skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-air-conditioning :

> By the late 1960s, most new homes had central air conditioning

So the addition of central HVAC likely isn't a big factor, because most new homes in the US already had it 50 years ago.
I think the nix community is doing an increasingly-better job at addressing several outstanding issues, and although the OP link resolves one of them - the getting-started experience - the "why" that you highlight here is still a hard one to answer without getting into the technical weeds. I ran an informal Twitter poll a few months ago and this question (the "why" instead of "how") was the most-requested kind of content.

One potential answer to this is, "imagine building and running software with lockfiles for _literally everything_". I'm not just talking about _versions_ of dependencies or shared libraries - which nix does - but also things like:

- Locking the current point in time (nix resets the build sandbox to the unix epoch)

- Locking out network conditions (all build dependencies need to be fetched and therefore expressed as part of the instructions and not left to "at some point during the build")

- Locking out access to any system state (again, builds occur in a sandbox populated only with what you indicate within the build instructions)

That's what's behind the marketing for reproducability and repeatability. If you lift those principles into new and interesting applications, the various other uses for nix fall out of it:

- NixOS takes the principle of those nix builds and applies to it building not just packages, but the system entirely, like the files it places in /etc or the running kernel.

- Projects like devenv[1] or flake devShells in general re-use the portability of a fully-defined nix package to ship hard-to-break executables into share-able devshells so your peers can work with the bit-for-bit same version of Terraform or python (without worrying about what version of /lib/libssl.so they may have)

- Since nix "owns" the _entirety_ of the inputs and outputs to a piece of built software, shaping it into different artifacts becomes trivial. For example, as long as you're able to build a rust project with nix, nix easily lets you kick out a minimal OCI container (without needing to write a `Dockerfile`), or produce a tiny qemu clone of your system (or any system) by feeding your NixOS configuration into a function that produces images instead of configuring your running system.

Hopefully that's helpful, sorry if it isn't - but nix is sort of alien software, and nix people are still learning how to best share its potential with others!

edit: list formatting

[1]: https://devenv.sh/
Thanks for passing this along. Carrier's innovations in the work of Bayesian inference applied to history are interesting and definitely worth exploring in greater detail. It's been a fun rabbit hole to go down!
Would be interesting to compare the regulations for building construction now and then.
Yup, we don't have permanent citizen sub-classes like Koreans in Japan who end up being neither Korean nor Japanese even multiple generations in.
Corruption was a massive problem in USA industry as well as slowdowns due to legal red tape.

My guess is incompetent government is at the root of the problem.

The more you scale red tape, the harder it is to do anything. Look at the California high speed rail.

Corrupt governments make far more money by slowing down a project and using it as a washing machine to extract rents.

Getting large public projects to misspend their funds on red tape, lawyers and other while delaying building is way more profitable than just letting any construction project simply get the job done fast.

The corruption of the government itself and hybrid with larger construction companies very likely incentivized slow and never complete construction.

Why would you want the work done fast when drawing it out and slowing it down is far more profitable, to milk it forever:
Safety is our number one priority.

Not efficiency.
The reaction where you get a court summons in the mail, unless you apologize profusely and profess your allegiance to the Party? Or the reaction where they take your picture while you're screwing the bulldozer, to fuel their strawman political campaigns?

The entire point of laws like this is to empower the bureaucrats with a credible truncheon, so that you can't just laugh away their self-important nonsense. "Not so funny now is it, funny man?"
Brother of OpenDNS
The whole Windows activation story sucks; 100% agree on that. But it's not "EEE". I don't follow how it's even remotely similar.

Aside: I just have a Windows VM for testing, but I bypassed the account "requirement" for that by disconnecting from the internet when installing Windows.
quote from the article:

"The toxicity tests showed that PLA particles were more toxic than the ABS particles on a per-particle comparison, but because the printers emitted so much more of the ABS"

so, not just ABS
If thats the intent, then it seems the Quick Start is what I'd adjust to be more linear then : )

Again, it looks like a basket of equally-weighted links that a user is free to click into at leisure. It seems more like a directory of useful links rather than a "highly opinionated" guide to get me from zero to proficient.

Compared to something like the sveltekit docs [1] (randomly pulled because I was viewing it today) its much easier to understand the flow of topics, and I think a user can assume they should read them in the presented order unless they understand a given topic already.

[1] - https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/introduction
Can you elaborate? From what I understand, Nix packages are mostly reproducible as they are running great lengths for that, to the point where every time in Nix land is the exact same.
Not just you; I agree. But few people seem to.
This also goes a long way to explaining why service economies are richer than goods-based ones; and why "manufacturing jobs" as a political project are mostly populist nonesense.
> management insists all engineering teams must use scrum.

