skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Magit is amazing. Start using it now.

`C-h m` is your friend
> some aspects of Ruby's syntax are well-loved.

By Ruby programmers. Why is it that Ruby programmers are incapable of imagining anyone doesn't love Ruby?

This isn't a universal truth for all programmers either. I've met plenty Java programmers willing to admit the shortcomings of Java, I've met PHP programmers painfully aware of the language's warts, I've even met Python programmers willing to admit Python's limitations. I've yet to meet a Ruby programmer who doesn't believe that Ruby is the best thing since sliced Jesus.
Ask HN: Thinking like a hardware designer
I understand it's difficult to realize what you don't know, so this question may be unanswerable.
I'm a hardware engineer, I develop ASICs and FPGAs for various tasks. I also develop simple software as a hobby. I don't have a background in the kinds of algorithms that a CS student would have, but I can hack my way through stuff.
That said, I'm interested in working a book to take a software engineer into the realm of hardware hacking of FPGAs. Rather than just give a CPU example in VHDL I'd like to work through the main principals of what sort of thinking is needed for hardware development.
However, since I don't have a CS degree, there is a lot of intro material that I'm just not sure is common knowledge to CS students or not.
So this is an open ended question. What sorts of things would you like to see in such an introductory book (geared toward software hackers) and what would you like it to assume you already understand?
For example are CS folks comfortable with the idea of two's complement for subtraction? Are you interested in semiconductor physics or the process of constructing integrated circuits? (that's interesting background, but not strictly required for digital design). Are you comfortable with boolean logic, stuff like demorgan's laws? I'm assuming karnaugh maps aren't frequently brought up in a CS environment.
I'm trying to figure out what would be a waste if I am targeting CS hacker types vs someone with no computer background.
You lose out on density, but I do wonder about putting these vertical units around the outside of office towers somehow? So you get many of the advantages of isolation, but you also benefit from free natural light? It seems insane to harvest solar energy just to pump it back into grow lamps.

I would be fine with sitting at an office tower "window seat" that looked out through 5 feet of agricultural activity.
100+ Quick Ways to Find Blog Post Inspiration
There is a list of sources at the very bottom of the provided infographic. I haven't actually gone through them though.
It would be nice to have pictures of the thing on the homepage... or anywhere linked. I had to find the atlassian link to even know what it looked like.

[EDIT] - I missed the folder called screenshots on the front page that has screenshots in it.

Also Magit, if you use emacs.
Is it possible to pipe free sunlight into a vertical farm using fiber?
That's just not true. Vertical farming isn't about building a whole new facility with fancy LED lights. It's about effectively utilizing space to get the most calories/input. There's no reason a traditional greenhouse can't grow crops vertically in their existing infrastructure.

Additionally, it seems like you are writing off the idea because "Commodity crops and animal agriculture are the biggest resource users in this system and vertical farming is no where close to finding a substitute for those"

Vertical farming isn't going to just poof magically fix everything. It's meant as a supplement to an unhealthy food system.

And I think the cost of production will come down.
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Great app! Have had a lot of fun trying it out. Especially like the spontaneous nature of it, certainly spices up the evening trying new places. Hook in with Tinder or Grindr to also grab a date?
Funny, from the description on the title I thought this was going to be another cryptocurrency project.
Hey HN, we built this recently because we saw a gap not being filled by calendar/note/todo apps. We noticed that even after writing down notes/ideas we wanted to remember, we’d forget them because our brains just aren’t good at keeping things top of mind. It’s possible to set manual reminders but it quickly becomes too much effort.

Would love to hear what people think (constructive feedback please). Happy to answer any questions too. Thanks!
I enjoyed the book: nice pacing, easy to read on a couple of flights and some snappy dialogue.

