skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fusion is never, ever going to be economical. The fuel is basically free, which is great. Meanwhile, the reactors themselves are arguably the most complex and expensive machines ever built, and they are essentially disposable due to the nature of fusion reactions.

There's a reason that the wise engineers who built our only working fusion reactor put it about 1 AU away from us. Much cheaper and easier to just catch the energy it sends us.
The whole thing is assuming that men drive progress and war drives progress, and both of those things are debatable.
As context, they're aiming for first plasma in 2026

https://www.axios.com/pro/climate-deals/2024/05/01/commonwea...
~400,000 GB * 8 bits/Byte = 3,200,000 Gb at 1Gbps that's 3,200,000 seconds or about 888 hours or about 37 days. If that's 400TB * 1024, instead of 1000, then it's a bit longer, pushing 38 days.
It’s interesting that the relative costs of offense vs. defense vary with technological development. In the middle ages when castles existed but guns did not, and societal structure was such that mounting enormous besieging armies of antiquity was not possible, the borders mostly stayed intact. It’s possible we’re entering something similar judging by the drone war in Ukraine which seems to heavily favor defense.
We need you to stop perpetuating nationalistic flamewars (as well as any other type of flamewar) on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

We've had to ask you this more than once before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31962578 (July 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28322571 (Aug 2021)

We have to ban accounts that keep doing this, if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
It seems like Lambda is not suited for such "hanging" use cases. To me the best use case for Lambda is for an API call that might be made very infrequently, like say 50 times a day. Doing the same with a VM instance (remember, it has to be HA, secure etc) is probably not worth the effort.
It is that simple. "Energy intensive" is irrelevant. On average, a solar panel will capture more energy in its lifetime than the amount used to create and eventually recycle it.

So please stop repeating that useless whine.
Iowa's water needs protection from aquifer raiders
The original L4 was written in assembler and replaced by different other implementations long before the ME platform was developed. Pistachio was in development around that time and available under BSD.
88 hours would be at 1 GB/sec = 8 Gbps, not 1 Gbps.

400 TB over 30 days is about 1.23 Gbps.
I don’t think there’s much room for promotion because migrations are fabrication and promotions favor innovation. It’s ability to save money versus ability to make money. See: Smiling curve in economics.
Vercel must do something a bit similar to Fly too, I assume.
In practice it’s fine to rebase and force push to your own published branch, even when it’s an open PR.

Just mark it draft or otherwise communicate when it’s no longer a moving target.
I am from Europe and managed to try Waymo in SF recently. Not sure why you couldn’t.
half of those are not proxy wars in any way shape or form.
Not at all. Someone’s got to look at your commits in the future when your code breaks ;)
The issue observed over millennia, is that if you get rid of -all- the greedy people in your land, the greedy person in charge of next door sees opportunity.

> My suspicion is, this is in the genes too, and I feel this is almost the bigger part of the problem.

My more specific suspicion is that some of it is that those who can 'go with the flow' are more likely to survive various 'cleansing's over the ages, and perhaps in fact the most 'opportunistic' (i.e. those that are not -quite- megalomania tier) find those opportunities and become that sort of 'old money bottom feeder' type.
I’ll never forget this. I was listening to a talk by Reed Hastings (Netflix Founder/CEO) at (I think was) Stanford. He was explaining how he came up with the idea of Netflix. A student asked: “when did you realize you had to switch to the internet”. At which he replied: “that was the idea from the beginning. We knew networks were going to become what they are today. Look, there’s a saying in a CS textbook that says: ‘never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes over the interstate’. We knew we had to ship the DVDs first until at some point the network would reach our desired level”.

While I was watching that i said: “DUDE! I remember that quote (and that illustration)”. Went to my text book and there it was. In Tanenbaum’s networking textbook.

Aside from the anecdote, this guy has had a huge influence in the whole industry (not even mentioning the Kernel debates).
That is awesome. I live in the PNW (Oregon,45°N) and the summers here are fantastic for solar power. I have a 20.2kW system on my roof and crank out 100-120 kWh a day in the summer months. I can store 42kWh, and push the rest back to the grid at full cost return.
(proof of life: https://x.com/doctorow/status/1804638204286656974)
What do you mean, "nope"? Which part of the previous claims are you refuting?

Your chart shows "real median personal income" increased by ~50% from 1975 to now (27k to 40k).

One of the links you're nope-ing says "From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5% (940.3% under the options-realized measure), far outstripping S&P stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage growth of very high earners (339.2%)."

Both of these can be true, and median personal income increasing by just 50% when the income of the wealthy increased by far, far more sure sounds a lot like "the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers."
A long time ago my retort when someone would claim California's government was oppressive was; I can walk into the grocery store Sunday morning and buy hard liquor.
Without telling us how much storage he was actually using, this post is worthless. I could trivially abuse any "unlimited" storage plan to make the provider renege on their claims.
Ok, but when you respond simply by reporting more of your enemies without doing anything to indicate that you've processed my reply or that you care about the intended spirit of the site, I find that a bit demoralizing.

