skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The big wattage numbers are great - but it is unclear how many watt-hours can be supplied - how many hours can California's grid run with batteries?

It appears that the batteries are 4 hour batteries. Two questions: is there excess solar capacity in the winter to charge the batteries? How do the batteries perform in the winter - total storage capacity and discharge rate?

It is misleading to compare a battery array that lasts for 4 hours to a nuclear powered electric plant that supplies energy at a constant 24/7.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/california-crosses-10...

"Developers plan to add 6,813 MW of battery projects in the California Independent System Operator's (CAISO) domain this year, dominated by four-hour lithium-ion systems, roughly double their additions in 2023, according to an analysis of S&P Global Market Intelligence data."
I know that jokes are ruined by explaining them, but... could you explain the joke here? I also read it as misdirection.
They also, effectively, fit information in the indexes of the parameters. I.e., _which_ of the parameters are nonzero carries real information.

In a sense, they have done their fitting using nine parameters, of which five are zero.
> I think the current fad of peaking plants is somewhat overblown

Do you mean peak powerplants will become obsolete? As far as I know, in many places peak powerplants are hydroelectric, which in the future, aided by local batteries, will allow filling the reservoir lakes to higher limits and covering greater peaks - eg. malfunctions - which in turn will make grids more stable.

The big unknown, as far as I understand, is whether or not we have enough rare minerals to cover enough TWh of the daily peaks of energy-demands so we can have a flat daily curve. I'm sure in 10-15 years time the "renewables" will look a bit different than what we expect them today.
The level of discussion that HN is a good medium for has absolutely no bearing or causal relationship with whether or not the actual stock market is normally distributed.

Imagine really thinking that the nature of a discussion forum can somehow influence the distribution of stock prices, as if stock prices examine comments on the Internet to determine their behavior.
Americans are their own little bubble again - I'd wager that most of the world's programmers don't live in US. Globally your average programmer will be someone writing utterly boring code making same salary as a teacher, maybe slightly above that if lucky. Happy to be proven wrong, but the whole "If you aren't making 6 figures as a programmer you failed at life" meme needs to go away - it's a tiny tiny sliver of all programmers that actually manage to achieve that.
Something something multicloud?
Well... most current lithium battery chemistries absolutely require cobalt, and given the demand for EVs and grid-scale PV storage there's bound to be a lot of interest for it.

Unfortunately for cobalt miners, there's significant r&d investment into chemistries free of materials which are dominantly sourced from questionable countries/conditions - some driven by preparation for trade conflicts, and some driven by law (EU supply chain / anti slavery acts). And that is yielding its first results, e.g. [1].

[1] https://www.global.toshiba/ww/technology/corporate/rdc/rd/to...
Australian here.

> if IRV gets repealed often due to its complexity,

Politicians of all stripes have introduced a mix of voting systems here, but remains it is predominantly IRV. When it is changed from IRV complexity is never the reason. It would be surprising if it was, because it isn't that complex and besides complexity doesn't worry the computer systems doing the counting.

The reason is always political: the mob in power chooses the system that benefits them. Invariably when they tinker with the voting system one side is fragmented (eg, there are two conservative parties) and one is not. IRV favours the fragmented one. So if that is the situation and the non-fragmented one is in power, then water down IRV in favour of FPP. If the fragmented one is in power the reverse happens.

The argument proffered in favour of returning to FFP is always "simplicity". It is a lie. They are never doing it to make things simple. They are doing it to keep themselves in office. If you give them the power to change the voting system at the stroke of a pen, they will do it regardless of whether it's IRV, Ranked voting or any other system.

Personally, I'd rank the voting systems from worst to best as FPP, just about anything other the FPP (the difference in outcomes is marginal), and MMP is best of all. The difference between the first two is a bit academic when you allow gerrymandering and don't have compulsory voting like the US. When you can change the rules on who is allowed to vote and where, it's so much easier to do that than change the voting system. MMP makes the system much harder to manipulate like that, and it is harder to undo because usually requires a constitutional change to set up.
Domestic violence may increase if England lose the Euros
How so? Would the Federal regulators have done a better job of making CenterPoint invest the right amount of money into tree trimming and placing lines underground?

California is under Federal regulation and has significant problems where PG&E hasn't invested enough in reliability.

If California just breezed through every natural disaster with no power outages and lower than Texas energy prices it would truly be a no brainer.

But Texas has retail power rates in the $0.10-$0.20/kwh range. From what I understand $0.20 would be an absolute bargain in California and that $0.30-$0.50 per kwh is more what folks out there pay.

