skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Rare" earth metals are actually not that rare.

The reason we (in the west) don't mine much is that they are very dirty to refine. We don't want pools of toxic waste left over from refining all over the place but China etc will tolerate those.

Given the ore itself is (ironically) quite common, all the mining happens where the refining happens because why would you bother shipping tonnes of ore there when is so common.
In summer yes, but efficiency is not a problem then. In winter those are providing ambient heat within your property anyway.
This is wrong, both ZFS and btrfs verify the checksum on every read.

It's not typically a performance concern because computing checksums is fast on modern hardware. Besides, historically IO was much slower than CPU.
wouldn't it be better to say 4 weeks minimum with unlimited maximum?

or as usual, American companies innovating in the subversion of workers rights.

you can often learn more from what is not said, as opposed to what is.
> Dont just start with assumption "self driving is currently safer" and then go on blame people for not trusting it.

My claim doesn't depend on that assumption. My claim depends on it being the case someday.

If the US tightens regulations on ADAS today, and that results in the day self-driving cars fully replace human-driven ones being 11 years away instead of 10, it has been delayed one year, at a cost of up to 1.35 million human lives.
One week still seem low compared to 25 minimum days "People working in India are entitled to 18 vacation days a year along with an additional 7 days of casual leaves, totaling to 25 a year." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...) but I'm otherwise not familiar with Indian work customs.
The ranking should more appropriately be called "tourist passport ranking", "visitor passport ranking" or something the like. It's a misnomer to call it a "passport ranking" without any qualifiers as this is based on visa exemptions for short-term visitors only.

Japan and Singapore win it every year because apart from being able to enter all the "usual" Western countries and tourist destinations, they are allowed 14-day visa-free entry to China and some other places that typically require visas from everyone else. But then, for China (at least pre-COVID), many other nationals are allowed 5-day visa-free stay while "transiting." And US citizens can get multiple-entry 10-year visas. So the difference in practice isn't that big.

Visitor visas in general are hardly difficult to obtain. For example Germany is a notch above other EU member states because it has visa-free entry to Namibia (perhaps in reciprocity for the generous German aid directed there), whereas for passport holders from most other countries it's a question of paying a nominal fee ("tourist tax"). Although the amount itself is steep (€90 last I checked), obtaining a visa there is unlikely to prove an obstacle.

It would be more interesting to see a ranking comparing access to the best job markets instead. But then the winners would obviously be EU/EEA member state and US passports, alongside some others that grant a pathway to one of those (Canada, Australia, ...).

Yet another way of looking at it is that the "best" passport is the one that grants the best consular protection for their holders abroad, and here the winners would either be the US (willing and capable of doing more than any other country to get their citizens out of trouble) or some countries that are nominally neutral and non-threatening to anyone (so that holding their passport does not paint you as a target in adversary countries), while still being able to flex their diplomatic muscle if need be (Switzerland? Sweden? The latter used to have the most embassies in the world I think.).

Finally, some passports have anti-features. For example the US citizenship is great if living in the US but can be a burden while abroad due to the need to file taxes even if non-resident, and the FATCA regulations making it difficult to even open a bank account in another country (extra reporting burden on the bank). Singapore is not even a democracy and has mandatory conscription for citizens by birth (perhaps not a gift you'd want to make to your children).

I would like to see a ranking considering all of the above as well but I doubt that's going to happen (unless I made one myself I guess): since the simplistic approach is enough to win the news cycle, why would anyone bother. It's similar to all those city rankings always topped by the most boring places that nominally check all the right boxes but few people aspire to move to.
SQLite Wasm in the browser backed by the Origin Private File System
From a technical engineering perspective the -22F claim in the article is amazing. When I was a kid that number was +40F and we walked up hill both ways to school in the snow.

As cool it is as an engineering story, its AWFUL as a marketing article.

Heat pumps have the same problem as EVs, its been pounded into the general public for decades that some number isn't enough for some people and the number improves every year, every decade.

So the "general public" shitpost on the internet around the turn of the century that an EV that only goes 100 miles is useless and once someone sells an EV that runs more than 100 miles the entire world will convert en masse. Non marketing people do NOT understand that it doesn't matter that people only need 0.1X or 0.5X or whatever if you market a continuously improving number they'll ALWAYS demand they are not buying until that number improves to 1.25X or 1.5X. And as technology improves, we get there in a decade or two, but it'll be the same reluctance. I absolutely guarantee that 90% of the people on the internet will be disappointed in EVs in 2030 because range will only be 750 miles and if only someone would sell an EV with a range of 1250 miles THEN they'd buy it. It doesn't matter how many well intentioned people point out that the average driver only goes 30 miles a day or whatever. You don't fix a marketing problem by screaming math equations at people. Not most people. Actually works with engineers, sometimes LOL. You sell EVs buy demonstrating they plug in anywhere in ten seconds vs some poor bastard walking uphill thru a blizzard carrying a heavy gas can because he ran out of gas.

