skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I appreciate your example (and level-headedness, btw), but what are we to make of:

1. The fact that these behaviors are learned precisely in response to physiological changes (be it avoidance of withdrawal or chasing the high)

2. The fact that all the supposedly non-physically-addictive drugs like cannabis have well-documented withdrawal symptoms, like sleep dysfunction, that are very much physiological.

If your point is that the physiological withdrawal from heroin is worse than cannabis, then I don’t disagree. I just disagree with the premise that anything can be meaningfully addictive without having a measurable physiological effect. This includes things like gambling, in which the physiological effects are well-documented.

So I’m not so sure that the two forms of addiction can be so well separated. It seems to me that physiology is the mediator of behavior, here, which points back to the very definition of addiction.

I’m left to wonder why people insist on the relevance of this distinction. I don’t believe it’s only to make the point that cannabis is less bad than heroin, as nobody is seriously debating that. I instead get a strong whiff of semantic games.
> It's a trivial amount of storage for a trivial amount of money. Do the math, don't hand wave.

Sure thing! Right now we have an annual battery production rate of 500 GWh globally [1]. If we're going to use global battery production figures, we need to use global electricity consumption, which is about 70 TWh per day [2]. How much storage we'll need varies, depending on the mix of solar and wind. Estimates I can find say 12 hours on the low end, 3 weeks on the high end [3].

So even with the optimistic estimates of 12 hours, that means we'd need 35,000 GWh of storage. This is 70 years of global production at our current rate, for the optimistic storage estimates. And of course we can't dedicate all battery production to grid storage - we need them for electric vehicles, and electrical devices

Production of batteries may grow in the future, but then again so will electricity demand as countries develop and transportation becomes more electrified. Furthermore, we're not counting the fact that batteries have limited lifetimes. It depends on depth of discharge, but we're usually looking at 1,500 to 3,000 cycles before they're substantially degraded.

As your can see, the scale of battery production and the scale of energy storage required to make intermittent sources variable are totally mismatched. The reality is there is no amount of money that will provision the battery storage required, because if countries across the world start trying to buy terawatt hours of batteries when only 500GWh of batteries are produced then the cost of batteries will skyrocket. Cathode material already

> The Eland project provides 24 hour power with only 4hr of storage. That's the demand curve in action.

The "demand curve" means Eland doesn't provide 24 hours of power at its rated output. It provides a fraction of its rated power at night and tells customers not to use as much electricity. This may work for some consumers, but not others. The pumps powering your sewage system can't demand shift if you want to flush your toilet at night. The reality is that peak energy demand happens at night [4], when storage isn't producing electricity. Eland can do this demand shift because other producers are picking up the slack.

When you read about storage projects you need to be on the lookout for weasel-words like this. Demand curve means they produce a fraction of the rated power output during periods of non-production. If I have a plant that produces 1,000 MW during the date and 100=MW at night, that's technically 24 hours of production. But clearly this is not the same thing as a nuclear plant that produces 1n000 MW at all hours.

1. https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/growt...

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consu...

3. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

4. https://reneweconomy.com.au/california-duck-curve-now-a-cany...
I think people struggle with the magnitude.

Mt St Helens, for example. Not the largest eruption.

But a landslide of approximately 2.5km^3 (over 3 billion cubic yards).

Okay, some say, so that is a lot of earth...

and then you learn that the landslide was moving at speeds of up to 160mph.

That's a LOT of energy.
In Manila, a Once-Lost Masterpiece Is Back on Public View
I wouldn't know. I just watched a talk a couple of years back about reverse engineering tamagochis, and they turned out to run on some 6502 compatible chip made by a company that - IIRC - sells to toy makers mostly.
I just assumed the uranium one is a joke created after this story started by some third party and made to look like the original one, so I also did not look any deeper. But the channel being created in 2012 then makes no sense. Someone just sitting on that channel name? Or can you rename a YouTube channel?
We actually did a mini internal hackathon among ourselves to see what we can do in 1 hour. We created a codepen (multiple code editors hooked up with iframes), spotify + lyrics + translation mini app, and a mini-dashboard.

Besides the common use-cases of creating apps or dashboards, we are excited about: AI apps and workflows, interactive education materials, a playground for kids to start thinking about logic, and hardware interface controls.
Utter Bullshit! Today's refrigerators are no more efficient than those from decades ago. In fact, the older, banned refrigerants are often more efficient, since their refrigerants were optimally designed and selected for maximum performance/efficiency in the first place! (And engineers were much better then, too. Really. Plus, I assure you that Thermodynamics has not changed in the interim!)

