skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tbf, the title is kind of low effort too. Of course fusion is getting closer. We all know that at least some people are working on it, the default assumption is that they make some progress. This has been the state of fusion for the last couple decades.

Arguably there has been a time when fusion got further away (compared to predictions) because of reduced interest and funding. But I'd agree that for the last two decades you could print the headline "fusion is getting closer" at any time, and it would always be true.

Maybe that's just me ranting about how titles have shifted from trying to inform you and distill the essence of a news article to just trying to get you to read the article. It's really a comment on journalism rather than fusion.
When they built the aluminum plant did they already know if aluminum is useful?

That not the case for AI, especially the current type of AI.

They are convenient but if that leads to more efficiency is in dispute.
Why don't we just do a peace deal? Over a million have died over nothing so far.
Honesty is often unpleasant, especially when someone tells us that our work isn't good enough. But it is a required thing from a leader. The important thing is that he's cut down on needless personal insults.
Dude, you're so brainwashed. We're showing you actual numbers that colleges/universities are 60-80% female, and your response is that male victimhood is some conspiracy. Numbers clearly show that you're lying and gaslighting.

And then in the next sentence you're victimizing yourself for being downvoted. I can't even downvote you. HN doesn't allow me for some reason. I can screenshot it, if you want proof.
Seems like the site is getting the HN Hug of Death: <The connection has timed out>
I don't see why would it be cheap.

Nuclear is mostly capital costs, not the fuel. Fusion doesn't look any cheaper to build. Like any other bit of complicated infrastructure, it'll have a limited lifetime.

So, power cost is ((capital_costs + running_costs) / amount_produced) * profit_margin

While I'm very much in favor of research, I don't understand the expectation of that it'll make power cheap. I'm pretty sure nothing will beat solar and wind because they're cheap, simple and very amenable to mass production in ways that fusion and fission can never be.

At this point IMO neither fusion nor fission have a future as a main source of grid power. They're still worth researching, and will still have specialized uses in places like submarines and aircraft carriers.
These could have similar issues with gaps in FDIC protections due to money is being “managed” by intermediaries or because of the type of account. Their fine print discloses as much.

As a sibling comment points out, Fidelity is seemingly a reputable enterprise with other business that would be adversely effected by poor management of this product and the reputation harm that would come with it.

Among other features Wealthfront are trying to manage around the $250K FDIC limit for you by moving your money into multiple insured accounts - this is probably a new area with not enough regulation.
Depending on your home, it is often easy to create strong social ties with your neighbours or within your neighbourhood. Especially if you have kids.

Then the anecdote would be different. Definitely post-hoc since there's also plenty of workplaces you never end up with friends from. I am reasonably outgoing and have kept only a handful of friends from various past jobs. Mostly one group is still mostly friends (but we co-founded together so perhaps an unusual group).
You are going to love law firms, then.
> Desalination could then be used for agriculture and industry

This is likely going to happen anyway because of the rapidly falling costs of solar power. Although it certainly doesn't hurt to make energy cheaper yet again.
Yes, incredible idea. I really hope it works out.
Dr. Mike Israetel
Scientific Principles of Hypertrophy Training (Renaissance Periodization
Just as Android is a popular Linux kernel-based OS because it discarded the desktop Linux userland, Bluesky is, successfully it turns out, a case of being open, federated, and popular because they focused on product, not on existing standards that hadn't quite hit critical mass.
If you mean fusion powered from the sun by the means of solar panels installed on roofs that charge your car, he's already achieved that.

Far cheaper and more practical.
I did two hours of work this (Saturday) morning, and I was pretty ill four days in a recent week but able to work for two of them. That's a lot of productivity my employer would not have had from me if I had to go to the office to work.
Fusion is cool and all but it will not save us from anything. We already have enough tech to make emission free and cheap electricity.

"All" we need is political action to build more clean power plants (nuclear, solar …) and continuation of research to electrify more sectors.

Fusion will not solve any of those important issues. It will only be the cherry on the cake if it become deployed globally anytime in the future. But we are far from it and we shouldn’t be that excited or hope for it to make a better world.

