skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They're not a breakthrough solar company, there's very little technically that they actually do that's better than anyone else

It's worth saying that this concept of a breakthrough discovery in solar has been pursued and hyped for years, including god knows how many articles in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and yet almost all of the progress which has happened, has been through the economics of increased scale, or with progressive optimizations made by anonymous industrial engineers in China (albeit with the groundwork laid by worldwide materials research).

Also, as far as I'm aware this is the first time SolarCity has been directly involved in manufacturing panels. As you say, they are more about business than technology, but it is interesting to have an installation company going back into the manufacturing process and putting its priorities at the centre. The focus on maximizing efficiency rather than cost per watt makes a lot more sense to an installer than a pure manufacturer - in terms of the large fixed labour costs of putting up scaffolding, fitting a certain number of panels, wiring etc.
> genetics provides merely the hardware, not the software

Much like code and data, there has never really been a fixed bright line between hardware and software, even in systems where we intentionally engineer that distinction (whence came the term "firmware" and the closely related concept of "microcode").
it has a camper, smuggled refugees doesnt care if they go confortable enough.
Hm. That guy writing the intro was extremely optimistic about human nature. Most folks find statistics very unintuitive. Folks routinely overestimate extremely unlikely events (lotto) and underestimate near-certainties (auto accident). Its the idea that we might get away with something, or maybe it won't happen to me, that guides most human activities.

Its this warping of the probability curve that is responsible for major facets of human society: war, witchcraft, gambling, marriage, on and on.
I've recently decided that all this async and evented stuff is just too hard to reason about. A proper language should have (lightweight) threads if it wants to support concurrency. Seems a lot easier to reason about.

See go or haskell for example.
I use OneNote, it seems to be pretty decent. Mostly I use it for bookmarking web pages and writing quick notes across devices. I'm not in the Apple club, but I have heard that it has decent clients for OSX, and the web interface in Office365 is not bad.
No, it's good. There will be latency between the proof and specific attack solutions.

We are better for the warning.

What if someone doesn't announce and has nefarious intent?
Output. The tuner was from the era when PCs and GPUs didn't have the horsepower to decode 1080i MPEG-2, so the tuner had to have its own MPEG-2 decoder chip and display driver, with 16MB of RAM.

It supported a basic OSD (sort of like hardware sprites) and arbitrary output resolutions, so IIRC I set up the OSD to stretch one of the OSD overlays to the full screen size, and pointed the framebuffer driver at the section of the card's memory assigned to that overlay. Here's an old demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDWH7d8pbH0

I never finished getting video input to work, and eventually my reference card was stolen so I never will.

Working with the framebuffer is almost as easy as calling mmap() on /dev/fb0 and just writing data. There are ioctls for switching resolutions on drivers that supported it. But it sounds like DRM/KMS is the way to go these days if you aren't running a proprietary GPU driver.
The author blurb at the end is funny!
who is "we"? you are NOTHING
> here might have been nothing at the time _in mainstream languages/platforms_ (important distinction)

Going off mainstream, I read somewhere that Objective-C WebObjects framework was the inspiration to J2EE, given the Objective-C work going at Sun back then.

Then there was also Taligent, but it was short lived as well.

> Does anyone still want remote object invocation these days?

Apparently yes, now they call it REST and microservices.
I was hoping the article would cover what happened to UnderTheSite.com and how it came to redirect to BuiltWith.

UnderTheSite was built so that members of the community could contribute fingerprints to detect previously undetected technologies. This seemed to work pretty well and had the advantage that it was one click to see the code of the fingerprint responsible for detecting that technology in order to debug false positives.

I'm not surprised BuiltWith would diminish the story of how they profited from volunteers' work without compensating the volunteers, but it does strike me as lacking class that they completely remove this part of their story.

Also it would be nice to have a better sense of "Why could this idea not succeed as an open source project?" (Eg., in an alternate history where UnderTheSite did not sell out to BuiltWith...)
Interesting, but way too short. Could have gone into a little bit more detail.
I'm not sure proteins have to be 'found'. They can be invented. Then they are a lot more like a copyright and not a patent.
You can see that the reflected waves have a big impact on the shape of the incoming waves as soon as the first of them reach the far end. I'm no hydrologist but it seems to me that the shape of the trough concentrates this effect in a way that would not happen in a more natural open environment like a shore or dike. I suppose they can account for this in their experiments. Very cool machine in any case. I love large-scale experimentation like this.
This was the confusing unstated assumption for me, which is why I got so angry when Marilyn Vos Savant introduced the problem to me and many others here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Vos_Savant_...

At the point when I read it, I didn't realize Monty was always choosing the door with pre-knowledge of which one the car wasn't behind.

