skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look at the the lowest point of energy demand. That's base load. How big is it relative to the peak of energy demand? Depends on the season, but it's usually 70-80% of peak demand. So, the vast majority of energy demand is in fact base load. I'm really confused about why renewable proponents talk about base load all the time - it's really not relevant to decarbonization of the grid.

Intermittency of wind and solar aren't just daily: you also have longer-term periods of cloud weather blocking solar and lower wind speed hampering wind power. Actually running a majority renewable grid requires either hydroelectricity, or fossil fuels.

The majority of Germany's electricity comes from fossil fuels [1]. It's not a mostly renewable grid, occasionally supplemented by peaker plants. It's a majority fossil fuel grid supplemented by renewables. By comparison, here's France's electricity production [2]. One of these is a mostly decarbonized grid. The other is a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplemented by renewables here and there.

> However, the world is also transitioning to Electric Vehicles, and most EV manufacturers are offering V2G (vehicle to grid) solutions, so millions of EVs can contribute a portion of their battery capacity to the grid in the future, and the grid can compensate them for their contribution.

This is an idea that no sane grid operator would ever accept. First of all, most of these vehicles actually lose energy in cold weather [3]. And if people leave to go on vacation, then we have blackouts because our energy storage solution drove away for a week? No to mention, plenty of people drive their cars around during the day doing chores or work and charge them at night. Those people are going to be a net drain on the grid.

> Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various chemistries are being explored.

The market demonstrates otherwise. At the end of the day, if there's a shortage of lithium and the price goes it up it doesn't really matter what people are writing on tech forums.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:F...

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34120237
Restaurant wages are lower for waitresses, not for cooks, cashiers, etc. Fast food/etc restaurant workers get the normal minimum wage at the least.

Such restaurants can out-compete restaurants with waitresses by simply offering the sort of self-service that most people prefer, if in fact most people prefer that. It's not as though these restaurants are forced to pay their waitresses more; they don't have waitresses at all. That's one less expense they have to worry about.
Retirement planning can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. By budgeting, saving, investing, and having a solid estate plan in place, you can ensure a comfortable future for yourself and your loved ones.
It's funny to focus on the length of a post on a platform, but then it is central to the medium.

I was on twitter when it was 140 characters, and appreciated the increase to 280. I've always agreed it shouldn't get too long, or you lose the character of the platform. But even with 280, I'm always wordsmithing my posts just to squeeze in enough context to avoid conflict and misinterpretation.

On Mastodon, I haven't once had to reword what I'm trying to say, and I have never felt that others' posts are verbose. The Mastodon post length limit seems to hit the sweet spot for this kind of platform.
Only one model of US reactor has ever gone down in price after repeated builds (and then not by much), South Korea's 'cheap' reactors are suddenly $10/W net when they built one somewhere else and couldn't get creative with the accounting. And the Messmer plan reactors turned out just great (in addition to going up in price with each reactor and having many hidden costs that make them not comparable to a privately funded project).

> This is where wind and solar really struggle: they're great at reducing fossil fuel use by ~40% by shutting down gas plants when wind and sun are available

I love how this number that renewables can't possibly go beyond keeps going up every month but is said with the same level of ridiculous overconfidence every time (you've got to update it to 60% now for NE Brazil, South Australia and a few other generation grids, and much of Europe has also crossed your 40% threshold too). Any realistic analysis puts the limit in the mid 70% range with no storage or overprovision and well above the threshold where biogas and existing hydro can cover the rest once you add diurnal storage and 3 day dispatchable loads like EV charging and electrolysis.
Also, the last start up I worked for used all the products of other start ups funded by the same VCs. It's like a keiretsu of early adopters.
I just find it easier "thing" that happens is one self-contained statement, if that makes sense. Makes it easier to see what does what. I don't think one way is "better" or "worse" btw; all I can say to my brain, I find it harder to follow. This is what can make programming in a team hard.

I'm also one of those people that likes single-letter variables. I know some people hate it with a passion, but I find it very convenient. Just makes it easier to read as there's less to read.

I'm not smart enough to do Haskell, so I can't say much about that.
> So it’s disingenuous to say that fossil fuels are responsible for blackouts when it’s the dispatchability of renewables that required fossil fuel burning in the first place.

No... as I recall, in the Texas blackouts, the renewables actually generated more power than originally forecasted. If the natural gas and coal plants go offline completely, that has nothing to do with the dispatchability of renewables. The fossil fuel plants would be part of the grid regardless, because it takes decades for those plants to reach the end of their lifecycle and be decommissioned.

The grid relies on every type of power doing what it says it will do. It is possible to predict when solar and wind will deliver power, and how much they will deliver. The stability of the grid relies on that. The fossil fuel plants were the ones that had problems. If they had produced power as they normally do, there would have been no blackout.

