evaporated one. With this, it is also referred to as an “Open Loop Cooling System”. This does not contribute to the overall data center Water Usage Effectiveness.

<https://www.akcp.com/articles/water-usage-effectiveness-towa...>
You can't use "EU" and "global" in the same headline here, BBC.
In around 2004 I worked for a big five company. They were using some AIX, Solaris and HP-UX next to Linux which was still seen as that new thing. I remember having a training on some software where HP UX workstations where wheeled in. But those were really getting old at that point.

I worked at an ISP in 2007 which was running mostly on Sun hardware and Solaris. This was because of huge discounts provided by Sun. Most devs ran Linux on their workstations. In 2014 I got to work with some guy whose previous project had been at that ISP, who was at that point desperately trying to move off Solaris because they had to start paying list price for the OS and it was much too expensive.
I don't think they are going to get that price
That blog post links to an annual water metrics report[1] which breaks it into withdrawal, discharge, and consumption. Withdrawal and discharge aren't defined. The disclaimers on that report:

> “Water consumption” is equal to (“water withdrawal” – “water discharge”). Unless otherwise noted, all water metrics above are potable water. Our reported annual water withdrawal, water discharge, and water consumption metrics do not include seawater. For these water metrics, the geographical scope includes Google-owned data centers. Water withdrawal and discharge data is based on actual metered or invoiced data when it is available. In all instances where actual data is not available, we estimate water withdrawal and discharge using industry best practices.

> This data is subject to measurement uncertainties resulting from limitations inherent in the nature and the methods used for determining such data. The selection of different but acceptable measurement techniques can result in materially different measurements. The precision of different measurement techniques may also vary. Whereas we annually obtain third-party assurance from an independent, accredited auditor for Google’s top down operational water metrics, the water metrics within this data table have not been similarly verified or assured.

Google is more secretive than Microsoft about how water's used:[2]

> Microsoft’s data centers currently use adiabatic cooling, which relies on outside air to cool down temperatures inside. It’s a system that uses less electricity than air conditioning and less water than cooling towers. But when temperatures rise above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, outside air isn’t very helpful. At that point, an evaporative cooling system kicks in, which uses water. It works like a “swamp cooler” — cooling the air by pushing it over or through water-soaked screens.

Evaporative cooling is wastewater typically discharged into sewerage, municipal or otherwise, for treatment. You can recycle it, but eventually it becomes too contaminated by the evaporation/condensation/discharge cycle for reuse OR cost-effective treatment, which can become a different form of local water system stress.[3][4]

1: (PDF) https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/2022-us-data-...

2: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/27/22747394/microsoft-data-...

3: https://www.watertechonline.com/process-water/article/140741...

4: Press release caveat: https://cyrusone.com/blog-post/not-all-water-is-created-equa...
Renewables and nuclear are of course not opposing each other; they are opposing fossil fuels.

According to the article, the UK now has less electrical generation than it would like / planned to have. Partly because the nuclear power plants failed to go online at the planned time. Partly because the amount of renewable generation that has been built in the meantime is not sufficient ether, because renewables need to be seriously overpeovisioned, due to their varying output.

Hence "both were too slow". Were they not, there'd be no energy deficit, I suppose.
From Doom Scrolling to Creator Economy: Web3 Rewiring Social Media as We Know It
Goldman Sachs prepares to lay off almost 4k employees
90s web design wasn't just geocities. In fact most web designs were more usable because they were designed only for desktop and almost always a single screen size. And there was no lack of pretty ones, beauty that was less uniform than it is today.
I do not understand how a human can participate in finning.

Amputation of the fins from a living, awake animal then tossing it into ocean while it thrashes around in pain.

There's no excuse for that level of inhumanity.
The evidence supports me on this.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm715152e1.htm?s_cid=...
This sounds like the plot of a John Irving novel.
> Some of what we today consider to be the canon of Western philosophy was never meant to be shared widely. ...Many of Aristotle's "writings" were just student-created notes of his teachings.

He wrote a large number of treatises, they just haven't survived. By contrast, all of Plato's works were preserved.

"Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises and other works covering all areas of philosophy and science. Of those, none survives in finished form. The approximately 30 works through which his thought was conveyed to later centuries consist of lecture notes (by Aristotle or his students) and draft manuscripts edited by ancient scholars, notably Andronicus of Rhodes, the last head of the Lyceum, who arranged, edited, and published Aristotle’s extant works in Rome about 60 BCE."

https://www.britannica.com/question/How-many-works-did-Arist...
I tried asking ChatGPT about a math question I thought of that I don't know the answer to:

Is there a function f: R -> R such that for all real x1, x2 and y where x1 < x2, there exists an x where x1 < x < x2 and f(x) = y ?