I'm not convinced as to how well Watney's diary-style entries to the computer will fare when spoken aloud by Matt Damon (or anyone, for that matter). Even in the trailer they felt a little too contrived.
Let's build huge arrays of vertical farms on top of traditional farms!
The State of Artificial Intelligence in Six Visuals
Transcends tangible benefits? Are you kidding me? You're talking about cult members, not employees. They call it "compensation" because it _compensates_ you for doing what you otherwise would not want to be doing. There are two kinds of people who work 90+ hour weeks: Those who are compensated enormously for it, and idiots.
Though Monbiot is cited in the original article, he doesn't really understand vertical farming. Not only are energy costs plummeting (which he doesn't address), but not all vertical farms rely on artificial light. Click back into the article and check out Sky Greens.
Mumsnet site attacks: FAQs and updates
Yeah, but they'd need to cover what the IPSE/PCG contract template covers already; for those few occasions where a client will accept it ...
"Closed loop" simply implies feedback from the outputs to the next inputs. It doesn't mean the system is "closed".
Real-time page changes tracking service
Take a look at pictures of actual vertical farms vs. artist concepts and compare their use of natural light and then tell me if this is truly as "sustainable" as they say. Growing things is more than getting the soil right. It's (for most plants) the use of chlorophyll to make sugars which (again for most plants) is harnessing the equivalent of sunlight.

Aquaponics are definitely sustainable and just downright awesome and we should invest more in them, but without sunlight you're just running a power hungry "grow op".
This is a really interesting idea.

I'm not sure if all the car gas might be a showstopper.
My results show 1.3s for HTTP/1.1 and 3.0 seconds for HTTP/2 using Chrome on OS X. So, this demo wasn't very impressive for me.
Rain Gutters Fall Maintenance Repair – All Roofing Solutions
Well a lot of free WiFi places trigger it because they use a man-in-the-middle HTTP(S) server to serve up the (utterly pointless) login screen. So I have to regularly click through the warning screen, even for www.google.com ...
The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce (1983) [pdf]
Some of the JavaScript weirds
Flash Flow is a tool to keep your acceptance environment up to date
We've been using this coffeescript/jsx project throughout our codebase: https://github.com/jsdf/coffee-react

Similar idea but just ads JSX tags to Coffeescript (cjsx).

Only ergonomics problem is that the syntax highlighting sometimes breaks on single quotes used within the XML tags so you end up having to do something like `<p>{"you're fired"}</p>` so that it doesn't mess up the highlighting in your whole file.
No big deal, it wasn't a slight against you, but rather the OP. It's not your fault he reposted your two year old benchmarks.
The benefit of JSX is its syntactical simplicity. Lots of beginners seem to think JSX adds all kinds of language features but in reality most of them are unrelated to JSX and either part of ES6 or experimental features of ES7.

The only new thing JSX brings to the table is the element syntax. And all that does is translate `<a b={c}>{d}</a>` to `React.createElement(a, {b: c}, d)`.
>> If every home had a room dedicated to vertical farming..

Why bring it inside? Gardening is a thing and has been for a long time. It can be really cheap too.
This isn't as big a problem as you would think. It's actually theoretically possible for a combination of solar cells and LEDs to increase the amount of usable energy delivered to the plant: plants absorb light in the red and blue parts of the spectrum, and reflect green light. A solar cell can capture light energy across the entire spectrum and convert it to electricity, then the LED grow lights output an optimized spectrum.

It's not possible today; but by converting green light to red through solar cells and LEDs, it will eventually be possible to deliver more light to the plants than they would have received from the sun.

Also, vertical farming allows you to build a solar array somewhere sunny and transmit the electricity to an urban area. So rather than having a farm there, you would have a solar farm that transmits energy to a vertical farm in the city. Again; this is many years off, but vertical farming and solar power go hand-in-hand. What we build today doesn't make a lot of sense commercially, but as a species we absolutely need to invest in unprofitable vertical farming projects because in 100 years, they may be our only reliable way to farm food.
SOPA had some of the biggest write-in campaigns in history, if thats not evidence of "the people" caring, what would be exactly?
July 2015 was warmest month ever recorded
Any way I can get in touch?
What fraction of the energy costs that go into food production are involved in its transport?

