skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me it doesn’t seem that paper straws is about the resource consumption or oil used or anything like that. I think you have completely misunderstood the purpose.

Even with the order of magnitude increase in resources used it’s still insignificant, as you touch on.

What’s not insignificant is that in the contexts where straws are used.. fast food and coffee shops and such, they’re all too likely to be just thrown out into nature rather than being properly disposed of.

Any material in that category needs to be biodegradable. That’s just a hard requirement in my opinion. So plastics is just not a suitable material.

Yes, there are other sources of plastic pollution that are much worse in volume. Though they tend to end up in other places. We need to work on all the sources of plastic pollution in parallel.

(Unless we go the other route and do massive bioengineering of microorganisms to let them break down plastics)
Screen time is contributing to chronic sleep deprivation in tweens and teens
Only because they are outbid. Individual consumers won't pay as much as advertisers will to keep ad space empty.
> [...] that people turn off their critical thinking abilities and value a commitment to some ideology more than being smart about things.

That's not at all what is happening in a crowd crush situation. As explained in the video, above a certain crowd density, people physically lose the ability to control their movement in the mass of bodies and involuntarily behave more like molecules in a fluid and less like individual actors. The people in the back of the crowd, who still have agency in their movement, don't know that they're indirectly causing the death of others, they're not homicidal maniacs (for the most part).

Blaming crowd crushes on the lack of "critical thinking abilities" and "commitment to some ideology" is intuitive, easy, and wrong. A wrong model for a problem will prevent you from finding an effective solution – as seductive as that model may be.
Pretty sure OP has apnea
you can use paraffin wax, beeswax, carnauba wax, or linseed oil (ideally without heavy-metal catalysts)

there are probably a lot of other alternatives that i'm not thinking of

fluorocarbons work better, are less toxic, and consume less resources because you can use less of them, but they aren't essential
This begs the question: why do we use straws at all? I'd be happier with a disposable sippable lid. Obviously a paradigm where we are rewarded for using our own containers would be best, but I am constraining to the baby steps that everyone is fond of.
Some of it is, but not all.

> usually attainable solution of reducing consumption.

Hell no.

I'm a real life example of this "unicorn" — someone so utterly uninterested in acquiring material things that I spent an average of €1131 per month on everything combined in the last six months. Rent, travel, food, new laptop… and I'm not even trying to be frugal, this is with a lot of eating out and organic groceries.

If everyone did what I did, not only would we still have wasteful straws (why were they in my mango lassis?), but also the economy would collapse immediately.

If everyone cuts back as far as I can when I last tried seriously, the economy breaks much harder.
I've been driving a 2005 Honda Odyssey van for 18 years. It has excellent visibility out the back.

My wife has a 2015 Mazda CX-5. Poor visibility out the back but it has a fair backup camera.

In May, 2018 every car was required to have a backup camera. [0] It feels like car manufacturers don't even consider visibility out the back anymore since they can rely on the camera.

For a while I drove a Jaguar, which had the leaping Jaguar hood ornament. Those were prohibited in Europe and manufacturers moved away from them. [1]

Years ago, I read that hoods were required to be higher (which blocks vision in front of the vehicle) to form a crumple zone. The idea was that a pedestrian would be tossed up in the air, land on the hood, and it would give rather than having the solid engine underneath. [2]

So there are definitely some governmental reasons why manufacturers do what they do. Thicker pillars protect passengers but reduce visibility. Etc. And most customers want bigger cars.

[0] https://www.autoinsurance.org/are-backup-cameras-required-on...

[1] https://magazine.northeast.aaa.com/daily/life/cars-trucks/au....

[2] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/07/while-other-countries...
What utensils/containers should I be using to avoid all forever chemicals and microplastics?
'tomorrow I go to the market' and 'tomorrow, I will go to the market' mean slightly different things in English.

the first one is something like "I have it in my calendar" or "that's the plan" or "as is routine"

the second one is a declaration of current intention, in some cases emphasizing your determination.
Glass. Metal.
I fail to understand how you manage to extrapolate my working conditions from a generalization of what soft skills are required to be a good engineer.
I get that, but that's just stupid given how the story actually played out. When people talk about flat organizations and mean it, they also mean transparent, cross-functional teams that understand the full context. If that had been allowed at Theranos, every employee would have puzzled together the fraudulent behavior in 5 minutes. Someone would have leaked it years earlier.
I think you're correct in the "right now", but I think things fall off dramatically in the next 5-10 years. NVIDIA's progress from 2018 to 2023 was insanely impressive. AMD's was too in fact, at least technologically. Intel is third, but at least still in the game.

Where your premise here falls apart, is the age-old adage, "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good."

We probably don't need CodeLlama 204B to be highly effective in our jobs as developers. Just like physicians probably don't need DocLlama 566B to be more effective in their jobs. We only need good enough. Good enough to be useful and insightful; not the All-Seeing Oracle that has insight beyond mortal man.