I was hoping it might at least point me in the right direction but, although it always attempts a proof, most of its answers contain something trivially incorrect like "A set cannot be infinite, therefore..."

That said, it did give me a reasonable proof that such a function can't exist if it has to be continuous, because of a thing called the intermediate value theorem, which I hadn't heard of before. But when I asked about noncontinuous functions, it went back to bullshitting.

(If anyone here does know the answer, I'd love to hear it!)
AdbOrc
> The only real solution is that we consumers consume less, and probably spend more for the same products, period.

I couldn’t disagree more. We need more regulation and taxation, and the real cost of the externalities added to the end product. The public is subsidizing and paying for private industry to pollute and use resources without accountability. That needs to end. The idea that the problem is solely due to personal consumption by individuals is a greenwashing tactic used by corporations to avoid responsibility for their products. The real solution is to put up barriers to producing these products and make the companies pay for their impact on the planet. This strange, antisocial idea that companies aren’t part of the social contract and don’t have to follow the rules of governments and civilization needs to be called out.
> Our tax systems have become a perverse inversion where we tax the poor to enrich monopoly cartels.

Could you expand on this?

Naively looking at the details on the federal tax revenue, I'm having trouble understanding: https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...

A chart, by income: https://files.taxfoundation.org/20220119175703/FedData2022_1...

Some relevant conclusions:

"The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI below $44,269) faced an average income tax rate of 3.5 percent."

"In 2019, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. "

"The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI of $546,434 and above) paid the highest effective income tax rate of 25.6 percent—more than seven times the rate faced by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers."
Ask HN: New business model? e.g. freemium, user-created content, 2way marketplac
what will this decade's breakthrough business model be?
We really appreciate any comments on our software for time tracking and the landing page. Currently the landing page is only in German but the software is also usable with an English translation.
More like the secant method I suppose.
But what do you replace it with? Windows also has "Windows Evenings" that I can't pull on my 30 years of experience to fix, and MacOS forces you to do things their way. And I'm a grumpy old man who likes things my way.
A huge reason companies use so much water is that it's artificially cheap. Companies typically pay 10% or less of the cost per gallon a resident does in their home.
Glad to hear that :D One of my main goals was to show the entire progression of how I approached the problem, instead of just saying "here's the final result".

I have another article that covers profiling in more detail, you might find it useful:
https://death.andgravity.com/fast-conway-cubes#intro-to-prof...

Note that besides the cProfile text output, there are better, graphical tools for profiling; I've personally used pyflame+flamegraph.pl, and tuna.
Hopefully abandoning the smartphone might result in these kids picking up Das Kapital at the Brooklyn library.
By that logic a parrot should be doing calculus within 10-20 years of its first word. Unlikely...

It's a fallacy to anthropomorphize a pile of linear algebra, relate it to a scale of human development, and extrapolate that AI is on a similar trajectory of progress/potential.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/605/
Use of AI Software on ArtStation
I'm not sure there's a director in the world who could have done the dinner scene justice. Some things just can't bridge mediums.
> company that uses Slack heavily. They have 1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff

It's possible that the entire company has problems here -- with communication/organizing efficiency, and with lots of activity that might not be very productive (spending lots of time operating Slack, and being interrupted by it).

You might not be able to solve the entire-company problem. But you should talk with your manager, if you trust them. They could interface sideways and up the chain of command, and with HR -- on behalf of their reports' health and the effectiveness of their unit, and maybe more broadly (depending how hierarchical the company is).
I'm unsure where I indicated any obsession? Before replying I didn't actually know all of his roles there, I looked them up.

No, I have never worked with a billionaire CEO, founder and chairman of a space company. I have however worked with many founders and CEOs, and the ones who are dead weight quickly get moved on.

Why you do believe it's likely for this one to hold all the decision making power in a successful company with effectively no input?

Surely the default assumption is the founder/CEO of a successful company plays a part in it? So what do you have to indicate this is untrue, aside from your obvious dislike of a person you don't know.
You can, or at least could 5 years ago or so (and I bet you still could now).

