skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The second sentenxe doesn't follow the first - it's a flavor of Zeno's paradox, after 5 years, you'll be left with 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 of the original batch.

You made a mistake: it's not that 1/5 of the computers spontaneously break every year. It's that 1/5 of the students treat their computers roughly.

Assuming that laptops get collected over the summer and re-distributed each year, you should actually expect that 100% of each tranche of laptops would need to be replaced every 5 years.
> Don't get an offgrid inverter, hybrid grid-tied inverter all the way. Even if you live in the sticks with no grid, just get a hybrid one.

Would you please expand on why a hybrid inverter is better even if you're not going to grid-tie it?
As other people have commented, seems like the West's addiction to never ending growth at all costs could be a strong driver of this. Reminds me of this TED talk, A healthy economy should be designed to thrive not grow: https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_sho...
Steve makes an interesting statement when he says "we know that perpetual motion is not possible". Yet we have a modification to the general cosmological view with the theoretical entity "dark energy" which if you consider what is said about it properties, it provides a means of creating a "perpetual motion" environment.

So what can we say: Does perpetual motion exist or not?
Thanks for answering. I'm not even an amateur in physics, so forgive me for this elementary follow-up question. Why does it not balance in water? It would seem to me that the same weight it on each side of the scale, so the same force is pushing down on each side of the scale.
Interesting! But 50kWh seems pretty small for (macro-) grid applications. How big are these units? Seems like most grid installations would want on the order of hundreds (~10MWh) to a few thousand (~100MWh) of these.

Or do you plan to focus more on microgrids?
IncarnaMind: Dynamic chunking for LLM Retrieval-augmented generation(RAG)
IncarnaMind (https://github.com/junruxiong/IncarnaMind) can chat with your private documents (PDF, TXT) using Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT. While OpenAI has recently launched a fine-tuning API for GPT models, it doesn't enable the base pretrained models to learn new data, and the responses can be prone to factual hallucinations. The dynamic Sliding Window Chunking mechanism and Emsemble Retriever enable efficient querying of both fine-grained and coarse-grained information within ground truth documents to augment the LLMs.
I think grid load management for water heaters is already fairly common. I've basic versions of the concept in use by a coop in South Carolina, and I can't imagine them being anywhere near the bleeding edge.
How live streaming is shaping public opinion and political discourse
I think this detail is key, because I've found it works well for me and intermittent fasting drives me bonkers.
I imagine a murder trial would be a lot easier if the person charged was quoted saying:

"I'm going to murder this person"

Compared to

"I hope something bad happens to this person"
Okay I was talking about this with a few friends because it’s now a “debacle” and actually did the math. Unity is cheaper than Unreal across the board whether you release a $70 AAA or a $5 indie experiment. And that’s with worst case numbers. It’s even cheaper if you’re a pro or enterprise user.

On my napkin: for a $30 indie title at the 200k install threshold it washes out to be a 0.67% “revenue share”. Unreal charges 5%.

So can someone show me the math where indie devs are getting screwed? How is this possibly so bad that people are sending “credible death threats” to the CEO?

Or is the issue just the attempt to apply the terms retroactively? That I understand. If Unity said “going forward this is pricing, we aren’t going to retroactively apply the runtime fee to installs prior to Jan 1, 2024”, would the fuss die down?
It's called acreaging. https://www.quora.com/How-do-Americans-live-in-the-worlds-la....
Like high-school level, a very basic familiarity with terms, experiment design, inference.
The authors cite and link to the five surveys used in the 'Data availability' section: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01677-8#data-avai...

* Surveys EB, Pew and GSS are publicly available and data and details can be found in refs. [27],[28],[29], respectively.

\* take the interactive Pew survey (11 questions) here: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/quiz/science-knowledge-quiz/

* The Fernbach study was published in ref. [9] and the authors made the data available.

* Lackner survey data are available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7920776

[27]: Bauer, M. W., Shukla, R. & Kakkar, P. Public Understanding of Science in Europe 1989–2005—A Eurobarometer Trend File (GESIS, 2012); https://www.gesis.org/en/eurobarometer-data-service/search-d...

[28]: Smith, T. W., Davern, M., Freese, J. & Morgan, S. L. General Social Surveys, 1972–2018 (NORC, 2019); https://gss.norc.org/get-the-data

[29]: Funk, C., Kennedy, B., Johnson, C., Hefferon, M. & Thigpen, C. L. American Trends Panel Wave 42 (Pew Research Center, 2019); https://www.pewresearch.org/science/dataset/american-trends-...

[9]: Fernbach, P. M., Light, N., Scott, S. E., Inbar, Y. & Rozin, P. Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most. Nat. Hum. Behav. 3, 251–256 (2019). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0520-3
My current HOA is raising dues AND charging a special assessments because they need money so desparately (despite having nearly half a million bucks).

