dang has been the community manager of hn for almost a decade. i'm going to bet you that he knows what a throwaway account is, and has already thought about what it means to ban them
Once you’re out of the mid-1970s, the accuracy has been good - especially for the serious IPCC reports which were based on many studies in different fields, all pointing in the same direction. Unfortunately, the late 70s is when the fossil fuel companies started funding a lot of fake science skepticism and, ultimately, capture of the Republican Party to delay or prevent regulation. For example, many people have heard that “scientists” predicted a global ice age — that narrative has been expensively circulated by the fossil fuel industry and their political allies but they’ll never mention that it was a) never anywhere near a mainstream consensus or even a majority position and b) was rejected by follow up research by the end of the decade. What you especially will not hear is that the predictions made by the papers which rejected that theory have in fact held up well despite the science being far less precise in the 1970s:
If you read the IPCCs first assessment report[1] (from 1990/92) and look at the business-as-usual scenario, it was pretty much spot on.
Since the IPCCs assessment is pretty much the (conservative) consensus of the climate research community, I'm going to equate this with "almost all of them came true".
That's the depressing thing. We knew what was coming. We know what is coming next. We just choose to ignore it, because something decades down the line really doesn't matter this election cycle/fiscal quarter.
This kind of validation is not very meaningful since most climate predictions make a consistent trend assumption. But even fairly old climate change models work pretty well.
"When Hausfather's team set pollution inputs in Hansen's model to correspond to actual historical levels, its projected temperature increases lined up with observed temperatures."
I don't know because I don't keep much track, but genuine question on my part, do you think that there has probably been no progress in climate sciences during the last 30 years and thus predictive power is at the same level?
Are there any other branches of science commonly in the news not progressing over the last three decades?
> do you think that there has probably been no progress in climate sciences during the last 30 years and thus predictive power is at the same level?
I agree there will have been lots of progress. However, 30 years from now people will probably say that the same thing to excuse todays predictions if they were wrong.
In case you are actually wondering and not just JAQing off, climate models have been very accurate, even from 50 years ago:
"""Overall the majority of model projections considered were consistent with observations under both metrics. Using the temperature versus time metric, 10 of the 17 model projections show results consistent with observations. Of the remaining seven model projections, four project more warming than observed—N77, ST81, and H88 Scenarios A and B—while three project less warming than observed—RS71, H81 Scenario 2a, and H88 Scenario C."""
which call out dozens of warnings over the past 50+ years, and seemingly didn't come true. Now some are still years off being 'done', but the tone of the piece (and many others like it) is that this is basically all a hoax to 'control' us. I disagree with that notion, but it does demonstrate that whatever you say publish/post can be weaponized back at you.
Of course there will be misses or extreme predictions. However, the fact remains that climate and environmental scientists, among several others, have been warning about these things for going on a century now.
The detrimental effects of a technocratic-oriented society have been predicted since Lewis Mumford to the publishing of Limits of Growth and onward. The effects are social, economic, and environmental, and the general gist of the predictions has come true. Actions have consequences and we're at the point where we can't engineer our way out of our problems.
That's a really round-about report - why not link directly to Hansen's published statements? And the rebuttal on that realclimatescience page is weak. It gives a chart for Lincoln, VA, as "in the DC area". But, Lincoln is 45 or so miles away and at 475 ft elevation - why not give the numbers for DC?
Perhaps because those numbers are different? Realclimatescience says "The number of hot days in the DC area peaked in 1911, and have been declining ever since", which appears to be true for Lincoln in the graph given.
> The number of hot days per year in D.C. has increased in recent decades. At the turn of the 20th century, the annual average of 90-degree days was about 25. In the mid-1970s, D.C. might have expected about 33 days so hot. From 2010 to 2020, the 90-degree average is about 49 days.
Hansen's prediction seems to be on track. While Realclimatescience seems to pull a slight-of-hand and not address the actual prediction.
So was Hansen's sea level rise prediction from the same source, saying 1-6 feet between 1988 and 2050. The current prediction is a foot of rise between 2020 and 2050 - on top of the rise from 1988 to 2020. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
Does that really count as a failed prediction?
The "Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past" is a newspaper headline contradicted by the content, which says 'within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event"' and 'Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.'
Headline writer are the clickbait of newspapers. The real question is, was the content wrong?
I noticed that several referred to Paul Ehrlich ("Dire Famine Forecast By 1975", "Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989", "America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980", "Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide", "Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980", "Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century", and likely more).
Isn't it rigging the numbers to cite the same person so many times?
The 1970s cooling papers (Rasool, Schneider, etc.) appear to be the ones warning that greatly increased aerosol production would provide a cooling effect more powerful than the CO2 warming effect. We reduced aerosol production (because "acid rain", above), so this didn't happen.