DevOps/SRE are actually System Admins (always have been, always will be), and they are NOT engineers. They are operations. You cannot run Operations using scrum/agile.
Did any other industry actually use this solution as suggested at the end of the article?
Nothing is free. If it's free, you're the product
PEX is great. I highly recommend keeping some shark bites and spare pieces of PEX around, as it's easy to do repairs on your own if you have an issue.
If you truly have control, then largely the artifacts of that control should be auditable by everyone.

The security cameras.

The door logs.

The DNS and netflow logs.

Ok, not sure about 10,000 screenshots showing nobody has admin access...
My favorite thing is "Our new design is so screwed that it violently vibrates to the point that the crew cant read screens...How can we modify the screen to work?" rather than "Hey..uh, how do we make it not violently do this?"
Prompt Engineering Shouldn't Exist
Houses were much simpler 50 years ago. The building codes have changed a lot since then and modern houses have added construction complexity with better waterproofing, air sealing, fire proofing, bracing, and more advanced mechanical systems.
Growing One's Consulting Business (2016)
If you don't mind, a shameless plug:

https://drakerossman.com/blog/nixos-for-apt-yum-users-a-gift...

I am doing a similar series of NixOS-related stuff, currently got only a single article out, yet quite "meaty".

You may want to check it out for a more streamlined approach in learning nix/NixOS which also compares it to familiar concepts from other Linux distributions. Will be releasing way more complete articles in the nearest future, hopefully within the next 2-3 weeks.
The most obvious example is that using the installer in the quick start enables the flakes and nix-command features automatically, even though they are still considered experimental by upstream.
> If you want to destroy productivity, firing people is a sure proof way of doing that.

In Spotify’s case, the business not making money, and hence not having a stock price that keeps up with the market, is also a way to destroy productivity. Higher productivity people are probably not going to want to work at a charity.
If I could push this to my kindle as an epub with an index. It would be great if these document frameworks would support it. At least a PDF.
Ohh, you know what? There's two, similar papers.

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p27...

This is the one that had a ton of discussion over the last few days.

The one you linked from the /. article is much, much shorter, and has only Bjarne as the author, unlike the other, which has co-authors.
Only for a few months and it's still not 100% effective.
The proposed new rules for calling this() and super() aren't so foreign. It seems to be almost the same rules as for assigning final instance variables (e.g. class Foo { final int bar; } }), where you must definitely assign every final field exactly once in the constructor, not more, not less.

Still, after I experienced the constructor-less paradigm in Rust, where you only can only construct structs entirely all at once, and every "constructor" is just a static factory function, it's harder to justify the traditional OOP paradigm in Java, C++, etc.
They aren’t teachers, that’s the only bit that matters.
Thanks. got it. It would be great if you add an example in the site :)
"common sense" things need to be empirically tested and validated
The openAI brand is now recognized much beyond the circles that know anything about it.

For most people it is "the chatGPT organization" and nothing more.
Thank you. I got it.
Maybe they're outsourcing their hiring to some third-party firm?
Yet another article that believes low birthrates of the Japanese nation can be solved by adding foreign people to the Japanese landmass.
Pull, commit, and push are basically the only git commands I know or ever use.
In "ICE cars" the biggest sources of particulate matter are the tires and brakes¹, don't electric car have those too ?

1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317425487/figure/fi...
Much less clever, but I had a microwave with far too opaque a grid to look through. By shaking my head left and right, it would sort of disappear though. The funny thing is how automatic these human things are. I didn't notice I was doing it until someone asked me why I was shaking my head at the microwave.
Wonders of Street View
They're measuring exactly what they want to measure to draw the conclusion they were looking for.
It's no joke, dude. That was Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...
What went wrong? Why didn't it take off, and why doesn't amazon have a similar offering on AWS? They have such a wide variety of products there that I'm surprised they didn't try again after 2007.
Red tape in many cases is simply an excuse for more corruption or stronger interest groups IMHO. It puts a legal stamp on a lot of things so that ordinary people cannot argue that.

That also makes me think that SWE should either break all those red tapes or put up their own. Nowadays they are simply being milked by everyone else who is behind a red tape or a stamp or a certification or something similar.
Actually I just realized I was confused because of the homepage styling. On the homepage it has the "quick start" pill in an active state, which I thought meant I was already _on_ the quick start page. It turns out you click that to actually view page 1 of the quick start. But on that page the "linear list of topics" is only shown when clicking the quick start in the header nav. I would add that to the sidebar by default.
Yes, but so is a modern control system model.
I have better one: "TV always costs 1000."

In 1958 cheapest car made in Russia was 1000 and BW-TV 1000.

In 1968 Fiat Bambino was 6000 and Color-TV 1000.

In 1996 the best washing machine was 1000 and Plasma-TV 1000.

In 2023 reasonably big smart-TV is 1000€.

