Recurecur

You're a bit RAM starved at only 32 GB.

My preferred environment is yours, inverted. Native Linux (likely Ubuntu 20) with Windows in a VM as necessary. That is making much better use of hardware IMO. It also gives you native Docker, and a ton of easily obtainable software. Much new software development is beginning in Linux or Linux-like environments, including most language development.

Perhaps more importantly, Linux is the deployment target for most cloud based software. The company I work with (Fortune 100) uses Linux as the preferred deployment platform simply due to cost, along with sufficient quality. It's nice to develop, test and deploy all on the same infrastructure.

Software turns out to be very interesting in terms of real lifecycle. Here in 2020, COBOL skills are in (relatively) high demand! While I'm interested to see the "Son of Unix", based on something like Rust and completely cleaned up, rationalized, and secured, Linux and Linux skills will be valuable for decades longer. Windows, I'm not so sure about...

My next development system will likely be a 16/32 core/thread AMD chip. I'd hate to hobble it with the Windows kernel, it's really not aimed at that class system. Linux is.

Exactly. Not to mention that what Trump tweeted about has long been the single workable solution to widespread looting.

Protests are fine. Mayhem and larceny, however, are not. Violence against lawbreakers is absolutely enshrined as acceptable, and that isn't going to change for the foreseeable future. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with Trump's tweet, certainly nothing overriding the First Amendment.

Further, Twitter is absolutely in the wrong to portray itself as passing some kind of absolute judgement on the President's views, and in fact that it is above the Presidency. It is NOT a neutral platform.

Here's my vote for the best way:

- Crowd sourced

- If 80%+ agreement it's true or false, report it as such with top sources provided

- If less than 80%, report it as "controversial leaning (strongly)..." with sources provided, inviting actual research

In the US, the question of mail voting encouraging fraudulence would get far less than a 80% consensus.

Has your friend applied for unemployment? He should be eligible...

This is probably excellent, and undervalued, advice.

I wonder what fraction of potential English learners can afford $20+ per hour... (Right now that won't beat the unemployment payout here in the States, BTW.)

Can those ballistic missiles actually hit anything?

They're converted ICBMs, and require some kind of terminal guidance. Something traveling Mach 10+ can't use radar or infrared guidance. How does it hit a maneuvering ship?

Current thinking is drones or some other local surveillance would be used, radio linked to the DF-21. I wonder how well that will work alongside US electronic warfare capabilities?

Interesting stuff...

Nope, the narrative is "the mortality rate is similar to flu, therefore draconian measures aren't necessary".

Implementation examples: South Dakota and Sweden.

It seems clear that the infection rate has been severely under counted, meaning mortality rates are artificially high. Even better (from the standpoint of restarting) that "flu-like" mortality rate is concentrated in people over 60 years old.

What that all means together is the economy can easily restart, with the most vulnerable (old and sick) taking extra precautions.

This entire thing has been a fascinating exercise in how poorly central planning can work given bad information. The cure has been vastly more damaging than the disease.

"How does China not have mass deaths atm then? They have lied a lot in Wuhan, but they can't outright hide mass kill offs."

They have almost certainly hidden mass deaths: "WUHAN COVID-19 DEATH TOLL MAY BE IN TENS OF THOUSANDS, DATA ON CREMATIONS AND SHIPMENTS OF URNS SUGGEST"

https://www.newsweek.com/wuhan-covid-19-death-toll-may-tens-...

As the old saying goes: "The truth will out."

I'd like to do something similar using GIS tools, what JH API call are you using for the national data?

The one I have returns a mix of country and region data, I want just the country level summaries (confirmed, deaths, recovered).

Thanks for any help!

In combination with antibiotics and (it seems) zinc it looks quite effective.

A doctor in NY has treated with that combination and is up to almost 700 COVID-19 patients without one dying _or needing a ventilator_.

Some relevant quotes:

>Dr. Zelenko said the whole treatment costs only $20 over a period of 5 days with 100% success. He defines success as “Not to die.” Dr. Zelenko first posted his Facebook video message last week calling on President Trump to “advise the country that they should be taking this medication.”