> An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.
If you look carefully, you'll see most of the links are to newspaper articles, not scientific publications. Most seem to be essentially sensational press reporting.
So it's not even a "whatever you say publish/post can be weaponized back at you" but rather that places like the AEI manufacture doubt out of whole cloth.
To echo other posters, in most cases the predictions underestimated the impact - sometimes significantly so.
This makes sense when you think about it. Most climate reports that are requested are for disinformation campaigns, so the entity paying for them REALLY* wants it to say there’s no problem or the problem has been exaggerated, putting financial pressure on the researcher publishing the report to fudge the numbers or massage the implications.
(* Impartial climate reports aren’t needed in the private sector as the science is settled and the reality is not in dispute).
Thank you for the warning. As a member of the community for 10 years it saddens me to see sock puppets profilerate and derail the conversation here.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect us to respond seriously to every throwaway account's "benign questions." It puts too much burden on the rest of us. On the other hand, leaving them as-is inevitably means conversations get derailed. This is their goal, after all.
I'll opt for option B in the future and cross my fingers that I'm still able to enjoy the community in 10 more years.
People make all kinds of judgments about what accounts are sockpuppets (or bots, or trolls, or shills, or foreign agents, etc.) and in my experience they're usually wrong, not to mention usually driven by strong passions on divisive topics. So it's generally best for discussion if we just don't go there.
I do believe there has been an increase in throwaway accounts in recent years as lots of users have gotten more sensitive about privacy, but that's not quite the same thing. Also, a username containing "throwaway" or similar isn't necessarily a throwaway account, since sometimes people end up keeping them for a long time.
It's definitely alarmism to some extent, you're right. On the other hand, if you don't claim that the sky is falling, then there will be no urgency and nothing will ever get done. Proof? NASA hasn't accomplished much of anything since the space race ended and their funding dried up.
This is the video I recommend to others when working with dynamodb. The video is by Rick Houlihan about dynamodb modeling. In my experience most developers that complain about dynamodb don't fully understand it.
All technologies have their pros and cons. They have use cases where they make sense and use case where they don't. The job of an engineer to decide which tool fits which use-case. To dismiss a useful technology as "BS", especially one used by companies all over the world for over a decade without any backing data seems a bit disingenuous.
All technologies have their pros and cons. They have use cases where they make sense and use case where they don't. The job of an engineer to decide which tool fits which use-case.
Exactly. But that's not how he paints it, I have seen him bashing RDBMs as been a thing of the past and his promoted way of data modeling and "new" database technology is how companies should start today or be moving to.
> In 2021, during the
66-hour Amazon Prime Day shopping event, Amazon systems
- including Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and Amazon fulfill-
ment centers, made trillions of API calls to DynamoDB, peak-
ing at 89.2 million requests per second, while experiencing
high availability with single-digit millisecond performance.
Sure it can, and I’ve operated MySQL (Percona) at large scale for a social media company. You shard requests by user or something else, doesn’t matter if you have 50 DBs or 50,000. However in most cases you have to write the sharding mechanism yourself, and understand your workload and what such a system can and cannot do.
Given perfect knowledge of access patterns, I bet you could. Especially since it's basically all reading and not writing. Horizontally scaled with many, many read-only replicas. But then there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. All the big companies running huge Oracle db installations are busy running their workloads, which probably don't look like Amazon Prime day traffic.
It's also impossible to have perfect knowledge of access patterns.
A master carpenter is knowledgeable enough to be critical of those who aggressively peddle tools to unsuspecting customers who are likely to be unfamiliar with just how dangerous and potentially project-destroying those tools can be when not the right tools for the job.
I was part of project where we moved user transaction lists from pg to dynamo.
While there are pros like ease of scale and all, the biggest was to tell product and higher-ups that the out of place feature with groupbys was simply not possible and there by ending the whole discussion.
You need to use the right tool for the right job. I know people using DynamoDB for a tiny dataset that would easily fit in sqlite (or any other DB) running on a $20/month VPS. That wouldn't be serverless, of course, so it's a no-go.
Not sure what you mean by "tiny dataset" by DynamboDB is great for something with 100 or a few thousand items. Especially if these are only occasionally accessed but need to be shared.
Half the time it'll be in the Free Quota or perhaps $1/month. Certainly cheaper than creating an instance.
> I know people using DynamoDB for a tiny dataset that would easily fit in sqlite (or any other DB) running on a $20/month VPS.
I have to say your comment comes off as very ignorant. If you are a AWS customer then you either pick any of the database offerings, such as DynamoDB or Amazon RDS, or run your own database on a EC2 instance. Except running your own db in EC2 can cost around the same as running Amazon RDS, and DynamoDB has a very roomy free tier.