Monetary units have been devalued and changed. But TV always costs 1000 units regardless.
Both have the technology, but Google has to protect their ad revenues, OpenAI has to impress everyone and get funding. That's why OpenAI released GPT-3 and chatGPT while Google is just starting to get serious. Google has a lot to lose from the paradigm shift in user-computer interaction that is coming. Eventually even regular people will run their local (smaller) AI model, so Google is reduced to a simple API call from the model.
Determinism is WebAssembly’s hidden superpower
Please consider that the poster telling you that you do not know enough to comment intelligently about this topic may be correct.

> Anyway, axiom/models is the common terminology though I recall a rather long rant that postulate is better once you start talking about multiple incompatible systems.

Model has a very specific definition in this area of mathematics. This sentence is nonsense.
>ICE vehicles conquered the world with abysmal efficiencies, they were around 10-15% when they already ruled the roads and the world.

Fossil fuel comes out of the ground with the energy already in it, hydrogen doesn't exist in a free form and the energy must be put into it coming from somewhere else.

Most hydrogen now comes from natural gas at maybe 75-80% efficiency through reforming, then it must be compressed, then it must be burned at similar efficiencies to fossil fuel or used in a fuel cell with slightly better efficiency than ICE.

It's way worse in efficiency than fossil fuels, you could just use the natural gas directly in a combustion engine and be way ahead. Solar/wind/nuclear to electrolysis is even worse, just charge a battery.

Hydrogen is a energy storage mechanism like a battery not a source of energy like fossil fuel.

Look at well to wheel efficiency BEV are far ahead of hydrogen.
fast forward to future post title "I can't checkout anymore on Amazon because I'm banned on stripe from black box algorithms and I don't know why"
How side hustle can advance your career: Akhil's story
We are often talking about side hustlesopening multiple doorways to opportunities.But getting started with your side hustles can be daunting in the face of a lack of ideas, skills or time. Akhil's story exemplifies how determination and willingness to learn can lead to getting started with side hustles and eventually find success.
Dont grow past 1 person, unless you love sales, the end game is your just in sales.
Maybe there is a correlation

"Worker injuries and illnesses are down—from 10.9 incidents per 100 workers in 1972 to 2.7 per 100 in 2020."

https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats
The US is a big and varied place. One could certainly spend an entire lifetime here and not feel left out of much. And I say this as someone with a meager but existent share of international travel under my belt.
I don't understand why anyone would DIY an air filter, when you can get e.g. a pair of 3M 6092x cartridges for $20.
I believe ChatGPT spewed this out. No one seems to know what's the cap of it so "capped-profit" is crap.
Scrum is useless for that team, you are right. You can't do scrum if more than 1/2 your work is ad hoc support tickets.

When I ran SRE at Netflix, our general trick was one person is on support for the week. They were the primary on-call, they handled any emergency support. Everyone else was primarily building, or at least doing longer-term follow up work from support tickets.

In major emergencies of course everyone would drop what they were doing and help, or if a support ticket came through for a tool someone else built, it was fine to ask them for help. But at least the mindset was "jedberg is on call this week, so don't expect him to be building anything this week".

We also had good management support so that when we went to review our quarterly goals, and 75% of them were red, they trusted us to know that it was because we had a lot of support load that month. Everyone who depended on our tools knew that they would be ready when they are ready.
Would this also be fixed by using a display with a high refresh rate? For instance, would a 240hz display be subject to the same vibration smearing?
> - Therefore, Netflix needs to do what it can to retain / attract subscribers, but essentially can wait until the other services have to give up due to cost

Good summary. Worth noting as well that he spends a lot of time in the article drawing the historical parallel to Blockbuster. The lesson is that Netflix has been in this situation before, of waiting for its competition to punch themselves out.

Personally, I think it's impossible to really predict the future for stuff like this, but it's an interesting read.
Amazon Simple Salary Swapping Service, or S4
No one is going on a spending spree right now. But, if someone asked me after consolidation who would be the last ones standing, it would be Netflix and Disney.
> India has special regulations for payments which blocks a lot of payment processors from doing business there. Adyen and Braintree don't process payments there. Stripe probably doesn't also.

Stripe processes payments in India, and has for over five years:

https://stripe.com/global
Older people vote Republican. Older people tend to have accumulated more wealth than those just starting out.
> Here's how: consider the set of numbers that cannot be described using any finite collection of symbols. Such numbers must exist because there are only a countably infinite number of numbers that can be described using a finite collection of symbols, but there are an uncountably infinite number of real numbers.

But wait. It’s true that there are only countably many “symbolic descriptions,” and uncountably many real numbers, but it doesn’t follow that there are specific real numbers which cannot be described using a finite collection of symbols, does it?

You can, of course, have a computer algebra system that includes a symbol for a non-computable number like a Chaitin constant (with a well-defined encoding). Wouldn’t it be the case that you could define symbols for any countably infinite set of non-computable numbers?

