skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if i'm clothed 98% of the day, it was a bad day. i wear as little as possible at all times. takes all kinds, however, but i'm sitting in mccarthy, alaska rn, in a robe i brought from my home in anchorage, so i'd only have to put on pants when necessary.
> As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier

Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans.

For SUVs it's essentially nil. The #1 factor in the weight of a car is how big a car you get. Weight is also a secondary factor to size, as drag is the biggest cost. AND weight matters less in an EV, because at low speeds where weight matters, the EV recoups energy from regenerative braking.

> Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment

Lithium is ~2% of the weight of a battery. It's a tiny amount of what is mined to make a car. It's also absolutely NOT a new thing- batteries were a minority use of lithium until ~2015.

> without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment

Absolutely, completely wrong. Lithium is present in low concentrations EVERYWHERE, just like any other salt. The lithium concentration in batteries is so low that if they were ores, it would not be economical to mine them. Economically viable hard rock lithium ore is 2-3x more concentrated.

Lithium is already in your drinking water, in your dirt, and a huge amount is in the ocean. If we were dumping giant blocks of it into landfills that would be an issue, but nobody is doing that.

> what impact the mines themselves will have.

Lithium brine is found in very arid places like salt flats where no water has washed the lithium into the ocean. Clay and brine mining is pretty non-disruptive, as long as you replace the water and aren't dumping acids everywhere. Hard rock lithium is just like any other quarry, but we need very little of it.

> should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products

When you have a cycle that is 20% efficient on one side and 50% efficient on the other side, you're consuming 10x as much energy as a pure electrical solution. It's a terrible idea. The sheer amount of fossil fuels burned globally is also like, beyond comprehension. If we did this, it would be a plurality of all human effort to sustain it.

> better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing

lithium is not a rare metal, or a rare earth metal. There are no rare earth metals in batteries. Lithium is as common as lead. Coincidentally, gas cars use more lead than EVs use lithium. Lead is also way, way more toxic.
Well only if you don't consider the surgeon who operated the davinci robot.

Not to diminish this case at all but people kinda misinterpret how surgical robots operate. They are less like CNC robots where you program in a control path before hand and the robot follows it. Rather they are like a set of "prosthetic" tools that allow you to stabilize your movements and shrink them down to extremely small motions beyond the precision human hands are capable of.

It still takes an extremely skilled human surgeon at the controls at all points of the surgery to make this possible, these are just tools that give those surgeons more fidelity and stability in their motions.

No less amazing in the slightest but make no mistake that this surgery was performed by a human, just with a far more advanced kit of scalpels and forceps.
Large models, such as climate models, which are among the largest are highly vulnerable to high variance because of the high dimensionality of their parameter sets.

Say you have n continuous parameters to your mode. This equates to an n dimensional polygon. Unless you a high iteration Monte Carlo technique the output of your model is going to depend on where exactly your estimator point in n degree space lands, and its accuracy will depend on its distance from the actual (unknown) point in the set.

Now, many of the parameters in large models have never been measured. They are averages from the literature, or in cases where there is no literature, which is common in cutting edge science, the investigators guess.

If you look at the meta studies of climate models, which is what the IPCC uses to make projections, they come out all over the place. These models really aren't great prediction tools. They are best thought of as tools for understanding a the components of a complex system.

Covid was a perfect example: modeling was suggesting devastating impacts from covid, to which localities responded differently, some were aggressive, some were lax. It didn't seem to matter. Yes, one can find statistically significant instances where different covid responses led to higher mortality rates, but nothing substantial enough for any group to want to change what they did.

CO2 makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere and humanity is only responsible for 3% of its creation. We are making very fine grained estimated using a macro model. It's a bit like carving toothpicks with a chain saw.
Sadly, the usage panel is no more, and maintenance of the ahdictionary.com web site apparently reduced to a skeleton crew:

https://mypointbeing.com/2020/12/14/the-end-of-the-road-for-...

I recall a blog post from one of the (former) members of the usage panel, but DDG isn't finding it for me now. Surely more than one of the former panelists have blogged about it -- anyone have links?

It's a telling comment on corporate priorities of our time that there's funding for keeping up with social "sensitivity issues", but not for dropping references to the non-existent panel from the main website. Indeed, some of those listed as active members have already set down their pen for the last time: Harold Bloom, Joan Didion.

https://ahdictionary.com/word/usagepanel.html
The problem is that it costs almost nothing ($150-180 over 10 years) to keep it registered vs the anticipated payday from selling it (over $9000!).