> These are different arguments.

Do you still think I changed my argument? I'm fairly sure I didn't, but I can see how you reached that conclusion without the clarifications above.
>Accidental Billionaires: How Seven Academics Who Didn’t Want To Make A Cent Are Now Worth Billions

We'll see for how long.
there are problems that people solve that you could pick 10,000 average engineers and they'd never solve. if you have the right person and the right problems why not?

how many books have you written vs. Donald Knuth? Richard Stevens? etc. those are just famous examples. do you think you have approximately the same skill as yo-yo ma? is he not approximately 100x (or more) what you'd be at his job? i don't think it's a stretch to say he's about 10x of the average professional cellist.

as other have pointed out talent, productivity, whatever measure you pick generally follows a normal-like distribution. if you center that bon "1x", most people are about average. 10x, 20x exists, but it might be quite rare. -1x also exists, as do -10x (e.g. that guy who single-handedly destroyed the project via mismanagement, ego, incompetence).

to not recognize this is just simply naive or you can't appreciate other people's talents.
While it's possible in theory to undo the sexual revolution in the US, it's also would be practically impossible.
Often competitive only means other jobs also pay too little money
I mean, the other way to be safe is if the government would actually arrest the crooks and throw them in jail instead of releasing them back onto the streets of SF and Oakland.
One of the lab workers I know who works the most with mice is more of the squeamish type and is a vegetarian, so I think she'd be more upset if she saw the mice were in distress - and she's explained the entire process to me.

It's also interesting they use the CO2 only on the adult mice, for the babies they simply cut their heads off with shears. She explained the babies are the ones that suffer when exposed to CO2, whereas the adults don't.

The thing is it's all a matter of trust. Do we trust the meat industry when they tell us the animals aren't suffering? We've been lied to so many times by corporations that we tend to no longer trust them without some evidence. When they pay off legislatures to pass laws making it illegal to collect any evidence it makes it appear they're lying.
- mastodon.social is the closest thing Mastodon has to a "main" node. With the pros and cons associated with that. Given the relative youth of the experiment, I'd be a little concerned about whether admins can keep up with the growth, but it's probably the best of the "no opinion" options.

- qoto.org: member of United Federation of Instances. Relatively inclusive (and has some interesting extensions running on the base Mastodon service), but not necessarily federated to all the instances mastodon.social is federated to because they don't have a strict "Nazis fuck off" policy.

- mastodon.lol: antifa / LGBTQ+ / hacker-friendly node. Strict "Nazis fuck off" policy.

- infosec.exchange: InfoSec-focused Mastodon node, but pretty open with a pretty regular policy.

I think the strategy I'd probably recommend for a new user is something like "Join at mastodon.social, follow some people, and lurk. If you see many people you like who live at a particular node, migrate to that node."

(And honestly, unless a defederation fight breaks out, 90% of nodes are pretty interchangeable with each other; you can follow anyone the node federates to so it doesn't matter over-much which node you're on unless you want some specific features or you want admins who have a particular attitude towards your bugbear-topics).
Point well made.

This is not a military autocracy. Neither the military nor law enforcement should have any special privileges with regards to violating the law or the established rights of the citizens. Too many supposedly intelligent people have given up on the fight to keep "the law" within the bounds of the law, and it's escaped those bounds like kudzu.
You don't have to memorize shit. When you refer to someone and they tell you "I prefer pronoun X" just use that pronoun for the rest of the interaction. If you interact with them regularly or they are important to you somehow, you will remember, the same as you remember a pet name or nickname or screenname. If you forget and interact with them again they will remind you. They will likely not be angry if you forget occasionally, and using their chosen pronouns will please them and endear them to you. They only get hurt if you obviously do it on purpose.

It's literally identical to the concept of learning someone's name, yet humans largely don't have a problem with that.
I've run my own successful database consulting business, been a sales rep, development engineer and product manager for a Fortune 50 company, ran a startup that I left, was VP ops for another startup, digital sales support rep, digital photo lab owner and photographer. I'm 53. Anything is possible. Agree with suggestions to hire a career coach. Mine was great when I went through a terrible patch in my early 40s. DM me for his contact.
95% of stored energy in the US is hydro-electric pump storage. People really have no understanding of how the grid works. We don't just run gas plants all night.
Almost a decade ago, I was part of a 10 person team (that was growing) and while there was consensus around transition to Git, it kept getting pushed back. I eventually forced the issue by changing the deployment job in Jenkins for one of the main projects to deploy from Git instead of SVN.

