skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good point that I had not considered, and I will add a few additional thoughts:

* In cold weather, solar heat gain can work in your favor as well. Much of the effect will depend on the orientation, shading, and properties of your windows, though. On the other hand, as another commenter pointed out, more sun in southern, cooling-dominated climate can also mean more, cheaper electricity.

* If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.

* At 65F (18.3C), most people I know would already be wearing a jumper/sweater. That's why I chose a lower target temperature for Berlin. The best source I could find[1] indicates that in November-December of 2022 (in the context of rising energy prices due to Russia's war with Ukraine), Germans actually kept their houses at 19.4C, on average.

* Maybe I'm moving the goalposts a bit, but I chose Berlin mostly because the numbers worked out conveniently. As someone who grew up in the American upper midwest, I wouldn't consider Berlin to be particularly cold. Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/80-percent-german-house... (original report is on German)
It's different when you do it to found a company/startup/product.

Me - I quit being a permanent employee decades ago, and only do consulting contract engagements - no regrets. (Admittedly - I am in a country where my basic healthcare needs are provided - and I can purchase reasonable coverage for things that are not)
> Whereas UK and Canadian politicians have to answer to their constituents.

Yeah, and "politicians have to answer to their constituents" is how we got the failed insurance markets in California and Florida. This thread has now gone full circle.
Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention.

Houses generally aren't destroyed by hurricanes in the sense of "the storm literally ripped them up", they're made uninhabitable by storm surges (flood).

The scary ones are tornados.

And tornados do genuinely fuck shit up. Even in those "enlightened" parts of the world you think have proper building regulations. If you're interested, go look at the recaps of tornado damage where they hit Europe here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_tornadoes_and...

Note the number of homes destroyed and people killed - plenty of both, even in those countries that prefer brick/concrete homes.

Hurricanes throw branches. Tornados throw cars.
Was it Joel Spolsky who first marketed his company to techies by giving advice? Or was he just the first wildly succesful person with that strategy?
I think that "addresses" would be a better word there? I guess they were going for a pun, but it didn't land for me either.
A portfolio of has-been chips, a patent portfolio nearing obsolescence, and a bunch of software nobody cares about?
Not to mention how much paper it would take to print 500B weights
> The fact that i'm a huge gamer, and have a huge friend group of them but nobody plays his games

Yeah, same here. But my conclusion from that would be "I'm not the target market", not "Those games are clearly shit because neither I or my friends play them".

Again, looking at the games, they've won awards + are highly rated by people playing them. You just think those people are wrong for liking the games, or something?
If you want a longer reinsurance term, it needed to be agreed to upfront. I'd guess insurance companies are well aware of the risks of writing long-term policies and so don't usually offer them. That being said, your comparison to term life insurance is quite apt - I wonder if such insurance policies actually exist. I would guess they'd cost more than a yearly renewing policy, but who knows.

Your other proposals as extensions to yearly terms certainly go too far. Annual renewal policies are commonplace, and it should be well understood that there's no obligation on any party to continue it.
Bill Gates "whine about losing mobile to Android"
OKRs are a complete waste of time for everyone involved. Just avoid this corporate nonsense.
Police Use of Face Recognition Continues to Wrack Up Real-World Harms
Cute, didn't know it was a thing in Chicago!

I suppose wormwood is an acquired taste, but it's one I happen to like. They still put it in many different bitters here in Sweden.
"Thermodynamics" is singular :) As for the numbers, my AC's manual shows COP of 3.71 for heating and 3.13 for cooling.

So you are spot on, in winter temperature deltas are larger, and efficiency goes up.
> It's obvious to every socialist that this move was stupid

Is it? Or is this post hoc rationalization? I really dislike playing the “both sides” card, even for a moment, but it’s hard to deny that there are questionable takes on both ends.

I agree with you that not every regulation equates to socialism, and it’s ridiculous to claim it is. However, the narrative of “insurance companies bad” is incredibly prevalent among left-leaning perspectives, and any regulation around insurance premiums tends to be automatically celebrated as a clear victory.

Ironically (because it's a free market argument), it’s a not-uncommon argument that if insurance companies can’t provide their services for no more than some arbitrarily-decided amount annually, they’re being inefficient or greedy and should go bankrupt and let a new competitor take the market.
What Fox News argued was a bit more nuanced than that all of Fox News isn't news. Rather, "Fox successfully argued that one particular segment on Tucker Carlson’s show could only be reasonably interpreted as making political arguments, not making factual assertions, and therefore couldn’t be defamation."[1]

That feels like a fairly reasonable assertion for anybody watching Tucker Carlson.