I'm sure my 35 y.o. Freon refrigerator is pretty much identically efficient to a modern one. The biggest difference is that mine is still running beautifully halfway through its 4th decade, while all the latest Chinese-sht-tech refrigerators will be unfixably dead in about five years at the outside. People should consider that* environmental and efficiency advantage!
I've had the same experience with caffeine- I am very addicted and without it the withdrawal includes a bad headache, serious fatigue, and not being able to think about much else except wanting caffeine. Yet lots of people have told me with a straight face that I am "wrong" and caffeine is not addictive.

Interesting, I also have the same symptoms as you, including insomnia even if I limit coffee to early AM. I think these effects are characteristic of "slow caffeine metabolizers," e.g. people for whom caffeine has an unusually long half life. My hypothesis is that for these people blood caffeine levels stay relatively high 24/7, so the body never gets to adapt to functioning without it, making addiction more likely.

It's weird to me that people seem adverse to the idea that peoples bodies and genetics vary, and one persons experience isn't going to be the same as another.
We aren’t talking about alcohol though.
What percentage of newly planted trees survive? I suspect it is low double-digits without serious watering and good site preparation, which isn’t the case for any of the tree planting at scale I’ve seen in Canadian sites.
You may want to read the actual article which explains how replies very much end up on their instance and therefore require moderation. They will 100% host all replies + all media attached to it. That's how federation works.

Yes, defederation is per instance but cuts of all users of that instance from BBC. Here's a fresh example:

https://social.anoxinon.de/@Curator@mastodon.art/11080988949...

Pretty large instance that defederated before BBC even started.
Alcoholics can survive pretty long, way longer than two month.
That sounds double plus ungood.

The world’s leaders continue to treat 1984 like it’s an instruction manual. Can’t let the proles read anything that would cause wrong think.
I would add to the list of externalities if we do not build more nuclear power plants: CHAOS

chaos that will ensue when we will reach peak oil/gas/coal, as we extract and consume faster than earth produce them. When the price to extract oil/gas/coal would be too high, chaos will result of our economies addiction to fossil fuel.

The sooner we use alternatives the better.

Housing: So, yes, it is annoying to have new house built with only electricity (i.e. without a gas line) but unless energy becomes super abundant and cheap so we can create gas (out of CO2 and water), electricity is the best bet long run.

Transportation: Same, the sooner we can electrify transportation the better starting with trucks and trains. Boats and planes might get the last drop of oil.

Industry: Should get incentives to move to electricity.

And all electricity should be eventually non-fossil (nuclear + solar + wind + hydro).
No indeed. Lots of this in our history. You can't do most of electronics without semiconductors. But, if you have no idea what's going on you can make some rudimentary electronics experiments work - unreliably - without knowing that - e.g. the "Cat's whisker" crystal radio technology. The reason this actually works is because it's a semiconductor, but since you don't know what those are yet, you just know if you fiddle about with a fine wire and certain types of crystal, sometimes it does what you wanted, and if it doesn't keep fiddling with it until it does.

I'd imagine early history of sugar products is the same. Today you can precisely control the temperatures and so you can engineer getting exactly the desired products from sugar, but if you're not so good at either measuring or keeping careful control of temperature, you get... something. It's sugar so in most cases it's delicious anyway, but if you wanted fudge but you've made toffee you may be disappointed. With practice you can "eyeball" it without better equipment, like the cat's whisker, but with better equipment an idiot with no experience can make it do what they wanted because the numbers were correct.
There is a very big difference in price. Slow unreliable shipping is something that established companies know how to deal with, while many of them don’t know how to get a positive ROI out of paying more for freight.

Of course, the fact that Yellow has shut down suggests that may not be as true as it once was.
The locations where pumped hydro could be used are extremely abundant. Remember, it doesn't have to be on a river. It can be out in a desert! Here's an example of a project being built in Nevada. Basin and Range geography, more vertical relief than you can shake a stick at. Look how small this thing is for the capacity!

https://www.cityofelynv.gov/pdf/CityCouncil2021/cc1-28-21/Wh...

https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/

(the whole thing could be sped up; that's a general problem in the US)
Through some back & forth in conda and pip (fighting dependencies), I have been able to get PyPy 3.9 running with my ARM64 Debian system. So far I am seeing a performance decrease up to 2x. I have a series of REST API calls that encapsulate a single DB transaction - a mix of reads and writes. Most of it is leaning on SQL Alchemy, but we have been reaching for psycopg2 for some of the larger insert statements.

I was hoping to see some improvement in ORM performance (SQLAlchemy 1.3) - mainly in the bookkeeping side. Currently the app is about 60% Python app wait time and 40% DB wait time. We have a handful noisy areas which emit a lot of statements (Update 1 row at a time, 10000 times via ORM for example).