>There are many other success stories about hydroxychloroquine across the country. Last week, Dr. William Grace, an oncologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said they’ve not had a single death in their hospital because of hydroxychloroquine. “Thanks to hydroxychloroquine, we have not had a death in our hospital,’ Dr. Grace said.

From:

https://techstartups.com/2020/03/28/dr-vladimir-zelenko-now-...

When people are dying in large numbers, sometimes "anecdotal evidence" (especially with large samples) is plenty.

It absolutely did not.

The press did.

The mainstream US media has become a one-sided partisan cheerleading squad for the Democrats, and most Americans are sick of it. We'll see how that works out in November.

It is somewhat performance, but there are three other more important factors. (Java performance, not counting startup overhead, is fairly close to C++ now.)

One factor is determinism. GC introduces unpredictable (non-deterministic) time latency, making GC languages generally unsuitable for real time programming.

Another is size efficiency, Java programs have a well-deserved rep for using lots of memory. That isn't a good mix for smaller/embedded systems. Java also carries along a large runtime, although Graal and other efforts are addressing this.

The final factor is that C++ is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be an "improved C". As the heir apparent to C, C++ has a ton of mindshare and momentum. Rust is now providing a major challenge, one I hope it wins! (Honorable mention to D, which is a nice language as well.)

How is this possible? It requires a prescription, no?

SMH...

Not really, you just switch in the same agile manner you did to produce quinine...

I have a feeling things are about to come up roses for President Trump yet again! :-)

Right now wind+solar account for less than 1% of global electric generation.

I'm highly skeptical that prices can remain low as that scales out to 10-40% of electric generation, given constraints on things like rare earth metals. There is also the issue of equipment wearing out relatively quickly compared to conventional/nuclear plants.

SMRs, built using mass production rather than one-off construction, and possessing safety qualities far beyond current reactors, will be necessary to provide safe, reliable, clean and cheap energy alongside "renewables", IMNSHO.

Giant stars are quite short-lived, with Betelgeuse estimated to have at most a 15 million (not billion!) year life before becoming a red supergiant . If simple life did evolve in time, it was wiped out about 100,000 years ago as Betelgeuse became a supergiant.

One last fun fact: Betelgeuse is about 125,000 times brighter than the Sun in absolute luminosity.

"Julia is the opposite - it's better than Python in one particular narrow niche, and cannot replace it broadly. So it has to offer enough to justify going from one language to two."

How so? Julia is a fine general purpose language. I'd go so far as to say it's more appropriate than Python for a wide class of problems!

> Why not? Wind is a ~50% cheaper source of energy per kWh than nuclear.

That's an illusory number. Wind requires backup power, or lots of storage. Wind turbines have a ~20 year lifespan, compared with ~60 years for coal/nuclear plants. Once the safety and economies of mass-produced Gen IV SMRs are accounted for, nuclear is MUCH cheaper than wind.

What would be really bad would be the first time thousands of people die when the wind/solar powered grid goes down during a cold snap.

> I remember paying close attention on HN when the Fukushima accident was under way, and there were plenty of people on HN and elsewhere swearing that the Fukushima reactor would never melt down, that it was designed to prevent just such a meltdown. It melted down nevertheless.

Yep, there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet. That said, the Fukushima reactors would have been fine if the backup generators to power cooling had been available. However, they weren't in a watertight compartment (as recommended), and were flooded by the tsunami. Even then other backup generators would have worked, but were delivered with the wrong connector and time ran out.

Many Gen-IV designs are, on the other hand, inherently or "walk away" safe. They literally can't melt down or explode due to basic physics.

> So if the majority of power will be non-nuclear, how is nuclear supposed to prevent inevitable global climate change? And why aren't we just pushing to go for 100% non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel energy? Why is that not an option?

First off, they have "biomass" as one of the options, which happens to be a bad one in almost all cases.

Second, it's very hard to have reliable grid power once more than 50% of your power is coming from unreliable sources. Even storage isn't a great answer, due to 10/100/1000 year events.

As the article points out, less than 2% of current power comes from wind/solar. It's very difficult to scale that to even 50%. Nuclear, on the other hand, can easily be scaled beyond 50%. In France, it was 80% at one point.

