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For those who aren't familiar with the great but tragic story of Principia and Russell's quest for the foundation of math (spoiler: there is none), there's a really great graphic novel called Logicomix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix I haven't read it in probably ten years, but it's one of those books and stories I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about, for whatever reason.

Look at the URL. It’s because the original WSJ title was “OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Resigns,” which was a dupe of yesterday’s discussions. WSJ changed the title yesterday evening.

Even better imo than all the chemical energy we could store when we have excess solar, think about all the water we could create. Creating fresh water from sea water is extremely energy intensive, but there's nothing easier to store than giant bodies of water. Once the energy term is the reverse osmosis opex equation is erased, large scale water plants wherever it's sunny are going to start looking awfully attractive.

The best mental model for a heat pump is that they can maintain a certain temperature differential, say 80F. If it gets to be 0F outside and you want it to be 70? You don’t need to switch to a fully separate heating system, you just need to warm up either the incoming or outgoing air an additional 10 degrees via a small resistance heater. The super wide range heat pump systems will do that automatically, and the principle really applies to any differential you could want.

About ten years ago I set custom vibrations for my top contacts on my phone to be the Morse code representation of their initials. Ever since, I’ve had the super power of knowing who is texting or calling me without pulling out my phone. I’d say that alone has made a quick memorization of the alphabet worth it.

What an impressive company. A good reminder that, even in a market with umpteen competitors, success comes down to execution. Hope they keep up the good work.

Congrats on the launch! The novel (for robotics) business structure looks interesting. How are you planning on kickstarting the ecosystem? It looks like you need at least one or two competent companies above you on the stack before you can start getting real-world feedback. (1) Do you have in mind who these companies will be? Do they exist yet or do the need to be created? (2) One of the super difficult things about robotics is reconciling the difference between a clean sim and a messy world. How will you get feedback on how your robots are operating and iterate if there’s an independent company sitting between you and the customer?

You can’t join unless you’re an accredited investor. That’s because, like for many other fun similar things, the enterprise passes the Howey Test and is considered a security under the Securities Act of 1933.

It’s funny how they try to disclose-away the problem at the bottom, even though they’re obviously worried about it enough to block retail investors (if a security only sells to accredited investors, you can basically do whatever you want.)

https://www.uclalawreview.org/here-comes-the-sun-how-securit...

From their ToS: Best Effort Service for RV Users. Network resources are always deprioritized for Starlink RVs users compared to other Starlink Services, resulting in degraded service and slower speeds in congested areas and during peak hours. Stated speeds and uninterrupted use of the Service are not guaranteed. Service degradation will occur most often in "Waitlist" areas designated on the Starlink Availability Map during peak usage hours. See the Starlink Specifications for expected performance of the Starlink for RV Services.

Something funny about bubbles. I’ve heard it said that housing prices in 2005 were outrageous, so much that they could only possibly be justified if the population somehow banded together to stop most new housing from being built. Likewise I’ve also heard something about the dotcom bubble- that the valuations of tech firms in 2001 were outrageous. That the multiples given could only ever be sustained if American consumer tech came to dominate the world…

Still a good thing, but title is misleading. 40% of India’s electricity does not come from non-fossil fuel sources. Instead, 40% of their installed capacity is non-fossil-fuel based. There’s a big difference because of the expected capacity factor of wind farms and solar farms vs fossil fuel plants. Even if 40% of your installed capacity is solar, with a capacity factor of 50%, you may be getting only 20% of your Joules from solar (fossil fuel plants generally have very high capacity factors)

For those who use Amazon and want cost perspective on particular items, Camelcamelcamel is a superpower (https://camelcamelcamel.com/)

I’m sure one day I’ll find out they make money in all sorts of sketchy ways, but in the mean time it’s a great free website, and I’m continually astounded to see how often retailers play around with the prices they post.

Vitess and Citus seem to be half-way between manual sharding and distributed SQL. They really discourage cross-shard updates, for instance, whereas they're a really natural part of distributed SQL: > The authors of Vitess recommend that you design your VSchema so that cross-shard updates (and 2PC) are not required. https://vitess.io/docs/reference/features/two-phase-commit/

Maybe though it's just a fundamental coordination problem one can't work around.

SymPy is pretty niche, but it saved my butt many years ago in my years of collegiate robotics. We spent months unsuccessfully trying to compute kinematics and sensor coordinate transformations on vectors of quarternions by “hand” with numpy. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. There are so many opportunities for mistakes, and the intermediate numbers can rarely be checked against your intuition.

With SymPy however (and some optional Newtonian physics package), one can simply define their free-bodies and coordinate systems, and SymPy will spit out simplified, compiled tensors of whatever expressions they want! It was truly magical at the time.

An incredible article. The author pulls out all the emotional stops against some environmentally conscious elite he dislikes: > Heidegger, like much of the conservation movement, would have hated what the Energiewende has become: an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes and local communities. > Opposition to renewables comes from the country peoples that Heidegger idolized as more authentic and “grounded” than urbane cosmopolitan elites who fetishize their solar roofs and Teslas as signs of virtue.

And yet, in an entire article written about a country’s investments in clean energy, there’s not a single mention of climate change, carbon emissions, or any of the reasons why I at least thought we were fighting to keep the fossil fuels in the ground.

And the author’s grand data-backed argument, showing why renewables are forever doomed? > But no amount of marketing could change the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy.

He places us on a playing field of energy per unit area, which could likely win the title of least useful metric of the year.

I think everyone agrees there is a lot to be criticized and learned from with the Energiewende, but the axes on which this article analyzes it make no sense.

I’ve been battling pretty severe RSI for a couple of years now. My unscientific and anecdotal couple of cents:

- Get an arm roller and use it regularly to massage and stretch your tendons

- Keep warm. Wear a sweatshirt while typing. My RSI flares when my arms become cold. I suspect it’s because of the generic tightening of muscles with temperature

- As odd as it seems, weightlifting seems to really help

- Use a mouse, but alternate hands regularly to give your clicking muscles a break. This one may take some practice

- Wear wrist braces while sleeping. I found out pretty late that I was sleeping while putting some weird pressures on my wrists and hands. I rarely wake up with pain in the mornings now

- Spend less time messing around on your phone. It’s never as bad as using a full computer, but it’s certainly less productive

- Work less. Your health isn’t worth it

This is hacking and is unethical at best and at worst, extremely illegal. Congratulations, you found out a way to systematically steal other people’s reward points and are helping others do the same. Should this really be on HN?

Banks who petition the Fed for FDIC insurance face much stricter reporting rules, capital reserve requirements, and limits on the riskiness investments they can make with client deposits from FINRA and the SEC. If you wanted, you could view the lack of FDIC insurance as a sign of a riskier institution overall, but like any other investment it might be worth it for the higher rate.

No, and that is one of the reasons their rate is so high. To receive FDIC insurance from the government, FINRA and the SEC generally have much tighter restrictions on what they allow the banks to do with the deposits and what they force the bank to keep in capital reserves, both of which are a drag on interest rates.