A former friend has been doing a ”trick” for a few years with godaddy domain auctions. He finds a domain that is quite good on Godaddy auctions whos registration is expiring soon (most people set the auction end date to when it expires) and uses a back order service or two to capture it if it were to expire. Using one of a number of alternate fake Godaddy accounts, he bids absolute bonkers amounts that he has no intention to pay for. When the auction ends, he ignores payments demands, the next guy in line won’t pay their bid because they’ve already moved on. Domain expires without a winning bid, owner doesn’t notice that it wasn’t paid before it gets released. His backorder provider will then snatch it up. He’s made about $50,000 from reselling domains he got for cheap this way, even though it costs his about $1000 per year to maintain all these accounts. As scummy as it is, his rule is that if it doesn’t sell during the next two registration years, he will let it expire.
Data presented is almost to perfect (and this is not saying to be clear that global warming doesn't exist just raising the issue). For example accuracy of data from the 1800's or early 1900's. Noting there does not appear to be anything on the site that explains where the data came from to make up these charts. Spining globes with info from the entire world? How did that get into these charts? Why is the assumption that what is presented here is vetted and correct (specifically again no way easily to dig back to see what was used to compile all of this).
This website is a pathetic example of cherry-picked and misrepresented data.

No surprise coming from climate change deniers.

Hacker News always had a pretty high number of such people (and an even higher number of climate change sceptics) amongst its users. I think it's due to a prevalent ideological proximity with the American right, which has been (and still is) the main driver for this propaganda.
The whole sub specialty of design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) helps us avoid the need for humans in robot exoskeletons on the assembly line.
I do agree with the principle of minimalism. Great idea. Big fan of that idea. People should start low and ow. But holy shit. Please please please stop recommend benzodiazepines so casually.
The actual future of remote work, i.e. several years or decades away, is much less about whether you are physically present as it is about the level, type, and timing of virtual presence.

Devices will be able to create a comfortable and realistic virtual remote working environment. I believe that many people will resist this almost as strongly as they do physically going to the office.

The compromise will probably be having a limited time that is required for virtual immersive presence.

The direction is more towards a very high percentage of workers eventually being their own "startups" herding AIs and robots. The contracts and protocols will continue to become more sophisticated.

Managers will not be concerned about whether the human is present or actually working on their project much of the time, but rather will have real-time information about products and services delivered by the individual's company's artificial entities.

Managers will have their own AIs that create and delete contracts based on measured productivity.
The real problem was when Slack added message reactions. Those weren't visible at all in IRC. They absolutely could have been surfaced, like how Apple sends reactions in SMS chats. In a business context that means missing critical acknowledgements of messages and generally forced our IRC bridge users to switch.

It was a pretty user-hostile way to reduce the number IRC bridge users (to then justify killing it), especially given it took them many years after to get the Electron client to the point where it wasn't a laptop-killer.
Having never worked at a FAANG company, I'm not sure exactly what the principal role commonly entails. That being said, I've recently been promoted from lead to principal, which is one of the highest titles for software engineers on our tech track. There are basically a few people who are higher in the entire company, which is a medium-sized public company.

The best thing about this company is the work life balance; I never put in a lot of hours. The worst thing is the skill level of most of our software engineers. The thing I hate about this new role is that I'm less connected to the day-to-day work and just getting shit done. I'm in even more meetings now and the expectation is that I'll somehow help to level up the semi-competent people we hire, and make sure projects go smoothly even though everything is built on a foundation of shit.

Fortunately I am paid extremely well. Pay is literally the only reason I accepted the promotion. Sadly, the company probably gets less value out of me now even though we all convince ourselves that this layer of principals and managers is making everyone below us more productive.
You did the wrong thing. You should have moved to right.

It's not your responsibility to predict where the ambulance wants to go or do the wrong thing because everyone else is doing the wrong thing.
Dedipath is excellent company
If anyone needs to migrate their VMs or Hybrid Servers, Please reach out to https://www.webhostingbingo.com
I think you might’ve intended to respond to my parent.
You actually do need to be a rocket scientist of a sort. You think CO2 increasing by that much is a problem because you've been told it is, probably since birth. It's not something you can observe directly with your own eyes, because it's all about small long term trends.

In practice it's rocket science because:

- The climate is a function of a bazillion factors, many of which aren't well understood at all, and climatologists suck at programming them anyway. That's why the models are so unstable and frequently go crazy to Venus or ice-age like conditions even when simulating a theoretically stable climate with no CO2 emissions.

- There is evidence the CO2 greenhouse effect may saturate logarithmically, which if so would completely change the discussion around climate (in reality it wouldn't be allowed to change, but in theory)

- Nobody knows what the effect on temperature of doubling CO2 is! This is called ECS and over the decades, different teams of climatologists have estimated it yet their estimates have been drifting apart not closer together. The much vaunted consensus has actually been collapsing, with some researchers claiming ECS is a high number and others that it's a low number.
My favorite is a tool called write-good

https://github.com/btford/write-good
This was amazing! Never knew of this. And Mehdi is great as always!