To have a great future, the human race needs clean, abundant, cheap energy. Nuclear is a win!

> we're at least a generation away from any new installations much less meaningful adoption within the grid.

That's just not the case, if sanity prevails at all. We could have much safer Gen IV plants online within 10 years easily. It just takes the will to do it.

For one thing it was detected (according to the unclassified releases) as high as 80,000 feet AGL.

There's no design of any type right now that can fly at 80,000 feet AND hover at low altitude, all without airfoils. That is also without accounting for the extremely high-G turns with no airfoils.

If it had been some kind of nuclear ramjet (which wouldn't work at low speeds) there would have been a visible plume of hot gas. There wasn't.

So, positing the video is authentic, which seems likely, here's what we know:

- This object, estimated to be 40 feet in largest dimension, exhibited flight performance beyond an F-18

- These objects exhibit long flight endurance, indicating a high density power source - The object was solid, as it was detected by the Aegis radar

- According to the pilot involved, the object did not obey the laws of physics as we know them

- The object flew without visible airfoils - no wings or rotor - and at low speeds including a hover

- The object allegedly hovered as low as fifty feet above the water, although I don't think this was caught on video

- The object departed the scene in a way the F-18 couldn't match

- The object changed orientation without apparent regard for direction of flight

- The video clearly shows some kind of nimbus, exhaust, or field around the object

If this is a classified project of some government, they've likely discovered new physics.

Personally I doubt that's the case, and these are the product of extraterrestrials.

(BTW, to the grandparent - there's a lot that's not understood by current physics. Dark energy, and dark matter, for starters. A new baryon may have been discovered recently. Quantum gravity. Much more I'm sure...)

Improved batteries are a huge deal, so naturally there's a lot of coverage and interest.

Out of the large number of candidates, some will be successful. IBM is certainly a reputable R&D company, so this announcement has more substance than most.

I'm also optimistic about the new Goodenough battery design, with its non-flammable solid electrolyte and a version replacing lithium with sodium.

One thing that did occur to me while reading this article is that if a "five minute 80% charge" is possible, for a 70 KWH battery pack that would involve a 672 KW rate, not accounting for losses. That's a whole lot of power!

A 1 GW powerplant could support charging less than 1500 cars simultaneously at that rate...

Yes, and I think Julia is a perfect starting point for an extremely productive general purpose language.

The one major wart with Julia is reliance on GC, I'm interested to hear what workarounds exist. If no common usage patterns rely on the GC, it should be possible to write "recycling" code that doesn't incur GC pauses and hence, unpredictable latency.

I really enjoy using Julia, it's a great balance of concision, expressiveness, and performance.

JetBrains in particular has done a great job, and the Community Edition of Idea provides a ton of value for free.

>I don't suddenly get sick from pollution from coal power.

Lung cancer isn't a "sudden sickness"?

Hundreds of thousands of people a year are estimated to die from air pollution. Nuclear has killed far fewer over its entire existence, and it would be almost none without the criminal Chernobyl reactor design.

People are terrible at understanding risk, but very good at being influenced by propaganda. Anti-nuclear propaganda has been very effective.

I'm encouraged by the innovation around Gen 4 modular reactors. I think they'll end up being successful, pervasive, and cheap. ThorCon in particular looks strong.

>Lidar has no problem with snow, only when its _snowing_. However, if visibility is reduced, a pure visual approach is going to be even worse.

Good thing Teslas have radar...which penetrates falling snow.

>Musk made a mistake, and he's spending billions to prove that he never made it.

People drive fairly well with only visual sensors (eyes). That is proof of concept. Lidar seems like overkill.

Tobacco is an even better example, in that even when used in the "recommended" way it's often fatal.

>If you live a kilometer downwind from place where an A-10 smashed some iraqi tanks with DU ammunition, you have clear source of exposure.

Sure, depending on how well the extremely dense (1.7x the density of lead, remember?) dust remains airborne. Also, the dust concentration is likely to be so low that far away that it's extremely low exposure.

Don't lose sight of the fact that the article provides zero factual evidence that DU caused those deformities. It's strictly guilt through association.