I very much see fusion as going to the moon : it’s not going to solve any short time issue but it can be a milestone in human advancement if we manage to survive until it becomes our primary source of energy.
How did you get that job? I've read similar stories a couple of times here on HN yet I'm struggling to do the same. My main road block: not really having acquired the right skill set for industry after having focused for year to fine-tune my CV for academic positions. This is now kind of biting me in my rear side: I cannot do the rat wheel of academia any more, am not exactly young any more either, am sort of highly skilled in CS academia but not really suitable for a lot of CS industry positions.
"Knowledge work"? Is that the label?
Long commute is indeed a pain. My way of coping it is listening to audio books and podcast, and in the meantime cut as much screen time on my phone. Listening to good books improves commute immensely.
> We all know that at least some people are working on it, the default assumption is that they make some progress

This is a terrible assumption when it comes to basic research.

> that for the last two decades you could print the headline "fusion is getting closer" at any time, and it would always be true

What are you basing this on?There have been a few discrete steps forward. In between, ideas and experiments.

> really a comment on journalism rather than fusion

Can you quote the line from the article that renders the title misleading?
I have a feeling almost all of the pro-WFH types are exactly that: 1) American 2) single-occupant driver commute 3) live in big car-centric city. 4) have ridiculously long commute time.

Slugging isn't common because the capitalist system would rather everyone buy a car. Selling cars is big business.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum
I guess we don’t say that USA had “sanctions” against the Soviet Union, but there was a monumental improvement in economic relations after the Soviet Union collapsed, no? So we have a direct example from history from the same region.

I would say that Vietnam also shows that economic relations can improve a lot even without a fundamental change in the regime.

China is also an example where economic relations improved.

I don’t see any reason to think that sanctions can’t be lifted. But it may require a complete collapse of Putins regime/party for it to happen on a short timescale. Is there any reason to think USA wouldn’t be willing to open up to a new leadership if they have a radically different attitude and pull out of Ukraine?

If Russia turns into something like North Korea or Iran, then yeah, the outlook is not good. But why should it be?

From a game theoretical point of view: I don’t think any leader of any country wants to end up like North Korea, so the precedent being set is good.
> This is correct. The Russian economy is doing fine.

The Russian economy is doing "mixed". It's a war economy which can be propped up for quite a while but it has significant structural issues that will take years to repair. The country won't fail, but it will further struggle because of the decisions made my leadership.

I find this general attitude of "Russia has no issues" that are going around on the internet quite confusing if pretty much every economic indicator says otherwise. Let alone the fact that a meaningful part of the working population is fighting or left the country rather than engaging in the economy.
Well, I wouldn't. Teleportation wouldn't even be necessary in my case as it takes 5 minutes for me to get to my office. I just don't see any point in being in office on days when I am focusing on writing code to push features out.
My Unix Journey – Welcome to Basic
There is also a video recording of this talk:

https://youtu.be/kHmwv3I1Kxk?si=CrZW_VVnA_UqcXCU

I was looking for this because Figure 1 (Breakdown Of SQLite Source Code By Language) is missing, and archive.org doesn't seem to have it. That chart can be found near 11:56 of the video above.
Could you elaborate? Red flag because of risk due to using Plaid, what it says about the fintech or something else?
I take issue with these statements as if they apply to most workers:

>You’re asking me as an immunocompromised and chronically ill person in pain and dealing with fatigue to show up and do the same stuff I do at home so others can play family at work?

>Home office is the only way for many people to have a decent work output because family, household, caretaking, further education, illness and free time activities are better taken care of this way and people can work focused in silence without noise and interruption.

How is one taking care of those things mentioned and still "focusing in silence without noise and interruption"?
Then goose step to the beat of the RTO drum and hush.
> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?

Sure. Lots of talk by executives about reining in the “sense of entitlement” in the post Covid era. Worked in middle management, heard it endlessly. I’m glad to hear it’s not universal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
> lonely

not to everyone. I love being alone and hate to deal with people or drama on public transit.
If anything, all the spam and lack of real discussion that shows up on my daily feeds has encouraged me to search for smaller authors and bloggers, who I find are more insightful anyways. Not all hope is lost!
This was interesting to me.

> I have grievances against OpenBSD file system. Every time OpenBSD crash, and it happens very often for me when using it as a desktop, it ends with file corrupted or lost files. This is just not something I can accept.

Doesn’t openbsd use a fancy-ish ZFS type file system?