I also tried cProfiler to drill down, but as I've seen in Stack Overflow notes that profiler has a larger impact in PyPy over CPython.
> recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season

That’s not quite how it works.

Consider the biggest hydro project in US, the Columbia river, with its 14 dams.

The system does fill up in the rainy season, but the crucial thing is that it’s not the dams that do fill up, but rather the whole watershed, meaning things like snowfall and ground water. This means that we have very limited amount of control over when we let the water through. We can’t just dam the river for an extended period: if we don’t use it for generating power, we must spill (waste) it. This means in practice that the dams are not batteries: to a large degree, it‘s use-it-or-lose-it.

To make these into batteries, we’d need to somehow refurbish the dams to tremendously increase the power generating capacity on each dam, so that instead of assumption of continuous flow (either through turbines or spillways), we make the flow more intermittent, so that we can make up for closed times by pushing more water through during open times.

This is tremendously difficult in practice: dams are simply not designed to allow for refurbishing with many more turbines or much more flow through them than they were originally designed for, the upstream reservoirs are not designed for quickly varying water levels, etc.

Point is, we can’t just “save the water”.
OMG, this is awesome!

This is what I needed for a current project!

Thank you!
We tried that for 50 years and ruined a lot of people's lives in the process. It was a colossal failure in every way.
Without any toolboxes though, and you'd typically need a handful of those depending on what field you're working in and that's another $45 per toolbox. But also anyone just getting started may not know which toolboxes they need upfront which increases the uncertainty about the price.

I really wish they had a more reasonably priced all you can eat home license that included all toolboxes.
The damage from alcohol was higher, when it was legal and cannibas was not. It remains to be seen if that stays the case.
It’s still illegal for federal/military employees or anyone with a security clearance - at some point the government will have to reconcile this discontinuity. Even off-the-shelf hand lotion and soaps have CBD now and might be risky for someone who gets drug tested.
Well I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. A functioning ecosystem and a functioning economy in our present contemplation of the term are not compatible.
Hearing a friend describe how he reacted to caffeine made me realize that some people have wildly different responses than I do.

Caffeine doesn't make me feel particularly great, and I feel almost no compulsion to have more than one cup, but it made him feel amazing, and he felt compelled to drink more.

I can stop drinking coffee for a week without any annoyance, but if he tries to pull back or stop drinking caffeine, he experiences 2 weeks of crippling headaches.

My takeaway: work your way into any drugs tentatively, and don't listen to people who tell you how much "everyone" responds to it.
Thank you! I recently wrote my first systemd unit file, and the experience was mostly pain free. I might recreate it as an rc script for good measure.
More 'edge' would be colocating your equipment in each major New York ISP's data center. One box for RCN, one for Optimum, one for Verizon...

But some people would say if it's in any kind of data center, it's not true edge.
After looking briefly at some of the proposals on Warren and Graham's plan, two thoughts came two mind:

* The road to hell is paved with good intentions -- "we must regulate content for the good of society."

* If Warren and Graham ever read Orwell, evidently they must have misunderstood him.
Well, it is also about intention yes, but my point was just that people do not like to be treated as children (especially when they are acting as such). To reach them, I first have to respect their choices.
I’ll preface this by saying I don’t think there is anything wrong with using cannabinoids in general. I don’t personally, but find the industry fascinating.

The farm bill opened the doors to a lot of other stuff besides legal D9 gummies and high THCA flower. Companies are selling an ever increasing number of cannabinoids. Some are found in tiny trace amounts in nature, others are completely novel. What they all have in common is they are unstudied, unregulated, and created via various chemical synthesis processes from base cannabinoids. It seems like a ticking time bomb.
“I’m not addicted, it doesn’t affect me.” Every addict I know. Seen a number of people slowly change from it until they are no longer who they are. Never in a good way. Seen some who got off it.

One because her husband has such a bad reaction (after several years of use) that he can’t ever touch it again. She became her old self again. Not quite as bright as she once was, but personality improved to the loving person I once knew.
Until we’re willing to let Iran, Pakistan, the Talibani Afghanistan build nuclear power plants, nuclear is no hope of anything other than an energy apartheid.

