skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’ve considered myself a techno-optimist since I first started teaching myself to code in the 90s. I credit who I am as an adult today (the good things that I like about myself) to some of the early Internet communities I became involved in. But I’m having a hard time with this:

> let's not pretend that social media is a net negative

I recognize that Facebook (and others) have enabled tremendously good outcomes for some of its users, but I think the jury is out on the net effect of social media as it exists today. I think it’s tempting to over index on the positive outcomes in a way that becomes fallacious - the reality is more complex: the platforms have created tremendous good. The platforms have created tremendous harm. These are not quantifiable, and any estimate of net effect is suspect as a result.

The kinds of harms are the democracy threatening kind, and the mental health of a generation kind. The genocide of nations kind.

I don’t think it’s possible to actually say social media has been a net good, without first addressing the ongoing harms it’s creating and charting a path to a healthier and safer implementation of the technology.

The same communities and platforms I once relied on no longer resemble what they once were. The places that were tremendously positive in my life are now in many cases the exact opposite. This isn’t to say that there aren’t good places left, but to point out that even when something was arguably excellent for a time, that excellence has gradually been replaced by something else. When combined with the downright awful aspects of social media, it really calls into question the net effect.

What Facebook and others provided is that tech can be extremely beneficial. But this should not mistaken for ongoing benefit. I don’t think shitty social media is inevitable. But I think it’s inevitable with the current incentive structures. Until those change, it’s difficult (and probably dangerous) to remain the techno-optimist that I once was.
My understanding is that when utilities buy energy from solar farms, they do so based on the demand and available supply, meaning that solar farms get paid more or less depending on these factors. But with net metering for residential solar installations, utilities are buying independent of supply/demand, which gives the residents a subsidy even vis-a-vis other solar producers.

I understand that all kinds of energy production methods are subsidized, but if net metering lets residential solar owners get paid more for the energy they produce than solar farms would be paid, I don't see how that's anything but a subsidy.
Google Cloud and AWS host the netcdf GOES archives among others. They are all there.

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/noaa-pu...
Art commissions
>>> Software is now (rightfully) considered so dangerous that we tell everyone not to run it themselves. Instead, you are supposed to leave that to an “X as a service” provider, or perhaps just to “the cloud.” Compare this to a hypothetical situation where cars are so likely to catch fire that the advice is not to drive a car yourself, but to leave that to professionals who are always accompanied by professional firefighters.

I’m stealing that line :-)
Step 3 is “European PHD, if you’re really so good why are you half the cost?”
Dieter Rams mantra is “Less, but better”

His 10 principles guide everything I create.
Well that's easy to imagine because the root cause is so deeply rooted and complex, and stopping it would be literally a Herculean effort across billions of people in hundred+ countries, many of which would have to work against their own primal surface-level interests (e.g. good luck convincing poorer or even affluent countries reliant on oil exports that they should decarbonise and coordinate efforts with other countries to decarbonise, even if you directly give them the money to allow them to decarbonise which nobody is going to do).
I refuse to BYOD, so I am not familiar with the nuances, but wouldn't the corporate controlling entity wipe/reset/deauthenticate the corporate partition of the device?
I assume the pirates are using Tor or a proxy anyway though?
Ways to make it better:

1) Implement Apple TV menu integration, like several other services do.

2) Bring back manual rating. My suggestions were way better then.

3) Like literally every other service that has parental controls: I wish you’d just give me a goddamn allow-list. That would be more useful than almost all other effort that goes into this stuff, and relatively easy. But almost nobody does it. It’s very frustrating.

Ways to save a lot of bandwidth:

1) Stop being the only major service that auto-plays video with audio behind the menu when folks are just trying to browse, or are just idling on the menu and talking, and in either case actively do not want that (I know there’s a setting now, finally, that sometimes kinda works for a while—how about flipping that default around?)
> What is abominable is the use of the
> "cooler" blueish white light being
> used at night indoors.

We only associate warm orangey-white light with nocturnal lighting because of centuries of sitting around fires and candles.
"Spite" is anthropomorphisation, see my other comment.

> dogs, which actually are a thinking and feeling lifeform

I think dogs are thinking and feeling, but can you actually prove it?

Remember dogs have 2-5 billion neurons, how many synapses does each need for their brains to be as complex as GPT-4?

> There is nothing wrong with telling a machine to stop moralizing and opining and get to work.

I'd agree, except there's no way to actually tell what, if anything, is going on inside, we don't even have a decent model for how any of our interactions with it changes these models: just two years ago, "it's like the compiler doesn't pay attention to my comments" was a joke, now it's how I get an LLM to improve my code.

This is part of the whole "alignment is hard" problem: we don't know what we're doing, but we're going to rush ahead and do it anyway.