And this is certainly one of the few things on his channel that I can try at home!

The wikipedia article -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherer
The rule appears to be something like `if isDatePassed? then successfullPrediction = "No."`. For example we have:

Hoover dam to be a 'dry hole by 2021': From the MSNBC documentary, Future Earth 2025, quote: "As water levels drop, by 2017 hoover dam will no longer provide drinking water to Las Vegas, Tucson, and San Diego. And it stops generating electricity to Los Angeles. And if nothing is done, the reservoir will be a dry hole by 2021".

This site calls it an unsuccessful prediction, yet there have been tons of water conservation efforts around Lake mead (more specifically the Colorado River). In other words "if we don't do something X will happen" followed by us putting a ton of work into preventing X apparently means the original prediction was wrong.

Other predictions like X could happen in "as little as 50 years" (establishing a lower, but no upper bound), are now marked incorrect 50 years later.
Abysmal Cupertino schools are among the best public schools. Half the math faculty in the local high school are Calculus teachers, because half of the student body is on the fastest math track. A good number of students continue their high school math education at the local community college.

Of course you can always get better like Proof School, where your kids take Linear Algebra without having to walk to a local community college.

Also, is $200k actually right for a PM's base salary? My friend who comes from a non-traditional background recently broke into the tech industry by joining Amazon for $180k as a junior. My other friends at similar big companies have similar offers.
Don't worry; policy makers don't seem to care about any of this.
Like with most things autonomous cars my question would be what is the over/under on how autonomous cars compare to the human population

because I see Human drivers blocking emergency vehicles all the time...

So the question is not, imo, if autonomous cars will be perfect, all the time. But if they are better than human drivers.
Are you using a text only browser? They are ([apple icon], [windows icon], and [linux icon]).
I think it's too difficult to prove in most cases. Like if somebody is riding one on the sidewalk. I don't think GPS is exact enough to definitively say whether they were on the sidewalk on in the road 6 feet away, especially if there's tall buildings around to interfere with the signal.
> What's your basis for saying it doesn't work? Have you actually tried to get a prepaid wallet at the airport counter and it didn't work for you?

Expecting incoming international passengers to queue up at a solitary shop (and hope that it’s staffed) in an airport arrivals zone, before they exit the airport secure area, isn’t helpful or convenient or “digital”. Because passengers after long flights often just want to exit the airport and get to a comfortable bed. Or even otherwise are prone to making mistakes.

Also, I’ve actually seen the kiosks in two airports unmanned and lying empty (to be fair, early morning arrivals). So even a motivated passenger is not guaranteed to receive service if they arrive at an odd time. So when I say your advice is not helpful, yes, it’s with personal experience.

The apps (one of them funded by YC) are a great alternative to this “line up at a particular spot” madness, and hopefully they’ll improve and become more streamlined over time.

PS. If you say “xx doesn’t need defending its stats speak for itself” you will sound uncritical whether you intend to or not. It’s a classic “shut down debate” line. Perhaps appropriate at the Arnab Goswami school of debate, but out of place elsewhere.

If you use it, are called out, and then see it as a personal attack, that’s unfortunate — certainly not my intention to attack you “personally”, but you’ll need to think about your words too.
This kind of headline drives me nuts.

Da Vinci is telecontrolled. The robot does nothing but imitate the exact motion its commanded to by the surgeon.

The headline should read " Surgeon saves patients life using surgical tool that has been widely available an on the market for decades"

The medical professionals deserve the credit. If this was 20 years ago, yeah, we should celebrate the technical achievement and advancement, but there isn't one here. It's old news.

Source- I've designed several (surgical robots)
> How about less cars? More effective public transit is good for people and the climate

Well, I'm about to renew the annual rail passes (which cover our entire local region) for two of our children, but this approach only works because we happen to live 5 mins walk from a local station and their school is 10 mins walk from another station, on the same line.

Good luck persuading people who don't have the benefit of such "lucky geography" to do the same :/
Yeah, this is the thing that bothers me about people's response to robo-taxis. They're not compared to human drivers, who make mistakes all the time. They're compared to a theoretical ideal of perfection, and people get outraged when they inevitably fall short. The problems with the status quo are easy to overlook, just a normal part of life that everybody has come to accept -- but the problems with any attempted change are headline news.
>Please don't recommend people take Xanax recreationally.

There is no way you could of inferred that from my post in good faith.