Urban areas are valuable. People in cities have less environmental impact than people spread out. The people displaced by an urban farm don't disappear -- they either stay out of the city or go to another city.
The modifier I use is longer, but I might switch to is-, that seems like a nice convention.
And that's different than in Perl, where they aren't statement modifiers (I slightly misspoke), they really are just rearranged into single statement if blocks. That is, if the postconditional is false, the statement is not executed at all.

my $x = 1;
$x = 10 if $x > 1;
say $x; # 1

Personally I find the assignment of the if/else statement's return value distasteful, as it's both complex to read and mixes a portion of a natural pattern of thinking while later abandoning it, making it unintuitive. At that level, I prefer a ternary operator.
Any advice for how to get past that filter? Things to put on the resume, specific things to say in a cover letter, etc.?
Huh? Harsh is not only objective but trivially easy to measure. As crime rates fell, the likelihood than an arrest would convert to a felony conviction rose. That's the opposite of the causality you'd want or expect: as the community gets safer, the criminal justice system should become less intrusive, not more.
See http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/screenshots/
You're right, my phrasing was a bit misleading. It was just the most dramatic example of a "major change" I could think up.
It was in response to the parent wondering about overlooked phenomena. Perhaps sunlight or even earthlight heat the surface of the moon and cause thermal expansion. That could easily displace things by several millimeters.
You would need a fiber collection area the same size as the total floor space of your vertical farm. So it would have to be absolutely massive.
Before any of this can happen key technologies need to experience massive evolutionary improvements:

Computers:
10x computing power
1/10 the volume (think: fits in the robot's head)
1/10 the power consumption of a desktop computer
10x reduction in failure modes (can remain operational with some damage)

Power:
2x to 10x the energy storage
1/2 to 1/10 the volume
Less weight
Electric vehicle market will help here!

Actuators:
10x improvement in power-to-weight ratio
10x to 100x reduction in cost
10x to 100x reduction in weight
10x reduction in fragility (think: still works after impact from a fall)
Moldability (think of the shape of every muscle in your body)

There's more, of course, starting with software, languages, tools, etc.
> By Ruby programmers.

As well as by not-Ruby programmers, which is why they keep getting used in non-Ruby languages that don't keep other aspects of Ruby.

> Why is it that Ruby programmers are incapable of imagining anyone doesn't love Ruby?

I think most Ruby programmers are capable of understanding that lots of people don't like Ruby, and more importantly that lots of people don't like aspects of Ruby that those Ruby programmers find most attractive.

Sure, some Ruby programmers have problems with this, but, OTOH, some non-Ruby programmers seem incapable of understanding that other non-Ruby programmers might find some aspects of Ruby attractive that they, themselves, do not.

> I've met plenty Java programmers willing to admit the shortcomings of Java

Well, sure, the more likely you are to be compelled to use a language because of corporate inertia, the more likely people that actually do use it will be the people that don't like it and use it under duress. So I'd expect Java to be among the languages with the highest proportion of active programmers who not only are willing to admit its shortcoming, but who outright despise it.

> I've yet to meet a Ruby programmer who doesn't believe that Ruby is the best thing since sliced Jesus.

Given the number of non-Ruby programming languages created with substantial input from (or even under the leadership of) people in the Ruby community specifically because, while they like many things about Ruby, they find it not optimal for some uses, I think this says a lot more about your limited exposure to the Ruby community than about the Ruby community itself.
Rust Production User Research Summary
You do know that plants literally grow out of thin air, don't you? The nutrients pulled from the soil are like our nutrients - required, but not the main substance of the plants. Water is needed to transport the nutrients and support cell growth and structure, but most water input into traditional farming just ends up as run off. Much of the actual substance of a plant is pulled from the air.