Despite that, the head tyrant in charge just pushed through an ultra-low priority parking lot painting project. Not like parking lot was bad, it just bothered him I guess.

More often than not (anecdotally of course) they're just Napoleonic power trips for the select few that are bored and no-life-having enough to devote their whole lives to it.
> Once you express what the humans actually thought ...

>> I'm not arguing that mathematical proofs are infallible to modeling inaccuracies, or that ...
Not at all. Peak shaving with approaches like this is fairly common with utilities. Lots of them will give huge rebates on smart meters in exchange for this.
It may not be what you mean, but you are responding to other people's takes on the situation with their usage of the word. What you mean does not matter.
Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics
You put the stick in, access forbidden web site (for example, Instagram). Take the stick out, police searches your computer, there are no traces. If you were using a regular OS, even through Tor, there are some incriminating traces left, in browser cache, in MFT, in pagefile etc. that can be recovered.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png
Yeah, that's cool and all, but

a) a logical fallacy is a particular pattern of invalid argument, not just an argument that is invalid. So just on like a semantic level, an individual argument can't be a fallacy, though it can commit one.

b) fallacies are invalid inferences by construction. You just don't agree with the premise in this case (and are also implicitly proposing a second premise that doing something not-brilliant means a person is not themselves brilliant)

And most importantly c) whether or not working for a FAANG company is "brilliant" is entirely a question of your opinion.
Myth of Ego Death
This really does seem like Unity is destroying their business for pennies. Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time. Unity may manage to wipe out AppLovin by burning down the rest of their business, but winning king-of-the-hill on top a pile of ashes does not seem to be a high value position.

Edit:
It's as if Unreal wants to be king of glossy, fancy, high value brochures, magazines, and books. Unity wants to be king of phone book yellow page ads.
Is this not standard for BigCorps?
But are you guilty of murder if you say “Im going to murder this person?”
The New Economics of Generating Code
I've did this all and currently installing a ~29kWp solar roof myself here in Switzerland. I will pay less than one third of the costs as when it gets installed via a company.
Valve would not count as an indie because they are themselves a large publisher.
Culture is based on what you actually do, not what you say. Volkswagen said they wanted to make cleaner cars, instead there was the emissions scandal. Most governments say they want to build new homes, not many houses get built.
Everything you need to know about Godot 4 Encore Bundle
Reminds attributed to Heisenberg -

“When I meet God, I’m going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he’ll have an answer for the first.”
Longer support is good. I hope schools don't see that 10 years of support as meaning that the Chromebooks they buy will have 10 years of useful life. My daughter has a 3-year old Chromebook issued by her high school that struggles to load web pages.
By far the best way to operate is via in-network connections you already have. This could be former employers who were happy with your work as an employee, former colleagues at those jobs, people you know from your local university or tech community, even niche Discords / Slacks / forums, and so on: places where you are a known quantity and not a commodity, places where you are not competing with a million anonymous consultants on the Internet.

If you are on Upwork or some similar site, you are in a brutal Hunger Games deathmatch with many, many highly experienced people around the world, all racing to the bottom to be commodity service providers at the lowest possible cost. Avoid that if at all possible.

Devote specific time towards keeping your old connections alive, revitalize that network periodically in accordance with your local business customs and norms (the exact things you have to do to do this vary significantly by region.) That network is highly valuable to you as a consultant. That is the one place in the world where you are not merely a commodity.

Take time too to expand your network: attend conferences and technical meetups. Participate in them as a presenter as much as you can. Ask people in your network for introductions to others.

You will find the networking aspect takes up a tremendous amount of time if done properly. Many don't like this, which is fine; these people tend to go back to being an employee.

Finally, make sure you don't spend all of your income as you get it -- that is, save a significant amount of money to cover the low points in your sales cycle. Your income as a consultant is highly "lumpy," meaning you will receive a lot of money at some points, then no money at all for a long time. Make sure you've budgeted appropriately, and you have enough money in reserve to pay for the "no income" parts of the cycle.

Hope this helps.
I have one in physics, but I have also taken a rather a lot (given the degree) in biology, chemistry, civil engineering, and electrical engineering. Went some places also not usual in math. And I've worked in IT since forever. There's a lot of stuff where I take a glance at it and realize I'm just looking at a single hull plate on a battleship.

What I am getting at is that if you have just intermediate knowledge in a bunch of places, I think it lends itself to sensing that you're just a paramecium stuck to the side of some N-dimensional construct. There's so much. I had a professor who was the expert in the second excited state of Helium-3. That was his thing. Just a single needle in the whale-sized blowfish of physics.
Hah yeah, for some reason that line never gets old for me.
Ubuntu convergence exists, so technically its doable.