Do not ever, EVER, give hallucogenic/psychoactive drug, to a new-comer, without having a benzo or nerve pill on hand.

Benzo's, when given appropriately, are the only way - chemically - to help absolve the uneasiness pre- and post- dosing.

Given set and mood are the most paramount factors, it IS recommended that those trying substances (esp. tryptamines) are in a well mind set when initiating.

Nobody is suggesting taking more than a threshold dose of benzo's for recreation. That is a near antithesis of the point of these miracle blessings we take for granted.

Although I do appreciate the concern, yes, you SHOULD have a chemical emergency exit, especially when initiating those on their maiden voyage to the other side of the consciousness spectrum.
The biggest issue is smaller wheels are less able to deal with bumps or holes in the road. Otherwise they're not significantly more unstable.
> What on earth are you even talking about?

This:

> Trade secrets are valid, until they no longer are. Copyright (in many jurisdictions) require no validation either, they're merely valid upon creation.

Some types of copyright requires approval via some organized entity in many jurisdictions, that is easily discoverable via a quick Google search by any passing reader. The prior comment appears like a deflection from the main point, since the fact that some jurisdictions operate differently is simply irrelevant as I never claimed otherwise, nor was that implied anywhere in the preceding comment chain.

Like I said you can't avoid the fact that 'invalidating' trade secrets makes no sense. They can be revealed, they can become so widely known that the label no longer applies, and so on.

But 'validity' whether legal, logical, etc., can not apply to them.

And in any case there are many real world products which so far have not been reverse engineered to a sufficient degree to recreate, such as the fixed glass trackpad previously mentioned. If you can prove otherwise then I would welcome a link.
> We saw what a fairly massive reduction in consumption looked like during the pandemic. It basically put CO2 levels back to what they were in 2016. That's no where nearly enough.

It's not, but an improvement in CO2 levels that's not enough is way better than no improvement unless we can go all the way.
Study on the Fabrication Process of X-Ray Focusing Mirrors
I get the same issue on regular up to date android stock browser.
"This crowd" usually suggests revisiting the US cultural default of living in car-dependent suburbs and relying on cars for everything.
But they didn’t have to line up to do it that way, because the robot is widely available these days.
Thus the second paragraph
I never said anything about forcing this idea on other people. I believe that degrowth and permaculture are about yourself, not other people. I believe that this change needs to start from the local level, in an organic way, instead of being signed into law and all dissenters be crushed. By engaging locally, logistics and politics problems that you speak of are pretty much solved.

I believe that I can change people's opinion by talking about this possible world, and they are completely free to act how they wish. I also think that doing these things are straight selfish benefits for you (more money in your pocket, skills that can make you more valuable in the current system, more time available now that you aren't swiping short form videos all day)
I'll be honest I think we have 10-15 years before things are just unbearable enough that most of the world will attempt military and or economic action towards countries like Germany that simply put, do not care at all about the environment and literally ban alternatives such as nuclear power all cause of political reasons.

We have historic inflation here in Peru, prices of common food we produce is to the roof, people can't afford it, in Lima the lakes we get water from (desert city) are at 65-70% of the normal because of no rain.

Crops are being lost because they are seasonal and we've been the entire winter but temperatures have not fallen below 19-20 degrees celcius at the minimum and going as high as 25 degrees MID WINTER, when usually it'd be 11-12 min and highs of 17 top.

It is very literally impossible to keep going if this gets even worse, no rain and having it impossible to farm winter crops, that's just a recipe for disaster.
Lots of countries around the world have an ID card which is the default ID mechanism and is often mandatory to have (compared to say a driver's license, which many simply don't have because they never drive). The US doesn't widely have that, altough there are some slow efforts to that effect AFAIK.
The issue with rebalancing is that it often has tax implications if you aren't careful. You have to weigh the benefits of rebalancing with the tax loss. It works in tax deferred accounts but, at least in the US, a significant percentage of people do not have material access to such accounts.
You still have to substantiate the accusation.
No, if you check above: "the aim is to keep the size of the repositories within a manageable bound. This is achieved by heuristically excluding some text files that won’t compress well based on their content and size before committing."

Github has a max size limit per repository. You can push a 150gb git repository to github: it won't stop you, but you'll get a message from support telling you remove it within 48 hours.

By "heuristically excluding some text files that won’t compress well based on their content and size before committing", we are able to keep the size bound of the repositories within those set by Github whilst keeping the majority of useful code.

We have excluded 26,610 .py files for being too large, whilst keeping 414,228,665 .py files. The average size for an excluded .py file is 15 MiB, vs ~10KiB for included files.

1. https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#c2VsZWN0IHNraXBfc...