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They're not saying it's not worth talking about. They're saying it should have a date tag, as is customary for old articles on Hacker News.

I think that may have only been in the animated TV show?



Interesting! Do you have a link to the full comic by any chance?

The article itself falsifies this explanation; IE wasn't released until August 1995. The HTML draft specs published prior to this already specified that these tags didn't need closing; these simply weren't invalid HTML in the first place.

The oldest public HTML documentation there is, from 1991, demonstrates that <li>, <dt>, and <dd> tags don't need to be closed! And the oldest HTML DTD, from 1992, explicitly specifies that these, as well as <p>, don't need closing. Remember, HTML is derived from SGML, not XML; and SGML, unlike XML, allows for the possibility of tags with optional close. The attempt to make HTML more XML-like didn't come until later.


Huh, is that legal? I mean I guess it is when the power company is the customer, as they talk about, but otherwise?


I'd assume otherwise you have to have a way for the drones to meter their usage and pay the power company. It will likely make power theft easier, but it seems entirely viable to have an account with the power company where you report "I drew X joules from line Y" and for them to bill appropriately.


The simplest might be for the drone company to act as an intermediary. They'd bill drone users for charging and have contracts with utilities. The drone company could do some authentication / DRM / etc. so that you'd basically have to jailbreak your drone to charge without paying.

Yes, I'm sure the markup would be large as a percentage, but for most customers the convenience would be worth it. Most of the customers are probably commercial and don't want to risk getting banned or sued.


That seems entirely unviable to me. Have you met… people?

“Trust me, bro!” is something I wish my power company would do, but they installed a meter instead.


Depends. When millions are on the line between companies, people are surprisingly willing to take a hand-created excel file as 'proof'. For example: https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/tricolors-excel-g...


Feels like this is likely to be targeting government and major corporate clients, in which case they're probably in a strong place to negotiate agreements based on charge reported by the drone's on board software. Not to mention the utility companies themselves, who are mentioned as the initial market.


What's unviable about having the power company vet the thing that reports "I drew X joules from line Y" like they would vet any other meter?


Does the device report directly to the power company, or is that data aggregated and reported in some other format?

If it's the latter then hand editing is all it takes to create fraud.


Hand editing is all it takes to create fraud in all areas of business.


B2B transactions like this are handled fine with contracts and lawyers all the time, I doubt it would be an issue. In the worst case, the utility could own the recharging module on the drone, just like they own your power meter.


Unmetered electric service based on "trust me bro" is actually the default (at least in the US) for a huge variety of devices, like streetlights, cell towers mounted to electric poles, public irrigation systems, etc etc.

Almost every US utility has a "UM" process to self-assess an unmetered load's consumption and be billed. So, yes, it's not only viable but widespread.


> Unmetered electric service based on "trust me bro" is actually the default (at least in the US) for a huge variety of devices

I wouldn't talk too loud about this or you will ruin it for all of us. If I discover the street lights on my street mine botcoins I will blame you.


I mean, if I have to pay them by how much power I draw, I'm pretty glad they have a way to measure that, because I don't.

What's there alternative in this case? If I can land a drone on the power line and suck up some power, they can either charge me when I tell them I did it, or they can not charge me.


They'll use this narrative to fundraise and build. Then they'll build their own distributed charging infra that becomes a moat.


Presumably they'd be doing inspections for the power company, who probably don't care if some minuscule amounts of power are consumed directly during operations.


There is a not so subtle hint in the description that they were mainly inspired by military applications (Air Force, DARPA). Legality doesn’t matter when you’re in enemy territory.


Liability is probably the biggest issue, rather than using the energy. If it causes damage because it fails to connect properly, or if it has a trailing wire to pick up other phases (not actually connect to it but to pick up induction)


The drones heavier than 250g already must transmit remote id


You can install electric fencing beneath high voltage transmission lines and it will be energized for ‘free’.


  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Maybe if it's on the east coast
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com
Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle/tree/develop/package...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.

I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)

I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).

I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!


Why do you say it's a strawman? All of those claims seem pretty familiar to me, even if, as the post says, the full exact combination might not be. You say you never assume it's in bad faith. Well, great! But that doesn't mean it's a strawman, it seems that other people do!


I say it’s a straw man because it’s a caricature that is easy to knock down. The point of my comment was that I would be surprised to find out that even 20% of people think this, much less a majority.


20% is a lot of people! If 20% of people think something is true, that's something worth arguing against!

"Straw man" strictly speaking means something you invented, although, yes, that is likely overly strict, since you can find someone saying just about anything. But 20%? That's a substantial fraction of the relevant population!

The other thing worth noting here is that the point of a straw-man fallacy is. In a straw-man fallacy, you replace your opponent's argument with a ridiculous version, and argue against that instead of what they actually said. Or, alternatively, it's where you are arguing against some general nebulous concept, and you instantiate it as something ridiculous -- which maybe someone is actually saying! -- and use your argument against the ridiculous version as an argument against the more general concept, tarring other versions by association. (The real solution here of course is to not argue about nebulous concepts like that in the first place, it's not a useful way of arguing, but that's another matter.)

But if you're not performing either of these types of substitution, if the ridiculous position is actually out there and you're simply arguing against it as it is and not trying to use it to substitute for something else or tar something else by association... then that's not a straw man, that's just people believing ridiculous things and you having to argue against them.


I'm really wondering whether this is true, but haven't found anything definitive on the matter...


> But choosing foundation has real implications on the mathematics. You can have a foundation where every total function on the real numbers is continuous. Or one where Banach–Tarski is just false.

I mean, mathematicians do care about the part of the foundations that affect what they do! Classical vs constructive matters, yes. But material vs structural is not something most mathematicians think about. (They don't think about classical vs constructive either, but that's because they don't really know about constructive and it's not what they're trying to do, rather than because it's irrelevant to them like material vs structural.)


Yacc is Yet Another Compiler Compiler, not Yet Another C Compiler. It's useful for writing compilers, not for compiling C.


Especially since, IIRC, it actually predates C.


Yep, my mistake! And it makes a lot more sense.


Then edit it, it's Wikipedia!


Because Wikipedia. My edit got immediately auto-bot-reverted[1] by some anti-vandalism crusader. Insert bell-curve meme[1] where "just edit wikipedia" is the middle of the bell-curve.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Discospinster#WTF_ed...?

[1] https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/533936279/Bell-Curve


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