skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did some calculations on this a while back, using the energy requirements of direct air capture (DAC) CO2 removal that we currently know how to produce and deploy.

The results I got where that if we built a very large solar farm (500 000 km^2) operating at the efficiency of current commercial solar farms and used all its output to power DAC CO2 removal, that would be enough to remove about half as much CO2 as we currently emit each year. In effect it would be as if we had cut emissions back to 1970 levels.

Note that since the solar farm would just be used to power DAC, it would not need electrical infrastructure outside the farm itself. We just need a place where we can put in 500 000 km^2 of solar panels and a bunch of DAC facilities.

The atmosphere does a good job of distributing CO2 so the solar/DAC facility doesn't need to be near any heavy CO2 emitters either.

BTW, the output of a 500 000 km^2 solar farm per year is about equal to the total yearly energy use of humanity, which shows just how insane the amount of solar energy available is. Let's call this one Human Energy Unit (HEU).

Build two HEU's worth of solar/DAC and we are effectively carbon neutral.

Of course you wouldn't have to build these as 500 000 km^2 facilities. 500 facilities of 1000 km^2 would do, or any other combination that gives us 1 HEU total of energy that is all used for DAC.

How far could we take this?

The 5 largest subtropical deserts in the world have enough room to hold 30 HEUs worth of solar farms.

If we built all those and turned them all on at once it would take one year to remove enough CO2 to get us down to 320 ppm, which is around the levels we had in 1960. Two years would take us back to levels last seen around 1800. 6 years would get us down to pre-industrial levels.

That was all using technology that we have today. It would be a huge project, but it does not require any new science or new engineering. Just a lot of money, politics, manufacturing, and construction.
For many people, the limiting factor of this is visual acuity though. I personally can't see it useful to have more than 2560x1440 equivalent pixels of space on a 27 inch monitor. For a larger monitor, you have to sit further back, so it is effectively the same. If you want to see more clearly, you'd need to get closer, but that causes issues since you are still limited by your available field of view.
I recently had to replace the majority of windows in my home in the US. I was appalled at the options and gimmicks and downright shady sales tactics. I ended up having custom windows made to get what I wanted. Maybe it's a "grass is greener" thing, but I'm envious of how it seems people are just more honest in the Nordics.
Speaking as a happy Gentoo user, what additional (or subtractional) features are you happiest with in calculate-linux?
First cat in space: how a Parisian stray “Félicette” was blasted far from Earth
> Some have been disgusting in places, but I've never seen what you imagine.

Because someone cleaned it up before you saw it? I worked at Seattle’s 3rd and Pine McDonald’s back in the mid 90s (if you live in Seattle, you know the place). We had lots of unhoused neighbors coming in doing really horrible things to our bathrooms. When someone reportedly all we could do was put our bathroom out of order until someone (like me) could clean it up.

Unmonitored public bathrooms simply don’t exist in downtown Seattle because they can’t be maintained without someone to constantly clean them and lock them up if things get too bad.

Lots of other crazy things happened at that place. Seriously, anyone who doesn’t understand homelessness should try working at a fast food restaurant in the downtown of a big city. But it never got boring there, and the coworkers (mostly Filipino) were all cool to work with.
It's even more fascinating that a 25 year old peripheral for a 30yr old handheld game console can be used in the current year with normal systems without any hacking.
I was just about to reply the same but I think what you said is true for coal but not necessarily so for oil.
I remember every lan party there would be someone that would have issues with his PC, that being network or Windows and could not play at all.
Always fun seeing kids at competitions doing these insanely fast solves with their tiny hands.
You have to start somewhere! This is a major public corporation that is making a significant investment with the goal of being carbon negative (!) by 2030. Imagine if every large corporation (and then, every corporation) made similar investments to become carbon neutral or negative.

Everything big started small, and I for one am super pumped that Microsoft is doing this. It's genuine leadership on the most pressing issue that humanity faces.
That's not how it works, sadly. Oil and coal got created in a time where there where no microbes that could break down trees, so dead trees just built up over millions of years and when buried slowly turned into oil and coal. Nowadays there are microbes that break down dead wood, so besides that it would take an enormous amount of time for plants to suck out enough CO2, it would also not stay out of the atmosphere. Unless you start cutting down trees and storing them in some underground caves in conditions where they don't rot or something. A huge and very slow effort.
Jakt (Programming Language)
The Jakt programming language.
I still dream of seeing this version of Smiley's People one day.
As much as I hate monopolies, I also hate having to write an application 5 times because Apple, Mozilla, or some ReactJS based browser like Vivaldi can’t be asked to implement a spec… or insist on creating their own names and prefixes for methods or properties identical to the ones in the spec. If browsers would just be standard compliant instead of inventing their own DSL and pretending like I both have time to learn 10 of them, and don’t mind littering my code with branches to check what planet I’m on every time I need to do something more advanced than the intro-to-html page on W3 Schools, you’d likely be able to log into your bank.
This is honestly really interesting.
i can testify to having helped with night harvesting in 1985 or so, at least. come home from school, get on the tractor and start running the grain wagons.