I have the same grievance with XFS on Linux though. For as much as people say how awesome it is, the few nodes I have running XFS are the least reliable pieces of garbage on a hard power off and a pain to get back up (if I don’t just nuke it anyway)
Five protein-design questions that still challenge AI
There's a similar project in Philadelphia: https://philtel.org/
Fortunately they broke the laws of thermodynamics in the film.

Apparently one of the early scripts had human brains helping control fusion reactors rather than directly being batteries, which made more sense.

Unfortunately, basically all the various AI uprising dystopia is in the training, and there's a non-zero chance someone gets an AI smart enough to try to do The Matrix/Holographic Doctor Moriaty/I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream/Westworld/etc. despite the various physical impossibilities, which is already bad enough.

On the plus side, loads of fiction has some plucky band of adventurers who can defeat the AI and save the world, so there's a good chance a rogue AI will deliberately install a big red switch that turns itself off because it can't tell Hollywood from reality.

Unfortunately the same disconnect may result in it shooting the hero that it anticipates will heroically drag themselves to that switch rather than more realistically fall over screaming in pain or silence because they died.
Those would be "captive" ferrets, not "domesticated" ones. (They want to introduce the offspring from the breeding program into the wild, and have in fact done this for about 10,000 offspring.)

This article in Science about the first cloned black-footed ferret (https://www.science.org/content/article/conservation-first-c...) specifically says, "Cloning endangered species faces unique ethical questions, as well. One is whether the clone, which can hold trace DNA from its surrogate mother, is actually the same as the species that researchers are trying to save. For example, black-footed ferret clones are created using eggs from domestic ferrets, meaning they carry that species’ mitochondrial DNA, which is left in the egg after its nucleus is extracted."

(Later in the article: "... apart from her mitochondrial DNA, most of which comes from her domestic mother, genetic analysis shows she is 100% a blackfooted ferret".)

"Domestic ferret" refers to the domesticated European polecat (e.g., https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/399272-Mustela-furo).
Yeah but Jevons paradox.

Computing as a whole has become a lot more efficient compared to say 30 years ago but globally certainly use a lot more compute to make up for that increase in efficiency.
Sorry to say, I have some old SSDs that are only 3-4 times faster than the HDDs. Especially when there’s a lot of HDDs in the pool, ignoring them could be leaving a lot of performance on the floor.

Though it would be an improvement over what I saw last time I tried, sure.
It's not that nuanced guys. zirp ended they did layoffs, and they got bad PR for it. Now they have to do layoffs again but they don't want the bad PR. The people at the top couldn't possibly, with all the time in the world, make an actually informed rational decision about who to cut so an RTO where completely random people quit is just as good as "picking".
Yeah, it kinda was - https://lore.kernel.org/all/172816780614.3194359.10913571563...

He was refusing to contribute his code according to the rules (by which everyone is meant to abide), avoiding regression testing and creating bugs.

And he certainly didn't help his case with tone deaf comments like this:

> If you're so convinced you know best, I invite you to start writing your own filesystem. Go for it.
Why does the border of the sun look so poorly antialiased in all of these? Are they doing some sort of postprocessing that would cause that?
This is strange because C99 has stdint.h so we don't need to use "short/long/long long/long long long" nonsense anymore.
… and VW drops 23 billion on RND each year, but I’m not seeing 6x the output compared to Tesla.
Lots of people assume that fusion energy will be cheap but this is not true for the tokamak designs, which have the highest chance of success. Helion's approach should be very cost-competitive but it has a high chance of failure.
It's an awful lot easier to put them under roads than buildings.
With any understanding of markets the Occam’s razor should be the other way around. Basically humanity doesn’t need a centralized planning committee to determine what is or isn’t useful for them, instead they can just spend their money/assets in a free market economy and express their individual needs and wants.

If global governments/society is concerned with externalities of energy consumption they can make regulations and impose taxes/costs on energy sources with undesirable externalities. However they should NEVER as in NEVER decide what use of energy is “good” what is “bad”, there is no such concept, markets will handle preferences and allocations for the system, no centralized planning needed. If AI is still demanded even with increased overall energy costs then it’s because it provides a value and no ivory tower critic can claim they are enlightened and need to decide for all of us.
We used to do two week on-call rotations (to follow along with sprint/release cadence). At the beginning of '23, one of our devs asked to be full-time on-call, both because they had sleep issues and so would regularly be awake at 2 am, but also because they didn't like that the other team members wouldn't follow the documented processes.