Therefore the piece of info you somehow left out is that DynamoDB is free for "a tiny dataset", and you do not have to manage anything at all with DynamoDB too.
I already know all that. I’ve been using AWS for over 10 years. I’ll just say I prefer the relational model when starting out and leave it there. I’ve had good luck with RDS.
I’ve seen people paint themselves into a corner by screwing up their DDB keys too many times and having to export and reload all their data. If you don’t think ahead about your access patterns this is very easy to do. Nobody thinks ahead with “agile.” You’re better off starting with SQL and migrating things to Dynamo where it makes sense.
Yeah I have no idea what icedchai is talking about, DynamoDB free tier is super generous https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/on-demand/. It's going to cost you nothing until you have enough customers to afford to pay for it. Correctly modelling single table design on the other hand ...
I use it for lots of stuff like this. The pay-per-use/on demand pricing makes it incredibly cheap even if I get occasional bursts of activity. With much better availability than SQLite running on a single VPS.
Using Dynamo for a small data set is overkill. You can manipulate the data way faster on a local server, where it is basically in memory (disk cache), and not have to deal with any modelling issues.
I guess some people like the DynamoDB API? I find it incredibly awkward.
> I know people using DynamoDB for a tiny dataset that would easily fit in sqlite (or any other DB) running on a $20/month VPS.
Depending on the use cases, there are plenty of reasons you might want to go down a NoSQL route other than price - schemaless makes it much easier and quicker to hack together new projects for instance (and more fun too!)
Overturning Roe was one of many decisions that they have made recently, you can easily google this information:
"The Supreme Court Benches the Separation of Church and State | News & Commentary | American Civil Liberties Union" https://www.aclu.org/news/religious-liberty/the-supreme-cour...
How do we distinguish between: "VCs are are selected because they go to school X", "school X is good at creating VCs", and "school X receives more potential VCs"?
My guess is probably more statements 2 and 3 for the usual suspects eg Stanford
If you hire a smart kid with an MBA from stanford and he gives you a bad name with a series of mistakes, well, bad apples happen. If you hire a smart kid from a no name university and the same happens people will be quicker to blame you.
Credentialism is a thing for the same reason brand recognition is a thing. When a product with good reputation fails it's bad luck. When a product with bad reputation fails it's to be expected. Power perpetuates.
The problem is that our federal legislative system is heavily tilted in favor of Republicans despite them being firmly a minority party. This is most apparent in the Senate, but gerrymandering gives them an edge in the House too.
So when you're talking about consensus, the country has it. There's consensus on immigration, gun control, and abortion. It's just that Republicans prevent us from acting on it.
Consensus doesn’t just mean 51%. It means general agreement. If you have 100 people in a room, 51 people are in favor of something and the other 49 are not, is that your “consensus”? Prior to the US each of the states were their own sovereign entities. Why enter the US (or stay in it) if you are going to be ruled against your will? The states agreed to give up some of their power and joined under the explicit conditions of the senate that they would have an equal say.
A majority of Americans support the right to choose [1] (61%), a path to amnesty for undocumented persons [2] (60%), restrictions on firearm purchase and ownership [3] (> 64%), moving off of fossil fuels and treating climate change like the threat it is [4] (76%), a wealth tax on people with a net worth of over $50m [5] (56%), the expanded voting rights in HR 1 [6] (>61%), etc. etc. etc.
These are big majorities, and I'd wager most Americans don't think this stuff is broadly popular.
The key word here is "sufficient consensus." Your judgement of sufficiency is a personal opinion.
I could, for example, define "sufficient consensus" as requiring that all laws require a 90% supermajority in the Senate. Or I could reduce this to 50% of the Senate. Alternatively I could reform Congress so that lawmaking requires voting totals representing 50% of the population.
Each of these is one possible version of "sufficient consensus", and still none of them actually matches the version we actually have. What is clear is that the sclerotic nature of today's Congress is problematic, and it's doing a great deal to undermine faith in our democratic system.
It might be obvious, but I feel like it's lost due to partisan motivated reasoning. eg. when your preferred party doesn't control the senate, then the filibusterer is an important part part of democracy that forces widespread consensus, but when your party does control the senate the filibusterer is a undemocratic tactic used by the minority to obstruct the majority.
Consider, for example, how the FDA operates. They have a broad mandate to keep food clean and drugs safe. They don't have an explicit mandate of "you must only regulate tylenol and aspirin, we need to pass a law for new drugs each time they come up."
