skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this point interesting:

> With the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, US policy began severely limiting the production and use of lead in infrastructure and consumer products, including water pipes, paint, and gasoline that have been historical sources of lead entry into the environment.
The pendulum just swung the other way. Message queues were complicated and don't solve every problem, so rather than think about what the individual needs, the "community" took a 180 and adopted solutions that were overly simplistic and didn't solve every problem. It happens every 5 years or so with a different tech thing. HN is nothing if not constantly chasing any contrarian opinion that seems novel.
'Dyson spheres' were theorized as a way to detect alien life
If we're aspiring to 1970s standards then sure. Nuclear power isn't about achieving the lofty heights of the 1970s. I'm just going to wave the famous article by Crawford on the economics of nuclear around: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop [0]

What you can see there is a very impressive learning curve that was well on the way to very cheap electricity. Then it suddenly and sharply inverts in a shape that defies common sense. Then no-one else really builds any.

"Supporting nuclear" isn't supposed to mean splitting the atom at any cost. The point is if we would just stop regulating the industry into oblivion and let costs drop then it'd be a perfectly competitive form of power. We have this lobby that goes in, wrecks the economics of nuclear then uses the wreck they created as justification for why we can't build any more. And in some senses that is fair because if they had the power to destroy past nuclear projects they can do it again. But lets not pretend that these costs are fundamental to nuclear.

Keeping a weather eye on China, if they do their usual trick and start learning how to build nuclear cheaply they could leapfrog everyone else on energy tech in another industry. On the one hand that'd be fantastic to the point where I'd love it. On the other it is so frustrating to be relying on nominal communists to push the state of the art forward on energy technology after listening to my western compatriots whinge about exactly that topic for decades while blocking the obvious solutions. We could have built the future in the west, we never had to have a do-it-in-China policy.

[0] If you read the article, he's paraphrasing some book by someone called Devanney. I'm going to gamble on nobody reading the article so I can get that wrong without being corrected.
How would transmission solve the massive electricity demand during cold winter nights? Even in more southern areas generation during winter is lower, then pay the massive loss of transmitting that so far north and it is no longer viable.
This is just some drivel from yet another VC touting AI will change everything. Fuck off already.
It's definitely a generation issue. When there's no sun(overcast, nighttime) there's no energy. This doesn't even factor in solars quick deterioration from peak performance and the cost of the panels and environment damage from producing them.
Just curious where "here" is. South Africa?
The compromise does look like a compromise.

The AFL-CIO (labor unions) are getting quicker resolutions. If the govt can deliver that it will be absolutely huge for most folks just trying to solve things without litigation. They need to deliver that critically. Make it so that DLSE / LWDA get stuff done in 60 days if the employee cooperates.

One issue has been CA state workers were all work from home - so stuff has slowed WAY down in terms of anything state agency level. I think they will back in office 2 days a week hopefully by the end of the year.
And for this reason ice floats on water as it’s one of those rare materials whose density decreases as it solidifies.

Because ice floats and is an excellent insulator rivers and lakes don’t completely freeze up enabling aquatic life to continue to thrive beneath while the surface remains frozen.
These sounds effects are unlocking DEEEP memories. Thank you for sharing!
In my experience, the biggest issue with microservices is that they convert nice errors with a stack trace to network errors. Unless you also invest heavily in observability (usually using expensive tools), running and debugging monoliths generally seems easier
Solar panels are getting cheaper by the day.

Solar power is not.

Because between the panel and the lightbulb lies a battery.
I'd agree. Clearly solar is sun-dependent, and other options may be more suited to other locations.

That said, electricity is one form of energy that is really cheap to distribute (once you are close to "the grid".) Which means that moving electricity from sunny places to darker corners is very practical.

There are some economics in play. Remote populations (like on islands, or in Alaska) are unlikely to be connected anytime soon. These populations are generally dependent on coal.

Nuclear might be appealing, but refueling nuclear takes time. So if it's your only electrical source, you need two reactors, each capable of supplying enough power. And of course the expertise to run it (expertise possibly harder to find in far-north Alaska.)

Ultimately diesel is likely to remain the fuel of choice for small communities because engines are cheap, fuel is easily transported, and expertise is local.
> Citing both an employee in Apple's headset supply chain and one working in headset manufacturing for Apple, the report claims that the cheaper Vision product—perhaps around the $1,600 mark—is due before the end of 2025.

I'd like to see a Meta Quest 4 hit the market in 2025 in time for Xmas to compete with it and see which fares better in the market. I'd also like to see a BigScreen Beyond that doesn't have room-scale tracking. Is an iPhone on your face really the thing people want?
Love it. I'm curious, anyone know how this was implemented? Is it a webassembly port of the original kidpix code or did he code it up from scratch via JS?
> There's a WebRTC Chromium bug that is making life difficult for us. I'd like to pay a developer to fix it, but I don't know where/how to find people.