It's not so compelling in that case. Of course I could have missed something. Please do let me know if I have.
I’m not an expert on this topic, but I think it comes down to cost and scalability. You have to construct a new project with custom specs for the exact site you’re on, and the permitting for a large environmental change is another drag. For large scale batteries, they all are a somewhat complex power electronic wrapper around mass produced battery cell cans or pouches that can be dropped anywhere. The cost declines of batteries are undeniable and are not stopping anytime soon.
It's funny, writing passwords down is excellent advice on today's Internet.

Physical security is easy, who's gonna see inside your purse? How often does that get stolen? Phones and laptops are high-value targets for thieves, and if they're online there could be a vuln. Paper doesn't have RCE.

(That said, I use KeePass, because it's nice to have it synced and encrypted. These days only my KeePass password is written down.)
Seconding this idea. IA especially is an astronomical gold mine and its benefits to humanity as a whole are immeasurable, I'm sure it could use non-monetary help beside the usual donation campaigns.
Batteries installed on concrete slabs are easier and cheaper, there are only so many places pumped hydro is feasible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919052
What’s IIT?
In my eyes, "we have sincere faith in our ability to sustain higher-than-market returns on average" and "our risk management calculations tell us that we will have beat the market on average with very high probability" are the same statement.
A bill in the future:

"Secure Data Fee - $4.51"
Maybe I'm too young, but I can't imagine building stuff locally and then pushing. Too messy later figuring out why stuff worked on your machine but not the end users'. I like way better setting up a CI pipeline on GitHub, building stuff remotely and then downloading the final binary to my own device or a VM to do manual testing.
What is it that you want to build? I mean if you frown upon AWS gurus, analysts and low code?

Programming for the sake of "writing code" is probably going to miss the target.

For example "analyst". My take is that is where it all started. Someone looking at numbers and needing computers to help making sense of them.
Arizona is a great case where agrovoltaics could really work. Solar reduces the sun load to something reasonable and minimizes evaporation, plants cool the air under the panels. Human / nature infrastructure symbiosis.
That's the common claim, but if you actually look at the successful funds that beat market year after year, their public fund is always the low yield, experimental strategies while the internal funds demolish the market. The reality is that most lucrative strategies have a yield cap and people who find them quickly surpass the cap so they just keep the strategies to themselves.
More discussion in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198372
Meanwhile the San Diego heatwave is a scorching two degrees above average at 78 degrees[1]. Now if the Santa Anas start blowing during one of these inland heatwaves and the grid still holds up that will be great.

[1] If this sounds like sarcasm, try living in coastal San Diego for a few years. You really acclimate to the perfect weather and 78 really does feel awfully hot. To say nothing of those freezes where it dips into the 60s. I’ve seen bar patios turn the heaters on then.
Image based OSes like Fedora silverblue are largely immutable. It's a much better model and think it's catching on.
Introduction to Numeric Computing with Rust
Wine 9.13 (Dev) – Run Windows Applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS
How does the data backend for this look like? Does the review live after the PR being merged?

One of the required features of a review flow is having a way to look at a patch, understand the reasoning behind it, and the thoughts of people that reviewed and accepted it.
Where does all the money go if it isn't being reinvested into the business? Are the massive profits immediately syphoned out by the execs and owners?

It's interesting there isn't a well-known real competitor to Steam (the Blizzard and Ubisoft stores, etc, don't count, because so few external parties publish there).

My gut says the lack of reinvestment could be someone else's opportunity, especially considering many of the longstanding VAC and other quality issues which have persisted on Steam's platform for more than 15 years. However, because of all the necessary catch-up, such an enterprise would be tricky to bootstrap and get to critical mass. Even then, where is the moat?
That would be great, because the RA1/C&C1 remaster collection has been great, so I hope the other games get the same treatment.
It's not a skill issue. I write, build, debug, and deploy golang regularly as appropriate. It's my language of choice at times.

> unless you want to edit the code and don't know GoLang, except that's also a skill issue.

How about editing the code live in a production environment currently lacking a debugger, internet, or compiler when it doesn't behave 100% according to expectations? Even if you have the debugger and compiler available and are comfortable using them, it's a world of difference in convenience.

> The fact that this tool is unnecessary due to other tools existing is a fair point though.

I never said that and do not believe that. Many options for the same thing can be great, let a thousand update helpers bloom I say. I guess we disagree on everything today :p
I see them, simply: who makes the money? If it's the State than the State made the money it's economy need period. Money are just units of measure of a substrate. An army is not made with money but with humans, foods, buildings, vehicles, ... they are in turn built by the country people, industries, agriculture and via commerce.