And that’s the optimistic scenario where it actually works well, scales, can be built out rapidly, and is not extremely expensive.
Yep. All art is interesting for its relative flattening of multi-dimensional realities in to lesser-dimensional representations. Key concerns for the navigators were signals such as migration patterns, seaweed and other flotsam drift currents, temperatures of said currents, star positions, wave qualities, dominant wind directions, conditions and precipitation and cloud over seasons. These dynamic realities cannot be flattened in to any standard two dimensional representations even today, yet often emanate from or are disturbed by the often-tiny landmasses they would specify as origin, destination or reference points within the navigation problem. In the same way modern navigation uses multi-layered systems like bathymetric maps, local depth sensors, RADAR, GPS and navigation lights to provide orientation and safe passage amongst static and dynamic obstacles, so too the traditional navigators combined layers of sensory input considered too subtle for modern systems yet potentially equally effective in their place and season.
That's a great read, the author had a passion project and stuck by it. I'd love to read more of these
I believe the deeper the layer of ice, the thougher it is, so at the surface is relatively easy to drill but at those depths it might be like drilling on steel.
What's your favourite Aussie animal sound? Have your say
Seems silly to compare to that absolute chunk of pyrplytic graphite. Shouldn't it be a similar size spec?
Maybe instead of floating it was half-buried for a while?
I have friends, but I guess I don't see the need to converse with them in public for all to see- why not use something private like whatsapp or signal? Why the need to show everyone else that you have friends?

Do you post a status update telling all your "friends" that you stubbed your toe and then feel depressed when you don't get many heart emojis?

Or do you post a really witty observation about something in the news, so witty you spent all morning thinking of it, and then get depressed when no one reposts it?

sure though, you only use it to communicate with your friends.
That's interesting. I live in a country where it is legalized, so our gummies are usually 10mg. You can also buy 5mg and 2mg mainly for medical or lightweight use, and usually have an extra dose of CBD.

Having said that eating 2 20mg gummies to get high, or a handful of weaker ones that still add up to 20mg to get high, results in the same thing (as you've mentioned). Most people can easily, and happily, eat a handful of gummies.

I guess that law is why our packaging also includes the concentrations for the whole package as well as the per-unit concentrations - to make some of it saleable in the parts of the US with the type of laws your describing.

Federally legal weed is a cash cow for the government and provinces here alike. Sadly it's hard to profit for the producers, so the stock market value is terrible.

Imagine a government that can make it hard to profit off of weed! Pretty shocking on its own. So full legalization is a "damned if you do; damned if you don't" situation for producers.
There are several battery backed solar power plants in the US already built.

Collocated Solar with batteries increases efficiency as DC from solar is used to directly charge batteries without the cost or losses associated with DC>AC>DC you would see if these where separate. LCOE is already below 60$/MWh because you only need batteries for a fraction of total production.

https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_pv-plus-...
Possibly we're thinking of different degrees of high-end. I'm thinking Miele and similar; definitely very expensive, but relatively high volume. There's certainly a tier above who make stoves that cost more than a car, and your concern would certainly apply there.
I’ve known lots of people who aren’t technical to the level of an engineer but still crazy smart and high-value in teams. They’re usually called project managers.

Calling them engineering managers and acting like it’s good to have EMs who can’t code is an anti-pattern. Just call them PMs and let them do all the high value stuff they do.
If you ever doubt that the US has a simply fucking insane advantage in primary resource extraction and consumption, consider your comment. You think $40 per MWh is expensive.

Wholesale rates in Europe hit SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE EUROS PER MWh last year because of gas supply issues and unfavorable weather. Spot prices have gone higher still, over one order of magnitude higher actually, those were futures contracts for a useful period of time. Because THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE WILL PAY WHEN THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.

Consumer rates of 30 cents per kWh are perfectly normal. 100 not unheard of.

Oh, fun fact; the largest producer of nuclear power in Europe is suing its government because it was forbidden from selling at that market rate. It had to sell at 40 cents per kWh. Not to consumers of course, to the fucking glorious private sector, aka resellers, who did sell it to consumers at market rate. The ones who hadn't gone bankrupt and fucked off earlier when market conditions were against them, that is. Although they did spend a lot arguing, successfully, they didn't need to pay producers then, either. Because the glorious efficient private sector can't have competition.

Yes, I'm bitter. Going to an industry conference and seeing no one able to run plants properly because of unreliable power, whilst neighouring Germany sets a new coal-burning record, in unnatural heat, does that.
So this law basically says the Fourth Amendment is void for any American who ever “electronically contacts” any foreign person? And there are hundreds of thousands of known abuses of it? Am I missing something here?
> only that making something illegal reduces its use

I'm not sure how that flies with this:
"An article published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found there was no increase in cannabis use among the general population or among previous users after their states legalized marijuana."

https://abcnews.go.com/US/marijuana-climb-legalization-state...

And also adding that making something illegal will only increase illegal usage, which puts people in jail and ruins lives (for a plant?).

You sound like my uncle.
And that is perfectly okay.
If they really believe they have the only sample they won't let it out of their sight most likely.

It'll be superconducting tomorrow if it's really superconducting today.