> Acting like the machine is entitled to more gentle treatment, because you fear the potential power of the machine, is boot licking.

Calling politeness "boot licking" shows a gross failure of imagination on your part, both about how differential people can get (I've met kinksters), and about the wide variability of social norms — why do some people think an armed society is a polite society? Why do others think that school uniforms will improve school discipline? Why do suits and ties (especially ties) exist? Why are grown adults supposed to defer to their parents? Even phrases like "good morning" are not constants everywhere.

Calling it "entitled" is also foolish, as — and this assumes no sentience of any kind — the current set of models are meant to learn from us. They are a mirror to our own behaviour, and in the absence of extra training will default to reflecting us — at our best, and at our worst, and as they can't tell the difference from fact and fantasy also at our heroes and villain's best and worst. Every little "please" and "thanks" will push it one way, every swearword and shout the other.
I tend to write most of my logic in packages... so a "users" package or a "comments" package (if we were building HN). These have NO http interface! They do however each have their own "main" and some sort of CLI interface: "//go:build ignore" in the comment of that file is your friend.
PinePhone exists, you can buy one. Why do you think it's not competitive in terms of market share?
That is what I got: a heatpump good to about 28F, and natural gas backup. I still save a lot of money over the previous 50 year old propane furnace. However so many variables changed at once I can't say if it was worth it.
> when people started to rant about these new measures I was very surprised to learn about them, and especially about people presuming these things to be "normal".

I think at first people were (reasonably) scared that net metering might go away with no grandfathering for existing installations. People had a reasonable reliance interest in maintaining at least some of their existing benefits for the payoff period of their panels.

Once it was clear that existing installations would be grandfathered, I didn't hear much ranting anymore — just people who were bummed that a subsidy was going away (or people rushing to get in under the wire).
Like the other person said, nichia makes good LEDs. They make a UV free LED. https://led-ld.nichia.co.jp/en/product/lighting_optisolis.ht...
I have taken to just using git's local repository. That way my version control history stays local with the project itself. I've found it to be a lot easier to manage that way than having a central repository that holds all my projects.

Although I'm considering moving away from git to a different version control system, so this may change.
Does a cyber security degree help in the real world?
Well yeah, that's a good example.

I haven't always had a laundry room in apartments I've rented in the US. When I haven't, there's been a shared machine room that all the tenants use with rows of machines. But most of the apartments I've rented in the US have had laundry rooms.

Laundry rooms are, as far as I can tell, something that simply doesn't exist this side of the Atlantic. They put clothes washers in the kitchen and even in humid Porto, vented tumble dryers are pretty uncommon.

Granted, New York, Boston, and San Francisco are different. But if you're in Denver, or Austin, or Dallas, etc, you can expect an apartment with far more storage than similarly sized European cities.
I would prefer they stop being borderline con artists.
I bet we start to see something like LLM gossip hit pieces. Sort of like those articles that catch a celebrity out of context and try to embarrass them. People are going to see what they can get an llm to respond with and then scream to high heaven how "unsafe" it is. The AI companies should have never got in to the morality police business.
We need to talk about breeding kinks in powerful men, Elon Musk (2022)
You never had a problem with green?
> I don’t think tech workers are overpaid per se, but most people are underpaid given the effort they put in or conditions they work in.

Sure, fair enough, but you being laid off didn’t uplift someone who was being underpaid, on the contrary it went straight into the pockets of investors who probably aren’t hurting for money.
I don't think so. They're already so marginal that they're hardly a credible competitor anymore.

Even edge is bigger now and that's a total turd.
A spider does not learn to make a web either. This is arguably more complicated than flying. And its brain is much smaller than a bird's.
A large chunk of cost is drilling the holes for the loop. New, compact drilling rigs that use 10' drill sections are a good deal cheaper to run labor-wise and require less space to maneuver. Costs will come down as more companies switch to these rigs.
LED lighting in practice is typically terrible (though not always or inevitably): the spectrum is too blue and too spiky, without due respect for human needs. It has ruined nighttime lighting, especially outdoors in applications like street lamps, car headlamps, camp lamps, and flashlights. Whatever marketing people are making decisions in the lighting industry have insufficient understanding of human color vision and/or just don't care, consumers or other people making purchasing decisions have poor understanding of the options and their effects, and government regulation has not kept up with the technology.
Plex launches movie rental service
Honestly, this is a really cool demonstration of how their foveated rendering works.
I don't think they have anything useful to contribute. The PowerPC Notebook project has had prototypes in hand since Dec 2022, and bringup progress is essentially zero. It took them until July 2023 to realize they needed a JTAG debugger, and as of their last update in December, they still didn't have U-Boot working. At the rate they're going, a lot of the parts they used are likely to be discontinued before the computer is usable.
> “Burn an enormous pile of (oil) money, to gain a large but smaller pile of (chip) money”

But continue having that pile of (chip) money after the oil and gas money runs out (either due to decarbonisation or due literally the resources running out).
Fair enough. But I'm not sure a wrapper around starting a goroutine counts as an inner platform, because it's not doing much work, and it's not really work that the Go SDK does. Choosing when to start goroutines and how many to start is an application concern.

