skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But why does that stop technical folks from creating protocol-based software and services?

That is how the Internet was in the 90s, right? It was no mainstream and nobody cared much. The tech folks created their protocols, server tools, client tools and created their own networks with their own subcultures. IRC, newsgroups, Gopher, BBS all came out of that.

Why should that stop now just because internet is now accessible to the whole world? Tech folks can be tech folks and they can still fool around and create these small networks with subcultures. Gemini is a recent development but such things are fewer today than in the 90s. Wonder why!
School budgets are set by your local school board(s). If you want to pay teachers more, vote for school board members that promise to do that exact thing.

School board elections are one of the best examples of a local election being able to enact meaningful, visible change in your community.
I wonder if there are any statistical correlations between an increase in porch pirates and other crime?

Also, I wonder if the Glitter Bomb lessons can be applied using a DNA forensic property marking system to secure nearly 100% conviction rates and fast response by law enforcement seeking to juice their arrest-to-conviction metrics. Might have to leave an actual Amazon delivery in the bait box to secure proof of harm in court? Instead of only spraying glitter, also spray the DNA marker and live narrowcast both GPS and an OpenHaystack transmitter to law enforcement to direct them in real-time to the right door to investigate.
>Only a tiny minority of the working population could read Ancient Greek in Europe in 1800. In England, around 50% of the population were still entirely illiterate at that point in time.

Surely that can't be true? Here in Sweden literacy was made mandatory for adults in 1686. It was not permitted to get married without being able to read.

Surely England can't have been that far behind, as late as 1800ed?
It's not true that most rich countries ship their plastic waste to poorer countries [0]:

Many people think that rich countries ship most of their plastic waste overseas. But is this really true?

The short answer is no: many countries export some of their waste, but they still handle most of it domestically.

Let’s take the example of the UK. In 2010, it generated an estimated 4.93 million tonnes of plastic waste.9 It exported 838,000 tonnes overseas.

That means it exported about 17% of its plastic waste. That’s a substantial fraction – nearly one-fifth of it.

0: https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
The biggest utility I can see would be some already proposed with prototypes. I.e. military boarding a boat, and high angle search and rescue. We've seen tech demos for both. I have no expertise in mountain climbing or EMS, so I can't speak for how far off we are from that being practical or useful.

For things like boat boardings, it seems like it could (eventually) be the best solution to an awful situation. If bad guys with guns are on a boat and you need to get on said boat (whether to repossess the boat, or save people on the boat) boarding it is a tactical nightmare. Your options are basically:

1. Ride a small boat up to it, hope they don't see you, and climb into bad guy boat. If the bad guys did see you and start shooting you, hopefully your friends from another boat or helicopter can shoot them first.

2. Fly a noisy helicopter above said bad guy boat and fast rope down, hoping they don't shoot you or the helicopter before you get into a fighting position

3. I dont know, maybe parachute onto it? Options 1 and 2 are outside of, but adjacent to, my expertise. This is a whole other level. The military has proposed, tried, and done crazier things though.

Option 4, Jetpacks, would be nice. To be able to go from good guy boat to bad guy boat within like, 30 seconds, is still a rough approach but probably the least awful.

Fortunately, for society (unfortunately for the Jetpack industry) maritime hostage rescue is a pretty small market surface
You can't permanently silence/exclude random people's opinions at social events or a family dinner with the touch of a button. So even that's not a good example of an ideological bubble of ideas.

I also said there's nothing wrong with niche forums but social networks were a new phenomenon circa 2005+ and hundreds of millions of people like the idea of public information networks... for the same reason why newspapers, broadcast news, and cultural TV shows are so popular, but now with more direct participation.

So if you want to toss aside the new concept of public platforms for discourse and culture then that at least be honest about it. Don't pretend it didn't exist.
So a high quality brand on sale should be presumed to be low quality?
If the FBI was asking Musk’s Twitter to respond to legal requests without financially covering the administrative overhead costs, he’d be screeching about having to ‘finance the deep state bureaucracy’ or something similar.

Instead, the FBI covering the overhead costs of Twitter responding to their inquiries is “paying for censorship”.

Either way, Musk gets to rile up people who believe his narrative.
And how do they see themselves getting money back? Is there a plan for paid subscriptions or something in the future?

Not trying to be snarky or anything -- generally curious! I love the project.
Oh this reminds me a lot of a familiar kafka vs SQL battle.

Yes it is possible to do it in kafka, but everything is obscured in the sense that you can't peek at what you are doing, you spend your precious CPU on serializing/deserializing and things like backfill is a mess.
Not specific to the UK, but here's a good source to read about plastic waste and export: https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
Tradition, nationalism, religion etc. were much stronger a hundred years ago. IE there was a society worth working to participate in.
I rage quit when they raised the price to $65/month with no grandfathered legacy pricing.

