skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their grid was still constructed on a capitalistic model. Investment in electricity generation stations in return for payments from electricity consuming users over time. Build too much nuclear (or any other power generation) and you lower the returns of the previous investors.

The easy answer is that financiers don't want it, so it won't happen.
OP is correct. Negative prices stokes battery storage deployment. See California and their ~52GW storage target (currently @ ~10GW), because of negative prices and the duck curve. California utility scale storage soaks up solar during the day (when spot prices approach zero or go negative), and discharges most profitably right after sunset for ~4 hr (but occasionally, right before sunrise when demand is ramping before the sun is up). If spot prices rise during daylight hours, you add more solar generation to push them back down.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-...

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/02/solar-passes-100-of-pow...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/california-solar-electricity-p...

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO?wind=false&...
>I've ended up in contact with vehicles twice this year through no fault of my own walking in my downtown area.

Ugh. Are you alright?
In 2024, even the fact that the website goes down periodically, assuming it does, is now itself an art performance. Solar and battery tech is perfectly capable of keeping it up all the time without an excessive expenditure of resources. I could rig something that could do it out of what I've got lying around the house and I'm nowhere near crazy into solar, it's just some stuff I keep for emergency backup.
Show HN: Defeating IVRs (i.e., phone trees) with a semantic cache
Do you or your application have to frequently complete an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) at the beginning of a phone call?

It turns out you can use semantic caching to navigate past an IVR.

In addition, you can use semantic caching with templating to input data into an IVR and extract data from an IVR.

I know, IVR is different than a phone tree. But most people think an IVR is a phone tree when they interact with it.

Would love to hear what the HN community thinks!
The “just” word is doing a lot of work here and masking multiple billion euro investments, decades long planning and build projects, risk and opportunity cost.
How about instead we “just” invest in grid scale and distributed battery storage and double down on wind and solar?
You also can't change the if statement, is that now magic too?
Odd, I’ve got a zenbook flip OLED and after some tweaking on Linux, I’ve been enjoying not thinking about battery life at all. I think on any modern device most of the power is consumed by the screen, which is not really a problem as much with OLED+linux (since the terminal background is black).

That said, it is pretty rare for me to go more than 10 or so hours without any access to electricity.

At the moment most of my power appears to be going to Bluetooth and wifi, which seems hard to blame on the instruction set.
Oil prices went negative due to an exogenous, rare event shocking demand. No one expected that would recur. (And indeed, many people did try to figure out how to store oil in one-off vessels, short term leases for storage, etc., though I don't know if anyone succeeded.)

Solar panel production on the other hand is exponential and growing much faster than overall power consumption. It can be very, very favorable to build batteries and that's why grid scale battery production is taking off. There is in fact a storage business dependent on energy arbitrage over time, it's lucrative, and all indications suggest it will continue to be lucrative for many years to come.
They tend to be expensive real estate, and the landlords prefer national corporate chains, so you see lots of banks, realtors, cell phones stores etc.

I've read that this design isn't ideally suited to many retail establishments but the details escape me.
My personal favorite resource is "R for Data Science" by Hadley Wickham. It covers lots of nice data manipulation and visualization examples, and provides a good introduction to the tidyverse, which is a particular dialect of R that's well-suited for data analysis. It's available for free at:

https://r4ds.hadley.nz/

For more specialized analytical methods there are lots of textbooks out there that provide a deep dive into packages for a specific field (e.g. survival analysis, machine learning, time series), but for general data manipulation and visualization it's hard to beat R4DS.
> Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.

The issue is that nuclear is currently the only reliable base load generation technology that doesn't produce carbon (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable"). The other top technologies either produce carbon (natural gas and coal) or are unreliable (solar and wind).

I actually don't believe nuclear is "the future" because I think renewables + battery storage will be more economical going forward and less politically dicey. But France is currently the envy of the world for their energy generation save for some countries with unique environments that allow for a lot of carbon-free generation (e.g. Norway with hydro and Iceland with geothermal).
> This ends up recreating housing crises of big cities because people that live and work in the town are getting priced out of living there.

Here is research that contradicts this assertion.

"We ultimately conclude, from both theory and empirical evidence, that adding new homes moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low- and moderate-income families. "

https://furmancenter.org/files/Supply_Skepticism_-_Final.pdf
There are plenty 50-100 year old examples (the whole range) in, say, Chicago of mid-rise 4-6 story buildings with retail on the first floor and residential or office on the remaining floors. Chicago is a mid-rise city. Examples which are considered attractive and historic and nobody complains about them... but they aren't timber frame over concrete podium, they're brick or stone on all floors. Which is of course often too expensive to do now. (Although Chicago has all-masonry examples from the past couple decades too... as well as timber-over-concrete examples I think).

