skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for all the in depth articles that I've read since '98.

For some perspective, here is a link to a 1999 feature on 17 year old Anand. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/1999/12/01/27...

"Despite the disparity in size, this David has had some winning moments against the Goliaths. Just a year ago, Anand scooped everyone in reporting on a new processor from AMD, the K6-3, well before its release. AMD officials say they don't know how he got the chip, and Anand sure isn't telling. The incident drew considerable attention to AnandTech, including a sniffy reference in PC Magazine to tests "purported to have been run with a prototype of the K6-3.""
I'll check out. Browser and command line crypto are two different beasts; it is where trust is placed.
> Most of their energy is nuclear

Sure not. Last I looked their cars all use gasoline...
> Can it be done quickly enough to prevent the damage from climate change?

Actually the renewable push in Germany is accelerating climate change, not preventing it. They don't get enough sun to make solar cells worth it, yet they do it anyway.

What it means is they will never make EROEI for them. On paper everything is wonderful (as a country emissions are low), but actually all they are doing is shipping the emissions to China which is where the solar cells are made.
In addition, problems facing nuclear are:

- huge cost overruns, both in construction and maintenance

- very expensive end-of-life shutdown costs

- shut down costs incentivizing the unwise extension of nuclear facility lifetimes
Why not? It would be extremely easy. The only reason they don't make more nuclear power plants is they are slightly more expensive on a KWh level than natural gas.

Making them was never the problem.
Irrational fears is the only thing keeping nuclear energy from being used to it's potential.

Read this excellent paper on nuclear energy. Alla common fallacies are addressed here from a physics standpoint.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/

I don't know why policymakers aren't required to actually study the science of the things they make decisions on.

So now we have coal power which kills massive amounts of people, and people talking about hings like chernobyl and fukusima without realizing that not one single person has ever died of a nuclear "disaster" that was the result of a "non-military nuclear powerplant", ie. all western nuclear powerplants.

And as for waste management, a quote:

"For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and simply drop it into the ocean at random locations.5 No one can claim that we don't know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities, spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood. Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In fact, if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power and all the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above its present level from natural radioactivity."
I agree with all of your points except nuclear reprocessing. It is overall worthwhile, but it is far from inherently safe. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster, which was a level-6 incident, i.e. the third worst in history (probably actually the second). Granted, it was the Russians.
You mean like food, housing, etc? Free markets don't mean they're optional, it means that participants interact freely and voluntarily.
That's a very glib and stirring bit, and for all I know it may have been considerably more accurate in Feynman's heyday, when people still took Freud's weird hangups seriously. And of course psychology still has a long way to go, as any psychologist in the world will tell you.

The only problem is, with modern psychology--not invariably, but more often than not--the planes do land.
Also, there are numerous discussions about how to ensure a build/binary is what it purports to be. I'm trying to find those…

EDIT:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023035
BTRFS is still considered experimental, but it certainly seems stable enough for many uses.
> Item 1: Germany shut down 41% of it's nuclear plants following Fukushima, and greatly accelerated plans to close the remaining ones.

Those were to close anyway in the very near future. Germany did not greatly accelerate the plan.

> Item 2: Germany is building a raft of new coal plants; something like 30 are in various stages of planning and building.

It does not. 'Planning' is not building. Germany currently discusses the closing of 50 fossil fuel plants.

> According to Die Welt, power generation from brown coal (the dirtiest form) is climbing, at the highest level since 1990, and projected to increase further.

It is not. This year coal use is going down.

> Overall fossil fuel use for power generation is staying constant.

Only for a few years.

> If it wasn't for the decline of nuclear power in Germany, fossil fuel use could have declined. And according to Germany's energy regulator, coal fired plants will be essential to replace the closing nuclear plants.

Fossil fuel plants will be greatly reduced during the next decades.

Already the industry is closing them faster than we want:

http://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/rueckzug-aus-der-kohle-r...

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/rwe-strom-energieriese...

http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article119000950/RWE-und-E-on-...

> Yes, there is. As you go on to admit, even if you label it a "temporary effect in a long-term plan". (But given that the coal plants now being built are projected to be operating for 40 years, it's not what I'd call temporary.)

We have a lot of old ones to close.

> And that shift will result in a net increase in deaths. You seem very defensive, but you haven't actually disputed any of the underlying facts.

Your so-called 'facts' are mostly wrong. I told you for example that coal use is going down this year. That's a fact.
> One is that two other carbon-free options, solar and wind, are dropping in cost

What's with that myth? They are certainly not "carbon-free" (presumably you mean carbon dioxide free).

Solar and wind use huge amounts of energy to build. The most common way they make money is be spending energy where it is cheap, and selling energy where it is expensive. (But the CO2 is global, as is the pollution.) In essence they are a complicated way of shipping energy.