When it was harvest time they ran the machinery as long as it ran, until it rained, or until the crop was in.
I do this as well but with a slightly cheaper solution. You can find a used SNES, Super Gameboy, and Gameboy Camera for a reasonable price on Ebay if you look around and are willing to do some minor cleanup and repairs. If you're fine with a bit of analog noise, you can capture it with a cheap composite -> USB ADC you can find on Amazon for under $10.

As an aside, I also do photography with the Gameboy Camera. A company called Epilogue makes the Operator, a USB device for dumping Gameboy carts. It has native Gameboy Camera support, allowing you to dump pixel-perfect pngs of your on-cart shots. The 2-bit dithering is lovely.
The US used to be entirely accessible by rail, both in town and between towns, before the auto lobby.

Towns big and small had extensive public transit networks comprised of street cars and trains - and they were all ripped out and downtown cores turned largely into parking lots divided by interstates.

Continuing down car-centricity isn't a foregone conclusion, and it's not too late to walk back our poor decision making.

My point is that freedom is achievable better, safer, cheaper and cleaner by investing in non-car transit.
In at least the early days of x86, it was common for AMD to document what Intel left undefined:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25320603
The author's tenets seem to insist upon the reality of universes expressed in inconsistent formal systems, so I don't think this is fatal to the argument - though it suppose it might render pointless any attempt to treat the premise analytically.
https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Error-Cod...

EIEIO : Computer bought the farm.
Just to be clear, I'm not a chemists. This is just what I have learned from following this industry. Any real domain expert feel free to correct or expand.

Lithium comes in many forms, on a high level there are 3, hard rock, clay and brine.

Hard rock was initially common, when lithium was new and was mined in North Carolina. It turn out it was cheaper to produce lithium from brines in South America. This basically means pumping salty water from below the earth and using the sun to evaproate the water [2].

However since the battery revolution, Australia has been a leading miner of Spodumene [1]. This then shipped to China and turned into lithium chemicals.

Clay has not yet been exploited, but many are tying (like Tesla showed in their presentation). Another technology much talked about is Direct Lithium Extraction, that simple extracts lithium and releases slightly less salty water back into the environment.

From these mining operations two different chemicals are produced as input for battery cathode refining processes, lithium carbonate [3] and lithium hydroxide [4]. Different methods of mining and refining produce either of those. If my understanding is correct, most brine operations end up being carbonate and most hard rock operations end up as hydroxide. Often hydroxide is also produced from carbonate as a follow up process.

Depending on your cathode material and your process you need carbonate or hydroxide of specific quality. And because the material performance here is so important and the battery as a system is so sensitive, even the slight changes in source material and the process can have large impacts. Even the slight changes in source material and the process can have big effects.

So that means if you have a mine, you can't just mine do minimal refinement and then throw it on to the international standardized metals market the way it works for other materials. You need to build a highly sophisticated chemical processing facility that can handle your material specifically and produce high quality materials in a sufficient quantity that car makers can go threw the many rounds of testing that are required before a new source material ever makes it into a car.

Since the lithium industry is comparatively so small the necessary expertise to do these things is not at all common. A few companies can do it and that's not very many people. So getting a team together that can pull of a major project like that isn't easy.

Some media sources that do lot of good reporting:

Global Lithium Podcast - https://www.globallithium.net/podcast - Opinion-ed Insider and Interviews

The Limiting Factor - https://www.youtube.com/@thelimitingfactor/videos - Well researched videos on batteries but also lithium supply chains. Also some interviews with experts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodumene

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Lithium_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_carbonate

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide
Pretty sure those protestors are driving there in vehicles using mined minerals, fueling them with energy refined and extracted using mined minerals (and likely burning fossil fuels too), etc.

If that isn’t saying things should be mined, just not where they can see it, I don’t know what is.
The movie captures the feeling of being a rockstar detective. The way everyone is dressed and the cold logic games they play. The movie raises an interesting question: what happens when the spy controls the environment? They could make anything appear any such way. The strength of your logic then becomes your undoing because an adversary can use your own logic against you. This is probably why rule-breaking is not only the norm for intelligence agencies, but practically mandatory.
^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital to our country's future. All the folks losing their minds are being short-sighted. While I agree in principle that the organizations should be paying their employees more, there's also the reality that China HEAVILY subsidizes their renewables AND has a lower base pay rate. Only one way to compete with that.
Nothing really beats good spodumene yet, and even that's pretty hard to get right at the mining stage, let alone at the refinement.