I guess it's the timber-over-concrete that is new and without historical example? Or regardless, the issue is that the historical examples are too expensive to build now. (Why isn't this an issue with residential too? I think it is actually?)

Here's a very typical generic Chicago example, which possibly has had it's ground floor facade replaced at some point in an uninspired way, but you can see the masonry on the upper floors (only 3-over-1) which would be an absolute premium luxury build today, and the building has plenty of character even though it's not being used for especially high-rent purposes at the moment: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9654135,-87.6587315,3a,75y,2...

Here's a new construction (past 20 years anyway) 4-over-1 that is all brick... pretty boring and generic. Would people hate it as much as the timber-over-concrete? I have no idea. https://www.google.com/maps/@41.962424,-87.6661565,3a,75y,26...

Here's a pretty delightful and typical older all masonry 5-over-1, nothing special, tons of buildings like this. https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9582377,-87.6528717,3a,75y,8...

There is no lack of great historical examples of mid-rise 5-over-1 residential over retail -- but they probably aren't timber frame over concrete podium.
Asda IT staff shuffled off to TCS amid messy tech divorce from Walmart
Does it make it type-safe though? In dynamic languages type errors also result in exceptions.
Let's see:

The line can't just go a few metres across the border. Let's say it connects Dortmund, in the German industrial heartland on the French side of the country, with Chooz, the site of a nuclear plant near the German border. French nuclear plants are evenly distributed around the country [0], so that should be a reasonable choice. That's 250 km.

High voltage transmission costs around €2m/km to build [1] and carries around 2 GW of power [2].

So your line costs €500m to build and makes €13 x 2000 = €26,000 an hour and pays for itself after 20,000 hours or three years.

You might reasonably say you wouldn't expect to capture all of the €13 per MWh in arbitrage profits, and perhaps this disparity was a short-lived aberration. But actually it's not: electricity futures in France are priced €25 cheaper than their equivalent contracts in Germany [3], so you could reasonably expect to capture a good portion of that - if you split the surplus between you, the consumer and the producer you can still get €9.

Of course, one problem with this free money is that your competitors are already doing it. The gap is expected to narrow over time thanks to interconnectors like this, increased generation in Germany, and French nuclear plants going out of service [3]. Still, with increasing electrification of the energy market, this kind of power transmission seems like a good business to be in and a good investment for national governments and grid operators.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-French-nuclear-po...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358793859_Cost_of_e...

[2] https://web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/grady/_13_EE392J_2_Spring...

[3] https://montelnews.com/news/e15ef79e-2905-41ca-9124-165d7469...
The nice thing about nuclear is that you can plan how much electricity you're going to generate. (Well, not counting project delays and stuff...)

Ergo, if you're using nuclear and energy became "too cheap to meter" then someone was not doing their job properly. If Tesla overestimated market demand and has to give away cars for free, would you say it means Tesla is the car of the future?
New Statesman has an obituary now too, so it seems pretty certain that he has died.
Ugh man I cannot stand this kind of alpha-nerd bragging story. I’ve heard it’s ilk so very very often.
Semantic Caching FAQ
We've talked to a lot of developers, especially in the Voice AI space, about semantic caching. We keep hearing the same questions again and again. We thought others in the HN community may find this FAQ about semantic caching helpful.
Wrong. FAIR has been open sourcing ML models and source code for the last 10+ years. It did not start with llama. Also, llama was not leaked by employees, but people in the broader community, who the weights were shared with.

For example:

Faster R-CNN - state of the art image segmentation, released in 2017.

FastText - text embedding models, 2016.

FAISS - vector DB, 2018.

https://github.com/orgs/facebookresearch/repositories has over 1,000 repos.
Where did you hear that? I've only ever heard about how nuclear is both capital and opex intensive and very expensive.
I have photoshopLE from at least 92...still using it.
> yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter"

French nuclear power is run by EDF, which although 85% owned by the French government has “a mandate to make a profit for its shareholders”
It feels like the industry is heading towards automating everything using non-deterministic black boxes stuck together with proprietary glue.
thnx for compiling quotes! useful
It seems like their image-tokenization model might be useful for this, but also have you looked into stuff like ControlNet?
Odd that they don’t expand on this:

In Yandex’s pre-trainings, the implementation of YaFSDP along with other memory optimization strategies resulted in a speed gain of 45%.
Many markets already do this: for example California pays generators a mixed rate per kWh and kW.