The fact you can't understand (beside my poor English, sorry) is a proof you live so much in a society POISONED by the current economical cleptocracy that you can't imaging something else, but actually most countries in the world in the past and various in the present do own their own money. China is an example, Russia is another. Why they are so powerful and remain powerful and gain ground against the west? Because of that. Because they run on industries, natural resources, etc not on finance. We was the most powerful when we have done the very same. It's not a matter of pseudo-democracies, it's a matter of who rule the State. Bankers who rule the west are very effective in PRs, but fails in the real world. They flourish out of a functional industrial system, then they demolish it and they can't recover because themselves fails to distinguish the unit of measure and the things they measure with.

BTW it's an old adage "a State try to resolve a crisis with taxes is like a man putting his feet in a bucket try to lift himself lifting the handle".
some existing example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianelli_Power_Plant
The hate as you call it is not weird. It’s a reasonable response to a state that consistently enacts laws and regulations that hurt the people. You get what you vote for and people in other states have to put up with idiotic Texas politicians who vote against hurricane Sandy aid while later requesting help. Texas deserves far more “hate” than it gets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world I'm referring to the countries in dark blue. Until the 80s you were under a dictatorship with rebel guerrillas/paramilitary organisations which later became gangs/pseudo governments in large parts of your cities. You're not really comparable.
Historically however AI didn't mean a neural net specifically.
Not to mentioned all the dirty cheap second hand batteries becoming available as electric cars are scrapped.

For grid storage second hand batteries might be fine. If taking them out of a scrapped car is feasible.
How HappyLock Works (a deadlock-free mutex library)
RegreSSHion 2: Electric Boogaloo (CVE-2024-6409)
Yes, otherwise I wouldn't have specified western countries. I'm comparing like for like.
Both will seem dull going forward.
TTS will feel more natural every passing year so the current spending for any TTS model will seem kind of wasteful after 1-2 years.
Generally agreed.

About WASM, it is not the first sandboxed bytecode interpreter but the first that runs in a browser and that has usable toolchains to compile not “browsers first” languages into it. I’d argue that that’s where the novelty is.
The cert can still be broken. The signatures are difficult, but not impossible, to break: it can and has been done with much older certificates, which means it will likely be doable to current certificates in a few years. In addition, certificate rotation allows for mandatory algorithm updates and certificate transparency logs. CT itself has exposed a few actors breaking the CA/B rules by backdating certificates with weaker encryption standards.

Certificate expiration, and cryptographic key rotation in general, works and is useful.
Terribly unrealistic, of course. No actual interstellar empire would refuse to give aid to slavers. On the contrary, the imperial core would give them more aid in order to quell any slave uprising.
They're saying the board games AlphaZero played with itself are experiences.
This PDF credits include Mark Roper. The corresponding video is: Mark Roper - My Puzzle Robot is 200x Faster Than a Human https://youtu.be/Sqr-PdVYhY4
Not using a throwaway, and agreeing in principle: Paul Graham appears here oddly non-scientific.
> Generally there needs to be some sort of intent.

Often yes, but often not.

Criminal negligence is a thing. That's a standard of mens rea that's lower than intent, or foreknowlege, or recklessness. And it's particularly a thing in the context of licensed professions.
Seems like some kind of bug on the LemonSqueezy side. It is enabled in the store settings, but I also cannot see it. Will open a ticket.
... the 2015 article date
If you say "I bought a drill because I'm afraid one day I'll need to make a hole in the wall" then yes it is fair to say that person is living in fear of needing to make a hole in the wall.

If you say I bought a gun because I'm afraid of being a victim of crime then you are spending your whole life in fear of crime. It is hard for people who grow up in cultures like that to understand but most people in rich western countries don't live in fear of crime like that. It just isn't something most of us think about at all.
Multiple replies merged into one because of HN's post rate limit.

I pulled myself up by my bootstraps once and now I'm the richest person alive.

Paul Graham is forced to appear non-scientific because there is no science, that justifies our current economic conditions. There's the whole field of economics, sure, but that only studies what does happen in our current economy, not how we should run an economy. The only things available to justify our current economic conditions are pseudoscience and appeal to power.

A world where people get rich by starting tech companies that make a mark on the world that appeals to current rich people isn't much better than a world where people get rich by being the children of current rich people. In both cases you get rich by helping the rich class perpetuate itself, not by actually making the world better.