They have a positive EROEI, but not hugely, just somewhat.

You make a good point on the financial costs of nuclear.
> I don't understand why Bayesian statistics needs to be an "-ism", and still less why other statistics needs to be an "-ism" too. I don't understand why people feel the need to line up on one side or the other or get so worked up about it.

Don't get hung up on the terminology, instead pay attention to the ideas behind the terms. The Frequentist and Bayesian approaches are very different, and produce different outcomes, so they deserve to be understood and their differences sorted out.

For example, and without providing all the technical details, using a Frequentist analysis a decision was made to recommend breast cancer screening x-rays for women over a given age. Later, after serious problems arose, a Bayesian approach showed that the false positive rate was 5 to 1 (5 false positives to 1 real cancer detection), which meant many more people were given the false news that they had cancer than those who actually did.

https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Bayes_...

This is not to exalt the Bayesian approach over the Frequentist, because both have their place, it is only to show how dramatic the difference can be.
Bayesian vs. frequentist: squabbling among the ignorant
Put the book down, John Galt.
I never understood why software estimates are so bad when other fields do so well.

When a contractor gives you an estimate of how long and how much it's going to take to do a remodel, he's invariably on time and on schedule, right?

And when Boeing spends billions of dollars on a new plane, they have on ready and on budget, right?

So why can't software people do the same?

Oh wait, complex, badly defined projects tend to run late and over budget. It's not that complicated. Spend 3-6 months defining all the details of your new web application, promise not to change anything on the fly, don't ask us to make it work on IE 7, and by the time we do 3-4 of these, we'll be able to give you a good estimate.
> Only for a few years.

You are including the coal used to build solar cells right?

No, of course you aren't. Germany is just shipping their coal emissions to China, so that on paper they look good, but are actually making things worse.

Greenwashing at its finest: Country wide and government supported.
Our Problem
They do. Infact there is a lot of fiber infrastructure built in germany and that has been taken advantage of by business. I.e. Hetzner.
That must be news about how photovoltaics could not meet global energy needs. Last I'd read up, global capacity with realistic assumptions was 3 times current energy use. Also, it's already cheaper per kWh than nuclear (fully depreciated). Also, nuclear is non-renewable. It's still flipping the bird to future generations.

Perhaps you are conflating capacity with transmission and storage?
Many customers/clients don't even want accurate estimates. Given the choice between an accurate estimate of $x, and a competing estimate of $0.75x with later surprises and deadline stress and renegotiations to pay another $0.35x for "phase 2" which gets the product up to what they originally wanted, especially when the business relationship has "bonded" in a way where it's all rah-rah, go-team, we're-in-this-together... clients will go for the latter path way more often than they should.

Part of the reason estimates are inaccurate is because there's that business disincentive to be accurate.
Wow, thank you so much for this! Reading through your changes I do feel a bit silly. And wiser! :)
I would hardly say it's dead. It's just dead domestically for Germany. Germany imports a large quantity of power from France (which relies almost entirely a nuclear for production).
So…the folks who want to increase the power of the State doubt the probity of the officers of the State? That's hardly a consistent system of thought?

I'd prefer to see elephants farmed for their ivory. It's a uniquely beautiful substance and it's a pity that there's no legal way to use it, and a further pity that the ways to use it which do exist are harmful to the elephant population as a whole.
Nuclear energy contributes ~17% of the world's electricity, and has only killed 90 people. Solar (rooftop) contributes <1% of the worlds electricity and has killed 440 people. So I don't really see how nuclear is a 'social problem'.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
I think that it was a mistake to shut down nuclear plants, rather than fossil fuel plants.

That said, if we stopped using fossil energy, wouldn't we find nuclear plants become much more expensive to build? They're built using fossil energy.

(Or significantly reduced fossil energy, thereby raising its price)
> Making them was never the problem.

You might want to work for Areva. They need help. In western countries it is quite difficult to build a new nuclear power plant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#C...

For the next two decades it will be difficult to even keep the current number of nuclear power plants online.
They bought corrupted laws and now they are brazen enough to complain that someone dares to oppose them? It's really disgusting.
Or air...
That's pure FUD. EROEI for solar in Germany vary's a lot but it's from a physics standpoint it's ~20x. However, EROEI has no set standard and it's easy to fudge the numbers. Yet, gasoline generally ends up as less than 1 using those metrics.

PS: Though from an economic and EROEI standpoint Rooftop solar is significantly less appealing than solar farms.
DjangoCon US Speaker Jose Padilla Implicated in Corruption Case
It costs too much energy to make a solar cell. Solar thermal at scale uses less energy for what it returns.
Important to note that nuclear accounts for only 90 deaths in history, while providing 17% of the world's power.

source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
* Building and maintaining a nuclear plant is NOT climate friendly. The emissions do happen just somewhere else.