If you can optimize the water usage, and provide the nutrients, the rest of the inputs into plant growth are quite minimal.
Maybe it's because I read the book and can fill in the gaps, but that trailer seemed like it gave away the entire plot of the movie. Astronaut gets left behind on Mars and while he's coming up with ingenious ways to survive, someone comes up with a plan to rescue him that might result in his entire crew dying. I think the trailer should've left out that last part about the rescue operation because we all know their plan is going to work.
I'm based at a university where there are a couple of solar-tracking devices feeding fibre optic cables to a corridor in a nearby building. The light from the 1 metre-wide trackers is laughable. You can see the light source but it's not strong enough to practically illuminate anything.

Maybe this is an old installation and the technology has since improved, but my instinct is that solar panels powering batteries to light LEDs would be much more efficient.
Are you still working at the job that is imposing asp.net web forms on you?

If so, maybe you could make an argument to adopt new technologies there while keeping your large pay check. If you make a business focused case for adopting new tech, you might find success.

Problem to Solve:

So, how does adopting new tech save money and/or make money?

Crude Proposed Solution:

Talented developers care about their tools, so if you are using dated techniques / technologies you are alienating potential new hires which could add significant value to the company.

The younger programmers coming out of school do not want to program in COBOL. They want to invest in technologies which will increase their marketability as a developer.

So by adopting newer technologies / techniques you reduce your risk of becoming a slave to a dwindling developer community. A community which has stopped growing and is bleeding devs, starting with the most talented. You also open up your company up to new opportunities where they can higher younger talented devs for cheap. You can mitigate problems caused by inexperience by giving them specialist roles which will decrease the amount ramp up time required for them to start adding value to the company.

Apologies:

This is a very knee jerk response. I do not feel as though I have proposed an actionable plan that is well thought out. I hope I have proposed an idea that is worth exploring.

Persuade your existing company to adopt new tech in terms of saving/making money and by reducing future risk (a potentially mortal risk) of problems caused by tech rot.
> Why is it okay for programmers to be turned into lifetime billionaires for what amounts to an interesting hack and a little hustle.

Because most programmers can't do both things well.
Because in urban environments, not everybody has an outside to use.
No, but it is possible to convert that sunlight into solar energy and use that to power LEDs. More efficient too; since you can use LEDs that emit the proper spectrum for the plants you're growing.
I can't do the beard, but I'm basically an oldschool unix neckbeard anyway.
I wasn't providing a narrative, I was citing statistics you can get from prisons.
The question is moot, because most humans have decided they're going to watch TV and not garden. There are hundreds of millions (at least) of people living in urban and suburban areas who could be gardening today, indoors or outdoors or both, with far less investment and expense than this method entails. Very few do. There's no reason to think that you're going to convince those who are not to start by adding the further requirements that they (a) dedicate a room to it, (b) buy a bunch of expensive shelving, (c) buy a bunch of expensive LED lights, (d) triple their electricity bill (at least), and (e) double their water bill (at least).

Maybe if food prices are 50x what they are today this starts to seem interesting. Like Victory Gardens. Of course, if that happened, then electricity and urban (potable!) water prices would immediately become unaffordable as well and we would simply end up at a new equilibrium with higher urban water and electricity prices, slightly lower food prices, and a few extra indoor gardeners making up those margins.

And don't tell me that solar-generated electricity is the answer here. A PV module is about 16% efficient; absorbing sunlight directly is 100% efficient (in both cases, photosynthesis itself is then about 45% efficient). So you would need 6x as much land dedicated to PV modules as you would need to dedicate to outdoor, rooftop, or windowbox gardens to get the same output. This is a problem of physics; even a 100% efficient PV module would be only marginally useful, in that it would allow capturing energy on land that is not itself suited for agriculture.

No free lunches, and that's before we're talking about wholesale changes in human behavior.
I would like to see some math on this solar + LED combination.

Solar PV is 16% efficient now. So the LEDs would have to put out light at least 6 times better than sunlight to break even.