I think that revolution is probably coming sooner than we think. I'd argue that in 5-10 years, we'll have hardware powerful enough that a motivated and moderately well-heeled consumer can train their own LLM with domain-specific knowledge and have a product as useful as Llama8 1.3T or ChatGPT-14. There'll always be a market - I think anyway - for incredibly powerful general-purpose LLMs that are subscription-based (whatever that looks like in terms of cost / month), but locally trained, locally run LLMs designed to do one thing and do it well? I think that's the real money and the real future.
Yeah, keep stateful stuff and stateless stuff separate; separate clusters, network spaces, cloud accounts, likely a mix of all that.

Clearly define boundaries and acceptable behavior within boundaries.

Setup up telemetry and observability to monitor for threshold violations.

Simple. Right?
Electricity is 50% of the energy France use. That is policy-based, maybe. hydro is maxed out, we can't install more renewable because producers in Asia are at capacity. The only part we really control is nuclear power. So 30% of French energy depends on policy.

Area more depending on policy: construction, food production, Healthcare, education, military.
10 hours ago (156 comments)
anywhere you go, friends, bars, they will get their drinks with straws. You can take it away, but it's not set up for it.
I haven't tried a Pixel Watch, but on phones I find Android animations generally kind of awkward. They too often feel like they don't fully connect with what they're animating, if that makes sense, and the curves they're on are often odd. I could definitely see the appeal in turning them off.
Yes. Yes I would.

It is clear there are some use cases where straw usage is a necessity.

I do wonder if that should just be something people use when they need it.

The analogy would be, some people use mobility scooters at the grocery store, but not everyone uses one, only the people who choose to them (presumably because they need it, but the point stands either way, need or want)
It's not illegal, just dumb (fuel is much more expansive here, parking spaces and roads aren't designed for huge pickup trucks, and if you're a farmer it makes a lot more sense to have a regular car + farming tractor than to have a pickup truck). So basically only hobbyists drive pickups. I've maybe seen 10 of them this year?
Zap them with laser midair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH_x3kpG8Z4
“Hiring less now” the last ad said.
Would be interested in seeing Katapult thrown into the mix. They're more expensive but I've found them to be overall very good.

http://katapult.io/
I'd made my comment (which note is based on the NYTimes story, there doesn't seem to be a corresponding observation in the LA Times version, see dang's comment about merging threads) because my understanding was that total suppression was no longer policy. I've commented at length on that before, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36233156>.

There's the possibility that the NY Times got this factoid wrong, though it's precisely the sort of comment I'd expect to be fact-checked prior to publication. Assuming the comment is accurate, it's a current documented statement that strongly suggests (near) total fire suppression along the lines of the US Forest Service's notorious "10 AM policy" (all reported fires should be extinguished completely by 10 AM the following day) remains in effect.

I'd much appreciate seeing your further references.
Odd, I always considered retropunk as something requiring a specialist skillset. Breaking into systems to bend them to your will etc. Different perspectives I guess.
Whenever I'm wearing my tinfoil hat, I wonder if all the advice to never implement your own crypto is a conspiracy to reduce independent implementations of cryptography algorithms.

I know constant time operation is important for these algorithms, but couldn't I do this with a timer? Call the algorithm, store the result, return the result exactly one second (an eternity in CPU time) after it was called. Basically put a timer wrapper around the actual cryptography algorithm. It would harm latency, but not throughput.

This is a honest question I'm hoping to have answered.
Edit: Misread and assumed 1100 euros / 6 months. Have removed comment
Any place which serves paper straws (in my area) gets an automatic no-go.
Not interested in a business virtue signaling to superficial ecology preservation. It is akin to anti-gunners betting all in on stopping made up categories of firearms (assault weapons) which make up a tiny portion of murders. Whereas if they were serious they would focus on restrictions of hand-guns. The two stats of crime committed with both are NOT the same levels.
Vite is pretty standard. Most importantly, it does a lot less by utilising new standards and a reasonable default config.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t “select anything to be bait”. I found an interesting behavior on a website and wanted to share it. What exactly is your problem?
> The Fall of US FAANG

I didn't realise they fell.
I would really doubt that. Holding digital identity (e.g. iCloud email, iMessage etc) hostage would cause the general customer base to lose an immense amount of trust in them. As an example, I'm 100% in the Apple ecosystem and totally happy with it. I would dump it tomorrow if they went down that road.
> small businesses represent 99.7% of U.S. employer firms and 64% of private-sector jobs

Is this accurate? Those percentages just -feel- way too high at first glance. Is it counting every gig worker and etsy seller as an independent small business or some other trickery, or were my assumptions just that far off?
A code generator that refuses to generate code.

