duckmysick

I remember it from a HN thread two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40800869

I'm spending too much time here.

Collectively, we spend an awful lot of resources on air. Clearly it must be of some value, otherwise we wouldn't bother. Unless it's a scam.

Sure, we're not being metered and charged by volume of air used. But someone, somewhere, is spending money to make sure it's suitable for breathing. And it's a pretty penny too.

For homelab (but not only) you can install Proxmox Virtual Environment on your physical machine. You end up with a way to create VMs and containers with a web UI. It supports cloud-init too. If you have a spare machine it's excellent for experimenting and learning.

https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...

https://proxmox-helper-scripts.vercel.app/

No need to speculate, we can check if such situation indeed takes place in Switzerland.

> The real conspiracy theory is: Telegram have never made any attempt to either implement full E2E or to dissuade their users for using it for politically sensitive messages. Why not?

Could be something nefarious or could be because not doing things is easier than doing things. Why bother if the existing conditions are just fine (for Telegram)?

I'm using a combination of pyinfra for provisioning and justfile for one-off operations. In fact, I also have separate pyinfra scripts for provisioning my desktop and laptops, so I can have a fresh install and they will set it up with proper apps and desktop environment settings.

https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra

https://github.com/casey/just

If I remember correctly, people had the same issues with the soda can tabs. Back in the days they were detachable (and people simply tossed them wherever). So they introduced various attachable designs before settling on the current one. It took some time for people to adjust.

An article from Slate: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/09/can-tabs-how-alumin...

> Also see Figure 19 on page 65, which summarises the different financing options, ranging from 100% state, the actual HPC deal, to 100% private.

Notice how the table of different outcomes shows changes in cost to taxpayers/government, returns, and the strike price. It doesn't show changes to the total construction cost itself, which is presumably fixed no matter what the financing option is. If the grandparent comment was correct, the table would have shown a different construction cost for different financing options.

All that's different is the strike price - which makes sense.

I don't see solar mentioned on this page. And according to data found in a sibling comment, they are practically similar (0.03 nuclear vs 0.02 solar).

Maybe I read it wrong, but I don't see anything supporting the statement: "Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced."

How much bigger of a health hazard is manufacturing/installing solar panels compared to nuclear? Let's say, per one terawatt-hour of produced energy, how many people die doing each?

> By the way, do you know what cost the most money on the HPC project? Loan interests, by a very large margin. Because of the risk of project failure given the lack of government guarantees, they had to borrow at a baffling 9% interest rate in a world if zero interest rate. This is the insanity that drove the cost to the sky, not the engineering side of things.

This is the first time I've heard of this, so I did a little digging.

> Lazard assumes investors want a return of 12% and bond holders will accept an interest payment of 8%. These are kept standard across all types of generation as the intention is not to assess the risk of the project but instead the competitiveness of the technology.

> If Hinkley was to pay these commercial rates, the project construction with interest would balloon out to close to $70b. But they didn’t and digging into EDF’s financial statements shows interest costs related to construction was only 1% of capitalised costs in 2017 and 4% in 2021.

https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/nuclear-economics-less...

The Finacial Times article from 2023 puts the cost increase elsewhere:

> The increase, caused by surges in material prices several billion above the most recent estimates, is nearly 80 per cent more than the cost of £18bn in 2016, when EDF first started work on the project.

https://www.ft.com/content/ae5fb399-08ce-4045-bb70-45a6531ac...

And directly from the horse's mouth, in the EDF's status update from 2024:

> The costs of completing the project are now estimated at between £31 billion and £34 billion in 2015 values. The cost of civil engineering and the longer duration of the electromechanical phase (and its impact on other work) are the two main reasons for this cost revision. If the risk of an additional delay of 12 months mentioned above in the final scenario does materialise it would result in an estimated additional cost of around £1 billion in 2015 values.

https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...

----

The only reference to the 9% figure you mentioned comes from a BBC article from 2018

> However, Dieter Helm, professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford, told the BBC that the government shift made sense.

> "The sheer cost of building new nuclear power stations means it makes sense for the government to help finance projects like this," he said.

> "Governments can borrow much more cheaply that private companies and that lower cost of borrowing can drastically reduce the ultimate cost. Hinkley Point C would have been roughly half the cost if the government had been borrowing the money to build it at 2%, rather than EDF's cost of capital, which was 9%."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44363366

I couldn't verify it anywhere else though. Can you point to a source from the EDF that confirms the loan interests cost the most money on the Hinkley Point C project?

> If this was a superior strategy that was so obvious no 1 would be making mistakes so how does this work?

Either people aren't aware of an optimal strategy (if one exists) or they ignore it for various reason.

The latter is surprisingly common. People know they should exercise, get enough sleep, eat healthy, stay hydrated, tackle high priority tasks instead of procrastinating, etc. - and yet they still aren't doing those things (or as much as they should).

Knowing something is not enough.

On the other hand, the box tree moth seems to be doing fine - to the dismay of many gardeners. And boy oh boy can they ravage boxwood hedges. Unfortunately, insecticides are the only effective option in Europe and America. In Asia (where it's native) there are some natural predators, so the damage is limited. Birds aren't interested in the caterpillars. Some types of hornets are, but introducing them into non-native habitat brings other problems.

Hotter than normally springs and falls don't help either; the moth thrives in the warmer weather and can go through as many as four cycles (generations) during a single year.

https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/terrestrial/invertebrate...

