213 karma · joined December 23, 2021
I agree the selling of power to ourselves via Sweden seems weird, but I suppose it's better to do just that instead of having to drain the dam without producing electricity at all, and it's a solution which works at this moment instead of waiting for an interconnect to be built. I would hazard a guess that it does slightly reduce the cost of power in other regions whenever we do sell to Sweden from NO4, but I have no data. I haven't really heard much about this exact issue being discussed though, so I don't have much information regarding that. But the issue with prices jumping to European levels would be relevant here too.
There is a lot of heavy industry in the north, such as petroleum, mining, refining and others. Norway does have a large aluminium industry which does rely more or less exclusively on hydro power, and seems to be in the top ten of aluminium producing countries, just above Iceland.
But now that the price has gone up by such an enormous amount in the south, connecting north and south will not reduce the price in the other zones, it will likely just cause NO4 to go up to the same level as in the rest of Norway. This is mainly due to the NO4 being basically not connected to the the synchronous grid of Continental Europe, while the other regions are to a much larger extent due to underwater cables going to the UK, Denmark and Germany. This means that the price of power in Europe directly influences the price of electricity in NO1-3, but not NO4. At least not to the same extent, although Sweden makes a killing buying cheap power from NO4 and selling it to mainland Europe, or even straight back to southern Norway. As such, connecting NO4 to the rest of Norway and by extention the European grid, would not be very popular in the north, but to be fair, the price increase has not exactly been popular in the south either.
The industry in Norway is highly electrified and some sectors are very energy intensive, such as aluminium production, which due to using electrolysis, runs almost entirely off the grid. Manufacturing used almost 37% of all power consumed in Norway in 2017, with power-intensive manufacturing accounting for over 80% of total energy use in the manufacturing sector that year.[0] This is also an issue which will need to be considered when talking about increasing transfer capacity between the two zones.
I hope this gives some insight, even if I rambled a bit and touched on a lot of different aspects. I'm by no means an expert, but have become interested in the subject as so many other Norwegians have lately. I'd love to answer more questions if you have any!
[0] https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energibruk/energibruken... (Source in English and published by the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy)
The subscription to the network is 150 NOK/month, with each transaction costing 0,21 NOK each, before volume rebates. 1 EUR/USD is worth roughly 10 NOK at the time of writing, so about 15/0,021 for the subscription/transaction cost. I don't know much about VISA and MasterCard costs, but I would hazard a guess they're higher.
I think the only time I ever use VISA is when purchasing things online, and even then I'm not quite sure it's always VISA. Fun fact, BankAxept stopped accepting the magnetic strip in 2011. Now chip & pin or NFC are the two main ways of paying, with NFC transactions under 500 NOK not requiring the PIN to be entered, except periodically for verification.
So central authentication has been a part of the game since the beginning of multiplayer more or less, but Microsoft has taken it quite a bit further with the recent changes. Quite a shame to potentially be banned from a private server I host myself, whitelisted only for IRL friends. How strict the criteria to actually get banned is irrelevant in my opinion, I bought the game over ten years ago, and now suddenly risk losing access to multiplayer, which was the only reason I bought the game. But we'll have to see how it actually gets implemented, I really hope it's opt-in, or at the very least possible to opt out for privately hosted servers, but I have no issue with it being implemented on Realms.
But for a number such as '3 milliarder', one often writes '3.000 millioner' instead. Exactly why I don't know, but I would guess it has something to do with more accurately reflecting the size of the number. It might not be as clear that the number is 1000x the size with a simple change in the end of the word. The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion, after all.
Speaking of confusion about numbers, just wait until you see how different countries divide up large numbers. Some countries, such as Norway write one million as 1.000.000,00 while others write it as 1,000,000.00.
I would postulate that the loop starts by selecting the yellow block and waiting for him to select or reject it. If he selects it, he is able to cycle through the letters from left to right, ending at the symbol all the way to the right on every layer to exit that block. Then it keeps cycling down until he selects a new colored block. You can see this in practice if you rewatch the bit where he asks his son if he wants to watch a movie with him.
The article also notes that the man gave feedback to improve the system, so I would guess that it's a mix between a limitation of the way this system is set up, how fast the system can accurately distinguish a yes from a no, and how fast he is able to keep up, and for how long.
It would be interesting to see this system be implemented in a better way, I'm sure you could speed this up by dynamically changing the letter layout or even suggesting words on the fly, in the same way spelling suggestions work on other devices.
Generally, an employer needs to document their reasons for wanting to fire a worker, and something like them not working fast enough is not reason enough on its own. Having a dialogue between employee and employer is very important, such that the employee gets a chance to change and improve if they wish.
The difference between how Norway and the US do everything from employment, to pension and workers rights is so vastly different. I would love to hear what HN thinks about this.
> Some software, notably git, is still using SHA-1, and relying on the fact that the best publicly-known method of generating SHA-1 collisions costs 2⁶⁹ computations, which is expensive. I think it is unwise to rely on this for two reasons. One is that there could be more efficient techniques to compute SHA-1 collisions that we don’t know about. Another is that the cost of doing 2⁶⁹ computations is falling rapidly—at the time of this writing (March 22, 2014), the Bitcoin network is performing enough computation to generate SHA-1 collisions every 131 minutes!
By guesstimating from just looking at the graph to the linked site, it seems the Bitcoin network was at about 100 PH/s, with the network at 185 EH/s, which is close to a 2000x in hashrate since this blogpost went live.