cranky908canuck

Nuclear is high (business) risk for two reasons.

1) Recent nuclear projects plan for years to develop (never mind the extra years over the original plan). So there's financing, and the risk that the power economy / regulatory regime when the plant opens isn't what the planners expected.

2) $100M gets a small solar plant going [1]. $50m of that could get a quarter of it going. A nuclear plant ("economy of scale") gets nothing until it's done... $50m gets you a planning document.

"Overnight cost" matters.

[1] Actually, $10k gets a small (rooftop) solar plant going. Try that with a SMR in the back yard... :-)

Posted this to see what comments would be for a utility that seems to give good advice on conservation options.

In areas I'm familiar with, anything other than the largish single family house with big yard / garage / etc. gets built as strata title. Lots that ought to be wide enough to split either get duplexed or bare-land strata with two or more narrow houses ... for some reason, that's ok although freehold lots aren't.

Then "people want a house without dealing with strata" gets misinterpreted as "people want big houses on big lots". Not necessarily true, just that the premium for the BHoBL is the necessary price of not giving busybody neighbours power over your home.

This is more about 'OS Sovereignty' and less about usability.

Apple is still an American company.

As for the 'rewrite it in Rust' thing...

Depends on what you are rewriting from.

C, you have memory issues, but battle-tested code.

COBOL, you have to hire retiree consultants for $BIG.

Or, twenty years from now, hire psychics for $BIG to communicate with them.

I wonder if some of the RIOR is about worry over C being the next generation's COBOL?

On the 'possible backdoor' issue, this excellent and thorough post buries the lede a bit, I think.

What I get when I follow the link is that mrustc is a cleanroom Rust compiler which is only intended to build the official Rust compiler.

So: it provides a way to build a Rust compiler from source, which can then be used to bootstrap itself.

No need for extensive error reporting --- it's ok to assume correct code, and fail messily if not. In fact, the simpler the better, for audit of the alternative implementation.

If one suspects that C/C++ has been also been infected with "Thompson's Trusting Trust" *with respect to the Rust compiler*, then try it using Python, or Perl. Maybe even COBOL. Maybe even Forth (but first you have to bootstrap a suitable Forth, keep us posted...[1]).

If after all that you still think the 'reflexive build chain' is compromised, then either you're truly paranoid, or we are all doomed :-)

[1] I really like Forth (aside from traditional use-cases, it makes a great souped-up calculator DSL), but I don't think it's the tool for this job unless you really do want a 'start from bare metal' proof. If you do, then it could be a way to get there faster than raw assembly.

At least in some jurisdictions, arrangements solely for the purpose of avoiding taxes (barring explicit carve-outs) are not permitted.

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canad...

TLDR: if the only reason for a transaction is tax avoidance, it may not be "illegal", but it may be disallowed (and presumably incorporated in subsequent legislation).

Similar is "wash sale" legislation: for example, selling a security for a tax loss and

- buying it back within 30 days

- buying a call option on that security.

I will guess that the former might get you just a reassessment (the first time). The latter... well, you're smart enough to know about options and tax-loss sale, now you need to demonstrate that you didn't do it for tax avoidance.

Not sure what US law (federal and gazillion states) has on this.

For trucks: interstate commercial vehicles have a scheme for this: "apportioned" plates.

Record-keeping required to support the proration of fees.

This misunderstands what I was trying to get across. The string is the file content, not a string in a file (so: a short snippet of source code), in text format; what followed was (an attempt at) a plausible binary tokenization.

I agree that the string "no" is ambiguous (though infamous as a somewhat pathological case), but at least it can be seen in context without having to spelunk a binary definition.

is_bright_and_shiny: "no"

vs

curt_negative_response: "no"

vs

country_code: "no"

It's not about writing a parser, it's about figuring out what the content is supposed to be in the first place. With plain text you can see what's a number, what's a string, what's an expression, etc... I'd rather try to figure out how to parse "2 7 + 3 -" than see a file with

0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x2 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x7 0x1 0x1 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x3 0x1 0x2

and try to figure out what that is all about.

"cakeistocracy". Wish I had thought of that.

