skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Typical average power plant efficiency is around 33%

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_02.html

That's slightly better than the typical maximum efficiency of an internal combustion gasoline engine (and way better than the average, including idling and other inefficient operating conditions).

Electric cars suffer from two additional conversions, each of which adds inefficiency, but it's not obvious to me that this overcomes the efficiency benefit from having a central power plant using fossil fuels more efficiently than in the auto. To me, it seems close enough that it takes actual analysis to determine the winner.
This is close to what I think. To a great extent buildings have been commodified. And businesses typically do not own buildings, they are tenants.

The bulldozed in 30 years attitude is post war nihilism in a nutshell. (In thirty years will be living on mars or dead from nuclear fire)
SQLAlchemy and You (2011)
Although, like mentioned in above comments, Signal does not hide metadata, which can be as valuable to attackers as the contents of the messages themselves.

Also, in terms of adoption, it's still hard when everyone has phones that use iMessage or SMS by default. iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but not compatible with Signal, and Android has no equivalent baked in. Using Signal requires two extra steps for the user 1) downloading/installing Signal 2) knowing about it and caring enough to use it in the first place.
Well, if it's actually a Dyson swarm in the making, we'll find out, watching the star go gradually dark during the next few hundred (or thousand?) years..
Was the video working when you posted this? I just see "This video is unavailable." (in the US though--but it doesn't say it's blocked in my country?)
Made in the same factory too. But owners are new
The patent on silicon carbide gemstones just expired a few months ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite#Applications
Learn How to Make Android Applications
For security you could also look at the DC area, especially if you're an AMCIT who wouldn't mind undergoing an SSBI. The downside is that most of those jobs are playing whack-a-mole with breaches, but for high-paying, high-profile forensics, response and research positions, federal contractors are hard to beat.
How to Attract an Audience with the Best Blog Photography Tips and 128 Free Images
China Stocks Enter Bull Market as State Stimulus Reverses Rout
I had to stop working on a website which was soon to launch when I learned about VAT MOSS. Although, I was thinking whether a faucet-style (india/russia/romania workers) website could pay people $N per email to send the digital good/service manually. Then that should bypass the VAT MOSS legislation, right? Although, they do have plans to apply VAT MOSS to physical goods/services in 2016. It's a pain in the ass.
Dark Mail turned out to be a joke. Apart from the silly fields like "political party", the fundamental security model's broken. It has essentially zero benefits of "just use Gmail". The suggested security level delegates security to the receiver's mail server. Basically if we just had a " require TLS with verified cert for SMTP" option, that'd do most of what Dark Mail does.

In fact, big companies already so this. When LM talks to the DOD over SMTP, you can bet they have mandatory TLS. Exchange offers this out of the box.

DM offers higher capabilities with no usability benefits over PGP or whatever.

Disclaimer: Since the beginning, I've said the DMA had a zero chance of success. The problem isn't solvable.
LPs decide whether to invest based on the information available. This is useful information.
The point is that the ceiling for the multiple a Hollywood film can return is way lower than the ceiling for the multiple VC can return. The discussion is around paying high prices and still getting a huge return, which makes Avatar a more apt analogy than the Blair Witch Project.

That having been said, perhaps the analogy is a bit flawed, but at the going market cap Thiel has a 60,000x return on Facebook (on a large sum of money), and that will likely continue to go up.

Even if the analogy is Twitter, started by the already successful Ev, or Slack, started by the already successful Stewart, both are likely to return a greater multiple.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Vandersteen speakers.

http://www.vandersteen.com

They are famous for their 2's and 2C's which did away with a box for the speaker altogether. The money went to circuitry and drivers which are enclosed in cloth on all 4 sides. The 1, 1C, 2, 2C and 3 are fantastic and amazing value for the money, probably better than competitors costing 5x as much.

Their newer speakers and some higher end speakers do have boxes and in my opinion don't deliver anywhere near as much bang for the buck.
I'm sometimes a bit sceptical giving money to friends to do fund raising 'challenges' [0] that are in some beautiful part of Australia and require them to walk a reasonable 20km in a day. I would hope that they cover their own costs (flying, registration fee, accommodation, etc.) and any donations they receive go to the charity/cause.

[0] http://www.humacharitychallenge.com/Charity-Challenge/Austra...
I like Slack. No video chat unless there's a plugin I am not aware of.
I wouldn't bother with this. There is an excellent project named Buildroot for the exact purpose. There is also Yocto but it generates bigger images in their recommended configuration but you can always tweak it.
If a close friend's experiencing some incredibly tough times, and he sets his goal to $125 or something reasonable like that, I'd have no issue with pitching in. I'm a totally broke college student, but that's the truth.