The other marketing problem with heat pumps is handled horribly by the article. Everyone knows they work like shit when its cold. Exactly when you want to be the toastiest they don't work. Its like marketing a spare tire for a car guaranteed to be flat when you need it the most. You can't gaslight people into wanting to be cold during a winter storm. The solution to this marketing problem is obvious. Instead of bitching at people that they would be holier than thou if they enjoyed being cold in the winter after spending a huge amount of money to avoid being cold, market (not sell) a heat pump model that has a 100KW electric space heater that requires special permission from the electric company to connect and flood video commercials of people in the arctic circle turning their houses into saunas by turning up the thermostat during a blizzard and they're all in towels and sweating while snow blows by the window. Everyone who actually lives up north knows its warm when it snows and cold when its not snowing but most of the people selecting a furnace for their house in Florida don't understand or care but they don't want to feel cold when its cold outside so they don't buy heat pumps, at least not now. After the new meme sets in that heat pumps turn your house into a sauna, don't buy a heat pump unless you want to sweat in the winter, the regular general public will start buying heat pumps. "Well I don't want all the hassle of installing the 100KW one, I'll buy a cheaper appropriately sized on instead"
The trouble is that the electricity demand is always topped-up by gas-fired generators. It's always there at the margin. Things like nuclear and renewables usually run at 100% of their ability, their generation is not affected by demand.

Therefore any increase in electrical demand is made up by turning up the gas-fired generators an equal amount.

So if a heat pump has a COP of 3, and the additional electricity consumed is generated from gas with, say, 33% efficiency (from the gas burner to the house electrical meter), there would be zero net change in overall gas consumption by converting from a gas boiler.

This is especially the case in winter, which is when most heating demand is, and the gas generators are definitely going to be running and making up that marginal generation.
Could these be described by KPIs?

Time per line, for other team members to have read and understood my code changes :-)

Amount of brain electricity and coffee consumed per line read?
It is sad we still live in the enterprise world where having both "SomeClass" and "SomeClassEntity" isn't grounds for rejecting a PR that dares to do this.

Therefore, thank you for making this. Automapping is a sign of incorrect abstractions and unarguably bad solution architecture but since we are still forced to deal with such, doing so with speed and without reflection is always welcome.
I think it's a lottery. You can be lucky and find good companies, or you can be unlucky and end up in toxic environments. Personally I was too trusting of teams who put their best foot forward in the interviews and are at best, misleading of the actual culture. It's a very abusive industry, especially working for start-ups.
Yeah an important clarification is New York is really only dominant in slice shops. Great restaurant pizza exists almost everywhere now.

I’ll have to check out your Philly recs.
Well, bullshit, essentially. Which is not a huge surprise considering the source.

Trump winning the election is not "fiction" in the same sense as Hillary winning them (since nobody seriously claimed she did, after the final results) nor Biden winning them (since he actually did). It's a debunked conspiracy theory that some disturbed people have a hard time letting go.

None of this is woke in any sense of the word, unless woke now means being sane.
> People who diss VR is the same kind who diss AI. Mixed Reality / AI will enhance productivity of everyone leaving the luddites far behind

There really is no guarantee for that. There have been a lot of techs supposed to disrupt everything just to flop miserably.

> in the next 5 years

I got a free vive in 2015 when they launched it in LA, promising a world wide revolution by 2016, 7 years later and still VR is nowhere to be seen. Just like fully autonomous teslas would be there "in two years" in 2012.

I'm very cautious with people promising revolutions "really soon". Crypto, VR, "AI", 3D TVs, 4D cinemas, self driving cars, it's all the same shit, rinse and repeat, "Bro! you gotta buy it now and invest everything you have in it RIGHT NOW! or you'll miss every opportunities!". All we get is the same as with everything else, very slow incremental evolutions, and that's when the tech doesn't straight up disappears
20-something years of web/app.config is the primary reason why I hate XML. Very, very closely followed by Java ("a DSL for turning XML into stacktraces") and its over complicated ecosystem of xml configurations.
British houses generally have terrible levels of insulation and if built before roughly 1930 are likely solid walled, so have no wall cavity to insulate. There is also the issue that a lot of people live in terraces and semis and there may simply be no suitable place to install a heat pump. When I looked into it for my house a couple of years ago the fitters basically said they couldn't do it because of lack of space.
XML is ok when both the reader and writer are machines, but you still want a text-based format (otherwise I'd just use protobuf) or when maybe you occasinally want to edit by hand but not often.

I think it's the same reason why, although HTML is a great standard, lots of us like writing in Markdown and having something convert that to HTML, despite all the problems when you try and push Markdown further than it was intended.