Traditional brines are fine but need scale and time and still a surprising amount of process tuning.

Clays, lepidolite and alternative brine methods (DLE. Extractive beads, etc) are efficient media for extracting money from the public markets but that's about all.
Simple bookmark manager built with Go
This seems like a non problem. If people are reading a tech website then they probably have some tech related interests. If they're reading an article about bicycles then...

People don't like seeing their "interests" follow them around into unrelated content. That's my anecdotal observation anyway.
The world lacks workers in those fields.
Speaking of Douglas Adams, a new book titled "42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams" is about to be released: https://www.amazon.com/42-Wildly-Improbable-Ideas-Douglas/dp...
You're right to be skeptical [1]. In the end it's better than nothing but it's probably not the most effective method and often times (especially with big corporations) these are bought out just as an excuse to pollute more. Even individual people are likely to use this as an excuse to put off the lifestyle changes (such as buying a new gas car instead of switching to electric or buying fewer clothes or cutting down on electricity/gas usage or installing solar panels).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_woAb8tZ62U
That's not how axes work. That's not how dimensions work. And that's definitely not how lines work.
Wait so the argument is: "There exists the possibility of corruption, so we should discount the opportunity to research further??"

I understand the trepidation for fear of greenwashing. But it's just that, a fear. Until you have evidence of wrong doing why trample on possible world saving research?

As for the above posters second rebuttal, is the argument: "This proccess has been done in the lab before, so this company couldn't have possibly found a more efficient process for doing the same thing?" Isn't this how every incremental step in efficiency is gained? Isn't it a good sign that the process is already known and proven, and so all this company has to do is make it more efficient?

Every new battery chemistry is given front page service, all the while everyone knows there's a slim chance in hell they'll ever be market viable. Shouldn't we be investing in tech that is already proven? Not wild moon shot ideas?
The global ecosystem is a living, complex, adaptive system, and will recover with or without human intervention. Whether humans survives as part of that adaptation remains to be seen.

Rather than looking at this as if we are separate from the ecosystem we live in, and try to sequester carbon, I think the better approach is to develop deeper relationships with local ecosystem.

The problem isn’t carbon. The problem is that the carbon is not moving through the ecosystem. Probably one of the more practical things is to separate the local hydrological cycle from the local carbon cycle — that is, plant more stuff; feed onsite composting to the plants; make greater use of greywater, even blackwater; design dwellings and sites with sun and shade and more passive heating and cooling in mind.
Thank you for flagging this! I had so many friends and family look over the site and no one called it out lol.
> In a way, it seems like async Rust appears more often when you need to do io operations, and not so much when you just need to do work in parallel.

Yep this makes sense to me.

If your workload is CPU-bound then context switching to make progress on 10 tasks concurrently, is going to be slower than doing them sequentially.

But if it’s IO-bound you will spend most of your time waiting, which you could use to make progress on the other tasks.
The 9” B&W screen on my SE/30 with a 512x384 resolution is perfectly usable for Word, Excel, IRC, and code editing.

Refreshingly so at times. Comparatively it’s very distraction free.

Whenever I fire it up to journal or fiddle with some classic MacOS development I always think, “Where did we manage to go so wrong in the last 30 years?”
I'd love to try this but my GPU is potato.

Does anyone know a convenient way to access the kind of GPUs required for this?

Should I just pay for Google Colab?
Thanks for connecting!
> I actually chose that example partly because there's an immediately actionable lower-carbon substitute:

Dua Lipa?
> The general idea is that you grossly overbuild your renewable energy production (solar and wind mostly) and during the middle of the day when the grid is fully saturated and all of the storage systems are filled up you dump the excess energy into carbon sequestration

Or you build solar and wind plants specifically for carbon sequestration. Then you don't have to worry about coordinating with the needs of the grid. You don't even need the plants to be on the grid. That frees you up to put them places where there is plenty of wind or solar but no infrastructure transporting electricity which would otherwise by useless for solar and wind currently.
Like Lennon and McCartney
In my experience async drop is a nice to have, not a must. Futures::block_on is good enough for the happy path in low stakes scenarios.

When dealing with async operations they tend to end up at a network boundary and thus the service enters distributed system land.

Now the async drop also has to handle the server crashing before the drop happens and at any time when it happens. Keeping that in mind trying to actually drop something becomes quite meaningless since you need to handle all other cases either way.
Lithium is pretty important in terms of electrifying our economy, which is important for the global environment and climate change - and it's got to come from somewhere.

It's also true that mines have a huge track record of getting in, digging stuff up, making money, and then leaving the mess for someone else to clean up.

