rssoconnor

> The programme is there for the convenience of the US. Would they allow Ireland to operate a corresponding facility on US soil?

FWIW, I recall reading that the program in Canada is reciprocal, and it is simply the case that Canada hasn't decided to operate any corresponding facility in the US.

TDMA. Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time.

> ISPs tend to oversubscribe these services as well (where you and your 10 neighbors might all be able to sign up for 1Gbps symmetric service, but not everyone can leverage that full 1Gbps at the same time).

How does this work for FTTH? I know nothing about fibre optic networks. I had the impression that each subscriber has their own wavelength, or rather a range of wavelengths that captures their bandwidth, and that does not overlap with other subscribers.

Otherwise I have no idea how passive optical networks could even work.

Is that what Nebula is?

> I never see any politician talk about in a meaningful way and I never see get attention.

I grew up before number portability. Let me tell you that phone number portability is among the greatest visible government mandated boons in my lifetime (though I suspect there many other less visible ones). The fact that the user in question in this post was able to reassign his phone number at all is basically a modern anti-corporate miracle.

I don't really mean to detract from your point. Certainly much more could and should be done. But we have to acknowledge that, miraculously, more than nothing has already been done.

While I could have had a battery backup for the blower, I never did, so I guess I'm not missing out. :)

I live in an urban environment, so I'm not too worried about losing power for an extended period of time, and if I do I would probably just leave temporarily.

In my rural living fantasy I have a Ford F150 Lightning which I use as a "portable" backup battery that can be recharged by driving it to a Level 3 charging station. That and either a pellet stove and/or a Masonry Heater fireplace that sits opposite to a large equator (south) facing window.

That is a worry. Of course a power outage would also knock out my old gas furnace too. Without the blower running, etc. the gas furnace wouldn't run.

This year I installed a heat pump with a 10kW auxiliary heater for my home in southern Ontario. With an appropriate air handler, both the heat pump and auxiliary heater can run at the same time. The setup seems fine to me.

If anything having a backup heat source makes me feel secure. A lot of things can go wrong with a gas furnace; some things can go wrong with a heat pump; but 10kW of electric restive heat is dead simple and just by itself it can provide 34000 BTU/h, which is 60% of the output of my old gas furnace. I don't think the duty cycle of my gas furnace ever exceeded 60% running time.

The auxiliary heater consists of two 5kW heaters, so even if one fails, there is still the other.

There is also an infamous episode where they are playing Risk on the subway.

I could be wrong (and I probably am) but I feel like the term "reproducible build" has shifted/solidified since 2006 when Dolstra's thesis was first written (which itself doesn't really use that term all that much). As evidence the first wikipedia page on "Reproducible builds" seems to have appeared in 2016, a decade after Dolstra's thesis, and even that stub from 2016 appears to prefer to use the term "Deterministic compilation".

Anyhow, when the Nix project originally spoke about "reproducible builds", what I understood was meant by that term was "being able to repeat the same build steps with the same inputs". Because of the lack of determinstic compilation, this doesn't always yield bit-by-bit identical outputs, but are simply presumed to be "functionally identical". There is, of course, no reason to believe that they will necessarily be functionally identical, but it is what developers take for granted every day, and if otherwise would be considered a bug somewhere in the package.

With Nix, when some software "doesn't work for me, but works for you", we can indeed recursively compare the nix derivation files locating and eliminating potential differences, a debugging process I have used on occasion.

I agree that "reproducible builds" now means something different, but that isn't exactly the fault of Nix advocates. I guess a new term for "being able to repeat the same build steps with the same inputs" is needed.

In NixOS, you can use system.replaceDependencies to create a new derivation that performs a search and replace on references to dynamically linked libraries in the old derivation, recursively swapping them out for the new library without recompiling.

I mean this question sincerely: Is it normal to be handling raw chicken and then just stick your fingers into a bowl of salt like that?

I know I am a pretty poor cook, and I get somewhat nervous handling raw meat, probably more than I should be. They say always use a separate cutting board and wash your hands with hot soapy water after handling raw meat. Then I see cooking clips like this one, with experts who have just one continuous cutting board with everything on it, and this guy isn't afraid to be touching is raw meat at all.