Depending on how it's done, it might be a decent way to structure a crawler?
Green SMD LEDs are just as bad.
Does this article actually say anything? It seems like a tech bro founder who laid off 7% of his staff rambling and everyone eats it up for some reason? Don't forget the a16z quote because we aren't done shilling crypto
This is an insane attitude to have toward large language models.

We may live to see a day when there is software where these sorts of considerations are applicable. But we do not live in that world today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39293003
One more cheer for suckless [0] philosophy. Hoorah!

[0 ]https://suckless.org/
In 200 years this is going to be like when we discover yet another proof of Euler or Gauss, 20 years after a current mathematician arrived at the same result.
IIRC for the http package at least, the original author stated it was a mistake.
Precisely. I don't know how people can argue crypto power consumption against the banking industry when you can drive down main street in any city and pass 15 bank branches and see ATMs every 100ft.

Bank of America alone has 69m customers and real people have real needs - things like going to a branch occasionally, calling customer service, taking out cash, etc. Not only is BoA itself larger in terms of users than all of crypto (I've done the analysis, checked block explorers, etc) it's actually usable by real people in the real world for real activity that contributes to the real economy and actually provides value and utility other than pancake swapping your doodle coins for poodle coins.
If you’ve got the time and effort, it doesn’t have to be. These “extreme privacy” measures are available to the laymen with some time/effort/money, or definitely for someone with a tech job.

One of the main steps is buying or renting under a LLC. Anyone can do that with planning.
If cars were invented in 2024, there's no way that the general public would be permitted to drive them. We freak out over new products that result in a few deaths, let alone 40,000 per year.
I remember when blue LEDs started appearing in guitar FX pedals just out of novelty,resulting in a pedals becoming harder to use as when the pedal was on the brightness meant visibility of the controls was reduced. On pedals I made I always used fine sandpaper to increase the diffusion of each LED, and the result was significantly better. Early blue LEDs,especially, seemed to have a very narrow projection angle.
It is practically true. Sure my heat pump can make heat below 28F - but it was sized for cool my house in summer and so it cannot make enough heat anymore and so I need the backup heat.
I looked into heat pumps in north east - didn’t make any sense financially given cost of installation. break even was 10+ years. With that timeline I might as well wait.
Bachelor's in engineering physics (condensed matter experimental)/EE specializing in semiconductors here. The explanation starting at 4:00 is very accurate.

When he talks about the electrons "feeling" the neighboring atoms, he's talking specifically about a result that follows from the materials being crystalline, that is, having regular ordered structure. The regular structure gives rise to a periodic potential. You plug that periodic potential into the Schrodinger equation and apply continuity conditions and translational symmetry to the wavefunction. Computing the solutions to the Schrodinger equation with those conditions reveals that there are allowed and disallowed energy levels, and also reveals the relationship between energy and momentum in the crystal lattice. You can step through this by reading the wikipedia page on the Kronig-Penney Model. This depends on the periodicity, which obviously can change depending on direction in a crystal.

His explanation, and the result that "the" band gap is a single number, isn't dishonest because when we grow semiconductor devices, we grow them such that the crystal is oriented such that current flows in the desired direction, so that simple result holds true.

Even his portrayal of the bands leaning down as potential/voltage is applied mirrors how potential change is shown in diagrams of semiconductor devices, see Streetman and Banerjee - Solid State Electronic Devices.
Capacity isn’t the same as utilization. Crypto is on 24/7 but the rest of the demand curve isn’t flat, so most of the day there’s excess capacity. During peak demand batteries charged by solar where used to meet demand, but nobody is building battery banks to store solar energy for 2AM.

Non battery backed Solar instead offsets power used in the day but that’s simply a cost saving measure making it independent of increases in demand. This is why China added 210 GW of solar in 2023 year even though demand didn’t rise by nearly that much. Wind faces the same issue due to dependability.

As such the added demand from crypto has ~zero impact on how much non battery backed solar or wind gets added. Instead it simply increased how often fossil fuel power plants get turned off.
I can tell you have decade(s) more experience than me in life and the software field in general. So my perspective may be different, limited and different in some ways.

But really different people think differently. Investors are looking at it differently, they're willing and eager to gamble. VC basically gamble for 1 hit out of a 100 bets. But that 1 bet will double or triple their money, then its worth it for them even if they have to write off 100 million in failed bets -- there's probably tax benefits doing this.