It wasn't until somebody wrote in with a computer program example that showed the benefits of switching, in which I inspected the source code, that I understand what Monty was doing.

personally, I think this has to do with ambiguous way word problems are stated, and how people model the word problem mentally.
Last time I had to deal with it was in 2005, luckily not more.

It had lots of nice ideas, but it was a pain to use in reality.

Typical enterprise stuff.
No button for my domain account as well. Have billing enabled. And when I attempt to send feedback on this issue, I get a "submission failed" error!

Have used micro instances in the past as remote development and deployment environments and a micro instance and it works ok. Wondering if something in between micro (0.7G) and standard (3.5G) might be better considering devenv can get pretty beefed up using certain modern frameworks we won't mention by name ;)
Not necessarily, but if this gets rolled into directx its availability on non-directx platforms might become restricted. This means it makes sense to cultivate alternatives before this happens.
Twitter causes the problem by limiting the number of people you can follow. For example, people who want to grow their user base follow a lot of people so they can getting follows back. You might follow 500 people so you can get 50 of them to follow you. But once you follow 2,000 people you reach Twitter's limit and from there the number you can follow depends on how many people follow you. This is an incentive to buy fake followers, so you can continue to follow the people you actually want.
a) "The Google Style Guide for HTML recommends omitting all optional tags. That includes <html>, <head>, <body>, <p> and <li>" https://google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.xml#Optiona...

b) HTML5 spec:
A body element's start tag may be omitted if the element is empty, or if the first thing inside the body element is not a space character or a comment, except if the first thing inside the body element is a meta, link, script, style, or template element.
Very nice! Were the transitions between visualizations algorithmic?
> I assume it's because you can't stand Las Vegas?

Haha, I have no idea because I haven't been there, but you're right that I can't stand even the idea of Las Vegas :-)
If you build a system that can rip off limbs, and then downmod the forces applied until it doesn't do that anymore, you can get realism and ratings both. Step 1 is optional.
Don't know anything about PhysX, but I'd imagine they would. I'd also imagine that they'll start building in support for their cloud based physics as used in the upcoming Crackdown 3
But if your sample space is just Cartesian of {B,G} and {1,2,3,4,5,6,7} then it is in fact just a noise. If you had some additional information, that, say, on Tuesdays there are two times as much boys born as girls, only then expanding sample space would make sense.

Also, for interpretation of problem 2a there is one fundamental flaw that I can see: The sample space listed as:'BB', 'BG', 'GB' is wrong, because 'BG' and 'GB' are in fact the same sample. Or, to put it in a different way: if you decide that ordering does not matter then you should list either 'BG' or 'GB', not both. And if order does matter then you should list 'BB' twice, for all the possible orderings. Both of which will make probability equal to 1/2.

EDIT: Moral of the story is: "If it looks like paradox you are doing it wrong". Which I think was the Norvig's point from the start.
Bitcoin Eclipse Attacks
This is more of an analog circuit. Here's some links to analog computers, specific and general purpose. The computing in empty space concept is particularly interesting. One of these is very practical with a huge speedup on numerical computation on the cheap.

Posted links to all here:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/07/friday_squid_...

Wikipedia has links to old ones below. The mechanical ones trip me out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

Another little-known use of analog is obfuscating trade secrets in ASIC's. One hardware engineer that used to post on Schneier's blog told us how most engineers and tools did digital with little understanding of analog or especially combinations of the two ("mixed signal"). So, he would put parts of the critical algorithms in analog with odd tie-ins to the digital side. Integrating their I.P. with digital tools was still easy but ripping it off required analog or mixed-signal experts spending a lot of time. A trick worth remembering.
Don't know where you got those ideas about Russia, but asking people that immigrated out of the country or who don't like it, is not exactly representative.

A common mistake of people in the West is to only talk to think-alike westernized versions of themselves from other countries (found in tech, social media etc), creating an echo chamber that's as representative of the other country as talking to some Williamsburg hipster is for somebody in Kentucky or Idaho.
The author also points out that some of the benchmarks poorly represent real workloads:

"Bottom up (since the worst offenders are now first),

binary-trees is silly since it measures allocation speed for a case that simply doesn't exist in real code;

thread-ring is basically insane, since nobody ever bottlenecks like that;

chameneos-redux's C++ implementation is ridiculous. The C is not so ridiculous, but you still have the problem that basically every language in the top few spots does something completely different;

pidigits tests whether you have bindings to GMP;

regex-dna tests a regex engine on a small subset of cases (arguably the first half-acceptable benchmark);

k-nucleotide tests who has the best hash table for this particular silly scheme, and they don't all even do the same thing (eg. Scala precompacts, like my new Rust version);

mandelbrot is kind'a OK;

reverse-complement would be kind'a OK if not for a few hacky implementations (like the Rust);

spectral-norm is kind'a OK;

Haskell basically cheats fasta (which is why I copied it);

meteor-contest is too short to mean anything at all;

fannkuch-redux is probably kind'a OK,

n-body is kind'a OK.