That tracks for Meta...
The adult behaviour I'd specified was "the ability and inclination to research for yourself what you might have done wrong". I fail to see at all how this would exclude anyone who might otherwise be capable of productively engaging with HN.

If you don't mind a late addition, it's also responding to comments as written, and not as one would prefer for them to have been written, as you're raising an objection not grounded in what I'd said.
I will repost it with Nitter, because Twitter, to some users doesn't show the replies (including myself now...). I understand what you felt, because if you see only the first post, it doesn't make anysense.
Add ceramic/clay.
> Just run the code in the debugger.

How do you set a breakpoint on an annotation? You can’t, and that’s the issue. You can’t reason about annotations in the precise way you can reason about library calls.
The linked AWS article specifically explains that it’s not just the typical single load balancer for cross AZ routing. I frankly don’t know where you’re getting that this means that HA is new to them.
Tokyo by Train (2016) [video]
They measured something at solar noon. This can be independently measured without communication and only requires to agree on the date.

The key, really, was to be able to pick 2 locations on the same longitude and to have enough math/trigo to perform the calculation.
I lol'd at this! Pretty accurate.
The thing I don't understand about Slack is how the core functionality seems to have continuously degraded since I started using it in ~2015. When I started using it, its core message sending features basically didn't have the issues with delayed messages or failure to send that I had experienced with competitors. Now, I routinely have to reset the app/clear the cache and go through various dances to get files to upload reliably (add the file to a message, wait five or ten seconds, then hit send). It's nice to see these technical write-ups about improving the infrastructure behind Slack, but I'd like to see fewer feature launches and more stability improvements to make the web, desktop and mobile apps feel like reliable software again. (nice to haves would be re-launching the XMPP and IRC bridges)
I wanted to like this, but:

1. it didn't make a great case for infrastructure working (they were on one angle with disasters, but ended up with one middle-aged bicyclist killed by a pothole, and some UCLA partier students enjoying a little wading pool water);

2. didn't suggest a plan of action;

3. was mostly poorly-executed gags, and a few potshots at politicians, diverting from any kind of critical thinking or action beyond impotent tweeting.

I strongly suspect that Daily Show style news-tainment has unintentionally been dumbing down what should be a very active left (while Rupert Murdoch and talk radio cynically did something analogous to what would become the right). Now people intuitively feel powerless, except to Tweet zingers at the imagined enemy.

How about: infrastructure is important because (off top of head)... disaster threats (cite some real-world examples, which exist), safety (e.g., drinking water), economic benefits from functioning infra (e.g., transportation efficiency), quality of life, social justice (cite real-world examples of poor areas, and how that marginalizes them), national sustainability (tie it into restoring can-do know-how, and manufacturing capability), with side benefit of creating worthwhile jobs that should already exist.

And don't drop the ball just complaining "oh, those politicans being politicians" and leaving it at that, when a politician says they haven't yet found money for it. Nor try to use the kind of people who'd call in to a TV news program (and get selected to be put on air) as representative of anything other than people who'd call in to a TV news program. The citizen is left with a muddle-headed idea that same-ol'-same-ol', and not informed to do anythign about it, other than make bitter jokes about the perceived adversary.

Graydon referenced West Wing, so I'll try: (context: backstage of Presidential election debate, incumbent meeting opponent GWB character): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvr1T1sFvEg
"However, smart readers are not flawless."

In other words, they are unreliable --- which makes them kinda useless for anything of significance. They offer up some "word salad" that may or may not be representative.

Would you trust serious money to a calculator if you knew that it might give you the wrong answer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CajdyoaSM0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leN5Vm3qdAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6CePBNRXM
For a European, Santana Row is depressing. It's utterly soulless and fake. Just build an actual town, FFS.
100%. It's pure exploitation/manipulation of the gullible, ill-informed and uneducated.
Sweet Jesus, that is amazing.
Odd: I haven't seen any, and search isn't turning up any.

EDIT: Found it, every 2 weeks for about 8 months now. You need to search for All (i.e. Stories and Comments, not just Stories)
Lago – Like Stripe Billing, but open source
Sources needed. This study says paper straws uses slightly less energy and emits about the same CO2 as a plastic one: https://www.appropedia.org/HSU_straw_analysis#:~:text=A%20si....

Even if that’s not the case, “resource usage” is not the right metric to optimize for, this cost-focused mentality is exactly how we ended up with plastic [literally] everywhere.

Hundreds of billions of plastic straws are thrown away every year, this is a massive problem even if its only a few % of the total.
Why would you put auxiliary resources on your critical path if they’re not required? What if google maps has an outage and suddenly your entire website breaks when the only part requiring google maps is the store locator? What if you’re on an airplane or some other network with limited connectivity?

If you engineer your application correctly with non-critical things outside the critical path you can have the best of both worlds.