[1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/fox-news-v-fox-entertainment-...
In universe, arguing the X-Men are not human would put you firmly in the villain category.
Perhaps it's 74% or 76%.
From the article:

> Some of the homes in Pacific Palisades were 90 years old

90 years exceeds your lifespan, the lifespan of your children, and maybe the lifespan of your grandchildren depending on when in your lifetime it is built. Even if the house is never sold and is simply inherited, it is very likely that a home that age is lived in by someone the builders never met.

So if a house burns down once every 3 generations, what incentive is there to build it to be more fire-resistant? These fires are bad, yes. But LA isn't burning down once a year. LA is massive and only small chunks are affected by each fire. For reference, these fires are the most destructive in history and have destroyed an estimated 12,000+ structures throughout metro LA and Riverside. Per ChatGPT, there's an estimated 3 million buildings in LA County alone with the rest of the greater metro area (San Bernadino, Orange, Riverside, and Ventura counties) have an estimated 5 million.

So while, yes, the odds of your home burning down are elevated in metro LA, they are still quite slim. Slim enough that making the initial building even more expensive is not worth it, especially not in an area that also sees a lot of earthquakes.
Wonder if you could either sue them for delivering an insufficient product (it does not function as a slipper under the definition for longer than a day after walking) or keep returning them under warranty.
Landing boosters saves money and helps with cadence.

SpaceX is charging NASA less. Even Boeing is charging NASA less than Russia.
Drywall is common in north america. It's ~1.25m×2.5m×1cm sheets of gypsum sandwiched between a heavy paper, and plaster is only used to bridge the seams. It's almost always screwed down, and adds significant rigidity to a stick-framed wall. Cement walls are often (but not always) finished by stick-framing a false wall and then screwing the drywall to that.
There must be some way to have their wordplay without such a clunky sentence.
Writing an Enigma Machine in 6502 Assembly(2022)
The richest Americans thrived under Biden, despite warnings of an 'oligarchy
Yea, trying to be funny with target specific references, only to construct a difficult to parse sentence. It's like saying a certain politician would love to couch a certain meme
Coupons aside, the whole process of eating at McD in PL is demeaning to me every time I'm there. From the clunky app that you basically must have to get anything at a decent price, to the kiosks that work slower that ATMs 20 years ago, to the whole flow of selecting your meal that requires like 15 taps that feels like installing Windows 98, up to the end where it tries to sell you some dessert that you would have selected if you wanted it in the first place.
We were speaking in the context of fires previously - in which case it's usually more about preserving the neighbourhood and land than anything else, you have to evacuate regardless.

Earthquakes are different and you'd need a house that stood anyway (though I'd guess most houses don't have a problem with earthquakes insofar as not collapsing on inhabitants, though they'd probably be damaged)
Storing a cookie to remember a "Reject tracking cookies" is fine. You're allowed to store cookies without consent, the objective of the cookie matters when figuring out if it's allowed to be stored without consent or not.

If people would just spend like 10-15 minutes reading up what they're arguing about, we'd actually get some substantive discussions on this topic.
>> If there is one thing the EU has absolutely achieved it is to massively reduce and harmonize tariffs and trade rules, and make the rules less susceptible to the whims of political favor and lobbying of local industry.

To a (considerable) extent yes. But it appears to be going backwards - from 2021 online shops have had to know and apply VAT for a product to the buyers country, not the country in which they are based, and thresholds for charging and submitting this VAT were eliminated. Basically handing over more online retail to the likes of Amazon.

Different products have different VAT rates in each country, the only thing that can't be discriminated on is the (EU) country of origin. This is still absolutely susceptible to the whims of political favour and local industry lobbying. A recent example from Finland: https://yle.fi/a/74-20087643

[Admittedly I'm unlikely to be buying chocolate and crisps online from Germany, but if I were a German seller needs to charge the correct rate of VAT for each, which will likely be different from Germany and every other EU country]
> The ML stuff they're worried about takes a giant data center to train and an unusually beefy computer even to run.

Now, consider this: the Palm [1] couldn’t even create an RSA [2] public/private key pair in “user time” The pace of technological advancement is astonishing, and new techniques continually emerge to overcome current limitations. For example, in 1980, Intel was selling mathematical coprocessors [3] that were cutting-edge at the time but would be laughable today. It’s reasonable to expect that the field of machine learning will follow a similar trajectory, making what seems computationally impractical now far more accessible in the future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)

[3] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087
> I'm trying to understand how what you're suggesting is different from mandating everyone just get a personal savings account

Because insurance will cover you even if your house burns down in the first year of coverage, whereas a personal savings account will have only a very small amount of money in it in the first year of home ownership.

That's the whole point of insurance.