It doesn’t seem to me that there is a fixed set of specific non-computable numbers that cannot be referred to by a symbol. Instead, it’s just that any particular countably infinite set of symbols can only refer to a countably infinite set of non-computable numbers.
Yeah “Quick Start” is really a misleading title for this “section” as it is really the meat of the site itself.
It's about 1 guy waking up on a spaceship with 80 years to go :) It's just really part of the story.

You might not like the premise but the film would lose its impact without it.

It's not a typical "because cheap" scenario where other characters are cut, here it's an integral part of the plot.
Sure, you can write safe C++ code but it's up to you to know all the patterns/syntax to do so. Other languages give you compile time errors when you try to do something unsafe.
There might be a slight difference between prayers in classrooms and books being available in a library for children to check out if interested. Unless you're suggesting that all material containing any religious content or characters also be excluded from libraries in the name of neutrality?
Yes, moral hazard is an issue. But in general a 10% cut doesn't eliminate the incentive for people to work, and the legal system makes "disappearing" non-trivial. That's also why I've included the possibility of automatically skipping low-income years, and not counting them towards the 10 years; ie, it's not just the next 10 years but the next 10 reasonably-profitable years. Finally, a chunk of the risk can be managed by the investor by diversification across different individuals, industries, skill sets, etc. And the rest is risk premium, which would result in a higher average return than a simple loan.

I don't think the difference between a guaranteed annuity and a lump sum is the main blocker here, those tend to be relatively interchangeable (at the appropriate interest/return).
The part I'm more interested in is the insurance aspect. As mentioned, disability insurance is a part of it, and an emergency fund is another part for short-term changes in income. But even with both of these in place, the remaining risk means that eg my effective buying/renting power for a house is significantly diminished.

Note that income share agreements already exist for student loans. They're not so widely used and have their own issues, but it's also a much harder market than people who are already confirmed to be able to take in high earnings.
To expand on this great example a little: TSMC is a really smart case, because the chip business is all about extraordinarily high up-front development costs and near-zero marginal costs.

TSMC uses Apple as their first-and-best customer for their bleeding edge chips, using fat stacks of iPhone cash to push the limits of semiconductor technology.

Then they can keep selling chips built on that process for a decade or more (to a very long tail of other customers).

Nobody would say that TSMC isn't dependent on Apple! They're certainly tied very tightly. But they've turned that dependency into just the top of a very profitable funnel.
Sounds a lot like Xerox and GUIs, Microsoft and Web 2.0, Microsoft and smartphones, etc
How does Nix compare to Environment Modules: https://modules.sourceforge.net/ Am I correct in understanding they are similar, except Nix has the "pure" package building?
Why Are Tech Companies Laying Off So Many Workers?
> Are you familiar with

Starting a sentence by "Are you familiar with" is a pretty clear cut indication that you _do_ live in an ivory tower.
But for others, like carbon monoxide, it is useless and leaves you to die.
First posting I looked at is US/Canada remote only: https://www.remoterocketship.com/company/academia-edu/jobs/s...

edit: Did I misunderstand the premise? Seen a number of jobs that are North America based.
Isn’t the real headline then that building construction technology hasn’t improved at the same rate as other manufacturing tech?

For example, cars today are orders of magnitude more complicated than 50 years ago, but due to more efficient manufacturing technology, the auto industry has far higher productivity per employee than it did 50 years ago.
Raspberry Pi with bare metal Smalltalk/Squeak is the kernel of this.

A Smalltalk with a boatload of RAM but actually running in a persistent, Virtual Memory environment. Some way to not have to "save" images, but at the same time a way to recover when you fat finger and delete the "Object" class from your image and murder it. Smalltalk will let you do that. You'll regret it, but it'll let you do it.

But other than that, the VM is the file system. Your email inbox is just an array named "inbox", stored in persistent VM, paged to and from disk as necessary. With 64GB of RAM, 4TB of disk, you cache "everything" eventually.

I just don't know how to get the virtual memory part to save stuff to disk properly. Maybe save the VM pages to something like an append only CouchDB style file store, that way it's easy to rollback when you bork something up. Every 6 months you'll need to vacuum the datastore to reclaim dead pages.
Indeed. I am too lazy to look but I distinctly remember an article talking about the hazards of 3d printing fumes before even 2015. Possibly all the way to the early days of the original makerbot.

I have been in injection molding plants and the smell isn't pleasant. Melted/burning plastic odors fill the air along with hydraulic fluid and other oils and grease from the machinery.
The large collection is an asset to you, but to many of us, it's a liability.

Almost everything I own I do because it is not cost-efficient to rent (which is what I would prefer to do). i.e. if cost-efficiency were even, I would rent things like books, movies, or music.
Thank you for sharing. Just applied from Brazil.
You mean the recently highlighted issue of gas stoves, or do you mean something that affects electrical stoves as well?