I'm sure you can understand that it gets distasteful after a while when people keep pointing the mods at their political opponents. That's not in the intended spirit of the site as a whole.

Also, the two proper ways to point the mods at things is to either flag a post (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag) or email hn@ycombinator.com. If you want to be sure that we take a look at something, you should do the latter, because the number of posts that get flagged is quite large.

Posting comments in the thread reporting on other users' bad behavior is not just off topic, it's guaranteed to be provocative in its own right, so we'd rather that people not do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For me, it's either:

- the start menu opens but displays only an empty box.

- the start menu opens fine, but application search produces zero results, not even if I type the complete name of the program I ran yesterday.

Yes, when something like this happens I throw my hands up and declare it not-working today. At least Winkey+R works and my most-used programs are pinned to the taskbar anyway.

Most of the time it's fixed after a good night's sleep, other times Windows manages to pull itself together after a few hours. It's usually not a blocker for me, so I don't care enough to keep rebooting my machine in the vain hope that some user action might fix it. It's my employer's machine, so my employer's problem, not mine.
Birth year impacts long-term protection from the flu
Yep 20% of global Global power when Australian solar is dealing with the shortest day of the year and near the equator it’s just a normal day.

Though obviously the northern hemisphere has a disproportionate percentage of total solar installs.
This isn't fill the reticle with CPU, it's make a dozen separate chips and package them on a network fabric. Amount of cache can increase linearly with number of cores without a problem.

There is some outstanding uncertainty about cache coherency vs performance as N goes up which shows up in numa cliff fashion. My pet theory is that'll be what ultimately kills x64 - the concurrency semantics are skewed really hard towards convenience and thus away from scalability.
Wonderful, thanks for the context! I knew they originally had plans for mid-decade, but I wasn't sure what their current timeline was.
ChatGPT and Wolfram Alpha confirmed to me that it's about 37 days, which is 888 hours, not 88 :)

Wolfram Alpha: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=400tb+at+1gbps
ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/4ddd464a-dabd-4c12-9cc4-e8271a51a6...

(ChatGPT did a great job at breaking down the problem)
More sensors doesn't mean waymo doesn't rely on AI and computer vision.
At least around here, backup generators are for outages that happen when solar would be mostly useless: heavy storms or during Winter.

Cheap and safe batteries paired with solar will help, but the capacity will likely still be an issue for extended outages.
In systems such as our own, where government power has been essentially captured by corporate lobbying, there is little difference between "government is doing it" and "companies are doing it."
I've found this to be the most reliable test.
It’s ~888 hours, or 37 days.

You dropped a 0 somewhere.
Once you add in the costs of additional transmission needed for utility scale solar, rooftop solar is extremely competitive.

Especially as transmission capital costs start to skyrocket, and solar capital costs plummet.

I have yet to see an economic argument in favor of utility scale solar over residential solar that takes into account the T&D upgrades necessary from utility scale solar.
hamster - slang, Internet (in Ua). same as home page
so thats why HamsterCMS ))))
The first developer tool I ever bought was Develop-64, an assembler for the Commodore 64 by a company called French Silk software. I was around thirteen years old and I figured this was some big professional company. Much later, I realised it was basically one guy and there was no way this was a full-time job. I think these tiny shops were pretty common back then, basically hobbyists trying to monetise their creations.
Personally, I would love if products containing PFAS were unambiguously labeled.

if cookware in california just said "not for sale in colorado", that would be a great help.

Most cookware labels read like a privacy policy, with misdirection, ambiguity and omission allowing just about anything.

I remember costco selling hexclad cookware which had very strong (but ambiguous) wording all over about safe and non-toxic, "combining stainless steel and ceramic"

Turns out they have forever chemicals on the OUTSIDE of the pan against the burner. Probably the hottest and worst place to put them. sigh.

Most other cookware descriptions read the same.
Even if you stay logged out, your data is collected from your mobile devices.

And even if you brick your devices and pull the battery, your data is collected by other people's mobile devices.

It all runs to data brokers in the end, and that data has a reliance on Facebook for additional refinement.

This technique impacts that refinement step.
What browser is this intended for? The below error comes up on Brave on MacOS. Both most up to date version.

VM172:14 Uncaught
TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'click')
at <anonymous>:14:71
(anonymous) @ VM172:14
Later but also noteworthy: [Macromedia|Adobe] Dreamweaver.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Dreamweaver
I wonder if they'll give the option for them to move to a paid storage option, at least temporarily, for them to have enough time to download everything.
A lifetime ban from Facebook would be a blessing for me :)
Read the comments, 400TB, and he's not bitter, but expected this to happen. Seems to be posting it because it's entertaining more than anything.
Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
My friend (who is not in technical field) was asking me if it is good idea that his son chooses a software development career.