However, this article really hits the mark. Begging your friends and family or the internet community at large is actually the last thing you should think of doing. And if you're asking for thousands of dollars, you'd better be buying food for a homeless shelter or something. Something that benefits, I don't know, more than a single person?
This was much, much more thoughtful than I expected. Some of the thought processes resonated with me. I spent a long time getting rid of everything I owned and, yet, after doing this for three years, I didn't have the change in mindset I really needed until I kind of marathon watched "Mission: Organization" on HGTV. I was still stuck in the American mindset of accumulation. I had long wanted to live more spartanly and I was deadest on buying my way there -- cuz, yeah, that makes so much sense.

Anyway, it's a really good read and not at all what I was expecting. I am sort of disappointed that so many of the comments here are about "Boo -- small space living!" or "Ugh! San Francisco!" or "It's even worse in many other countries!" because the piece really was not written that way. It wasn't written as "Ugh! Pity me! Boo hoo!" It is very thoughtful and a really good read.

I just wish the article had a native tweet button. I couldn't find one.
Isn't it sad, that we know non of this makes no sense at all. Yet, you and I, we do everything to get our hands on some of those "non-synthetic stones" in form or another.
I've been pretty happy with it, but I'm also a programmer with interest in and knowledge of why it's important and how it's useful. I can see non-technically-inclined family and friends being very confused by it.
You will always be bad at hiring
Unless you are claiming that Comcast injects their own ads into your traffic, what are you even saying?
You request a page from a server, they deliver that page to you, in whole as requested- The fact that there might be advertising on that page is due to the server/site owner. Why should Comcast have to not charge for content that you technically requested (although likely didn't want).

If they are injecting ads (which I have seen through other providers, but I believe it wasn't related to Comcast) then your point is valid. At that point you are being delivered packets (large video-laden amounts) were not requested, and being charged for them. As a side note, I believe Verizon was doing this to mobile customers, not sure how it ended though.
Not sure the point of this article. Of course there are more or less deserving, more or less craven. It's a platform for anyone to use, that's the whole point. Don't want to give? Then don't.
a16z invested $250k in the Instagram seed round before it was even called Instagram.
You'd be surprised at what people continue to invest in because it's fashionable, "other people's money," or because they're so thirsty for appearance of yield after an unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates. Despite the evidence that some alternative asset classes may not be worth the considerable fees. Most hedge funds fall squarely into this category [1]. There's also the ongoing scandal involving the U.S.'s biggest pension funds and their inability to figure out what fees they are actually paying to private equity, and hence whether the returns are worth it.

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/05/19/hedge-funds-mediocrity/
[2] http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/08/calpers-private-equit...
PG, thanks for doing and sharing this. I like your advice on exploring 'hidden interestingness', this may work for teens and adults too.
I thought they were going to put microcells in solar powered street lights. No. This claim assumes the street lights retain both power and fiber optic connectivity.

Some areas in hurricane country are going to solar powered street lighting.[1] There are several manufacturers which make solar panel powered units tough enough for that. Giving them minimal cellular capability (voice and text only, RF relay to each other) might be worth it. There's a minor startup opportunity there, coming up with a low-cost, very rugged, very long life unit which can do that.

[1] http://www.sepco-solarlighting.com/projects/solar-street-lig...
Why is the rest of the country required to subsidize the Appalachian way of life in extremis? Should we mandate factories be placed there or something?
I prefer no spaces around em-dashes for the entirely subjective reason that I find it aesthetically pleasing. It boggles my mind that other people look at an elegant em-dash and think, "Yes... with spaces... now it looks right."

There are some instances when I use spaces - such as in in forum posts or emails, which are far more ephemeral, and I'm not going to hunt around for the actual em-dash character, and I'll use us a space and a hyphen as an uglier, but expedient, substitute.
Secrets for eavesdropping in Macedonia
>Essentially dirty methods of producing electricity and converting that electricity back into mechanical energy are less efficient than gasoline engines. So yes - we do need electric cars and it's great companies are making them but that won't have a significant impact until the industrial-scale energy problems are addressed.

In America; and really, most of the wealthy bits of the world, this is purely a political choice. fission is a real answer that we can use right now, one that pretty provably kills fewer people than coal. But coal kills people very slowly in a way that isn't very dramatic, while when a nuclear problem gets that bad, it's very scary and dramatic.

We burn coal for the same reason that we heavily regulate airlines, while we let just about any yahoo drive just about any car, no matter how unsafe.

But, the point about electric cars is just that if the left actually starts to believe in global warming like they say they do, and actually decides to solve the problem, like they say they want to, rather than just opposing cheap energy on the principle of "you shouldn't waste things" (e.g. "I can afford less mature energy sources, so why shouldn't you?") - the technology of fission is there, and building more nuclear power plants is only half the solution, the other half is converting our transportation network to run on electricity rather than oil.