Have you filed a bug in the project's issue tracker? Has the project team not followed up? Is there a link to this issue?
Sorta feels a bit like Atom Curtis' "All watched over by machines of lovin grace"

I first saw it over here on thoughtmaybe
https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...
Top LLMs mimic Russian disinfo 30% of the time, relying on fake local news sites
A fair number of claims are guidance issues or gotcha issues. Wrong employer address on a paycheck is a crime (as it should be), but is it a $2 million dollar crime? Or could it be fixed in the next payroll cycle if a zip code was missing on an address with maybe some kind of penalty per employee for one payroll (not every paycheck).
As said, a video demo would be great, especially since it is not on iOS yet, but it looks great!
I would add `shift` and `command shift` to that matrix.
More than that, they should include the opportunity cost of setting aside that much land to be a polluted or sunless wasteland, fairly close to population centers.

Something like nuclear puts the large wasteland far away from dense populations, with only the small reactor close by
I'm not offering a "theory"; but you did, and a plainly untenable one.

If the only response you can think of is to speculate about the background of the person pointing this out to you -- that's a pretty common psychological defense, and if it offers some form of comfort to you, you're more than entitled to it.
I don't know about your friend, but there was an option piece, not a scientific study, that reported about that number of "landmark" cancer research papers as being "not-reproducible" in industry hands.

However, it did not have methods, it didn't say how they were not reproducible, as in a figure or an effect etc.

The closest thing to a definition of "reproducible" was a footnote on a table defining it as "sufficient to drive a drug development program," which is not at all the same thing as reproducible.

Which is to say, I'm skeptical of these anecdotes.
You can obtain a certificate for the domain in question (easier if you are a nation-state) and MITM that specific user.
I was half expecting to find a real page there.
It's just you; the sentence is written in a straightforward manner using pretty typical vocabulary.

There's an effort to repeal law X; that effort has been defeated by a last-minute political compromise.

> also, since when does anyone say “headed off?”

Again, just you.
Most of those places haven't been staffed with enlisted men at any sort of real capacity for decades (if ever.)
How does defining `IFS` here make the second statement more efficient than the first?

```

# Inefficient
while read -r line; do
echo "$line"
done < file.txt

# Efficient
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "$line"
done < file.txt

```

https://omid.dev/2024/06/19/advanced-shell-scripting-techniq...
It's the same all over. Never speak up. Especially not internally. If you have to, find a regulatory agency that has the legal clout to protect you from retaliation, or go to the press anonymously. Know the names of the people who retaliate against you, and don't try to get them fired: it's better to know exactly where your enemies are going to be than having them vaguely at large.
People predict falling prices because that’s what fits the trends not because it’s necessary for a ‘green’ future.

We don’t need the price of solar or batteries to keep falling, or for large exponential growth to occur. Simply maintaining the current rate of solar energy installs over the next 25 years would result in a renewable heavy grid.

China is currently on pace to install ~300 GW of solar power in 2024 assuming they continue that for 25 years and give a minimal 15% capacity factor that’s already at 100% of their current electricity consumption before those panels hit end of life. Granted, demand would increase over that time period but keeping up with demand doesn’t require crazy exponential growth here.

Grid batteries are in a similar situation, companies aren’t installing them at scale because they don’t need to but there’s plenty of excess battery manufacturing capacity right now to fill the need as it shows up. Basically at current rate of renewable installs there becomes an economic incentive to slowly ramp up grid batteries.
Research also suggests that we only domesticated ourselves 40-50k years ago. Language and culture are fairly recent additions in our evolution and so when people start comparing how we understand the world, to that of other mammals, I struggle to find it fair.

I do try hard not to anthropomorphize my dog, but the little dude is very clever, and I just can't help but consider him conscious on some level. Him and I definitely have a way of communicating with each other without using sentences, so I know he's self-aware far more than I would have given dogs credit before he came into my life.
Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40558094#40568509>

The recommended approach in the article is not a good one, though. What you'll end up with is worse than just running unzip by hand—so just do that instead. Programmers thinking that they need Git itself (or some plugin for it) to support the file format is just a weird mental block, anyway.

Unzip the files. Check in the necessary changes. It's not hard or a hard concept to grasp.
Amazing this was downvoted. The comment starts with "in my experience" and is hardly a controversial perspective. I beg the HN community, stop disincentivizing people from respectively providing a converse opinion, lest this become yet another echo chamber of groupthink.
This is very true. But we should also mention that Facebook sadly have been and are on a negative trajectory of openness. As someone working closely with them, there was a culture of nearly complete openness in the early years of their existence. Research was promptly shared in its entirety and licensing was compliant with open science. However, as the "AI boom" has grown, there is an increasing internal culture of holding parts of research back (my understanding is that this pressure comes from the C-suite). Licensing that previously was open source compliant, has had non-commercial clauses added more and more frequently and even non-standard complex agreements as we have seen for LLaMA 2 and 3. This is sad and the culture of openness is ultimately at risk as they become more and more like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, etc.