RHD vs LHD is the issue. Waymo has "300+ million kilometres of experience" that will all be on the wrong side of the road.

I would not be confident of human driving with a lifetime of experience with one not screwing up the other; more confident of one with regularly maintained experience of both (IOW, aware of switching back and forth).

Must be early in the process, most if not all the photos and graphics where the driving side is visible show North American side driving.

I saw what you did there...

TFH:

> Their hiring is paid for through a Canadian government investment of more than > 500 million Canadian dollars (about $364 million) in research fields that are > strategically important, from global warming to artificial intelligence.

Agree it's not clear from the article, but I'd expect that a lot of that is research funding, not necessarily salary. IOW, this is money that might have been spent on this anyhow, getting access to additional scholars is icing on the cake.

Can't speak to the rest, but lumber has had significant import tariffs to the US for decades. So it doesn't seem as if relative affordability of that commodity is an issue (at least for the last four decades).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49115814

I see a lot of posts to this site being 'dead'. I'm not even sure what 'dead' means (I assume it's more than "voted not interesting", which I find in itself interesting since I find a lot of the posts interesting).

I would agree that at least some of the posts are (a mild form of) self-promotion, but this one does not seem to meet that bar. Looks to me like an entertaining analysis of what someone who did something spectacularly stupid ought to expect.

Hmm.

From the footer of the post:

>>> I'm Kyla Lee, a DUI lawyer in Vancouver. I spend my days fighting impaired driving charges, roadside prohibitions, and the ever-expanding powers police have at traffic stops. <<<

Advertising?

If you google "farmer name activist" the results light up like a christmas tree. (Where the actual name is substituted in, of course.)

Regardless of the merits of the actual issue being protested, presenting this as "poor innocent farmer arrested for going five seconds over" doesn't seem accurate.

I previously observed that of course getting arrested wasn't something he would have planned...

OTOH, given that this is the second time the "five seconds over" story has been posted to HN, seems like somebody is leveraging the 'Streisand Effect'.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784061

Not his first rodeo, it seems.

This popped up on a casual search:

https://medium.com/@antonellosemeraro/technical-debt-is-not-...

(paywalled, looks like a decent and recent writeup from what I can see of it, and the essence is above the fold).

Not sure why Ward Cunningham missed this, I expect in corporate finance (not stock trading) options trading (for profit, not hedging) isn't common.

If you google "Darren Blanchard activist", the screen lights up, TV, newspapers, etc. So, not his first time on the dance floor.

I'm not going to address whether what happened was completely right, or the merits of the underlying discussion. But this is not a case of a poor dirt farmer shocked at being arrested. I'd be very surprised myself if he didn't at least think that was a possible outcome (and would not presume to suggest that it was intended in any way whatsoever, obviously being arrested would be detrimental to his cause!).

See my prior comment: IMO it's the caller's issue that (guaranteed) TCE is needed. The callee should not have to do anything.

One of the things I forget to give thanks to the Rust designers for is the default of immutability. I remember my days in a Java environment where policy was "everything needs to be declared final" (so "final" got spattered all over the place) with zero nostalgia. Requiring TCE callees to explicitly represent themselves as TCE-friendly would be the same sort of abomination.

As a user of the feature, it's the caller that needs the guaranteed elimination (and, presumably, is willing to pay for it, in syntax / compile time / run time / cognitive load). The 'zero cost feature' (only pay if used) principle seems broken if the callee has to indicate something special.

The compiler is free to do something clever (eg., two versions of fn Foo(...), one guaranteeing TCE), but as a developer merely using Foo, I don't want to have to decorate it (or, in a library, have it already decorated) to make TCE (not just TCO) possible. That requirement would constitute delving into the internals.

I won't argue with wikipedia, but assuming it's correct the 'standard nomenclature' seems sloppy to me. The whole point of the original post was taking advantage of the guarantee of TCE (elimination), vs TCO ("give it a try but oops, oh well, whatever...").

I suppose maybe TCE (as distinct from TCO) should be expanded to include any mechanism that doesn't expand the stack / heap / whatever for things that rhyme with recursion (in which case the existing sloppiness may as well stand, but we need a new TLA).