I mean, yeah. For now? electric cars are largely signs of wealth that rich people can buy. But the point is that having the technology out there, working with it, improving it, gets us more ready for the day that we do decide to get serious about our energy problems.
Who should be more shameful? The ones asking for money for vacation / nose job / new car, or the ones actually giving the money?
The paragraph about Christiania is bullshit.

It is not legal to smoke or sell cannabis there, and the police have done several raids over the years.
Most people don't even consider it a country, but more like a borough for the hippies.
Copenhagen is mainly social democrat, with some areas even more left wing, and clearing out Christiania would be a very unpopular idea, because a large majority of their voters support Christiania.
Well you can rent them from Hertz!

That... that was the joke.
Weird. I can't get it to work at all on my Nexus 5 Marshmallow in Chrome 46. I tried turning off autorotate. Still nothing.
The article is spot on. Bunch of scams on there with few good people in between needing real help. I wonder if the admins/Mod on the site vet people out.
i'm really interested in chuck. ge wang is a brilliant guy

here's some SuperCollider music i wrote if anyone is interested.

source: https://github.com/keypulsations/variations/tree/master/lilj...

audio:
https://soundcloud.com/keypulsations/liljedahl_abiogenesis_1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10520025

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519875
I think he means funding.
Cached version if you're having trouble: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MXidqS...
And did a great disservice.
A lot of times they aren't the greatest charities in the world either (in terms of outcomes). I'm pretty resentful of these requests--you pick your charity and let me pick mine. They are nowhere near as bad as what the article is talking about though, I've never gotten requests like that.
The news media don't have access to British Telecom's internal systems, so any hacking they do is outside of internal security controls. Here, BT != bluetooth (which may indeed be the attack vector for many hacks).
There is no correct and incorrect; it is a matter of the manual of style you're adhering to.

Chicago (2.13): An em dash has no space before or after, unless you're doing some fancy word-replacing maneuvers with a 2-em dash.

AP (p. 368): An em dash, like an ellipsis, has a space before and after, except when used to introduce items in a vertical list.

http://www.apvschicago.com/2011/05/em-dashes-and-ellipses-cl...

Edit: this won't be complete without mentioning Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style:

> The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.
Am I the only one who prefers the current internet over IPFS? IPFS exposes my IP to anyone who wants to know about the websites I'm visiting. As seen with BitTorrent, that power gets abused significantly. I would prefer a IPFS+Usenet solution, separating the nodes from the clients. What would be even better is if I could choose to connect exclusively to [any country here] nodes, and then I can feel comfortable knowing my traffic is remaining within borders that I can trust with privacy laws.
It's the digital version of panhandling, and it's unfortunate that the few on there who have (in my opinion) a legitimate need are so overshadowed by those begging for a new camera or to go on a trip.
There is nothing wrong donating money for good cause. But when you are giving money when the intentions aren't good, then you are encouraging whoever set up the fund that sort of behavior is ok.
Indeed, and that is not something I want to do. Not knowing about it, doesn't make it OK.
This story was originally posted here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10525159
The answer will be "no, I lost my job".

That doesn't make environmentalism a bad idea.
I think you're speculating. What little evidence I know says that Google is worried about response time, and have strong economic justification to not let it go up. (For example, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-u... ).

Google's initial response time was "virtually instantaneous" by comparison with Altavista. But recall how it used to be an actual form, where you had to submit a query? That took time. Since then, there are features like suggestions and results-while-typing, which help reduce the overall search time.

BTW, when you say "next Google", remember that you can't decouple Google from its advertising-based revenue model. It might not be possible for a search company that uses an another funding model, like DuckDuckGo, to be "a Google" in terms of size and income.

Floating VR controls don't work so well. It's very tiring to keep your arms out in front of your face. I used to work in a VR project, and had the advantage of being a fencer, so I could keep my arm in front of me longer than my co-workers.

Personally, there's still a lot of space left for the "connects everyone" model. What's really missing, and is hard to do, is prioritize connections correctly. That depends very much on personal interests, relationships, and current mood - all of which are hard to determine algorithmically.

The idea in my vision would be to ask something like 'who knows something about writing Excel files?' - a low priority task - and get a response within a couple of hours when a friend who has the experience also has the time to discuss things with you. Or, 'is anyone else interested in going to the beach tomorrow?' and have it only go to those who you are actually interested in going to the beach with.

Basically, personal assistants that coordinate with each other "the right way". A very hard problem to solve. But then again, personal travel advisers were also once a common thing, and useful spam filters non-existent.
Yeah, I personally don't like this bundling of fun activities and charity. If you want to run a marathon, run a marathon. If you want to give to charities, just give. Don't make a pretence of charity to do what you find fun.
I do to.
Reposts are allowed if there hasn't be significant discussion.