Its not as useful as you would think. You can access most commonly used apps as a web app on a laptop or a desktop. The only real advantage would be file locality, but phone storage is somewhat small.

There is a small use case of mobile gaming where you want to play a mobile game with a keyboard and mouse, but that is very niche and custom solutions exist for this.
For things like this, Matt Levine is insightful:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/securities-law/matt-levines-mo...

Summary is that not only can you not say things like "lock up" or "market share", you also can't tell employees not to say those things or you'll see headlines like the posted article and have the government claiming at trial that you're trying to hide evidence. This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair.
Yeah I was thinking about how annoyed Apple must be about Unity cratering their own reputation. Their terrible relationship with Epic precludes any Unreal Engine partnership as well.

It's very interesting that Apple has been increasingly emphasizing high-end games, starting with the Apple Silicon Macs, and just recently with the iPhone 15 Pro. Apple buying Unity is not out of the question. They don't have a lot of other attractive options.
Hitler had it all though. He killed his family, that's family punishment. He killed himself too, that's personal death sentence. 7000000 Germans died too, that's kin punishment. What evil can be invented to exceed this?
Chasing (GitHub) Stars
This is a wonderful story!

I listened to the podcast version of this Damn Interesting post: https://www.damninteresting.com/devouring-the-heart-of-portu...
As I said, my anti-growth example is the local family restaurant, that's hugely successful and profitable, popular, provides steady employment to new family members, and is not trying to take over the world.

If it throws off profits, those can be invested in other businesses, not in growing the restaurant.
I think url design is largely unimportant for a blog because people don’t need to form those URLs the same way they would for some query frontend. The most complicated thing you might want to support is anchors/fragments.

There are other much more digestible ways to navigate a blog like RSS, XML, Google Search, the page that lists all your posts, clicking on tags. I think almost everyone follows links rather than editing the URL so the structure is kind of irrelevant.
My father had been using a laptop he got in 2011 (I5-2410m) until a few months ago when I bought him a mini PC with an Intel N95, he didn't even want to switch because for the most part everything worked pretty well and why wouldn't it? The i5-2410m is faster than the Celeron N4020, which is commonly found in many ChromeBooks and budget laptops today, and the i5-2410m wasn't even the best mobile processor back then. Many cheap laptops today are also limited to a soldered-on 4GB of RAM, but most older laptops can be upgraded to 8GB.

I have several other laptops from 2011 which are even weaker (One with I5-560M (upgraded from 380M for 6$) and other with I3-2310M) and they are also mostly fine for web browsing and office, and capable of playing 1080p YouTube video even without hardware acceleration (they don't have VP9 decoding),with H264ify CPU usage drops to 30-40 percents.

With progress in semiconductors slowing down i would expect laptops to last even longer, but with manufactures soldering down RAM and sometimes even SSD maybe that won't be the case. Cause if i wouldn't be able to replaces HHD with SSD and upgrade RAM on these old laptops they would be garbage long time ago.
Can you give me some thoughts on what you enjoyed about the book? I read it several years ago after reading many many glowing reviews but I just couldn't get much out of the book at all. What did I miss?
What I'd like to see is that this fiasco encourages studios to produce their own engines rather than using the pre/existing selection.

I'd happily wait another 5-7 years for a new game on a new engine then have a new game in two years that feels identical to others.

And then open-source it and let the creativity roam free.
>> “A fresh report…has thrown light on the situation”

…no it hasn’t. This was in their original announcement. Discounts are available for those using other Unity products/services (which includes their ad stuff).
(IANAL) AFAIK, intent matters a lot in the criminal law, and if the statement is unambiguous it's significantly easier to prove the intent.
The problem is that installs are not sales.
My 1993 Jeep Wrangler is so simple that I myself can do almost all repairs myself.

The only work it ever needed was a new transmission after living in SF for too long.

I see my friends taking their new modern cars into the shop regularly. My Jeep has been running smoothly for literally more than 30 YEARS!

All the high-tech features like music/podcasts, gps navigation, etc... that's my phone stuck to the dash.

It is a simple robust vehicle. KISS
People Believe Self-Relevant Artwork Is More Beautiful
> I’ve never worked at a firm that received a death threat. If we did, I would expect it to be taken very seriously by senior management and law enforcement.

You expect it would be? IOW, you wouldn't automatically be told about a death threat, so you wouldn't know if the company received a death threat.

I've worked for at least two companies that received "death threats"; I've also worked with folks who were individually stalked, unrelated to their job.

Most "death threats" are vague and unsubstantiated: some (pseudo) anonymous e-mail threatening general violence. They're so common that most companies (and the police) ignore them.

A _specific_ threat will usually get reported to and acted upon by the police, but that often requires naming an individual person and something else, like a specific place or a weapon or such.