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant-pests-diseases/box-tree-mot...

It's interesting that you use Paul Graham as an example. Another comment in this thread shows him using the outline technique for one of his essays: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41149003

Yes, he didn't come up with the ideas from scratch as he was writing them. It took years to gain the experience and expertise. Yet he still saw the value in outlining when the time came to write it down.

> Filling out an outline like this produces an uninspired, boring, formulaic trash

So write a better outline. George R. R. Martin and Agatha Christie both used extensive notes and outlines as part of their writing process.

> She made endless notes in dozens of notebooks, jotting down erratic ideas and potential plots and characters as they came to her “I usually have about half a dozen (notebooks) on hand and I used to make notes in them of ideas that struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper”.

> She spent the majority of time with each book working out all the plot details and clues in her head or her notebooks before she actually started writing.

https://www.agathachristie.com/about-christie/how-christie-w...

I think the main confusion is about the speedrunning aspect. You don't speedrun gathering thoughts, you speedrun turning those thoughts (that took weeks, months, or years to develop) into writing. You may not struggle with writing, but a lot of people absolutely are.

The way I see it, "the language that people actually speak" didn't include refactoring as a euphemism for firing people; it's something corporations came up with. Now we have someone who tries to eschew this euphemism. I think it's a good thing. Using words in their plain meaning makes for a clear communication.

Depending on the location, it's between 10-25%. The EIA data says it's around 25%. Wind is 35%, nuclear 92%, gas combined 58%, coal 40-50%, hydro 35-40%. As you can see, the capacity factor is not 100% for pretty much everything.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Again, it all depends on the location. The US has a pretty high capacity factor for nuclear at over 90%, but the UK has it at 60-80%. Wind farms can go over 50%.

That's what the point number five is about: "Is cleaned out regularly—ideally daily, at most weekly—, so that it doesn’t become a storage area."

> deal with things when they come

Sometimes it's not practical. You can't deal with everything in the morning because you will be late for work or school. You have to push certain things later and it's ok - as long as "later" is something specific like 6 PM every weekday.

It seems to me if something is not safe and we can't make it reasonably safe, we shouldn't use it.

Form what I've seen Duralex glasses are (and have been for some time) quite popular in restaurants/food joints.

Most of the point of sale systems I've seen run Windows, which means most of the off-the-shelf apps are written for Windows. Even if they are written in Java, they have hard dependencies on Windows.

> Using a general-purpose desktop designed for corporate executives running Excel and PowerPoint is just the wrong technology choice for such an application.

Agree, which is why most of the time you use Windows Embedded for Point of Service or Windows IoT Enterprise. Which again, is Windows.

How does version control work with Labview?

Also, since you;ve done only one project with it, how hard was it to pick it up and learn?

Are you asking why an arbitrary group of American companies, popularized in an American TV show about the American stock market, has only American companies? I don't know. That's a good question. Why didn't they include others like Tencent, Alibaba, TSMC, Samsung, or BYD?

It's like asking why are the Fortune 500 companies all American companies. In contrast, Fortune Global 500, using the same criteria but in a wider pool, has companies from other counties.

For me it's all about reducing the friction.

I have a cron job that opens my note app - a few times every day. The app is focused in the foreground, opened on the top of a journaling note, pre-filled with the today's date. All that's left for me is to write.

Look into invoice factoring services. You sell your invoices to them and get paid upfront. They get a % of your invoice and/or a small processing fee.

Ideally you want a non-recourse factoring agreement (the one where the factoring company takes most of the risk of non-payment), but it might be difficult to get. It helps if you can show that your previous clients paid on time. But then again the freelancing platforms handled that for you.

In any case, it's worth asking around. Have your lawyer review the factoring terms before you agree to anything.

> removed after a bank started asking questions

What? That seems crazy. A bank was giving you an earful for accessing your own balance?

Since your #1 song on this playlist is a Star Wars track, there's a fun little easter egg in a Spotify client. The progress bar is replaced with a lightsaber and you can change its handle by clicking on it.

That's pretty cool.

> that triggers additional review steps

Is this done by some sort of a linter running in CI?

> Twilio has detected that threat actors were able to identify data associated with Authy accounts, including phone numbers, due to an unauthenticated endpoint. We have taken action to secure this endpoint and no longer allow unauthenticated requests

How do I avoid such problems in my own app? Force authentication for all requests with row-level security? Rate limiting?

Any testing frameworks that would catch this? Something like "given endpoint /user/phone-number-validate make sure only <user> can access it".

I think we're both in agreement. Perhaps my example of coche/carro was unfortunate and I didn't make my point clear enough.

A well-designed study, in my mind, would compare the usage of a varied bag of words. Starting from articles, pronouns, numbers, common verbs, then common objects, verb forms, less common adjectives, ending with uncommon objects and phrases. The compared words would be weighted based on their frequency. If two dialects have the same articles, pronouns, numbers, etc. and some differences in less frequent nouns, they would be similar rather than radically different - at least lexically. Things might look differently if we look at pronunciation.

I don't know what list of words was compared in the study linked in this subthread, so it's hard for me to say anything about it.

Why would it be incorrect? Sometimes two or three different words describe the same thing and that's ok. If you poll enough people you can get a rough idea if one version is more dominant that the other, if there's an even split, or if different regions in the same country prefer different versions. Similar to soda/pop/coke in the US.

You can design a study with a high level of data granularity. You could even track differences in pronunciation and grammar if you wish so.