For a while I thought this was going to go the way of the whispering earring: https://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.l...

I bought a pair of sensors based on the HN mentions, and so far I'm pretty happy. I was mainly interested in their PM sensor, which isn't on your list of complaints, and works quite well.

I discovered my rangehood, which doesn't have an outdoor exhaust, is even more useless than I had imagined. I bought a HEPA filter for my kitchen to run while I'm cooking (a Blueair based on other HN comments) and based on the PM sensor readings of the AirGradient the HEPA filter is quite effective.

I did have to configure the CO₂ sensor recalibration period to keep the numbers sensible. It wasn't so easy to set different recalibration periods for the indoor and outdoor sensors, but with some curl commands, I was able to get things configured to my liking. I do appreciate that, in principle, I can edit the firmware to my liking in the future.

New spacemacs user here. When I'm on the magit pane (SPC g s) what commands are available to me and how am I supposed to know? I know I can do 'p' to enter a push menu and 'r' will give me a rebase menu, but that's pretty much all I know.

Yes. Paragraph 182 of the judgment [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch).

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/COPA-v-W...

Try doing this task: http://www.boundvariable.org/task.shtml

> For the question "which of the 5 is correct?"

There is a discontinuity as the parameter 'c' crosses a location that lies on the boundary of the Mandelbrot set, where the corresponding Juila set goes from a thick ring of disconnected points (Cantor-set like) to suddenly connected and the ring is completely filled in. One candidate machine will draw a filled in Julia set, and another candidate machine will draw the ring.

For each Turing Machine one can construct a complex value c, that is just barely outside the Mandlebrot set if the machine halts, but is on the inside (specifically on the boundary) of the Mandelbrot set if the Machine does not halt.

Thus being able to correctly draw the Julia set all of these points amounts to solving the halting problem. Though any individual point may or may not be solvable.

Of course there is at least one Turing Machine that searches for an inconsistency in ZFC. If ZFC is consistent then this machine never halts, but ZFC cannot prove this fact.

In my experience, I find that constructive mathematics better aligns with peoples intuitions here rather than classical computer science.

For example, we don't (yet) have a proof that there exists (constructively) a program that that prints out the answer to the P=NP problem.

I had some commentary in my thesis about this issue with regards to computable Julia sets. Mark Braverman proved that every (quadratic) Julia set is computable. But, as he notes, his proof isn't uniformly computable. Instead he develops 5 machines that attempt to draw various sets (at whatever desired resolution) given the parameter for the Julia set desired. For each Julia set, one of these 5 machines will correctly draw the set.

When doing constructive mathematics, the constructive notion of a compact set roughly corresponds to being a computable set in the sense we need for computable Julia sets. We cannot constructively prove that every (quadratic) Julia set is compact. Instead we have to divide the complex plane of possible parameters of the Julia set into multiple regions, and within each of those regions we can prove all of the corresponding Julia sets are compact.

In classical mathematics the union of all these regions is the entire complex plane, but this result doesn't hold constructively. Analogously, in classical mathematics the union of the positive reals, and the non-positive reals is the whole real line; however, again, this result doesn't hold constructively.

The constructive mathematics approach clearly states exactly what additional information is need to actually realize the computation of a (quadratic) Julia set: that is you must state in which of these regions of the complex plane you given parameter belongs to, which in turn tells you which of these 5 machines you need to run to get actually get the image you want. This is a much more satisfying answer.

On weekdays, my price of electricity from 11pm to 7am is about 4 times cheaper than from 7am to 4pm, and about 10 times cheaper than from 4pm to 9pm.

Also I usually run the dishwasher and laundry sometime after 11pm, so it is usually helpful to have hot water available overnight.

Edit: I should mention that I have a ventless combo washer/dryer, so my clothes come out clean and dry in the morning. Unfortunately they are not folded.

I had my electrician build me such a box, though the result was so simple that if you are handy I'm sure you could do it yourself.