I joined when it launched at $35/month, and it was amazing. While perhaps loss-leading, it was an unbeatable deal for cable TV, which I barely watched, but enjoyed from time to time—particularly during breaking news or major live events (SuperBowl, Oscars, etc.).

But after adding more useless channels and nearly doubling the price, I was immediately out. CableTV with ads is a garbage experience, and at that price I still can't justify it.

Sunday Ticket is not going to be cheap, either. $65/month for YTTV, PLUS Sunday Ticket, PLUS Netflix, HBOMax, Disney+, and whatever other streaming services you subscribe too—who has the money to justify all of this?

Who has the time to justify this?
It is a shame that someone probably lost 15-30 minutes of their life in composing this (much more polite) expansion of "RTFA".
https://eightouncecoffee.ca/collections/hand-grinders/produc...

And yeah for products like these you really need to search prosumer forums for the specific area in question, Consumer Reports would be useless.
“Get up and walk around in circles for a few bars.”
>I have a friend who buys apartment complexes and houses on the company for his employees to live in

When railroad and heavy industry did this exact thing in the 19th century we called them robber barons and broke up their obscenely powerful and corrupt monopolies via antitrust legislation.
Here's a fairly recent paper on techniques to reduce the aliasing: https://www.dafx.de/paper-archive/2016/dafxpapers/20-DAFx-16...
There are also some things that do work decently well that we don't do anymore for political reasons, such as estate taxes.
Would it not be possible to then tax them on their ownership on that corporate entity, which gets assessed based on its holdings (including, yes, property)?

Or prevent companies from holding real estate as an investment vehicle?

I'm not naive enough to argue that this is a definitively easy thing, but especially when it comes to housing, the poor and middle class are getting completely fucked right now; it's gotten to the point in the crisis where we absolutely need to do something urgently.
lol you can’t certify Tesla of airplane. Certification isn’t that lax in aerospace to allow that fast and loose philosophy
In the US and most places, you are only liable for capital gains tax on realized gains. The shares have to change hands before a tax is due.
Rust doesn’t though. But it does make it much harder to leak memory than C. You need to create a cycle between reference counted objects versus just forget to free something.

Not that it matters as much as people think. Memory leaks aren’t a correctness problem. You typically want to restart a program or service regularly anyway to deal with memory fragmentation. You also frequently have a watchdog like systemd to restart your program if it crashes. Heroku restarts your whole dyno once a day. This means in practice that programs with slow memory leaks tend to work just fine (there are plenty of them in the wild.)
Those are LCOE marginal numbers that don't consider systems costs like overbuilding capacity to charge batteries, extra transmission, long-term backup capacity, etc.

LCOE is unrelated to systems costs.
Key item here: “These cells as they are could last one or two years without packaging,” Bulović says. “With packaging, we could extend that to five to 10 years. And that’s plenty.”

As with existing thin film cells, degradation in real-world outdoor conditions is significant and limits usefulness.
AMC to raise $110M, proposes reverse stock split
Probably would’ve been ample old growth trees of that size to pick from back in the day, but a Doug fir is going to be cheaper and actually available
Male Gender Bias Deters Men from Some Career Paths
In my opinion there is only one humidifier that is worth the money, the honeywell warm mist humidifier [1]. It works great for us, just put it in a little tray in case it leaks. It also got one of the best written customer reviews on amazon I ever saw [2]. TL;DR, they use it on McMurdo station in Antarctica and love it.

Don't buy a ultrasonic humidifiers, they actually reduce the air quality considerably [3], you need to get an evaporative humidifier and frankly there aren't that many.

[1] https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/news/honeywell-warm-mis...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R911WGTC1OHLL/ref...

[3] https://learn.kaiterra.com/en/air-academy/humidifiers-cause-...
The Book of Netiquette (1997)
Worth noting that the source is essentially a Christian disinformation campaign on AI and brain research.

mindmatters.ai is ran [1] by the "Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence", who's stated mission is [2]:

> to explore the benefits as well as the challenges raised by artificial intelligence (AI) in light of the enduring truth of human exceptionalism. People know at a fundamental level that they are not machines. But faulty thinking can cause people to assent to views that in their heart of hearts they know to be untrue. The Bradley Center seeks to help individuals—and our society at large—to realize that we are not machines while at the same time helping to put machines (especially computers and AI) in proper perspective.

So they have an incentive to associate the brain with quantum stuff or cosmic spacetime weirdness or any other topic that people pride themselves in not understanding - because they want to present the brain as something otherworldly and mysterious that we could not possibly be able to understand.

Unsurprisingly they are also big fans of panpsychism [3].

Edit: ...not to mention, the Discovery Institute [4] is in there too...