If he asked me this question two years ago, I could definitely say that there will be always opportunities for him. Now it looks like it is not that easy to answer this question. We see that the coding performance of LLMs are getting better and better.

If your non-technical friend asks you and what would you suggest?

Do you see in your circle that the demand for junior developers are decreasing?
But the ancient greeks considered them not greek. They wouldnt let them compete at the olympics either.

However, if we hypothesize that in similarity how the ancient macedonians started becoming roman and byzantine after, the same way they were actually assimilated into being slavs and mixed with them, because the slavs were in fact very open minded who was a slav and who wasnt, then we could say that the genetic line is there and in fact lots of people in the balkans and anatolia and south italy trace greek heritage.

The slavs from russia and ural are very different looking than the balkan slavs. In addition, you dont see many ethnic hungarians that look asian, even though the initial magyars were asian nomads. Same with bulgaria, the bulgars were asian nomads from the steppe, but hardly any ethnic bulgarians look asian. Meaning, the initial conquerors were a minority group being overlords or leaders of a majority local natives, who then got assimilated.

The mixing of peoples was there. The genetic trace is there. But the political rhetoric is crazy.
Required viewing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(film)
An islanding solar system with storage is not useless during storms or the winter, it still generates during the day. Not sure where your "around here" is, though.
Fallacious arguments have the effect of sounding correct. In this case it's the https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy.
One thing I've learned from these large migration projects is that v1 always seems like total crap, while v2 appears to be the perfect dream. However, as you begin building v2, you start to realize that v1 was not actually that bad and had many great but unappreciated features. Additionally, you come to understand that many v1 features took a long time to develop, were battle-tested, and would require significant effort to rebuild in v2 with minimal benefits.

So, what I've learned is not to completely discard v1. Instead, it's better to refactor or rebuild only the parts that pose issues, even though it may not be as sexy or exciting as starting v2 from scratch.

In practice, I would begin by cloning v1 and deploying it to a development environment to start tweaking it. I would also ensure to implement numerous automated tests to safeguard against any potential issues caused by refactoring. Of course, if you can keep using the same database that's even better as you can test refactored features with real customer data and even run both builds in parallel to spot any differences.
Ah, that's not a browser delay. That's an internet speed issue. I'll have to add more resilience to account for that. Thanks!
There's a correlation between the speed limit and the design speed, but there's also a lot of mismatch and the bias usually goes in a specific direction.

A few mph over the speed limit in dry weather is rarely outside the design.

And I think I have a reasonable amount of nuance. If you don't have nuance you get "the sign can't be wrong" or "always go slower". The former is objectively not true, and I've never seen anyone seriously advocate for the latter.
Exactly, I see many questions that start with “If the electrons are flowing from the negative terminal…”

The movement of electrons is inconsequential. It’s the magnetic fields between electrons that provide the power in an electric circuit. These fields actually don’t even travel through the wires! They move around the space outside the wires. Ask anyone who has routed a differential signal pair :)
Late in the 90s we had a 27” CRT. That was absolutely sold as a big screen. I don’t think you could get much bigger.

Past that you had projection TVs. They could get way bigger but the picture was also dimmer and perhaps not as sharp? I only remember being around one a few times, we never had one.
That's pretty bad for the northern hemisphere's solstice. It should be way higher than that.
Battery backed renewable energy with grid upgrades is cheaper today and getting cheaper.

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Gen...
Yah. I am glad we are deemphasizing residential solar.

Utility-scale solar has better capacity factors and installation economics.

I think it's going to be barely possible to keep our current quality of life and reach a low-CO2 economy. We have limited resources, and even if a residential solar panel "pays back" its energy in 2.5 years, we are better off putting it in a desert where it will pay back that energy in a year.
Sadly at least where I live the backup generators are well-used, winter and summer alike. There was a period of about a year where we went no more than a week or two between power outages. Absolutely a lifesaver, when you have a freezer full of frozen goods.

In this context I'm saving my pennies for a solar and battery set up - it both makes financial sense when connected to the grid, and obviates the annoying side effect and high cost of running the backup generator during outages, unless they're extremely lengthy.
The G4 did indeed support Open Firmware: I had an MDD.
I think to a large extent this is because people define "internal monologue" differently, so let me just clarify:

a. There is a voice inside your head, and your consciousness is not the one talking: schizophrenia.

b. There is a voice inside your head, it's you doing the talking i.e. you're doing everything but moving your lips and producing sound - the words are literally being narrated in your mind: internal monologue.

c. No language is being "spoken" inside your head. If you're not talking, you're not forming sentences at all: apparently some people have this experience.