I had to give several talks to existing and new employees about how Git works and how to use it. I was also that #1597 guy (https://xkcd.com/1597/). Back then most hires didn't work with Git before joining us, today of course it's different. Over time, all projects moved to Git as whenever someone was working on two projects, one Git and one SVN, they would ask "why is this still on SVN?" and soon it would be on Git.
Humorously enough, PayPal is one of the first online financial services to support passkeys.

https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2022-10-24-PayPal-Introduce...
Yeah, it was just disgusting both for what it said about how they viewed their children and the not inconsiderable number of women who are cheated on by “good Christian men” and find out the hard way.
It's even more dire than this.

Anna Gunn played the emasculating wife of Walter White in "Breaking Bad". She was not a popular character (and wasn't supposed to be, at least at first).

She received a myriad of death threats on social media for that portrayal.

https://www.vulture.com/2013/08/breaking-bads-anna-gunn-conf...

I cannot express how bananas that is that people can't separate fiction from real life in this way. That these people are such emotional creatures that it never occurs to them that the way they feel towards the character is invalid towards the actress.
That's what I'm saying. People are used to paying for a good based on its intrinsic value (cost to manufacture/distribute/etc. + some profit margin). But since digital goods are nearly 100% profit margin once created, you can instead pay with "time" aka % of your income.

That's why it's surreal (for me at least) - it would be like walking into a grocery store, but instead of fixed prices the items on shelves had labels like "Box of Lucky Charms: .005% of your annual income"
Personally I'm glad that I have to manually confirm updates, but folks who want their apps changed without notice should have the option.
Ski towns in Colorado are facing a deluge of false alarms from apple Devices thinking people are injured due to skiing falls.
Emergency services should start sending Apple false alarm fines.

The arrogance of thinking you can think of all corner cases is the root of this silliness. Pro tip, you can’t think of all the corner cases so don’t try and never assume that you’re incapable of a false alarm. If you design like that you’d give users the choice to opt in and you’re very clear about the parameters.
Dev salaries going down and all the rest going up.
When is the Ivory iOS app scheduled to come out?
My main entry point to Twitter is their search box (I’m basically a read-only user). Mastodon seems to be resisting multi-instance searching and that makes it more cumbersome for me to use.

If Mastodon isn’t interested in this functionality, it would be cool to see Google add a “mastodon:” search operator that works like their “site:” operator.
No OpenScience’s Bloom (opensource, 175B params), no Google’s T5 (opensource, 11B).

The AI/ML space moves so fast that this review is already outdated.
I asked ChatGPT one of my company's interview questions (which involves designing a bloom filter). It got it very subtly wrong; when asked to fix things, it made it worse. I would definitely not use it to interview for jobs yet, but I do think it would be good for training interviewers to detect BS and suggest "hints" that lead things in the right direction. Practice interview without wasting any human's time!

Meanwhile, humans have not really struggled with this problem. We tell you what a bloom filter is, you just have to write the code to spec. (This is different than some interviews where you need to know the answer to the trivia question; know what a bloom filter is and how to implement one, or you fail. ChatGPT was not capable of either.)

Overall my take on the current state of AI-produced computer programs is that the programmer is forced to take on the role of code reviewer and detail checker, which I think is a more difficult problem than just typing in code in a green-field environment. The thing that's difficult about reviewing code is that things can diverge away from your mental model so quickly, that you don't know which details you should be checking up on. When you're writing it from scratch, you don't lead yourself astray in the same way.

In a few years this could be completely different, of course.
Twice. At 31 I left the Automotive field to start working in IT. It was a low paying government job without a lot of applicants. I started college at 32 and got an AA in IT. At 38 my state legislature shut down my agency and my wife and kids moved out. I lost everything in resetting my finances and digging myself out of the hole she created.

I had spent the past few years of my IT life learning PHP and at 39 I landed a job as a developer at another state agency. Not only was it a career reset, but an entire life reset. I turned 40 with absolutely nothing. I'm about to turn 44, and am flirting with 6 figures between my state salary and my side gigs. I have a savings for the first time in my adult life and a stable home life.

it's absolutely possible and I didn't even try very hard.
Interesting. This was mid 90's.
If you learn British English as a second language, that’s the accent you have. Apparently most of the non-star actors playing Soviets were Eastern European/Russian so it would make sense that they didn’t have American accents.
Linearity is exclusive to Idris 2, compile time only values/run-time erasure are supported by all major proof assistants. Coq and Lean have the Prop type (compile time only) while Agda allows annotation of variables as run-time irrelevant.
!(funcA(transferObject) || true) || !(funcB(transferObject) || true) ...
// ceci n'est pas une pipe

function pipe(func, obj) {
return !(func(obj) || true);
}
pipe(funcA, transferObject) || pipe(funcB, transferObject) ...
// cecie n'est pas une pipe non plus

function pipeB(func, obj) {
func(obj);
return 0 | 0;
}
pipeB(funcA, transferObject) | pipeB(funcB, transferObject) ...
// no more pipes, please!

funcA(transferObject), funcB(transferObject) ...
// finally...