[1] https://mindmatters.ai/about/

[2] https://centerforintelligence.org/

[3] https://mindmatters.ai/2022/09/can-panpsychism-save-naturali...

[4] https://www.discovery.org/id/about/
So you can have instant right-hand turns too. Nice.
> Wealth isn’t zero sum but power over law…

Religious extremism isn’t coming mainly from the wealthy. It’s dominantly a lower-strata southern thing, with notable metastases all around the country, yet it plays strongly in the US system.

That some wealthy co-opt the extremists doesn’t change the above.
Automotive News for... automotive news: https://www.autonews.com/
You can actually predict by that metric how safety aware your current surroundings are in production facilties.

Time of last incident, average promotion time (over time reduces safety awareness again), calculating that, one can behave acyclic until the next accident.
Ah, fair, I don't have a lot of experience with C++. My answer was based on Java, which from the benchmarks I've seen doesn't suffer from any performance hit when you use a static exception object with no stacktrace.
As I was typing it out, it occurred to me that the whole angle of national unity was maybe trumped up a bit by the documentary. After all, ultimately the whole thing was driven by nationalistic competition and technology originally invented for war.

But I still think there's something to it that couldn't exist today. If you watch the doc you'll see an absolute gaggle of people who turned out to watch the launch and there really does seem to be an overriding air of excitement and hopefulness.

In the spirit of optimistic naivete I mentioned in my OP, I will choose to believe that, by the time the mission was in progress, for a all-too-brief moment, we as a country _really were_ all rooting for the same thing in 1969 - that the mission would be a success, that the astronauts would come home safely, and that the scientific achievement represented hope for a better future for everyone.
> In the 1980s there were plenty of books about writing text adventure games (as they were more widely called then) on home microcomputers

Indeed. Adventure games were the most sophisticated games around. Companies like Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls ruled the roost. Teenagers like myself aspired to one day work there, which for me was a major reason to go and study AI (which was mostly parsers and tree walks at the time).

And then along came iD software. One day I walked into the shared computer facility of my university and everybody was playing Castle Wolfenstein and I remember thinking: o shit...

Fortunately AI did not turn out to be such a bad choice after all.
As you would expect. You’re paying to support an entire business including retail space rent and utilities, employees, and owners.
All three things are taxed, so it doesn't factor into this discussion of tax avoidance.
Instead of artificially limiting performance, why not make that a user configurable option, and let the drivers make the trade off with tire life.

Kind of like how many newer phones and laptops have an option to save the life of the battery by only charging up to 80%, with the trade off being lower uptime on battery. And people can change the option to charge up to 100% when they think they may need it.
And when it does click for you all the other things that do not involve for/while loops (dicts, map/reduce/group by) become very obvious.
what's to prevent a wealthy parent from gifting wealth to their children while alive? This seems like the easiest thing of all for someone with a competent accountant to circumvent.

Bad for families building generational wealth who don't have it yet though, and boy do I hate the idea as a result.
It's not that simple. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/exploding-pyrex/

> What's Undetermined

> Whether Pyrex switched from using borosilicate glass to tempered soda lime glass only after Corning sold the brand to World Kitchen in 1998.

…

> In a January 2011 article on glass bakeware, Consumer Reports stated that they were unable to determine exactly when major U.S. manufacturers (including Pyrex) switched
The disadvantage being that they add weight to the roof and are a significant source of wind load.
It's a bit of both, though it looked like the robots were roombas or something. And I think the cleaning would only matter on longer stays, since I believe they'd still have to turn over the room between guests.
I resonate with this as well. I learned to program as a hobby but now it’s my day job and although I enjoy it, it’s not the same as coding in my free time.

Currently I’m building a small social network where you can only post once, edit it, like and follow other posts. I imagine it as an anti-twitter.

Sounds silly but I had a ton of fun learning Tailwind and using vanilla Django (no drf, htmx, etc) for the first time since like 5 years.

It’s hosted in a small vpc running with docker-compose and a managed postgres db for now. It’s essentially bricked for new users though until sendgrid approves my account.

https://app.pressnt.net/
I don't think the person who said it was serious, but I think they understood that Musk needed to hear it.
Risk avoidance. Poor people can't economically handle "someone sneezed so you get no income for months". Plenty of low paying jobs never closed during covid and everyone's crowding into them to avoid possible economic disaster.

Normally you fix lack of employees with higher pay, but low pay is baked into the cake they can't pay more and stay in business (which is the step right before going out of business, BTW).
I was asked to invent the next Wordle. How hard could it be?
> Storage is a solved problem.

Lol no, it really isn’t.

> Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world,

Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams. It works great in the Alps; good luck doing that in the UK or in the Netherlands.

> battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged

They are nowhere near the right scale. Bear in mind, in Europe they’d need to store energy over several weeks or months. The continent is prone to winter anti cyclonic conditions that go on for weeks, with no wind and no sun light. It’s quite different from, say, most of Australia.

> alternative battery technologies have matured

I’d like to know which one, because as far as I know none of the alternative are anywhere near maturity. Progress is being made, but you’re overselling it.

> Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed.

These are no silver bullets and have several drawbacks, including the “flow” bit, which requires pumps and valves. Efficiency is also not that great. There are sulphides, lithium-air, and Na-ion designs that are more promising. But again, none of that is mature, or even really produced at scale.

> I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages.

It’s the counterpoint of all these “lol renewables all the way” posts that crop up any time we discuss energy policy.

Most people would say that there are very good use cases for renewables. But they won’t be enough. If you read analyses at the grid level (some of that is in the IPCC reports), constant base production is very much required, otherwise you need to vastly overbuild and your grid has one huge point of failure (yes, freak meteorological events do happen).
I interact with SQL on a daily basis but never write a single query by hand. It's all abstracted by the Django ORM. I do have to be mindful of what I do of course but mostly I just plow away with the abstractions offered. Once in a while I have to take a look at the SQL or the query plan but those are few and far between.
I'm not sure I understand how a JOIN would have fixed this problem. That is, if each chunk is fetching 1k rows, and you're doing 50 simultaneous chunks, then you're doing a 50,000 row query, and that's ALSO going to be extremely slow, in terms of exclusive database contention (less of an issue with bigquery) and result set memory usage (definitely still a huge issue for python). In fact, one of my most frequent pieces of feedback to junior engineers who are just working on a larger backend for the first time is "this query tries to fetch too much data at once, it will take too long and use way more memory then it needs to, please use find_each to automatically batch the query so that we balance memory usage and database contention". Indeed, Rails by default will use the exact same batching strategy the junior engineer chose in this case: fetch 1k items, process those items, and move on to the next 1k items. I understand that the author rankles about things not being done the "right way" with JOIN, but I question whether their focus on "best practices" is preventing them from seeing the optimization forest (split things up into parallel background tasks, don't try to keep the entire dataset in memory at once) for the "doing things right" trees (use JOIN)
It's entirely true, and England was not unusual in that respect compared to the rest of Europe. See e.g. here: https://ourworldindata.org/literacy. Or here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Literacy-rates-in-Europe...
The trick IMO is to use your extended family as a network and try to keep things within the network.

People don't like this but not only does it work well it's often more efficient in general.
I've got several 5-10year old Nudie pairs. Enough of a buffer to get me through 6-12weeks waiting times easily.
I'm not an expert, but my reading of the IRS's FAQ [1] is that the cost basis of inherited assets gets reset to the fair market value of the assets on the date of death.

1. https://www.irs.gov/faqs/interest-dividends-other-types-of-i...
Zero sum game? Fractional reserve banking would like to have a word with you
Clipping adds high-frequency components.
Surely that is true. The legal landscape will have to be settled before self-driving becomes common.

E.g. should a self-driving car leave the road to avoid sudden accident? What if it then hits a pedestrian?

One advantage to software-driven decision making is, we can make a rule and they will all follow it. I.e. the law can decide no self-driving car should leave the road.
Looking at social media in Japan, I tend to see strong enmity towards solar -- eg large solar farms destroy the surrounding environment, they don't fit in with Japan's mountainous terrain and are prone to breakage during storms and landslides, failure to generate after snow, processing of obsolete units, etc. While there seems to be merit to many of the arguments made, the overall hostile attitude towards solar in general comes off as surprising; it's as if they think solar is by default evil. Wondering what shaped this attitude.
The solution is to cut the size of government first. The inefficiency and outright grift happening in all federal agencies would make any entrepreneur’s head spin. Imagine if Congress had to answer to VCs for their spending. They would all be blackballed from the investor community overnight.

The “tax the rich more” line is a little naive. The world is a different place after the Rothschilds figured out how to shield their wealth from monarchies. It’s easier than ever to offshore wealth, remember the Panama papers that promptly disappeared from the news?

The “solution” of global governments is a cure that’s likely far worse than the disease.

It’s a complicated situation. A progressive VAT tax that is consistent across jurisdictions would be a good start. The tax code (at least in the US) needs to be thrown out and replaced. Monetary policy and taxation via inflation is also primitive and in dire need of reform.
Does it apply better to land/housing or other limited resources?
> I'm surprised it gets so much attention.

0.999... = 1 is my favourite internet drama. Unlike picking a fight with other classics like "will an airplane on a treadmill take off?", this one actually has an objectively correct, unambiguous answer. People argue against it so hard and are just so wrong. It's always hilarious.