YAML, as I see it, is trying to be to XML configurations what Markdown is to HTML, with the added bonus of an attempt at a tag/reference system to store object graphs that are not trees. Back in the day of XML-based Spring config files, we had <bean> and <ref bean=...> but as far as I know that's implemented on the Spring layer, it's not a generic property of XML, whereas YAML tries to abstract that into the format itself.
My thought was that the cars following needed to have adaptive cruise control engaged and perhaps then the accidents would be avoided.
> People over 35 have seen bear markets before 1980-1982, 1987, 2000-2002...

Yes, how could a 35-year-old forget those bear markets that happened when they were 13, 0 and -5 years old...
Amazon fails to overturn Staten Island warehouse's vote to unionize
I personally think the title is clickbaity but decide to keep as it's the one used by the newspaper.
So you are happy with the same class that is used to represent the row in the database including potentially sensitive data also being used in responses to API calls?
Great name for a bagel shop.
> was just improved

That’s yet to be seen, otherwise I wholeheartedly agree with your statement :)
Aren't high taxes on income from work a disincentive for people to work? How does the same logic not apply? By looking at the tax incentive structure, it is telling people: sitting on your ass doing nothing and being paid dividends (derived from the work of others) is more important than working a job yourself.
Our company has discretionary time off. I can't speak for other managers in the company but in my own role as manager I actually lecture my people if they don't take enough time off. I don't know if my frequent encouragement on the matter is the cause but it seems to be that no one is viewed poorly by their peers for taking time off.

This is just one anecdotal example though so it's hardly proof that these programs work. I'll just say that if the managers set the culture appropriately then it can work.
>> Or, simply think about the last time you heard about a nationwide credit/debit card outage...

Last year in Canada when Rogers had a meltdown.

E.g. https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/everything-impacted-rogers-o...

Bell goes down more rarely but also can take large swathes of nation out.
Fib(x)=0 does satisfy this property though.
I agree. If an engineer comes fresh from university/ leet code/ certain companies and hasn't yet adopted the kind of mindset you're looking for, teach them!

If they are actually smart as in „intelligent, humble and curious“ they'll understand and adapt.

During my first two years as a developer, I was also in the „a double for-loop? Not under my watch!“ - camp and wrote a lot of „clever“ code that often was a waste of time or even caused problems lateron.

With experience + reading more about software engineering „in practise” as opposed to „in academic theory“, I learned to prefer solutions that don't use many layers of abstraction, are simple enough for a junior engineer to understand, easy to maintain and actually add value for the business.

A smart engineer knows that engineering time is limited and expensive - and acts accordingly.
True, it's kinda special aviation history. Like the Kai Tak approach. But I think that for security and traffic reasons (eg foreign debris) it would have had to change eventually.
Isn't Thule on Greenland (or are there multiple Thule around?)
Or write on a piece of paper without looking at it, or drink coffee without knowing where the cup is, &c.
I don't agree that "there's no hope of working with people like this"; I've had a few "twitchy smart" people in my organizations in the past. This is valuable energy that can be usefully directed with competent management and technical leadership. But it requires a good understanding of the nuances at play, as you've noted, and a clear statement of the importance of the team's overall success, not their personal triumphs.
We're in Vermont in a house built in 1926. We blew insulation into the walls, insulated the attic well, and replaced the ground floor windows (some day we'll do the rest of the windows; in the meantime we use plastic film in the winter). We heat with pellets primarily, but when the pellet stove starts to struggle we turn on the heat pump we installed a few years ago. It warms up the house in no time.
> So 28 days is actually only 20 working days. As basically it counts weekends too.

Similar in my country. The legal minimum by law is 24 days and based on a 6 day work week (Mon-Sat) thus for most workers it's 20 days.
> rich veins with good rewards for hand tools

I'm far from knowledgeable about the topic. Still, I'm twinging on your earlier use of the "costs", which is different than "good rewards".

If something is rare, people may pay a lot for it. Labor-intensive manual mining (and we mustn't forget the use of slave labor hides the economic costs and adds a human cost) might not move as much material, but may still have high costs.

> plot the per tonne increased extraction costs of target materials against deposit richness as reserves are depleted.

I do understand that. But what does 'dense deposit' mean?

I took it to mean gold deposits where manual mining provided good rewards. Gold cyanidation is for low-grade ore, says Wikipedia, and the result gave good rewards for South African mine owners, yes?

What I don't know is the cost per unit production of either method.

I fully understand that new methods may make previously low-grade material economically profitable, but I don't think those should be re-categorized as "dense".

In looking around, I believe iodine production might be another case to consider. As I understand it, the historical production was from sea water through bioaccumulation in kelp, which was then dried and processed.