However, it involved finding some random blog post on how to do it, and then even once I got it up and running there were some issues like the fans being pegged at 100%. Still, it was mostly functional.
It’s a technical philosophical term for sensations like color and smell, which denotes they are subjective experiences of sensory information, as opposed to objective properties out there in the world.
Took long enough.
"Download Wordpress.exe and double click to run it"
One famous example (from 1997) is to lay out the rules for generating Fast Fourier code (for any input range, not just powers of two) and have correct efficient C code generated.

[1] https://www.fftw.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFTW
“Bossism”

Because we didn’t already have a name for the system in which power (both within firms and within the broader society as a whole) is placed in the hands of capital owners rather than workers.
What will the ratio be once the reactor does come online?
> Roberts criticises those theorists who claim that this post-pandemic digital capitalism means that Marx’s theory of value and exploitation of labour is no longer relevant to the nature of class relations and oppression at work in modern societies.

Who can’t make that argument based on the fact Marx’s theory of value is just plain wrong?

And what’s up with all the pro-communist propaganda being posted lately?
Yes, let’s - both.
Lots of advice here about things you can do, but remeber that your work is relational: you and your company can work together to find a solution that works for you. I see this as a JEDI (justice, equality/equity, diversity, and inclusion) issue. Your company should be willing to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate you.
There's another very simple test you can put ChatGPT through: Ask it to multiply some small numbers which it will most likely get right. Then ask it to multiply some large numbers and it will most likely be wrong by an order of magnitude or more. My layman's explanation is that because the space of likely answers is much smaller for small numbers than for larger ones the probability of finding the same multiplication in its corpus is high and the result likely correct. The larger the numbers the less likely it is to find the same multiplication or find an inference (for example both numbers begin with a 2, the result is likely starting with a 4) that is correct for all digits.
Cybertruck preorders cost $100, not $100K.
That's a fine guess, and it's not like I know any better, but if the fronts don't travel at the same speeds then... why? If there's enough kinetic energy to break the bonds in the material, what's it doing before they break?
This is incredibly cool, especially the prompts[1] where you describe information retrieval as reinforcement learning problem. Am I understanding that right? I had no idea you could do that.

[1] https://github.com/ferrucc-io/gpt-google/blob/57dfd0dc20d614...
Does schizophrenia occur more often in people with certain genetic traits? Does the majority of people with such traits live in urban environments, e.g. in highly urbanized countries?

(No idea; just a hypothesis to test.)
Oppenheimer Cleared [pdf]
"Pursuant to the authority vested in the Secretary of Energy to carry out the functions of the Atomic
Energy Commission, I hereby order that the decision rendered on June 29, 1954, In The Matter of
J. Robert Oppenheimer be vacated. "
Computing a SHA1 (Ed: for every password in the file) is hardly free, which suggests rather than minimize total time you want to minimize latency for a service.

In which case the obvious improvement is to load as much of the password file into RAM as possible while waiting for the request and then only search the disk if it’s non in RAM. As to whether you want to load prefixes so you can quickly reject passwords not in the file or full passwords to acknowledge the password as soon as possible probably depends on how likely the matches are.
Thomas Pynchon: Is It O.K. To Be a Luddite?
Those irregularities should smooth out over generations if we keep at it.
As a teacher, I totally agree. Understanding something when the teacher presents material is not at all the same thing as digging in and trying some problems yourself.
I agree. Using software modifications as a competitive advantage in business does not violate free software licenses. It does, however, violate non-free licenses like GPL
My understanding is that, within the academic literature, nearly everyone accepts qualia in as much as qualia is simply the subjective character of an experience/sensation. The disagreement is over how exactly to cash that out, and whether - and to what extent - the non-physical comes into play.
I’m not sure foie gras have sustainability implications, it scales up and down well.

Basically the only principle involved is to insert a pipe into a bird’s throat, and force feed it to the point vision will be lost from complications. The bird is then slaughtered and liver harvested. Resultant specimen is butter-like but rich in flavor and pleasantly elastic.

Gods forbid foie gras enjoyer entering heavens, but the sin of it isn’t in environmental division.
Props for looking beyond the headline. I am only about 1/5 through and have 4 pages of notes so far (many of which are "things to expect context-free outrage bait headline/talkshow topics to focus on". We'll see how it goes.
Remote work is fine in some circumstances. One of the circumstances where it is definitely not fine is in designing, manufacturing, and testing high-precision aerospace hardware. You aren't gonna put a 5-axis CNC mill in your garage.
I think that’s a really interesting ethical question, personally I think the profit incentive will cause a cobra effect type situation and these species will never be made extinct where they were introduced.