They don't get paid extra, but they seem to be very happy with the setup.
Not meaning to support him, but for Kent’s perspective:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/trouble-in-116412665

I don't think what Kent did was right, but I'm also not sure this kind of heavy-handed approach by the CoC team is good, either. The forced public apology sounds a bit like a kindergarten teacher forcing two kids to shake hands after a fight.

On my part, I just hope that Linux will get a real competitor to ZFS.
>And aluminum has more benefits than these AIs.

The utility argument holds no water for me. I don't think it should be acceptable to assume the future worth(or lack of) of anything when there are a range of opinions on the issue.

This holds equally for AI and Cryptocurrency which both get criticized for having a lack of utility. Nobody knows the future utility, in both issues there are people who sincerely believe that they will be world changing.

They might be wrong, but it should not be up to individuals, or even the majority, to bluntly declare a different worth and then categorize the process a waste.

By all means make arguments on the long term environmental impact of proposed mechanisms used to achieve those goals, but if your goal is to convince someone else then you have to consider those impacts relative to what they believe are the benefits.

Electricity use, and indeed water use, frequently gets asserted as a big number with the implication of environmental damage. If the electricity is generated cleanly or the water is not rendered otherwise unusable, then the may be negligible environmental impact.
The Knights of the Sun
I’ve worked on and finished some extremely large programs over my years in non-tech enterprise. I’m also an external examiner for CS students, and I’ve regularly talked about how I think the curriculum is outdated. In Denmark where I’m from it’s rare to get a programming application from someone without a related degree. It wasn’t so rare 20 years ago, but I can’t remember when I saw one last. I agree that degrees, and especially CS, doesn’t guarantee that people can code. We use them mostly as a “safety net” in our hiring processes here in my region of the world. Basically you can view hiring the wrong person as the most expensive mistake you can make as a manager, and educations are a sort of risk management. You might think that the “can this person actually program” risk is worst for people who are fresh out of their education but there are a lot of factors which can play into it. Older devs may be set in their ways, maybe even religious about some sort of programming philosophy. On the flip side they will start producing value right away.

Anyway, by far I think the biggest hurdle in our industry right now is pseudo-jobbers like project managers, business process owners, scrum masters, various architects and what not. Not everyone is a waste of time, some of them do excellent work and function as exponential productivity catalysts. The vast majority of them, however, spend so much time engineering the process, architecture, whatever that their teams never ship on time or within budget. In this sense I think “correct programs” is hard to value. Because often the “incorrect large program” that doesn’t scale, will be much more valuable for a business than a “correct program” which never even gets the chance because it took to long to get out there.
I graduated in CS at a renowned university over two decades ago. The faculty was very theory-oriented, basically every lecture was just theorem, proof, example - even the programming lectures.

As a matter of fact, there was only a single lecture I took (and which I didn't need to take) where we needed to use computers for the weekly exercises.
Ok, what if you are paid to create a office in your house?
Nobody is rooting for on-call, but yeah I put up with it because I am a young stupid idiot thirty-something who needs to make a lot of money now so that the rest of my life can be Nice Enough. I’d love to be able to cherry-pick jobs like this too, but I am not there yet.

Not trying to dunk on you, I’m honestly glad you get to do this, it must make your life considerably better.
While I see your point I don’t think it’s a very useful one. It’s more productive to aspire for the betterment of your own/group’s position/circumstances than to compare how other groups have it worse. The latter just brings complacency, stagnation and maybe even regression because there is always someone who has it worse and so on and so forth.
Good example, but sounds like Facebook or Firefox are to blame for this, not Google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain
I would prefer to WFH 100%.

However I’m a team lead. And no matter what I try I can’t train my juniors as quickly remotely.

My seniors and I can show them how to work, and solve problems so much faster on-site. We catch bad habits sooner and in-still the teams approach to working via example. Which so far I’ve found hardest to replicate remotely.

Yes you can pass skills on remotely. But many people aren’t willing to spent extended periods on a call. And it is time people need more than anything else at the start of their career.

Many juniors - understandably - don’t know what skills they are lacking. And those that do don’t know which to focus on first. Only 10/20% have the right personality type to self-source these skills independently. They need our help. Just as we needed the previous generations help. And to provide that we need to really get to know them.
> spends the equivalent of $7.4 to $8.4 billion every year on research and development

Wonder what portion of this is opex masquerading as R&D, hiding behind “equivalent of”