I don't know where the idea came from that the purpose of home insurance is for people in low-risk homes to subsidize people in high-risk homes, but it's a very strange idea.
But the EU doesn’t do tariffs? I thought that was exclusive to the incoming US administration, because it’s stupid.
> Ok then why does nearly every company make people write code for interviews or do take home programming projects?

For the same reason they put leetcode problems to "test" an applicants skill. Or have them write mergesort on a chalkboard by hand. It gives them a warm fuzzy feeling in the tummy because now they can say "we did something to check they are competent". Why, you ask? Well it's mostly impossible to come up with a test to verify a competency you don't have yourself. Imagine you can't distinguish red and green, are not aware of it, but want to hire people who can. That's their situation, but they cannot admit it - because it would be clear evidence that they are no good fit for their current role. Use this information responsibly ;)

> Why do people list programming languages on their resumes if it's "least important"?

You put the programming languages in there alongside the HR-soothing stuff because you hope that an actual software person gets to see your resume and gives you an extra vote for being a good match. Notice that most guides recommend a relatively small amount of technical content vs. lots of "using my awesomeness i managed to blafoo the dingleberries in a more efficient manner to earn the company a higher bottom line"

If you don't want to be a software developer that's fine. But your questions point me towards the conclusion that you don't know a lot of things about software development in the first place which doesn't speak for your ability to estimate how easy it will be to automate it using LLMs.
same, absolutely terrible choice of a verb for the headline
Testing to failure is pretty common in rocketry. If you don’t push the limits you’ll never really know where the limits are.
It does not make more sense to the British, this is just the particular "clever" writing style favoured by The Register. Maybe it was sharp in the 2000s, I can't honestly remember, but these days it makes the site pretty much unreadable for me.
You’re never telling React “do this”, instead it’s always “change this state” and then hope that it does what you expect it to do, but instead it re-renders 10 components for nonobvious reasons. Sure useMemo can help with this, but, eh, I just wish it worked the first way.

And every React-adjacent project either ends up abandoned or subsumed into the beast.
I'm no insurance expert, but I know that insurance usually doesn't cover what's called force majeure — ie. "great forces" such as natural disasters. That's because insurance doesn't work if all insurees (or a large proportion) need to be compensated at the same time.

So my question is: is it even possible to insure against these events — e.g. hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes — given that all insurance takers may need to collect compensation at once (in which case the price of a house insurance would need to be at least the same as the price of a new house).
It's a tough spot to be in as nearly all modern vehicles are doing this now. There isn't a free market alternative that I know of outside of building your own kit car
The practice: Shipping creative work by Seth Godin would be a good read.
NASA pays both Boeing and SpaceX less than Soyuz was.
And who's the "you" in that case? If you're on a team of ten developers working for a shoddy company - because your family can't eat lofty principles - and a bad piece of software is released, who loses their accreditation? Is it the whole team? Do we go through the commits one by one? Is it just the tech lead, or the PM, or the engineering manager?
When we bought our house in the UK (a long time ago), it was a condition of the mortgage that we had buildings insurance. The theory is that if the house burns down or similar, the bank will want the rest of their money back and the house buyer is unlikely to be able to afford that considering that they needed a mortgage in the first place.

It's basically the bank just outsourcing a lot of risk to the insurance company (via the house buyer).
> Or they see that as a cute bit of misdirection. Profits are capped as a percentage of healthcare costs, sure. [...]

You know what else is "a cute bit of misdirection"? Mentioning that profits are capped without mentioning why it's that way in the first place.

>You ever think it's curious that for-profit insurance companies pay out 2–3x what Medicare does for the same procedures?

...because the government low-balls healthcare providers?
Prototyping in Rust
I have incorporated a lot of SO code. I never incorporate it, until I understand exactly what it does.

I usually learn it, by adapting it to my coding style, and documenting it. I seldom leave it untouched. I usually modify in one way or another, and I always add a HeaderDoc comment, linking to the SO answer.

So far, I have not been especially thrilled with the AI-generated code that I've encountered. I expect things to improve, rapidly, though.
I'm not the CTO of anything, FWIW.
I believe we can still do them for fun, for practice. But having them readily available (also, tested) when you are trying to build something is much better.
I'm excited to see how that x86 backend is, I haven't tried it yet. It's definitely an interesting step for a new language to do on its own
The traditional materials used in Japanese construction of everyday homes aren't really in the "built to last" category: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1DP5xpM3Y8 . In some cases, trying to make a house that was resistant to floods, fires and earthquakes at the same time would have been prohibitively expensive. I'm sure that led to forming habits that have continued into more modern eras of building styles where it's less required.

They're also smaller, which makes construction costs cheaper which means people are more likely to make dramatic changes when fashion changes. And then there's more of a culture of prefab house building rather than extensions etc. Planning is also a lot more liberal which allows the rebuilt house to be more different and also reduces the cost of the process.