My experience is b, but it is possible for me to also think without having to narrate everything (a bit of c). If anyone has a different internal experience, please reply.
If you go from 0 to 100K legit requests in the same instant, any sane architecture will ramp up autoscaling, but not so instantly that it tries to serve every last one of them in that moment. Most of them get throttled. A well-behaved client will back off and retry, and a badly-behaved client can go pound sand. But reality is, if you crank the max instances knob to 100k and they all open DB connections, your DB had better handle 100k connections.
This feels a little pedantic; I assume the commenter means that Tesla relies exclusively on vision, whereas Waymo additionally has sensors (i.e. lidar)
In a case where a dependency has a consistent high latency and you can’t avoid it, I’d run the numbers and see if it’s more worthwhile to just run your app on ECS or something instead.
Sony had all the coolest TVs in that era—one of the last great ones, which I've only seen in person _once_ at a broadcast TV tower site (it's still there today, and works!) was the KD-34XBR970[1]. It was 'only' 34", but it weighed nearly 200 lbs.

[1] https://youtu.be/W_U9pFfXjYA?t=614
So did your sibling comments and I imagine anyone with very basic maths skills could.

And most likely burning a lot less carbon than ChatGPT.
Is there nothing to improve in your life? Was there nothing to improve in the 50s? Would you like supersonic commercial flights for everyone and photorealistic computer games? Electric cars and larger houses? You can also do better and improve the life of everyone. That’s not even considering the improvements impoverished countries around the world have experienced in the recent decades, have a look at Africa.
toddler-level abilities would also be AGI.
Can you list some benefits of data center usage?
>So for most home owners it’s easily worth it.

Can you elaborate on how you arrived at that conclusion? At least where I live, the math didn’t work out. It seemed like smarter conservation was a much better alternative. A couple portable/window A/C units that pay for themselves within a year or two made a heck of a lot more sense than $30k of solar on a roof already at half it’s life. Maybe when it’s time to replace my roof I’ll reconsider, but the payback didn’t seem there. (FWIW, I probably average < $100/mo in electricity.) I know conservation can go against human nature, but it sure seems like the better option for me.
Especially when other social norms 'get in the way'.

Someone that actually hired me at a past job, at her next job wound up hiring someone who performed a very intentional set of revenge porn acts on me. [0]

Of course, I dare not speak up on social media, as it would impact my ability to find a job in the future. At 'best' I would be a drama magnet, at worst claims could be made and it would be a mud-slinging fest.

I still have siblings that dislike when I speak up about how at my first high school, a starting basketball player slammed my head into a locker a half dozen times, I was told afterwards that I was not allowed to go to the school nurse, with no regard given for anything I slurred post-concussion... and that my parents didn't do anything about the injustice because it was a catholic school and mum was so catholic she dressed like a nun.

So, I just have to let it sit.

And it all works out, because Carhartt is shit now anyway.

[0] - Which gives me the dubious claim of having someone blocking me on LinkedIn, lmao.
> plasma means that fusion is actually occuring, rigth?

As mentioned plasma is just another state of matter[1], where a significant portion of the electrons and ions a separate rather than combined as atoms.

Fusion happens when you overcome the electrostatic repulsion of nuclei, bringing them close enough together so they can fuse[2]. Typically, in reactors like this, that means you confine (compress) a sufficient amount of material ("fuel") to a small volume and heat it up sufficiently. Both are needed to make it possible for the nuclei to come close enough to fuse. The heat required is so great the material will turn into a plasma.

> And does anyone know how this one collects the heat and converts it into electricity or whatever?

This depends somewhat on reactor design, including fuel used. However they're all fancy steam generators in the end, so not unlike a traditional nuclear power plant in that regard.

From what I know, typically the "surplus heat" of a fusion reactor comes in the form of energetic neutron radiation[3]. This radiation is ionizing and as such shielding is required, and this shielding will heat up as it slows down those energetic neutrons.

In the ARC reactor[4] for example, a liquid shielding "blanket" surrounds the fusion chamber. As the neutrons heats up the liquid, the liquid gets pumped through a heat exchanger to produce steam to run a steam turbine.

edit: I found this talk[5] from one of the folks behind ARC to be very illuminating in how fusion power works and the challenges involved. It's from 2017, but the basics haven't changed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Requirements

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

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk
yeah, clicking into an advertiser has a ~5 second delay to /api/graphql/ at the moment. I was working on resiliency myself
Rear projection TVs were a neat party trick, but I always liked either a projector or screen, or just using a smaller CRT. Even the cheaper sets would give a brighter (and usually slightly sharper) image than even the nicer rear-projection TVs in that era.
I love these posts about the thrill of using the computer. It is like back in the day when your uncle called and bragged about being able to email the White House