;-)
Bitmovin (YC S15) Is Hiring a Solutions Engineer US
Naming is hard because names are useful.

Getting rid of the name moves the hard problem, rather than solve it
All I wanted was a Pepsi. Just one Pepsi. And she wouldn't give it to me.
http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/atom.xml looks like it works
Hah, yeah, I think we haven't a terminology difference here. I wouldn't even term "bad" code in short-lived projects to be "tech debt" in the first place.

I definitely agree you about the near irrelevance of tech debt in short lived projects.

the large majority is short-term projects which

Is this really true? Really depends on where you work, I guess. It hasn't generally been my experience.

But it really depends on if you're working at e.g. an agency vs. working on long lived in house projects.
What is it called when hiring because worse as good employees leave?
I read a hacker new article a few weeks ago about how good employees leave, bad employees stay, and hiring quantity drops because of it. It is a downward spiral phenomenon with a technical term for it. Does anyone know what this term is called?
I use the standard mastodon client and follow people on many different servers. I was surprised, but most everyone I followed on Twitter moved - even the non-techies.

It feels exactly like Twitter to me now, except less noise.
This does explain a lot of the difference in development, especially in very poor countries. And this isn’t just a result of “old”, traditional colonialism, but imperialism in the form of meddling in their internal politics. Guatemala is a great example, having had its democracy destroyed by Allen Dulles and his CIA in the 1950s. But you can also take a more recent example like the 2009 coup in Honduras, backed by Hillary Clinton.
Locality has natural efficiencies, which is why cities and caches are so powerful. That can't really be fought head-on in the short term. But over a longer period the increasing costs of a white-hot locale will cause other places to be more appealing. And new tech can find a new natural place to land with costs as part of that.

This is happening all the time. A hundred years ago the Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley was orchards. Detroit was getting rich on the latest tech wave.

A hundred years before that, the North of England was making fortunes in the Industrial Revolution.

In our lifetimes China has changed incredibly. Foxconn is now a big name company that employs over a million people and moved a lot of money into the places they operate.
If someone tells me they are happy and comfortable being referred to as "it", and that situation makes me uncomfortable, isn't that a "ME" problem?
It’s the same “F,” but I pronounce it “Fine.”
> You must be connected to the server to do any source control work. There is no local repository...

That's not correct technically speaking. You can create repository on your machine - on local FS.

But of course it is more reliable to run it on server, even for yourself. If on Windows then VisualSVN is one click solution for those who just want to have that thing working.
Ask HN: Has your blog benefited you in any way?
I always read/hear that it is good to start a blog as a software dev but have never met anyone who has benefited all too much from it (given how much time they put in). I may start one just as an outlet but wondering if it could be more than that for me.
Truman had made a big name for himself in the Senate fighting war profiteering, he was in the news a lot by then
One would like to think that you can maximize security of your phone by using both:

- what you have, and

- what you know
My friend started training to be a programmer at 32. She's 39 now and is enjoying her very successful programming "early" career.

Prior to this she was a pianist.
Not really, in my opinion. If you do go with 8GB, do create a big enough swap partition and I can’t recommend zram enough!

Unfortunately on high contention linux is still prone to trashing memory, basically writing out a page to swap only to read it back into memory, evicting other pages. This was supposedly solved for HDDs, but it is still a problem with SSDs to the point where I had a completely stuck system, only reacting to REISUB. I did try to experiment with userspace OOMKillers, but they are no real solutions, and I think it is safe to bet that only larger memory requirements await us in the future. 8GB really is not enough today, not even for regular use let alone dev work.
In the most rude and profane way imaginable...

Go fuck a lonesome duck.
Indeed it is, but it's kind of a different context than a "real" programming language. What works for one doesn't necessarily work well for the other.
I think you've sort of answered your own question. Servants used to be sort of an extension to the household and they tended to be given some extra money at Christmas if nothing else. Now that a lot of this sort of thing is time-sliced, it mostly got shifted to an ongoing gratuity.

I do give my monthly housekeeper something at Christmas and I've seen other contexts where there's the expectation of contributing to a Christmas bonus for staff as well.
>Do you really believe that we cannot make generalizations about the layperson's understanding of AI?

I never said anything like that.

Another point: They also continually conflate "AI", deep learning, and mechanical-turk style crowdsourcing.
Is it exploitation to buy things from poor people?
Your link literally shows reactor costs going up in price over 20% per year for reactors finished before TMI, many of which were NOAK. Prices only went down before reactors had been operated commercially, and that's only because the fixes to stop them catching fire or being offline the vast majority of time hadn't been invented (and retrofitting them to existing reactors cost just as much as adding them to new ones).
That’s probably true. I’m just pointing out that “we can’t” is a different argument than “we like it this way and are willing to put up with the consequences.”
Not sure why you need an FBI raid to seize a fake diary?