As I frequently point out, Facebook are free to decide on their own culture as they see fit and I am not entitled to their work. But it saddens me that they believe that compromising on their initial ideals is the way forward, rather than sticking to them through thick and thin. This, ultimately, makes it more and more difficult for me as an academic that believe in these ideals to work with them.
Actually delivers on the attention-grabbing title. Comments also worth perusal.
Yeah solar is inevitably going to dominate the grid mix over the next couple decades.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424

Even if you discount by capacity factor it's the #1 new energy source being installed in the US, and similar or better anywhere with enough sun.

I've done some armchair analysis that says that solar plus battery is cheaper than basically any other kind of new plant, obviously the biggest gains come first in peaking and adaptive load, but once you factor in fuel costs it even beats out natural gas now I think.
>Non-proliferation groups including the Union of Concerned Scientists have warned against measures that ease licensing for high-tech nuclear reactors, including those using highly enriched uranium, arguing that safety should remain the priority.

And the next generation reactors are 'passively' safe, in that a lack of coolant flow leads to shutdown of reaction unlike current reactors.
The violation of this specific California law simply isn't enforceable at a systemic level, but the problem it is trying to address is definitely systemic.

Abuses of this nature are reported on social media by workers at Amazon warehouses everywhere.
If you say "repeat after me: [some string]" and the LLM responds: "[some string]", it hallucinated the string?
I think "message queues" have become pretty commoditized. You can buy Confluent or RedPanda or MSK as a service and never have to administer Kafka yourself.

Change Data Capture (CDC) has also gotten really good and mainstream. It's relatively easy to write your data to a RDBMS and then capture the change data and propagate it to other systems. This pattern means people aren't writing about Kafka, for instance, because the message queue is just the backbone that the CDC system uses to relay messages.

These architectures definitely still exist and they mostly satisfy organizational constraints - if you have a write-once, read-many queue like Kafka you're exposing an API to other parts of the organization. A lot of companies use this pattern to shuffle data between different teams.

A small team owning a lot of microservices feels like resume-driven developnent. But in companies with 100+ engineers it makes sense.
I'm not sure there are much in the way of geolocation countermeasures against ICBMs anyway, they're inertially guided. Unless you can generate localized gravity anomalies at will, I guess.
Do you think batteries are getting more expensive over time?
Improving air quality with generative AI
Mozilla sued for discrimination by former CEO-to-be
Using grid like this isn't absolute positioning, we still have implicit sizing and regular document flow. We're just assigning the elements to the same grid area and letting that area be sized by its contents.
If you like this you might also like the YouTube channel Journey to the Microcosmos: https://youtube.com/@journeytomicro?si=FWOd1qA3CbG2Yb_V
Yeah, this is the most likely reason.

It used to be popular to post about rewriting angular to react. Now everyone just uses react (or they write posts about rewriting react to vue or whatever the flavor of the month)
Sequoia is both more and less generous to Intel Macs, depending on the model
Too bad it's totally fucked up on android mobile, I'm stuck in the top left quartile.

This has all the 90s vibes which I absolutely ADORE! Awesome sounds and UX. The nostalgia is almost too much, it was a uniquely raw and badass time to be a kid in the 90s.

"1999" by Charli XCX comes to mind.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6-v1b9waHWY

Some things are invariably lost to time. <3
> It always surprised me how baseball never caught on in the UK.

It’s too close to cricket.
Ancient Maya genomes reveal ritual sacrifice at Chichén Itzá
>now that solar energy is far cheaper than coal ever was

I'm sorry, this is simply not true. Usually such claims are the result of ignoring two basic facts:

First, solar is only online 50% of the time, at most (in most regions, considerably less than 50%). That means that you need at a minimum twice the nameplate capacity for a solar plant than for a coal one.

Second, being offline half the time means that you also need sufficient (very expensive!) storage capacity to cover the half the time that the solar plant is not working at all.

In other words, to replace a 2GW conventional plant you're going to need at least 4GW worth of solar cells, plus 24 megawatt-hours of storage.

If you have a source for reliable figures that take these factors into account, and still show solar being "far cheaper", please provide it.

Edit: oh, and no woo-woo battery or solar cell technology that's not currently in mass production. Your statement was that it's "far cheaper" right now, not using future fantasy batteries or solar cells that may (or may not) be on the market in the future.
If there is a good enough economic impetus, it will enter commercial use quickly. Also, things like iron air batteries are relatively extremely simple - it's not like there is complicated chemistry to figure out.