This ruling finds the EPA, who has the mandate to keep pollutants out of the air, can't determine that CO2 is a pollutant. Why is that? The 2016 clean air act specifically gave them the power to regulate air pollutants.
The only answer is political activism. There is no difference between the FDA's broad mandate and the EPA's broad mandate.
I recommend reading the dissent on this case. It makes it absolutely clear that this is an EPA power. The conservatives couldn't get new laws passed repealing the EPA, so instead they packed the court with political activists so they could make law from the bench.
The rise of China is testing and will continue to test this assumption. The Chinese government does not require consensus. It can build 40,000 kilometers of high speed rail in just a few years. It can pull hundreds of millions from poverty. It can shut down entire companies and industries overnight (e.g. private school tutoring), jail corrupt corporate executives, and in general coerce compliance to any law.
Do you know how many school teachers in China must buy supplies for their students with their own money? Zero.
Do you know how many Chinese ambassadorships are left vacant because of political bickering? Zero.
I am not a shill for the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, or the ideology of the Chinese political system, but I increasingly am a shill for the ruthless efficiency of the Chinese government.
China is one extreme. The other extreme is the United States, which isn't able to accomplish anything, good or bad. All the US does anymore is renaming post offices, mailing social security checks, funding the army, and tax stuff. Tax cuts, tax credits, tax rebates, tax incentives.
China may well supersede the United States in the future, despite its treatment of minorities.
They also can't enforce building codes leading to fires that kill a lot of people, have no real food safety and dramatically impinge on any sense of individual rights.
I exclusively use Firefox on Android because of the addons. For me it's the killer feature. Dark mode, ad blocks, YouTube while screen is off. It's made android so much more enjoyable.
>I lost it when at my previous job I found a 20 multiline super complex type defined by another dev, asked him to describe it because I was in a tight deadline and had not time to parse whatever he was defining. He starts with "it's pretty simple" and then used like 10 minutes to describe me what he meant while writing on paper the various pieces getting confused two time
In this case this is why the base layer of fiat law is important. Common law give wide leeway in letting people setup contracts under whatever form they want. But generally apply common sense judgement for clearly egregious cases. They're not just going to say "this North Korean hacker owns the house because he found an exploit". They'll recognize the plain intent of the LLC bylaws.
A snarky and simplistic question. Here's a simplistic answer: You could program the NFT to not be transferable based on a blockchain datetime or only transferable in an "escrow transaction" with a minimum exchange value (i.e. the market value of the house + some percentage).
Or time delayed exchanges for important things like your house NFT.
It's not a snarky question, it's a genuine concern. Telling people to not worry about the details like "what happens in case of fraud" is handwaving away the problem.
> (i.e. the market value of the house + some percentage).
Where does the market value come from? "Market value" for properties varies wildly, and the number a property does not necessarily track to a fair market value - I might be willing to accept 10% under market value to someone who is a cash buyer because I need a quick sale, or I might be in a ripping hot property market where properties are selling for 20+% over their market valuations
> time delayed exchanges
That's all well and good if everyone involved is digitally contactable for the entire duration of the process, but if I'm ill for a period of time, or otherwise vulnerable, it doesn't matter whether the delay is 2 days or 2 months. The advantage the current system has is that there is inherently a central organisation that says "yes you own this" and they handle disputes. If you have an actual problem of suspected fraud (say your car catches fire with all of your ID in it), you can go to a government office, sign some legal documents, and get new ID and continue. Similarly, if someone impersonates you there are legal protections that can and are enforced.
Market value comes from a decentralised oracle. I don't want to write here the most famous decentralised oracle, but right now, it provides price information to various defi protocols why not also the market value...
Market values aren't generally quantifiable though. Two houses on the exact same street might be valued slightly differently because one has some original features, or one has historic significance. Unless your decentralised oracle factors in all or the unique aspects of an area and a property, it's not an accurate representation of the value, and as I said before market valuation isn't something that dictates a purchase price. If the paper valuation of a house is 500k, I am well within my rights to give it to my children for nothing, or to sell it to a local person for below cost because they have a unique interest in the property that I agree with.
Let me tell you something obvious. The credit system is doomed to fail, and it is not working. This blockchain thingy, defi, NFTs, now we might have a chance to build a better financial system. And yes, those two houses may be valued differently, but trust me, Some of the smart-ass people I know are working in crypto like there is no tomorrow. I'm sure we will solve this minor issue on the way.
>Now we might have a chance to build a better financial system.
Not with blockchains we don't. They're also doomed to fail, and not working. A system where your money loses 25% of its value in a day its completely unusable for a mortgage. Saying "I'm sure the problem will be solved" doesn't mean anything, you could say the same thing about a credit system.
Genuine question. How many climate predictions from 30 years ago came true today?