But just pricing per kWh can work. If the limit is available capacity at 6PM, then those kWh are the most profitable and capacity will be built to meet demand at 6PM.
5 over 1 has nothing to do with the number of floors. It means type 5 (wood) over type 1 (concrete).
Why don't you walk them to school
Study was done by Chinese researchers and funded mostly by sources in China, though the data is on European peoples so it is not one of those industry backed studies finding the industry is great for your health.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01905-9
No, animals arent conscious. Kill them indiscriminately and brutally. Happy Bakrid everyone !
We maintain our own finances, but split everything proportional to our earnings.
Noam Chomsky has passed away
Consumers don't pay the market rate, because that'd expose them to price shocks (see: the griddy fiasco in texas a few years ago). They get a fixed rate from their utility.
The main issues with them is that they are don't create much community, with their lifeless corridors and alienating common areas, and that the ground-floor retail tends to be (apparently) reserved for overpriced retail chains that come and go every few years, presumably because they charge high rents for large spaces. They also tend to not have balcony space for people to decorate so from outside they look completely un-personalized.

If they were less soulsuckingly lifeless nobody would mind them. Also as a result of their soulsuckingness it's hard to imagine treating one as a long-term home, which compounds because they're more soulsucking due to having nobody people treating them as long-term homes. Also they are usually not for sale as condos either so that's another reason they don't feel like long-term homes. (Nor are they able to personalize them significantly).
Even if it did, it's not clear how many developers would take that up. Part of why the 5-over-1 is attractive is because you get a decent amount of housing (and some retail) for fairly cheap. Going taller usually means a more expensive type of building.

Having been to a lot of big European cities, buildings of roughly this size of ~6 stories or so seem to typically be the norm, and they get plenty of density out of it just by having a lot of them. Much taller buildings usually aren't all that common. Hell, even in Tokyo, while there's a lot of high rises, the average building definitely isn't a high rise, it's probably still six stories or less.

That said, much higher density in some areas (e.g. downtown, or right next to subway stations) definitely makes a lot of sense.
Gaussian splatting is such an impressive technique. I wish it finds real-world applications useful for average person -- right now it's probably the best way to show photorealistic scenes in VR. There ought to be more usages out there.
You're remembering a (mis-)quote of a speech given in 1954[0].

And even if it weren't a misquote, "Living up to a quote from 1954" is not how we judge whether a power source is still worth investing in for the future.

[0] https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2015/09/too-cheap-to-meter-t...
"The zoning" is different everywhere, there are plenty of places that allow more than 5 total stories and/or more than 4 residential stories above commercial.
If you're human, you aren't an obligate carnivore, because humans can live healthily on a fully vegan diet. Animal products (meat, dairy, eggs) certainly gave pre-industrial humans a big boost as a dense and (at times) readily available source of calories and protein, but that's a far cry from "needing" it.

Modern usage of animal products for food is purely for convenience and pleasure. A point could be made that that's sufficent, but it's objectively not necessary.
> There were never any promises, and Putin barely even cared that it resulted in Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

you don't know for sure. The only evidence is some notes from brit diplomats I think which refer on such promise..

Also, Ukraine is much more considered as Russian inner territory than Finland and Sweden, and Putin likely got freaked out that pro-western movements will move to actual Russia and kill his regime.
I used to live over a bodega and laundrymat in NYC.. it was relatively cheap AND convenient :-)
For some related ideas...

Let us imagine that there are 100 000 Starlink-sized satellites on the orbit.

At a given time, approximately 29 000 of them are over dry land and the rest over the sea.

29 000 car-sized object randomly moving across all 6 continents, including terrains such as the Himalayas. It would be pretty infrequent for them to come close to one another.
Vibe Transcribe – A FOSS local LLM front end for macOS, Windows and *Nix
What I always wondered as a layman with no background in physics is - couldn’t the observed particle-like properties of waves be an emergent property?
Yeah. They're everywhere around me (Greater Boston), but we really do need more housing in this country. These allow denser construction, without needing to build skyscrapers.

One of the issues, though not directly related to 5-over-1, is the inability (that I've seen) of cities to construct neighborhoods. Most places where these are going up are not "neighborhoods," even in places were urban neighborhoods are very natural, like Greater Boston. Instead, there is sometimes some attempt at a retail space on the bottom of these buildings, but the streets are too wide, not walkable enough, and the retail opportunities are not designed for corner shops/bodegas/other cheap places that help create a neighborhood.

I don't know how to create a neighborhood from whole cloth, but somebody has been thinking about it, I'm sure, and I wish cities would try to learn from their lessons.
Replace FxHasher with faster and better finalized hash
The Nature of Emergent Magnetic Monopoles
Interesting question! Maybe someone cleverer than me can work it out :)
The article said there was no finding that the primary author did anything wrong but that the original photos were no longer available so the paper could not be corrected.

NOTE: I DON'T FOLLOW THIS WORK CLOSELY: I am not sure that there are any successful programs using pluripotent somatic (adult) stem cells, if they even really exist, though there's lot of successful work with differentiated stem cells. So I think there's an unstated subtext as you surmise.