If you look at the satellite map of the area, you see the former Cordero mercury mine: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9221322,-117.8162339,7151m/d...

There's a whole report on it here: https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=7029

> The EPA Site Assessment program conducted a Site Inspection in 1988 which recommended no further action. Upon request from the Fort McDermitt Pauite Shoshone Tribe, EPA Emergency Response conducted an additional site visit in November 2009. At that time, EPA was notified of the possibility that mine waste had been used as fill at locations within the town of McDermitt and on the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone Reservation.

In other words, they tried to get out of doing any cleanup. Then they found that "well, actually..." there was some cleanup needed.

So... it's probably still worth doing because of climate change, but it'd sure be nice to ensure it's done right, and they do right by the people who have always lived there.
I imagine the local tribes are also pretty wary of getting screwed, because that is something that has been very much par for the course throughout US history.
Any plans for a Llama 2 version? (Wondering how much difference it makes at such small model sizes.)
Its not that different from oil. Oil has the same different from different sources requiring different refining. But oil is an industry is about 100-1000x bigger. Lithium until just a few years ago was a absolutely tiny industry.

So in oil its very worth it to build the right refining capacity for large resources and there are tons and tons of experienced people to do those things.
Except Google blocks you from logging in to your own account even if you can receive the forwarded emails elsewhere.
Some personal memories:

A switch might explode by using the wrong power adapter and still work afterwards somehow.

At my high school, every computer was on unrestricted LAN divided by floors. Four classrooms playing Armagetron (the open source tron clone) was a LAN party I didn’t expect.
The point is the carbon capture plant shouldn't get any power. For sure there is no point in running direct air capture from carbon-emitting power sources. (It may, but very unlikely, be worth running it from some fossil fuel station with carbon sequestration of its own, but these in effect don't really exist outside of a handful of not particularly successful test projects. Though direct air capture is kind of in the same position at the moment, so it's all basically just experimenting with the technology at the moment.)
If you remove Le Guin from the search, you'll find attributions for this quote going back to Socrates. She may very well have had such a sign, but it's strange to attach it to her when she had so much wonderful writing that she did do.

Example: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/823818-is-it-true-is-it-kin...
JCDecaux also operated Paris' public bike sharing system; there wasn't any ad space on those (but then it wasn't free).
I would contend that while, yes, there is a vocal contingent against - or without belief in - mask wearing measures, there are also quite a lot of people who consider it a trivial obligation.
Oh please, with the sequence flashing for microseconds I would wager 90% of humans wouldn’t be able to beat that chimp.
I threw up much of it and it was a little spicy on the way out but it wasn’t that bad compared to eating it. Also I do not remember too much discomfort out the other end related to spice. But I generally felt nauseous and my stomach hurt in general. And once it was out I felt better.
So then if prices of battery-grade lithium go up enough then it'll incentivize new production techniques?
Seems like 8-12% is turned into plastics. Though it’s usually natural gas that is used, not oil directly. Natural gas is also used to produce fertilizer and explosives in large quantities.
Ask HN: How do you work with dynamic type programming language
How do you make the codebase written in dynamic type programming language maintainable over time?

By written a lot of tests that are more strict than the type system?

I know statically type-safe along is not enough because it doesn't prevent logical error but isn't having it better than not?
It sounds like this is about direct carbon cature, not carbon offsets.
Does the UK have lots of lithium in their borders? France? Germany?

Im sympathetic to the point that its fairly common but cant we overstate it’s abundance? As far as I know its not very evenly distributed and not everyone has good access to it.
Agree, nobody wants to know or see how the sausage is made, they just want the sausage.
Prohibition of 'any' financial activity is easier than ever now.

Financial institutions have required reporting already, watching for large transactions is already in place.

Coming up with penalties and sentences for violations would be the trickier part.
It depends on when you need those things. A new discovery will take 10 year minimum before it can be ready, more likely 20. So discoveries like this aren't gone do anything.

There are some domestic companies further along in the process. But existing sources like South American brine and Australian hard rock will continue to be a huge part of the market.

The US companies that originally mined in North Carolina are still around on the processing side.

So its not really clear if having the mining domestically makes much of a difference. China is refining mostly things from Australia.

Tesla is setting up a huge lithium refining factory on US soil but most of the material won't be mined in the US.
The carbon being put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels wasn't part of the ecosystem for millions of years. Simply moving it around the cycle isn't really going to solve the excess (though whether the air is the best place to try to remove it from the cycle is an important question).
https://archive.ph/o6OUO
It takes more power to get the carbon out of the atmosphere than we get from burning the coal.

You'd want to stop burning the coal before you start to try and claw solid carbon back out.