I think even in Europe some of the older houses are houses of theseus though. The exterior shell is the same, but there's plenty of buildings in the local city centre that were tenements, then small business offices, then apartments, with significant remodeling that occurred. Or the house I used to live in was built in the 1880s, extended in the 1950s and significantly modernised in the 2000s. Each time there would have involved largely gutting the interior and rebuilding.
Ask NASA about MSR
Yes, Jaffa Cakes - minature sponge cakes flavoured with Jaffa oranges. Cakes aren't subject to Value Added Tax in the UK, which allows them to be sold more cheaply to the consumer or have a greater profit margin. A tribunal confirmed that they are true, real and genuine cakes, so you may feel entitled to enjoy your tax-free treat!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandco...
And windows being covered with bricks for tax reasons.
The code in the article is not wrong. It is not unsafe. The author explicitly handles the OOM case correctly. It is true that there are more optimal ways to do it if you do have an OOM handling strategy.

And no, you're not supposed to teach your students the best way to do things at the start. That's not how teaching works. You start with the simpler (but still correct) way, and then work towards the best way. This is why introductions to Rust are full of clone calls. The best Rust code minimizes the number of clones. But when you're introducing people to something, you don't necessarily do the optimal thing first because that disrupts the learning process.
Yes; former communist but not former soviet union. Old habits die hard I guess.
You can’t win arguments on the internet. Best case: they ghost you. Cowards, I say!
MessageFormat 2.0 Final Candidate
Not that unusual for Sony.

They have a lot of WTF product design decisions.

I have a running joke with friends about how there must be some terrible engineer who is the CEO's son or something that gets to design one feature in every product.
Look there are countless game designers making shovelware crap. I don't fault them at all, what annoys me is people pointing to him as an authority when those same people don't even play the game. Even here you're just assuming someone somewhere does, why not pay attention to game designers that make games you enjoy yourself?
Well, we are commenting on an article specifically about the spread of fire in urban areas, as we've seen in LA this week.

Here in the seismically stable UK, we had problems with fire spreading in urban areas [1] in 1666. So we banned wood exteriors on buildings. It works pretty well if you don't need to worry about earthquakes or hurricanes; brick doesn't burn.

This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year olds, and they don't tend to go into other countries' construction traditions, or reasons not to use bricks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London
Lua Programming in Lua with Lua
Drywall is two sheets of paper/cardboard cladding (increasingly) low density gypsum.

Soundproofing material is also often made of cardboard (though we do have alternatives for that, unlike drywall).
Yes, I've worked on small teams of highly experienced people where code reviews may only happen a couple times a year for the purpose of knowledge transfer. This is how I've seen it work on what I would consider the most critical and best performing code I've been exposed to. High volume, high stakes stuff in finance and health care.
If you treat your RSS feeds as reading lists, it is useful to have the full list in there. Of course you can track your unread entries another way (browser bookmark, etc) but it's not as convenient.
I think that's a naive and ignorant position considering what has been going on since 1948 (violence from both sides, yes, but effectively an apartheid-state with more and more illegal occupations).
That is the problem with conflating insurance and subsidy.

To buy votes, politicians sell “insurance”, but in reality it is a subsidy to a specific group of taxpayers.

When a government directly pays for healthcare, it can’t be called insurance, and so limits to the subsidy are easily attributed to the government leaders.

Whereas, if a government has the population buy “insurance” from non governmental entities, then it can pretend (for the layperson) that it isn’t a government subsidy and so the laypeople can blame limits of the subsidy on someone else.

Obviously, health insurance in the US is far from health insurance and premiums are closer to taxes being paid rather than premiums for one’s own health risks.

That isn’t so true in property and casualty insurance, at least not until governments like California step in.
From the other side, have you ever tried to deal with corporate customers with SSO?

What normally happens:
* Enterprise customer's CIO/Legal/Security team demands SSO.

* You are put in touch with some support guy in India in IT

* He doesn't know so has to go out to some external consultancy to work with whatever hell they've layered on top of Entra ID

* You end up getting sent a SAML configuration

* Said SAML configuration doesn't work for some reason so you reach out again.

* You wait for a response for a month

* The people who actually want to use the product are getting annoyed

* Somehow an exception is made, so user accounts get created, people start using the product.

* 6 months later the exception is up, you've still not heard from their IT team despite badgering them.

* Suddenly their IT team gets into gear, it all gets set up and is working.

* Two years later, the SAML configuration is due to expire. You reach out to the customer contact and the whole game starts all over again because of course all the people you previously spoke to have left.
Trump Plans to Designate Cryptocurrency as a National Priority