So, the article is BS and repeating a lie once again.
> You are including the coal used to build solar cells right?

You know that renewable energy is more than solar?

> Germany is just shipping their coal emissions to China

We were not shipping emissions to China. Germany has build a lot of solar cell plants. Many got financial problems when China entered the market.

> Greenwashing at its finest: Country wide and government supported.

Personally I like our greenwashing more than your greenwashing.
Hi there, and thanks for your feedback!

You will be able to, just not right now, since the site is in an experimental/beta state. :-)
I think they should be broken up and their infrastructure sold off.
With respect to psychedelics, they actually do affect your brain. You'd be hard-pressed to tease apart what portion of the outcome was unaffected by the drug when claiming that the results were all due to the Placebo Effect.
Quote: "The point of this website is that death is certain but nobody knows that there isn't an afterlife."

So "nobody knows that there isn't an afterlife" constitutes a useful speculation? Nobody knows there isn't a Bigfoot, either, but guess what? I have much better uses for my time than imagining where I might run into Bigfoot.

This is a classic example where the scientific outlook differs from the unscientific one. A scientist assumes that an idea unaccompanied by evidence is false (the idea behind the term "null hypothesis"). A nonscientist (or a child) assumes that an idea unaccompanied by evidence is true.

A scientist can be persuaded only by evidence to give credence to an idea. By contrast, a nonscientist can never be persuaded to abandon a belief through the absence of evidence, because proving a negative is an impossible evidentiary burden -- the possibility that Bigfoot is hiding under a rock on some faraway planet cannot be discounted.

But hey -- nobody knows that there isn't an afterlife. This is religions get started.
Germany actually has an export SURPLUS of electricity with France.
You can't undo what's already been done, but if you want to stop damaging it further, or if you don't want to see our civilization collapsing/being seriously disturbed by running out of fossil fuel and therefore you want to go all green before that happens, then yes, you can build enough nuclear plants and absolutely positively have to.

This book [0] goes through math of pretty much all energy sources and one of the conclusions the author reaches is that if you want to cover all of our power needs with green energy, renewables alone ain't gonna cut it.

[0] - http://www.withouthotair.com/
Government publishes detailed instructions on how to safely roast marshmallows
The people in Chattanooga don't seem to be complaining one little bit about "American municipal politics" with their 1 gigabit symmetric connections.

We've had to put up with this bullshit from Comcast and TWC for decades. I say let's try the alternative.
"Solar and wind use huge amounts of energy to build"

That's just patently false. And without being too insulting, stupidly so, in a really obvious way.

A 300 watt panel without obstructed view in an average climate is going to get something on the order of magnitude of:

10 hours of sunlight / day
250 sunny days / year
20 years of service

so, 15 million watt-hours, or 15 megawatts hours.

Per wikipedia it takes 400 kilowatt-hours to produce 1 ton of steel in an arc furnace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_arc_furnace).

That single panel can produce enough energy to produce something like 35 tons of steel over its service life.

Just looking at a state of the art PV panel (http://us.sunpower.com/sites/sunpower/files/media-library/da...) - note, its capacity is 345 watts - it weighs 41 pounds. I am fairly confident that, outside of it being made of pure energy, that the EROEI is pretty decent.

edit: Also, I can't imagine this is a favorable comparison to nuclear, which requires immense amounts of energy-intensive steel and concrete, as well as a fuel that is difficult to mine, process, purify, and separate.
yes actually you're right - maybe not as much as in chess due to the depth and variation involved in openings, but still a hell of a lot.
No it isn't. EROEI for solar barely reaches 5 in sunny areas, in Germany it would not surprise me if it was below 1.

If the EROEI was so high they would not need massive government subsidies to encourage adoption - people would do it without encouragement.
If you don't count the thousands of victims that died of contamination from Tchernobyl. Oh and don't forget the deformed babies.
That's true, but there's no chance to have a control group. No one having an acid trip can possibly compare his subjective experience to someone who's taken a sugar pill. And without control groups and other strict controls, human studies are next to useless.

The above means that the Placebo Effect cannot be realistically guarded against or dismissed.
ECMAScript 6: what’s next for JavaScript?
"In 2009, Petteri Tiippana, the director of STUK's nuclear power plant division, told the BBC that it was difficult to deliver nuclear power plant projects on schedule because builders were not used to working to the exacting standards required on nuclear construction sites, since so few new reactors had been built in recent years."