So maybe 5/13 are acceptable, and I'd still only use 4 of those. I think if looking at mandelbrot, spectral-norm, fannkuch-redux and n-body you can argue the benches are a reasonable measure of peak performance. However, these cases are also all too small and simple to really be convincing either, nor is it particularly fair (where's NumPy for Python?)."

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/blog-rust-faster/3117/12?u=acc...
This mostly qualifies as "not even wrong" material.

Recycling may or may not be broken in New York or the US at large, but it's quite a no-brainer that you should not try to incinerate aluminum cans just to waste resources making new material. (Or paper. Or glass.)

With language like "indoctrination" there's no way to take this seriously. (Don't get me started on countries still using landfills. There's just no excuse for a modern society. The cost model won't make sense at all unless you do something with your trash.)

The examples in the article is also cringeworthy. "To offset the greenhouse production of a plane trip you have to recycle x cans" (where x is large). On the surface that tells us plane trips are very dirty, greenhouse-wise. Yet somehow the spin is how inefficient recycling is. But the greenhouse effect is not the main reason to recycle (also aluminum production is heavy on using renewables)!
If the events involve I/O then they are not deterministic. Even if you save every event to Kafka and then replay them, you may not get the same bug.
Balancing this line defines the human experience in my opinion. Objectively it is true, we are minute. But humanity is in the subjective making of meaning. That opportunity to make your own meaning is an incredible one if you choose to accept it. If you don't, it's not, and depression/nihilism results.

And the funny thing is, those who hone that strongest sense of subjective meaning and well being in how they see the world, are the ones who make an outsized butterfly-effect impact on the world, coming closest to overcoming that objective meaninglessnes.

So basically, imo the answer to why do anything? Is because you believe something is worth doing subjectively/on faith/on instinct. Only then does it have a chance to build toward a more objective answer to why do it, in its impact on people & history.
The correct design is to return to the state they were in before they lost power, like most desktop/server systems can be configured to do.
> How much of it is due to needlessly churning out new editions to cut off the used book market?

And there is all the more incentive when the instructor requires a book he has written himself.
Ahhh the piece of software that brought us the best weapon in game ever - the Painkiller stake gun. Impaling zombies on the walls with it was awesome. Good for them.
>So something about India is attractive in itself.

Just that they are accustomed to that culture (on an everyday-life basis). It's pretty unique and far less western that Russia's culture (which is mostly shared with European and Eastern European culture) is, so those traditionally inclined feel a better cultural fit there than in the West.

Beyond that, India is way worse of than Russia in quality of life for hundrends of millions of its population.
With transition:, width:, and :hover, I was able to make an element repeatedly cycle between states with the only user input being to leave a cursor positioned over the page.

Maybe it's a browser-specific quirk; maybe it uses features only implemented after the initial explorations of turing-complete CSS; maybe there isn't any way to hook the two together. CSS will continue to add features over the years, though, and each added feature is another chance to find a missing piece that makes turing-complete CSS easier, more possible, and/or more powerful.
It's historically dangerous to do business at scale with Microsoft. If it were a matter of paying a license fee and using the software, nobody would mind, but getting large-scale licenses from Microsoft almost always involves ridiculous platform-exclusivity agreements and other unpleasant modi operandi.

The good news is Havok technology may be integrated into DirectX, which would mean even small shops get cheap access to this technology. It all depends on whether Microsoft regards this acquisition as "making DirectX technology better" or "leveraging developers into preferential treatment for Microsoft platforms."

We'll have to wait and see.
Well, I guess we will find out if this is going to have a negative effect on the multi-platform support.
SDRPlay
http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-014408
Oculus Rift likely will cost more than $350 when it ships, says Luckey
I imagine this is two things for Microsoft: An investment to bolster DirectX and a cloud investment. Microsoft has shown that it wants to push physics calculations into the cloud. They have a pretty incredible demo displaying it, and it will be used for Crackdown. I can only suspect that they will want other dev shops to start utilizing this as it can bolster Azure.
Samsung Decides Not to Backport Kernel Patches in Some S4 Smartphones
I agree. But don't forget that it took years of hard work to build up enough of "Java the platform". Things that help there is having traditional man-power, which costs money, and having a strong community, which takes lobbying/evangelising/advertising. In a way, all those "luminaries" you mention may or may not miss the point individually, but the buzz it creates is necessary to build the community that makes the platform, and that in turn makes the language succeed.
Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers...
OP has come a long way from her a project a day. Glad to see that! Good luck!!
Not generally true. I'd have given up on Haskell yonks ago if that's all type inference was good for. In many cases, I just can't figure out the types of arguments without stopping completely and thinking really hard, and I usually can't be bothered to do that when I have a compiler that's happy to do it for me. Haskell gets bonus points for allowing me to insert holes arbitrarily in my code and ask the type-inferencer "what sort of thing do I need to put there?" Inference of the types of function arguments is a special case of that.