Noahpinion's article misses a point: it talks about how there isn't that much actual wealth and most "wealth" is fake zero-sum financial instruments and since there isn't much actual wealth there isn't much point taxing it. But it ignores that taxing zero-sum financial instrument wealth still alters the world, in a way that many find desirable: simultaneously deleting a positive-value financial instrument from a rich person and its counterpart negative-value financial instrument from a poor person may not change the total net wealth, but it reduces inequality.
"Topology is all that matters" --> bold statement, especially when you read the paper. The original authors were much more reserved in terms of their conclusions.
There's always a push and pull between old and new tech and I agree some of the hot new tech is regurgitated old tech, but most of your examples aren't really comparable.
There are way, way, way more jobs that make 300k+ in our industry than there ever have been.

It's not that these jobs have never existed, it's that they are in greater quantities.
I am well aware that the productivity is not "bad" and that there isn't a net shortage. That doesn't imply we don't need the improvement, or that it won't have a significant impact.

I'd refrain from calling people naive. Farmers would call your approach naive as they know that every promile of productivity counts and can make or break their investment. As you said, this is very unintuitive and it's hard to imagine how much can a tiny increase of productivity at the base level change at the output - but it really is a lot.
It can only be speculation, but it's my belief. Linux became a server system for big applications. Who benefits most from such software are huge businesses. Who pays for their benefit are the Linux developers doing very specialized and competent work for free.

Why is there no consumer friendly solution for having a server connected at home and publishing your own website to the world, without having to be very skilled at computers? There are consumer friendly solutions for everything else: office suites, e-mailing, photo editing, all sorts of creativity. Consumers are now regulated to posting their online stuff on social media, because that is what is accessible to them. And I want to blame Linux partly for this, because the great allure of "free" halted any consumer solution.
Socal and the general southwest has been setting records[1]. Some highlights:

> Palmdale and Lancaster on Tuesday experienced a record sixth straight day of temperatures at or above 110 degrees, surpassing the prior record of three days for both Antelope Valley cities. But wait, there’s more — officials say the streak is expected to continue the rest of the week, with highs forecast over 110 until Friday.

> Las Vegas on Sunday smashed its record high temperature by three degrees, hitting 120 for the first time since record-keeping began in 1937.

> Las Vegas is also expected to break its all-time record for consecutive days at or above 110 degrees, on its way there with six days in a row Tuesday. It’s forecast to remain just as hot through next week, which would beat the prior 10-day streak.

> Palm Springs on Friday hit 124 degrees, its highest temperature in recorded history.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-09/temperat...
Not necessarily, but just a pattern that only you would likely remember.
At $1.3 million per employee in payroll expenses, it seems like much of the profits are being distributed to the employees that work there.
>Give it senses and ways to interact with the world

Much easier said than done.

You can take just one example, energy storage and usage, to illustrate how far off we are from giving AI real-world physical capabilities.

Human biological-based energy management capabilities are many orders of magnitude more advanced than current battery technology.

For any AGI to have seriously scary consequences, it needs to have a physical real-world presence that is at least comparable to humans. We're very far from that. Decades at least, if not centuries.

The more realistic near-term threat is a non physical presence AGI being used by bad actor humans for malevolent ends.
POSIX and SUS both define only d_ino and d_name in struct dirent, so there's not really any legacy left. Everything beyond those two values is an extension by the implementation. I'm arguing that the implementation in Linux is fundamentally poor. They've actually changed the API for this in the past when they switched system calls from readdir to getdents.
David Foster Wallace was clever in his forethought here, though the reasons video calls have largely fallen out of favor in the real world may be different.

“Within like 16 months or 5 sales quarters, the tumescent demand curve collapsed like a kicked tent, so that by the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, fewer than 10 percent of all private telephone communications utilized any video image fiber data transfers … the average US phone user deciding that s/he actually preferred the retrograde old low-tech Bell-era voice-only phone interface after all.
…
Audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her ... video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.”
> Social media is left leaning because people under 40 are left leaning.

Attributed to Winston Churchill: "If you are not a liberal when twenty - you have no heart, if you are not conservative when forty - you have no brains."
There may be no technical limitation to not setting dnd all the time but it effectively means you either have this app for some reason other than the main pitch or you're forced under this apps surveillance/interruption mode by the org. In either case the thing solved in this scenario is not reducing meeting interruptions for the user.

I think I lean with the others that the problem this app aims to solve is not really a technical problem. That said it doesn't mean there won't be lots of businesses interested in the app.
Agreed, that's generous. TFA also states Valve still makes $15m/employee

p.s. thanks so much for hnreplies.com, Dan! It dramatically increased the utility of HN for me. Your creation is fantastic.
Noahopinion has a very recent interesting article on wealth and taxation. It makes me mad because it contradicts a lot of cherished ideas I have about the rich and taxation, but probably makes sense in this conversation:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/theres-not-that-much-wealth-in...
you can make batteries out of iron or sulfur. no rare minerals required.