We're certainly not helping ourselves by delaying/canceling more nuclear projects because of stupidly high amounts of FUD in the society regarding nuclear powers.
The problem is that Germany, with its focus on wind and solar, is paying twice as much as for electricity compared to France - also a country with higher density in the middle of Europe - while also emitting more carbon dioxide per capita (9.6 vs 6.1 tons per capita). The difference is that France made the right decision 30 years ago when they transitioned from oil and coal to nuclear power for power generation. Solar and Wind are a much more expensive way of accomplishing the same thing. Der Energiewende is both expensive and inefficient.
> It costs too much energy to make a solar cell.

Compared to what? Solar cells last a long time, and in sunny climates generate a lot of power, far more than enough to pay back the energy cost of their construction.

> Solar thermal at scale uses less energy for what it returns.

That may be true, but don't dismiss solar panels, in particular in remote locations where there's adequate sunlight.
Even if, when you tally everything up, nuclear still ends up as the least deadly solution per kWh. And it's not even about one-upping one another on safety statistics. Is that mainstream has it completely backwards. They think that nuclear is the most deadly and fossils are safe, whereas it's exactly the other way around. Nuclear is the safest, while fossils are probably the most lethal.
No, that statement is BS if you compare it to climate-friendliness of all other solutions. PV arrays don't grow on tree, they involve a lot of carbon emissions and highly toxic processing, but if it's done in China, then apparently nobody cares.
Every one of your numbers are not realistic.

You won't get 10 hours of direct sun, you're lucky to get 6. You are also unlikely to get 20 years out of it - certainly not with zero maintenance (i.e. zero cost). And you are ignoring conversion losses.

Assuming 6 hours and 10 years you get 4.5MW out of it, and let's ignore conversion losses. 4.5MW of electricty at $0.15 per KW/h costs $675.

Installed cost for a 300 watt solar cell? About $500. Not including the inverter.

Cost is a reasonable proxy for energy usage, so your EROEI is about 1.35. Even assuming your figures you have an EROEI of about 4. Less once you include maintenance.

i.e. huge energy costs.

PS. Don't confuse my numbers for financial ROI - if you want that you need to include the time-value of money, and once you include that solar cells loose money even by your measure.
See my reply to you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8248640

Also, I don't understand your response.
1.) what is "too much" energy.
2.) what's your source on solar thermal vs PV EROEI at scale?
3.) what's the relevance of the solar thermal vs PV comparison, since every building in the US can have solar on the roof but not solar thermal.
4.) what's the relevance of your response to what I said?
In most western civilizations government food assistance and other nutritional aid are available for those who would otherwise starve to death. Given that the only estimate I found of actual starvation deaths in the United States was 140 in 2004, I think we can say that people in the United States have a right to basic amounts of food.
The number of non-acute deaths from Chernobyl is highly uncertain and difficult to estimate, even 30 years later. The range of estimate seem to more reflect the author's opinion on nuclear power than scientific fact. WHO estimated 4000 additional cancer deaths from Chernobyl (out of a population of hundreds of millions), based on the LNT-model, which seems very conservative given that there doesn't seem to be much glaring extra cancers in areas with higher natural background radiation.
Switzerland enjoys the same "state-level" autonomy, and they still get to call themselves "Swiss" at the end of the day.

Having studied the Constitution and surrounding documents with some degree of rigor, I think it's incorrect to assert that that a large difference was intended between the United States and the European Union.

It's of course open to interpretation, but the idea that states espouse a degree of autonomy beyond a monolithic federal government isn't absurd, and is even codified into both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
1023, unless you want it to spew characters when you aren't touching it.
Kuto -Craigslist for iOS
everyone should write at least one whole application in assembly just to appreciate how the hardware really works

Unfortunately, with out-of-order execution and instruction-level parallelism, I doubt learning assembly teaches you much about how the hardware really works.

Edit: To the downvoter, care to comment?
OT, but: on the hook. On the lam means you are trying to escape (re)capture by the legal system.
It seems it's based on the markov-chain algorithms.
> what is "too much" energy.

More energy than it costs to make them, or at least enough energy that it's better to build something else.

> what's your source on solar thermal vs PV EROEI at scale?

Solar thermal just needs a mirror (ideally aluminium rather than glass and silver) and the rest of the plant is the same as a regular power plant. A mirror costs less than fuel I'm sure.

Solar cells need ultra pure silicon which is very very expensive to make.

> what's the relevance of the solar thermal vs PV comparison, since every building in the US
can have solar on the roof

What would be the point if the energy return is not there?

> 4.) what's the relevance of your response to what I said?

I said they could meet global energy needs, just that it's not worth it. You assumed for some odd reason that I said they could not, so I figured you were asking about a comparison.
What about using these to make prefab components?
the case is spiffy. but way too tall. i will probably use it bare. definitely will induce wrist pain if not used on a low keyboard tray (which no one has on any table from this century)

and nice project and documentation of it! thank you a lot for sharing.