Not to mention the LEDs+PV cost money, whereas the sunlight is free.
Neither can most artists.
She did not want to encourage competition - if she had then she would have gone for the cheapest solution for all basic infrastructure (power, waste, internet, transport) and used that to power a stronger economy - instead what she really wanted was to break the back of the Labour-funding unions (stronger in public organisations) and provide tax-derived profits for large corporations who would then provide for her and her colleagues in the future.

IMHO
Thanks, we're working hard to improve our codebase even more! :)

Umbrella Project can be found on https://github.com/erlio/vernemq
as well as our website https://verne.mq
SXSW Needs a Great Big Dose of Periods
Would it help if building owners got tax cuts to let you run on their roofs?
RubberHose – simple character rigging script for AE
Good old fashioned foot work. Cold email the places you know that use your tech stack.

Introduce yourself and what you have to offer. Show that you understand their business and some of the technical problems they may experience.

Ask for referrals after contracts complete.

Open source contributions and presenting at industry conferences go a long way to establishing an air of expertise; carry yourself like an expert and you almost always will get a second look from a potential client.
How can someone get a hold of me to help me??
I am anonymously1234
They're already doing this with offices and hotels. Just not commercially. It's more so for publicity for the companies that they're green.
Is there a good way of actually inserting data using it?
Wascally Wabbits in Wuby
Vertical farming: Another 'solution' that won't work
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/12/13/vertical-farming/
_ ... there are no fertilizers needed. There are no pesticides needed. There is no chemical runoff. Even if you make a worst-case assumption that each farm will use synthetic nutrient solutions, these solutions are used in a closed, recirculating system with no chance for environmental contamination._

Can someone explain how this is so? What is the alternative to a "synthetic nutrient solution"?
It should be noted that Zapier is (YC S12).
How to Compile Ffmpeg on a Raspberry Pi
>> Work In Sprints

No. A gentleman (developer) walks but never runs.
There's a lot less energy going into transporting the food though and much less water is used too.
> No, but it is possible to convert that sunlight into solar energy and use that to power LEDs. More efficient too; since you can use LEDs that emit the proper spectrum for the plants you're growing.

Citation needed on the "more efficient" part. Sure, if you assume that the photovoltaics, transmission systems, and LED lights themselves are all 100% efficient (and that there is no energy cost to maintain any of those systems) so that you are transforming the spectrum for free, it would be more efficient, but none of those things are true, and some of them are very far from true.
The only vertical farming I see as part of a sustainable future is Agroforestry. As for the rest of vertical farming, their wastefulness becomes even more evident once one considers that the nutritional profile of its production is often comparable (or even inferior) to that of weeds.

For an alternative framework (rather than an alternative technique) take a look at Agroecology http://www.srfood.org/en/report-agroecology-and-the-right-to...
I don't think you need to consider a pay cut. It's easy to look at HN and think that all of the good jobs are in new technologies and your experience is worthless. That's not the case.

Take a week or two to build a handful of sites in ASP.Net MVC with Entity Framework, so you're familiar with the basics. At that point you'd be marketable for a lot of current senior .Net positions. Experience with .Net is more relevant to most companies than MVC-specific experience. Add in your SQL Server skills for when Entity Framework doesn't cover exactly what you need and you can almost write your own ticket.
An Analysis of Zirtual’s Reality and the Perils of Debt
Ding, ding.

The math has to be done on a case by case basis. Why are all potatoes grown in Idaho? Because soil and climate conditions there are really good for potatoes. You can grow potatoes in Idaho and ship them to Kansas for less -- less land use, less effort, less energy-cost, less environmental impact -- than you can grow them locally.

There are going to be some crops and some urban environments where vertical farming is the best option. There are going to be some where it is not.
Finding the sweet spot between memory and speed on Android
Learn how to easily add Two Factor Authentication to your Node.js app using TOTP
How about Java, then? It's a little less esoteric than most of those languages.
The "just" before the "one out of every 60,000 passengers has died" is rather problematic IMHO.
"theoretically possible"

You need higher efficiency solar, which is feasible with non PV techniques.