As a general statement, I would agree with the person who wrote above, "that every company over a certain size gets a certain number of death threats."
You are correct, regarding "Can I take..." but the queries used "How can I take..." which is not ambiguous.
Notice how you had to change the wording in this comment to make the scenario work. If the problem statement is "compressing 1GB to zero bytes" or "decompress 1GB from zero bytes" then that trick is easily called out as invalid.
At least this means that the OS is less likely to be the constraint.
> It is because utilities can externalize many costs with their current development practices

I'm curious what you mean with that statement. Which costs are they able to externalize by building grid scale solar that they'd have to cover out-of-pocket for a grid-scale rooftop solar deployment?

> Incentives aren't aligned between the utilities and their customers.

I mean, as a first approximation the utilities incentives are:

- keep capex and opex costs as low as possible

- while selling electricity at the prevailing rate inside their RTO

"Shorting The Grid" by Meredith Angwin paints an absolutely atrocious picture of the governance structures inside many RTOs and there are definitely perverse incentives at play, but fundamentally the utilities want to sell electricity while maximizing their margins.

I'm not even sure what the "customer incentives" are beyond paying as little as possible to keep their lights on and houses heated and cooled.
Giving attention? Actively investing your attention in someone else’s wellbeing?
Granting that for the sake of argument:

That applies to the economy as a whole. It doesn't mean that every single corporation in the economy has to grow, beyond the general rate of GDP growth.
Yeah i definitely see both sides of this issue. In the end i'd bet 95% or more of the revenue changes from this big model is going to come from large game studios anyway.

What i think people aren't getting is Unity probably implemented the per install fee in anticipation of the Apple vision pro. An extremely large amount of vision pro apps are going to be using Unity because of the new partnership with apple.
I don't think just saying "hey it is still cheaper than unreal so what is the problem?"

There are now new fees that people didn't have to pay previously. I.e. devs used to use unity and now they still use unity but have to pay more than they did before. Unreal might not even factor in for them.

Indie devs potentially make negative profits at the best of times. That doesn't make death threats (even "credible" ones...) ok though. Just use Godot and move on.
>I think the parent was probably saying for a given input, Google MT provides the same output.

I don't care about being given the exact same output (you're not getting deterministic translations from people either). I care about quality translations. Variability for GPT style translations is much more about word choice and style than wrong or extremely different translations. and if i really wanted to, i could guide both (word choice, style) either with instructions or examples.
Monterey Bay sea creature is the ‘sister’ that took its own evolutionary path
Nigeria power grid collapse causes nationwide blackouts
The grid collapsed at least four times in 2022, which authorities blamed on technical problems.
>Open source seems like the only real hope there.

You know how the saying goes: The best things in life are Free Software!
I thought this was fairly well known.
I’m surprised Google et al. still don’t seem to have communications recording mandates for sensitive roles, like investment firms.
Thats very confusing-- its like a web powerpoint-- but I had no idea. I thought maybe the page just wasn't loading. Do you want to add some help about what to do?
Builder velocity: It's about time
For any Unreal experts:

I'm an aspiring graphics/engine programmer. I don't really care about making games, I'm more excited about improving the tools available. My feet are wet enough with C++ that I think it would be good to start digging around in/ modifying/ contributing (likely merely attempting 'small' stuff like bugfixes) to the Unreal codebase. I've been doing so lately with Blender's codebase lately with some success, so large software isn't totally new to me. Blender is mostly C though, hence my interest in seeing how things are done in Unreal.

Any tips/ resources/ advice/ quirks I should know that you can share would be greatly appreciated!
One important version of this idea is using electricity to drive photosynthesis. If this manages to be even 10% efficient it could massively increase the amount of calories available without much increase in land usage (or ecosystem damage). Of course I suspect this wouldn't produce particularly good food, so it would probably be something of last resort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

To be fair, I don't know if they actually had to pay anyone.
Toyota’s advanced battery technology roadmap
I am not sure why we have all these comments about confidence/overconfidence of scientists and the limits of science.

The article has some very different findings. The crucial paragraph from the abstract is:

>We find a nonlinear relationship between knowledge and confidence, with overconfidence (the confidence gap) peaking at intermediate levels of actual scientific knowledge. These high-confidence/intermediate-knowledge groups also display the least positive attitudes towards science.

It seems to that it is essentially a refinement of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It also matches some previous study I remember which found that science sceptisim and many conspiracy theories around science are most prevalent with certain engineering disciplines (I can't find the study right now, but will update with a link once I do).

It is interesting that someone mentioned Sabine Hossenfelder as a positive example, because I find much of her recent content peddles to exactly the crowd who has intermediate knowledge of and very negative attitude toward science. In particular she often comments on topics where she herself has very little understanding (I know because I have seen it for topics where I am an expert) and just pushes a scepticism opinion without much understanding, but acting like she is an authority.