Imagine going into the CTO’s office to explain why some vital tool or feature hasn’t been working for 35% of users because of some silly issue with Google Maps. “Why did Google Maps issues break our site?” … “well ackshually our entire app waits for maps.init()…” this is like the worst response imaginable.
Demonizing saturated fats and shilling plant-based diet. No thanks, ill take the risk of eating that steak.
> isn’t PHP on par perf wise to Hack these days?

No. But I don't have any numbers, because it's been years since the two languages were directly comparable on anything but a teeny tiny example program.

Facebook gets big cost savings from a 1% improvement in performance, so they make sure that performance is as good as it can possibly be. They have a team of engineers working on the problem.

PHP doesn't have any engineers working on performance full-time — it's impossible for the language to compete there. Hack has also removed a bunch of PHP constructs (e.g. magic methods) that are a drain on performance, so there's no way to close the gap.

But that should in no way make you choose Hack over PHP. Apart from anything else, the delta won't matter for 99.9% of websites.
[I hope this is OK to share here; the guidelines haven't made it very clear to me what HN's stance on political submissions is. Feel free to ignore / purge / flame me if this isn't a good place to share. This account is literally 10 years old but I only have 2 past submissions.]

This is an article of mine lamenting how the code of conduct trend has not changed anything for the better.

To the contrary, I believe the massively popular Contributor Covenant (the specific CoC now used everywhere, even by Linux) is arguably sexist/misogynist in nature, and can be used to harass feminists.

Specifically, I was hounded out of the Guix community for daring to suggest that the CoC should perhaps include the term "sex." (You know, whether someone is female or male.) It does, after all, list everything else under the sun for which you could be discriminated against.

Eventually, they included "sex characteristics" in line with the changes made upstream in the C.C., but I'm unhappy with this for reasons outlined in the article / in the GitHub issue mentioned in the article.

To be honest, I've grown overall highly skeptical of CoCs, and believe they've become tools to push specific political views instead of foment a friendly and inclusive environment. (Yes, I know some will say "duh" but I used to be very optimistic.) This article is, however, written from a very pro-feminist standpoint, so be wary if that's not your cup of tea.
Do we need disposable straws?

Some people need straws (kids, disabled people), but in most cases it's better to bring your own reusable straw to fill that need rather than relying on whatever straws they have at the place you are going to.

My toddler for example will just chew up most types of straws (especially those disgusting paper straws). Bringing a stainless steel, a glass straw, or one of those cups with integrated straw is a much better alternative.

People with movement disorders will probably want something more flexible, so I guess a reusable silicone straw is probably best.

I don't think we need disposable straws.
Ceramic, as a glass, is valid too. Pottery I’m thinking as well but maybe with some caveats such as non-leaded paint.

Edit-I wish store items could be bought in reusable containers made from such materials. It would make groceries heavy and the cost of the containers might need to be “leased” some way (like old milk jugs were perhaps). But I’d do it.
First Bites–Why, When, and What Solid Foods to Feed Infants
What’s Europe using for machine learning?
> I find it easy enough to imagine a type of people that would not engage in such barbaric actions under any circumstances.

None of the people in the back intend to cause injuries to the people in the front of the crowd, nor do they even know what's happening. The cause of crowd crushes is not the "type of people assembling", as evidenced by the wide variety of crowds that experienced crushes.
I think you may have misread something; €1131 per month, of which €468 is rent and utilities (in Berlin, so still a good rate).

€7.6 euros per week for food is doable, I think, but last time I really tried to optimise that I was at university, in the UK, and it was 2003. (£0.50/day: Lidl instant noodles that they don't even sell any more, Quaker oats packs that aren't sold here, skimmed milk, dried fruit in the oats; I don't recommend reproducing this, it was a game to see how little I could spend without going hungry).
RFC 9414: Unfortunate History of Transient Numeric Identifiers
Exactly 1 year (not to say thats obviates the :X nature of it)
At that point your store will get robbed as well.

On a more serious note, that process can be done online, in particular as a lottery. The main issue would be that some stores actually want the crowd lining up to get news coverage of the event. Covering the event in a more dire light (from the angle of the store being too dumb with their operation ?) could help for those.
from my point of view, it depends on how much of it there is and what effect it has on the environment

sand, glass, metal, and rust aren't biodegradable either, but i don't think we should ban mountains because they throw sand out into nature when they erode

plastic straws are generally polypropylene, which is photodegradable to relatively nontoxic materials
I would bet every individual corp is counted as an employer, so under this very few Wendy’s staff count as working for Wendy’s and rather for the franchise business.
I see that there might be some cases where a straw can be helpful or necessary. But there are handed out so many straws wh ich aren't needed. I never understood why they put a straw into my whiskey cola or cuba libre.
We should get there where we just hand out straws if people ask for them as it is with other extras.