If you're upset about missing karma, it's just luck of the draw.
Waiting for the page load to time out?
Show HN: Self-Contained CRUD Template for Java
A lot of them sell for much less than (monthly revenue) * 12. I haven't personally purchased a site from there, but I know people who have.

You don't need to buy something from there -- you can simply use the site to find niches where people actually make money.

Making money online can be done. Example: I started a Minecraft server early on, sold in-game benefits, and now make $5-15K (depending on season) per month. A friend of mine makes way more. Here are the stats he sent me recently: https://i.gyazo.com/81718cef2295bbf4df8a6d9892d140c1.png

One of DHH's bits of advice is to find a niche and focus on profiting enough to support yourself. The internet is the best place to do that.
The twitch creative #programming tag is probably your best bet.
Suddenly, a leopard print sofa appears:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749660

I am a tall woman. If I wear "unisex clothes" -- and not wearing a bra seems a large factor here, so you cannot see bra straps (through clothing) from the back -- and have my hair short enough, I get lots of "Excuse me sir, I think you are in the wrong bathroom." This in spite of most of my life being read as extremely feminine.

Humans haven't solved this yet for humans. I imagine we are rather far off for software.
That's the exact reason why I moved away from reddit some time ago. Reddit used to have insightful comments and debate, but it deteriorated into knee jerk one liners and pun threads (at least in the main subs)

Sadly the same trend is noticeable on hackernews too lately, still very rarely but it seems to become more common.
> correct in American English

Wikipedia has megabytes (hundreds of thousands of words) of discussion around when to use m dash, n dash, hyphen, or minus. Some conversations went to arbcom. Some editors probably got bans.

"Correct" is a dangerous word.
Yes, but on another note, age-group is a murky term to deal with, because a delta t of one year is a lot of time, when development is still very fast as is obvious in weight and size gains.
The idea that you have no say, except once every few years, to pick one of the per-chosen to "respresent" you, isn't actually at-all democratic. It's more like monarchy-light.
Especially because governments don't go repressive overnight. What's perfectly reasonable today may not be in ten years. (Example, Iran.)
> "it's a mistake to start too young"

> "don't start before 23"

Oh Silicon Valley. I've been in tech in the Bay Area for about 5 years now, regularly attending various events and being a part of the community, and most startup founders under 30-35 are ridiculously naive and boring, with very little to show over time. People over 30 with a decade or so of industry and work experience tend to be much more realistic and methodical about what they're doing (I'm 25).

PG is very successful and has some interesting things to say, but it's important to keep in mind that taking advice from someone whose vision of startups in the last 10 years came exclusively from manning YCombinator is going to be deeply biased.
What Happens When You Go Without Sugar for 10 Days?
Pure direct democracy, sure. But Switzerland is has a 'pause' from when the referendum collects signatures to when it actually happens. This gives the 'hive-mind' time to calm and to think more rationally over emotionally. Also, the requirement to physically go to the voting stations acts as a good disincentive for internet viral uproar as they can't make snap decisions. Although, some Cantons are moving towards vote-by-post, but that's still not as bad as what internet voting would be.

IMO, direct democracy to throw out laws and to also get the government to NOT do something (ie: invade a country) I'm in favor for. Though, direct democracy to vote through laws would require stronger restrictions (the law has to be drafted by elected politicians, for example).

But we do need some form of direct democracy because politicians are easily paid for and certainly don't represent the population (at least, here, in the UK).
No market (as libertarians understand markets) has ever emerged in all of history the way libertarians believe they do. All markets emerge in the context of state actors, the earliest being warlords that capture gold and silver, strike coin with their visage to pay their soldiers and demand the peasantry to pay taxes in said coin. Markets follow directly from that. They require states to function for no other reason to have police protection over transactions. When you have too much control from a police state, markets suffer. When you have too little, markets suffer (or melt away actually). You will have to do better than this.
Aren't you saying exactly what my comment was saying?
A more important question is this actually what you want. I've done a bit of research on this myself.

First you need to find a way to tap/click things, and not do so with anything accidentally. Not easy. Blink will have many false positives, as will time-based solutions. Having things pop up new buttons (my original approach) becomes distracting as you gaze over many items that you don't intend to click, only to have new things happening that move so you look at them, but shouldn't.

Also eye fatigue comes in pretty quickly. There's something physiologically interesting when things that normally are automatic becomes purposeful, stress is induced. For example, dictation with speech recognition will quickly strain your voice and you can actually get RSI in your vocal chords! Eyes are similar when you use them as a primary interaction driver versus a support.
The site seems fine to me. A friend told me about it and sent me the link on Facebook.