The contents of the box are

1. A programable timer light switch: https://leviton.com/products/vpt24-1pz

2. A 120 volt controlled contactor. I'm not entirely sure which one it is, but I think it is https://ca.rs-online.com/product/eaton-cutler-hammer/c25bnb2...

The box has a 240 volt circuit and a 120 volt circuit into it. The 120 volt circuit is connected to the programable timer light switch, which is then connected to the control inputs of the contactor.

The 240 volt line connects to the contactor and then on the other side of the contactor it connects goes out of the box and to the water heater.

For me I've programmed my hot water heater to turn off from 4pm to 11pm on weekdays, which avoids heating the water during peak time of day rates at my location. (I typically shower sometime during that period.)

I can open the box and press the switch on the timer if I ever want to temporarily override the program.

That all said, I don't have any measurements to tell me if it is worth the expense. Although it is quite clear from my hourly power usage when the hot water tank switches on at 11 pm.

Is this committed to Guix and/or otherwise available somewhere?

> it looks like they've gotten a little further now than in that post

Can you say more, or provide any references? I would be interested in the state of the art here.

> Nixpkgs also doesn't seem to require that all packages be built from source - which, if you're really looking for reproducibility, is a downside.

Does Guix not have GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) or did it somehow bootstrap GHC? Last time I checked bootstrapping GHC on today's hardware is effectively an unsolved problem. [1]

> NixOS does not have an equivalent to Guix's full-source bootstrap

While you are not wrong, there is nothing fundamentally stopping Nixpkgs from being bootstrapped in a similar way to Guix. emilytrau has already done a lot of the work. [2]

[1] https://elephly.net/posts/2017-01-09-bootstrapping-haskell-p... [2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/227914

Also, if we don't get some calendar reform, by the year 17000, the northward (spring) equinox will be around February 23rd.

Oh.

When I said "you can pick any point P", I meant universal quantification, i.e "for all points P", rather than a randomly chosen P.

I did say "choose P", which was pretty bad phrasing on my part.

You can just use the function that is constantly 1 everywhere as your improper prior.

Improper priors are not distributions so they don't need to integrate to 1. You cannot sample from them. However, you can still apply Bayes' rule using improper priors and you usually get a posterior distribution that is proper.

> There's no uninformed prior over this space, so there is always a choice of origin implicit in some way...

You could use an uninformed improper prior.

In the diagram the mean of the distribution is the center of the circle.

Of the set of samples a fixed distance d from the mean of the distribution, strictly less than half of them will be closer to the origin than the mean is, and strictly greater than half of them will be further from the the origin than the mean. This is true for all values of d > 0, so the result holds for all samples.

I think the part on "How arbitrary is the origin, really?" is not correct. The origin is arbitrary. As the Wikipedia article points you you can pick any point, whether or not it is the origin, and use the James-Stein estimator to push your estimate towards that point and it will improve one's mean squared error.

If you pick a point to the left of your sample, then moving your estimate to the left will improve your mean squared error on average. If you pick a point to the right of your sample, then moving your estimate to the right will improve your mean squared error as well.

I'm still trying to come to grips with this, and below is conjecture on my part. Imagine sampling many points from a 3-D Gaussian distribution (with identity covariance), making a nice cloud of points. Next choose any point P. P could be close to the cloud or far away, it doesn't matter. No matter which point P you pick, if you adjust all the points from your cloud of samples in accordance to this James-Stein formula, moving them all towards your chosen point P by various amounts, then, on average they will move closer to the center of your Gaussian distribution. This happens no matter where P is.

The cloud is, of course, centered around the center of the Gaussian distribution. As the points are pulled towards this arbitrary point P some will be pulled away from the the center of Gaussian, some are pulled towards the center, and some are squeezed so that they are pulled away from the center in the paralled direction, but squeezed closer in the perpendicular direction. Anyhow, apparently everything ends up, on average, closer to the center of the Gaussian in the end.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this result. Perhaps it means that mean squared error is a silly error metric?