It might not be such a big-deal in Rust. I don't have enough experience with it. But if it ever gets HKTs, it wouldn't surprise me if their interaction with typeclasses becomes a pain-point without (nearly) global type inference.
"return a closure of what to do given a cursor into the database"

Some people would insist that the closure is a mock, but otherwise this is correct, using closures in this way does help isolate one's tests.
For those who don't want to google it: http://elm-lang.org/
As you can see here, code amount is also measured:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...
You can try twitteraudit.com (I made it a few years ago). It doesn't do anything fancy at all, but it works pretty well with about a 10% margin of error. It only looks at a sample of 5000 followers though.
Confusing mixed signals then.
It's interesting that Intel seems to be selling off a lot of the acquisitions that they've acquired in the last few years -- first Mashery and now Havok. I wonder if this is a change of direction from Intel to go back to the chipset/foundry business.
I don't think the statement about Toyota is a "gut feeling": http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...
So much wrong in one place. A promise is the IO monad, with `then` being `>>=` [1].

If you write your promises code not to cause explicit side effects - it won't and you get pure code.

The fact you have (controlled!) side effects is the whole purpose of the IO monad. You can't avoid side effects or your program wouldn't do anything, a promise keeps the side effects in a box (the promise) and lets you code using boxes so that your code is purer. Of course, not all your code can be _actually_ pure because all code needs side effects.

The FUD about async/await is even stranger. JS _has_ async/await, it already shipped in Microsoft Edge (IE) and it's coming to other browsers. It is based on promises (just like it's based on Tasks = Promises) in C#.

The fact people talk so much about this without learning the topic is amazing. I'm genuinely disappointed with the quality of discussion in HN over these topics lately.

Monet is also a bad implementation of the IO monad in JS, in fact it's not an implementation at all. Here is an issue I opened there a while ago: https://github.com/cwmyers/monet.js/issues/25

[1] up to the fact `.then` does both `fmap` and `>>=` through overloading based on the return type. Seriously, if you remove the exceptions and the fact you can return an unwrapped value it's `Promise a -> a -> Promise b -> Promise b` for then's signature (the Promise a being `this`, the a -> Promise b` being the handler and the return value being itself).
framework proselytizing considered harmful
All this "smart" learning software feels really gimmicky to me. Anyone remember Windows Vista had this heavily marketed feature that would "learn" how you use your apps at certain time of the day, and therefore allow you to launch them faster by pre-caching a few minutes before your expected launch. This feels similar.

The Nest thermostat I have at home promised to save me energy by learning my schedule, and heating the house only when needed - I had to turn this off because it never really worked. People do not inherently have a predictable schedule anyway.

The leaving for the airport in 15 minutes example in this article is similarly contrived.

Perhaps using multiple types of batteries will be useful in the future, but I'm not sold on the software learning part ATM.
That is super cool. I would love to know though how long the willow branch mattress would last though before vegetation growing on it would also help it rot, get water logged and sink.

Would one also want to include the drum based floats underneath to help keep it above water?

It would be interesting to see these made and just placed out in various areas to grow, like little artificial islands or marsh patches. It would also be a boon to the willow stick industry :-) (any idea why they picked willow branches aside from the fact that the willow just grows a boat-load of vine-y sticks?) (pun intended)
I think part of "the system" involves learning and lending institutions informally forecasting what the lifetime return on a student's education will be, and then attempting to maximize the return on the student loan(s) as an investment on those future earnings.

The learning and lending institutions clearly fucked up big-time in their forecasting, along with everyone else who was irrationally exuberant in their optimism about the future economy.

Now they are stuck between students on one hand (who have been sold a bill of goods and are seriously pissed about the pittance left over after their loan payments, if they're able to pay back at all), and the investors on the other hand (which includes not only evil bankers' money but also people who have been sacrificing in good faith for decades to contribute to their retirement accounts).

So the stage is set for a nice messy society-destroying generational war that should distract everyone from the forecasting mistakes.
Such a binary either/or kind of thinking. Reductionist, too. Did it ever occur to you that there are better and worse ways to deal with bad laws, or bad application of laws? Anarchy is a markedly inferior alternative which every time in history has only enabled a new set of oligarchs to rise.