Having that in mind it’s a situation where one needs a crystal ball to determine whats the right things. A single large ecological shift, with all ethical harms that come with it, or a long term lower level of ethical harm.
I used to work for Sherwin-Williams. The in-store computers run some custom *nix OS. The software that company runs on is a text based ui that hasn't changed since it was introduced in the 90s.

They released a major update in 2020 that allowed you to move windows around the screen. It was groundbreaking.

But let me tell you, this system was absolutely terrible. All the machines were full x86 desktops with no hard drive, they netbooted from the manager's computer. Why not a thin client? A mystery.

The system stored a local cache of the database, which is only superficially useful. The cache is always several days, weeks, or months out of date, depending on what data you need. Most functions require querying the database hosted at corporate HQ in Cleveland. That link is up about 90% of the time, and when it's down, every store in the country is crippled.

It crashed frequently and is fundamentally incapable of concurrent access: if an order is open on the mixing station, you cannot access that order to bill the customer, and you can't access their account at all. Frequently, the system loses track of which records are open, requiring the manager manually override the DB lock just to bill an order.

If a store has been operating for more than a couple of years, the DB gets bloated or fragmented or something, and the entire system slows to a crawl. It takes minutes to open an order.

Which is all to say it's a bad system that cannot support their current scale of business.
Actually, Europe's renewables - besides hydroelectricity - are mostly wind precisely for this reason. Wind is 12% of the EU's electricity generation as compared to 6% for solar [2]. Nuclear power is more than both combined at 25% [3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Uni...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

3. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
https://docs.python.org/3/library/bisect.html
Autopilot steers with the lane you're in. If it's unsure at the intersection, it will force the driver to retake control.

I've never been at an intersection where straight ahead is a wrong way (wouldn't the traffic be then facing you?), but like any cruise control system, it would likely require driver attention.

Autopilot is not intended to be enable and go to sleep. It's simply fancy cruise control.
> We especially didn't want to pawn off our responsibility as parents onto their future 18-year-old college-bound selves to learn how to deal with excesses.

This is an important point. There's a reason that it's well known on any given college campus that the wildest people are the ones with the strictest parents.

To anyone reading this - guide your kids, don't try to lock them down. Obviously what degree of freedom:restriction will be dependent on the kid in question, but be guided by the point above. I don't want to know where I would be right now if I didn't have friends who screwed up their life first and didn't choose to use them as a warning.

E: Added last sentence
Say you have a web app, an iOS app and an android app. And let’s say the model of the data that makes sense for the purposes being the UI for these apps is different from the model that’s used to persist data in the database. It means somewhere between the database and the UI template you’re going to be transforming from one model to another. What you don’t want to do is have the equivalent transformation implemented 3 times — once per app; instead you want to do this transform at or below the common interface that they call operate against, ie the GraphQL server.

In my experience it’s very uncommon for anything other than simple prototypes to not have at least some divergence between the UI model and the persistence model.
Get vaxxed, then you can't get hurt by them.
This is the downside of a more decentralized country. In many nations with more centralized control, the federal government would simply come up with a plan and each smaller jurisdiction would have to do what they were told.

But the USA requires a meeting of "officials from seven states, water agencies, tribes and the federal government" to negotiate, and continually fail to come to any agreement.

Each will blame the others, nothing will get done, and everyone will lose, all to avoid not getting the best deal for themselves.
How do you prevent ⌘+Tab from automatically jumping you between desktops? At that point, the desktops feel like impediments, not boundaries.
How is China able to build nuclear power plants relatively quickly? Are you saying the British are incapable of doing this in less than a decade? I bet the military could do it faster.
3 years. I’m back at my computer and checked, my certificates were 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022
> If they stop wanting meat companies will stop making meat.

If companies start paying the total costs (water, carbon)—including externalities—of their raw materials, and pass those costs onto consumers, perhaps things will rebalance.
Technically, its the technical philosophical term for subjective experiences generally.

Any discussion about it, however, is fairly deep navel-gazing, because it excludes and cannot be distinguished by any objective, testable, material effect.
I always thought XP + >=ServPack2 was the best.
Hunter gatherer societies no doubt considered them to be shamans or treated them with psychedelics
If you're lucky
One of the top use cases for OCaml is to build interpreters and compilers for new languages. Its syntax and type system makes it very natural to navigate tree-structured data, such as ASTs. It has a great parser generator library, Menhir, as well as an up-to-date LLVM API. The first version of Rust was written in OCaml.