When it comes to grid scale storage, I think there will be rapid advancements because the constraints for what what makes a good grid battery is so different from what makes a good laptop or EV battery, and we've really only recently been investigated batteries with those constraints. I.e. for decades battery tech has been concerned about things like weight-to-capacity ratios, recharge times, etc. Most of that hardly even matters for fixed, installed batteries at power plants.
Related Steve Teixeira, Mozilla’s New Chief Product Officer (78 points, 2 years ago, 163 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32475570
Another advantage of microservices is that you can avoid the overhead of multiple services by having one really big microservice.
This is a big part of it IMO. When your downstream consumers can scale up and down quickly, you don’t necessarily need anything in the middle to smooth out load unless your workloads are especially spiky.

I think this also speaks to a related phenomenon where there are simply more tools and technologies you can buy or run “off the shelf” now. Back in the 2010s everybody was trying to roll their own super complex distributed systems. Nowadays you have a ton of options to pay for more or less polished products to handle that mess for you. No need for engineering meetups and technical blogs about tools that kinda-sorta work if you really know what you’re doing - just pay snowflake or confluent and work on other problems.
I think you're underestimating the costs of transporting power long distances.
Speaking from my own experience message queues haven’t disappeared as much as have been abstracted away. For example enqueue to SQS + poll became invoke server less process. There is a message queue in there somewhere just that it’s not as exposed.

Or take AWS SNS which IMO is one level of abstraction higher than SQS. It became so feature rich that it can practically replace SQS.

What might have disappeared is those use cases which used Queues to handle short bursts of peak traffic?

Also streaming has become very reliable tech so a class of usecases that used Queues as streaming pipe have migrated to the streaming proper.
The $150K/song isn't a government fine, but rather statutory damages awarded to the plaintiff (the copyright holder), so it isn't limited by the prohibition on Excessive Fines.
One of my favorite things about the statistical physics of water is that H2O is a strong electric dipole. You'd expect this plays an important role on its nucleation, and yet we get quite good approximations when we neglect this fact.
Yup, so the question is then why does this story have 56 points?

I thought Hacker News readers were better than that ...

"Slop" is indeed taking over the web, even Hacker News.
the reality is that most of these 5-over-1 buildings are the result of bylaws meant to do exactly that, by forbidding anything deemed "ugly". When you throw up barriers to building so that developers have to make the least offensive, blandest buildings possible to satisfy every quirk of the building code, the design review board, the community engagement process, etc, you get bland buildings.

good design doesn't come through legislation. it comes through allowing people the freedom to take risks and do interesting things in their designs, and to have the confidence that the work they put into designing something won't be thrown out at a community meeting because it doesn't fit the neighbourhood character.
Show HN: Lectura – AI-powered learning assistant for YouTube videos
Demo here: https://twitter.com/itsonolo/status/1802791424426914028
Always Do Extra (2021)
I think they can sell enough to make it worthwhile, and disposing of the rest is extremely cheap because of the lack environmental regulations etc.
Yes, and no.

Yes, a lot of people who install residential solar have a battery, and "common wisdom" tends to size the battery up if the solar install is larger.

But nothing stops the battery being really small, or indeed (like commercial solar generation) there being no battery at all.

Yes, of course, solar is not 24 hours. But having cheap energy "only" half the day (1) is a major plus. And as energy cost fluctuates, so do habits. For example since we got solar we tend to use the dishwasher in the mid morning instead of at night.

(1) actual solar availability depends on the width of your country. For example solar plants in say Arizona happily generate good power while the East coast is dark, and panels in say Florida would cater for mornings in California.

And that's before we factor in wind, which is commonly stronger in the late afternoon into the evening.
But only if my VPN is using TCP transport, right?
I decided to get used to the inverted scrolling with the mouse wheel. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would.
> It's just you; the sentence is written in straightforward manner using pretty typical vocabulary.

This sentence alone, is poorly worded. Is it straightforward or using pretty typical vocabulary? The qualification is unneeded, unless it's not typical. Perhaps, graciously, it's typical for a region.

The phrase "headed off", instead of "blocked" or "pre-empted", is unclear as an idiom.
Big discussion at the time (258 points, Oct 2012, 122 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28856730
Don't give yourself a hernia setting up that straw man, dude.
iceoryx2 uses shared memory and is implemented in rust if anyone wants something off the shelf
I think US was involved in the tensions between Ukraine and Russia change into full scale war. Putin needed an excuse to go for all out war and take over parts of Ukraine. And US played a part in that happening.
> There's no good way of telling if a builtin exists programatically (for, let's say, feature detection).

Doesn’t the `type` command (technically a builtin) meet your requirements?
It just seems so obvious that the government should work towards making energy practically free. It would lower the cost of everything.
Enthusiasts, for one? What a dull world it would be if writers decided to publish based solely on the size of target audience(s).