We've since moved to richer sources, either mineral (caliche) or brine.
Would Thorium be part of that list as well?

Edit: I kinda know that because I have some weird passion about the elements of periodic table and because I'm reading "Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of The Elements From Arsenic To Zinc" which I really recommend!
There isn't that much to elaborate on. Commercial heat pumps just aren't good for the average UK house. They would be "alright" if the costs weren't prohibitive.

I don't know the specifics of your parents. A "wooden house" with a heat pump acting as the primary heating system in a country like Norway sounds fairly bad on the surface. But I don't know the insulation specifics, nor do I know what other heating element might come at play when the heating pump fails to keep up with the heat loss. Also, what heating pump are we talking about?
I'm a manager with discretionary time off. I default to yes and then push back on deadlines if the PTO means we can't make it. So far it's working.
Yeah the Swedes helped Nazi Germany immensely selling them high quality iron. There were invasion plans drawn up going from German controlled Narvik to Kiruna, but the Swedes was so accommodating that it wasn't needed.
The HM Embody resolved the burning pain that used to set into my shoulders after 5 hours.
There is no lie / part skipped, what that number is meant to tell you is that it reaches its 1:1 point there, so it "works", with diminishing returns, down to that point. Which is where it's as "efficient" (to put it that way) as a resistive heater.

Obviously you need to take that into account - is the amount of heat you get out of it sufficient for nominal winter temperatures, at its coldest, for where you live? (geographic location and building conditions). As for myself, I have a backup in my wood stove, but I only need it under special circumstances (like last week when it was particularly cold and no electricity for parts of two whole days because I had electricians doing major rewiring in my home).
Using René Girard’s mimetic theory to know what you really want
Agencies like the FAA are notoriously risk adverse. Basically the motivations of most employees seems like, "if I mess up once, I get fired; if I don't produce any movement, I can't get fired". Naturally, the output is glacial progress and the introduction of tons of safety-theatre procedures (that get the implementers promotions for "increasing a culture of safety").

We all know this from the subject the FAA regulates: flights. New unleaded gas gets forever to approve. Simple changes to instruments takes years of certification, leaving 1960s technology in place when clear improvements have happened in the last 60 years.

I always wondered what would happen if this culture were carried over to another space. We know what it looks like in medicine because the FDA has similar priorities. Rarely do we see it in tech, which is known to "move fast and break stuff". But here we get a glimpse of the dystopian crossover between FAA-procedure-culture and software engineering.
You asked a good question.

Q: What this malware does?

A: probably nothing , but You kind of gave keys to Your device to 3rd party. And 2nd party (that also has keys ) doesn't like that.

Ideally You the owner should have the key and nobody else.
Yes, it's more efficient than resistive electric heating, but in the UK that is typically not the alternative it's being compared to. The usual existing heating system would be a gas-fired central heating boiler, and the cost of gas vs cost of electricity means that gas is still cheaper, I think.
Japan Bets Big on Bringing Semiconductor Manufacturing Home
30 years of Brainfuck
It’s more typing but it’s simple typing most people don’t even think about because it’s predictable (not to mention automatic in many editors). I’d take that over the frictional cost of thinking your YAML is done and then having to debug magic data conversion or realize that you left out one character causing something to be parsed completely differently.

Where XML falls down hard is tool usability. There’s still no standard formatter or good validation tool, and things like namespace support is a constant source of friction.
No, that's not the only reason. It's also just currently a lot cheaper in China, so European mines can't afford to operate (I believe due to the very low density of deposits), so we keep the closed in reserve. There's awareness that this is probably a strategic mistake but as far as I know nobody's doing anything about that yet.
Ask HN: Top life hack which, quite surprisingly, no one else does?
What is your top (or top few) life hacks which you, quite surprisingly, do not see employed by others.
really... if you've ever tried to write your own functionality into something like wordpress or bootstrap or whatever, you'd rather have that all in a single code file with less white space or comments? Would that make it easier to change the positioning of a particular dialog box? I thank God all the time for the white space and long comments left by writers of those kinds of libraries. Maybe those seem like trivial examples, but they're huge libs that don't often need a lot of changes; yet when you need to change things, they make it quite easy to find.

[edit] as I wrote that, I just realized that younger devs might actually look in horror on the idea of directly editing libraries like that for particular deployments because the tooling or shop mentality so forces automated upgrades that could overwrite custom changes... and institutional memory being so short, no one might remember the change some dev made to a bootstrap file. heh. But that's like someone calling themselves a mechanic without ever modifying an engine. You write a note, commit it with a custom marker like #weModifiedThis, and don't upgrade the library for 15 years or until you're dead or retired or the company goes out of business. Done.
Similar set up here, though this one is/was available to visit on the Thames in London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_U-475_Black_Widow