This paper was very important and eagerly received because the GW Bush administration had banned federal funding for research using foetal stem cells as a sop to the religious right (all that work moved to sg and cn, and continued in Europe).
Also for smaller buildings, they should probably remove the need for two fire exits .

Video: Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments (because of one rule)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRdwXQb7CfM
Im not really sure what you mean here, could you elaborate?
Your experience with generative AI is considerably different from mine.
The prices being negative is literally the incentive to build storage.
Exactly ... I love my almost maxed out m3 macbook pro but if I can get one of these fast arm chips in a laptop with thinkpad level linux support I'd insta-buy yet another laptop.
For me the "unelected" part is the key point here. I mean, if we ignore (totally valid) nihilistic views on the nature of governmental bodies, we are supposed to think that this is the point of modern civilized society (as opposed to "totalitarian states" like NK) where we rule over ourselves. We are even accustomed to call it "democracy" even though this is pretty laughable perversion of the word. But whatever, there is valid reasoning why "representative democracy" is the only solution, and there is valid reasoning why we need experts in the government, so long story short unelected institutions are ok and we are supposed to pretend that each of us kinda proxy-elected them.

(I mean, I'm really going to pretend it is ok: after all, I don't consider USA presidential election to be any more real than "proxy-elections" of appointed secretaries/ministers, and in Russia, where people actually vote for a president and he has a lot of power so it actually matters who is the president, people will claim for various valid reasons that this isn't really a democracy and Putin is more like a king now.)

But being as charitable to that world-view as I can be, EU structure feels way beyond that. Recently I tired to answer myself, how it came to be that I somehow "elected" Ursula von der Leyen? Or rather, how did "we" do it (keeping in mind that "we" as in "majority of voters" usually have different opinion than I do)? I just don't feel any connection. EC President is nominated by Counsel from the set of whoever-they-want (chosen behind the closed doors), and then voted-in by the parliament. AFAIK, the parliament never actually rejected a nominee, and BTW in Ursula's case 327/710 people voted against her, so she barely passed the bar. It somehow coincided that at the time my country's representative on the Counsel was "not really elected" as well, and by the end of my "investigation" I felt totally alienated. There is this European Commission thing, it affects me, I don't affect it. This is just how the world works.
> Most of the kids that rent these "luxury apartments" (which is how they are always described) are from cities with much higher cost of living so they can charge a ton of money and mom and dad will still think it is reasonable

Calling apartments "luxury apartments" is just a marketing standard. It's like when Taco Bell says their food is "delicious." It's not the end of civilization.
That's pretty much the whole dilemma now with decarbonization. We know how to generate electricity very cheaply with solar and wind. We just don't know how to do it at the right time.

It will take a lot of investment in storage tech (beyond lots of people using their EV car batteries as time-shifting storage, though that's certainly a good use!) in order to get prices smoothed out so that electricity generated at 1PM can be used at 11PM.
That one (as I am seeing it now) cites the Jacobin article as a source, but the Jacobin article itself is fuzzy on sourcing.
There's nothing stopping localities from forcing developers to make these buildings nice looking. I've been to villages where the mcdonalds is in a tutor style building because that's what code requires. Most of these buildings are the same 5-over-1 design with retail on the bottom, but with a fancy looking facade that makes it look nicer.

But developers aren't going to pay for design unless they are forced to.

That being said, a lot of styles we appreciate now were the cheap designs of their day. Those mid-century storefronts in towns that grew up the 50-60s were all cheap to produce.
I like the design. In theory it offers convenience. Go downstairs for a bite, haircut, whatever...

The downside, when they're new, is the rent for the commercial floors is only affordable by mid to upper market merchants. 30 years hence, we could see "gentrification" where thin margin businesses can survive. Like, you can have a grocery store, but it'll be an expensive grocery store with higher mark-ups and fancier food. The coffee shop will be one with thoughtful art pieces and not recycled-trash-cum-art, etc.
On her Twitter account, Jenny Watson pasted some JSON output of a face detection service [1] which seems to match up with Luxand's web API [2].

She hasn't announced which product her app will end up using to distinguish female faces from male faces, but assuming it is Luxand's, they do make a similar statement on their website [3]:

> Luxand cloud has consistently demonstrated high accuracy in face detection, recognition, and attribute detection, exceeding 99% in many cases.

I'm also skeptical of this claim but in the end I don't think it will matter too much. Either it works as intended, providing an effective dating space for lesbians, or the app gets overrun by intrusive males, which is just more evidence that lesbian spaces are under threat by men who don't respect women's boundaries. Either way she makes her point.

[1] https://x.com/dnalerinrehtron/status/1798367224974950677

[2] https://luxand.cloud/face-detection-api

[3] https://luxand.cloud/face-recognition-blog/face-recognition-...