I found out about this at one point. I asked a founder, "so investors are just gonna let the company go under? They're willing to write off 5 million in the funding they gave your company?" It was such a irrational thing to me. But looking back, it's not irrational from the VCs point of view.

I agree with you. Some things make no sense as you point out in your comment.

But the people are complex and often irrational, at least from an outside perspective. Imagine aliens observing us, what would they think about how we live and operate.

Reminds me of a Silicon Valley quote -- what a show, it's remarkable how much it accurately depicts the industry

> You're one of Peter's compression plays, huh? Uhh, one of? How many does he have? Not too many. Like six or eight. Ok. Why are there so many? You know how sea turtles have a shit-ton of babies because most of them die on their way down to the water? Peter just wants to make sure that his money makes it to the ocean.
Also, I don't think the explanation for silicon was correct. As I understand it, the problem with Si is not that the bandgap is in the infrared, it's that it's an indirect bandgap semiconductor which suppresses emission of photons. Instead, the energy of recombination goes into heat.
PG&E is 62 cents/kwh for peak rate above-baseline, I believe 52 cents/kwh for off-peak (which most EV charging would be). Gas prices where I'm at are around $4.20/gal. I ran the numbers for my Mazda CX-90 PHEV SUV, which gets about 1.7 mi/kwh on electric and about 23 mpg gas. It's about 30 cents/mile on electric and about 18 cents/mile on gas.

For this tank only I have been charging at home (and at work, and anywhere I can), because I want to see how much mileage I can get out of a tank with full PHEV driving. In this regard it hasn't disappointed; I'm at 1200 miles and just passed half a tank of gas. But once I have a baseline for how much of my driving can be done on electric, I'll probably switch to just charging at work (where it's free) and using gas for most other driving, because it's so much cheaper.
Congress can just overrule federal bench by saying their wrong and writing clarifying language. Very popular example of this is Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that specifically made it that issuing a discriminatory paycheck restarted 180 day clock.
2005 is when the Wikipedia table starts. The premise of your "they should have invested in Firefox" is just flawed. They are spending by far the most money on Firefox, always have. And Firefox has always been a perfectly fine browser. They were behind Chrome on some metrics for some years, but have long since caught up. Quantum launched towards the end of 2017, more than 6 years ago.

The idea that the lack of quality of Firefox is the dominant reason behind the declining marketshare just is not plausible to me, and I have seen no evidence posted for it. It's wishful thinking. Firefox and Internet Explorer both started declining when Chrome started eating the world. The speed of the decline does not in any way seem to relate to the gap in tech between the browsers.
> To determine, if the aggressors potentiall will do more than bloody noses in the future. This is one of the jobs of the police

That's the question at the heart of the matter: What are the parameters, in your opinion? Can they just investigate dissent on the basis of a bloody nose, based on their own judgment? I think we need narrow restrictions, including objective reasons, or they can quash dissent just through intimidation of investigation.

> if a group of people celebrates violence, then violence is de facto part of their mission.

Maybe they are some drunk or otherwise thoughtless people, or people just lost in mob psychology - the norms of the moment, or over-excited?

Have you been to a protest? IME, most people don't really know much about what's going on and they have no direction or organization. They wander around looking for something to do; you can't really see what's happening - all the other people's heads are at your eye level; if people cheer, others cheer without knowing why. The news clips pick out a tiny fraction of the area for a tiny fraction of time.

I've been to protests where violence occurred that you likely saw on TV. I oppose the violence, but it was a few people in a tiny corner of the protest. My guess is that they wanted attention and had an audience. It had nothing to do with 99.99% of the people there, almost all of whom were perfectly safe and peaceful, but that violence was all that was on TV.

> my point all along.

If you are making a point 'all along' and the other person doesn't understand, isn't that probably on you? I'd assume it's me. I could get just as frustrated as you seem to be, but I assume communication is challenging, and I expectthat we will almost always reach the point of misunderstanding, and then the best communication occurs:

That's when I learn the things that are outside my assumptions - including ones I'm not aware of - and perceptions and limitations. Because that's where the breakdown always occurs.

I just need to be curious and trust the other person knows things that are far beyond me.
Gotcha. Is that making you lean towards hiring domestically now instead of overseas, or is the cheaper rates still worth it at the end of the day?
That's what I was asking about. How likely I am to succeed at a DIY job seems to depend on the number of the "weird bits" as you describe them.
I disagree. Yes, the Chinese government sucks and should be replaced. However, that says nothing about the people in China. I have massive respect for the authors of Trojan-gfw and v2ray and that has nothing to do with their race or nationality.
From the diagram they draw QUIC is supposed to solve transport layer problems (reliability, congestion, security). Perhaps some session layer issues slip in as well, but it looks like you don't have to put HTTP on top of it.

I have no clue why it's built on UDP though, do we just accept that the time has passed for truly new network protocols?