skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I guess I would respectfully disagree with a lot of what you say based on underlying assumptions. At first it doesn't matter how land efficient or inefficient these things are; they have to actually really for reals work and prove that they have durability and whatnot. There's a decent chance they won't and if so, how tightly you can pack them is 100% irrelevant.

> Windmills are sited such that they are rarely idle, it happens but that's money being lost and a very large amount of the pre-work in siting a wind power park is to make sure that idle time is as low as possible. Yes, it is nice they're stowed when not in use but that's a situation you want to avoid.

Well, sort-of. Traditional windmills are fairly expensive per watt and they can only be financed when they're turning all the time. But if your kite system only cost 10% of a traditional windmill then it only has to turn 10% as much as a regular windmill. Further, that's before you start factoring in the cost of actually moving the power from where the windmill generates power to where people use power. I don't know what it's like in Europe for sure (though from what I can tell there are problems), but I can tell you that it's a nightmare here in the US. Dollars per watt generated are important, but ultimately what governs feasibility is dollars per watt delivered. If you have to spend $1b to put up new transmission lines to your $200mm ideally located, perfectly productive wind park, you're going to have a bad time.

If these kites are much, much cheaper than everything else you could end up seeing a sort of paradigm shift like computing saw; at first instruction execution was expensive and latency was "free" but eventually execution got cheap and latency got expensive. Is it a perfect analogy? No. But there's some wisdom hidden, perhaps.

EDIT: I read your longer write-up on the issue and perhaps they're not talking about power per meter of rotor, but power per dollar. Metrics matter.
I fear we may have to agree to disagree; ironically, I think we have a lot of common ground. I would like to point out of couple of closing thoughts:

>It even appears you're meeting the World Health Organization's recommendation to get at least 55% of calories from carbohydrates and probably getting enough fiber (which only 3% of Americans do!)

This doubtful; while the total carbs of this diet might reach this threshold- Most designers of well formed teratogenic diets are targeting net carbs (<30g). I would imagine this fiber portion of the carbs (well over 50% in this case) does not really count towards caloric carbs.

>you've already exceeded the daily recommended intake for cholesterol (300 mg; each egg contains approximately 250 mg)

Unless you have the right (wrong?) mutations, I think the jury is still out on this. Would you be surprised if I told you my serum cholesterol has not been negatively impacted?

>Nitrites and nitrates have also been shown to increase insulin resistance and

These meals should be limited to what naturally occurs- which is minimal compared to processed meat.

>However, let's agree there is room for improvement, especially if you struggle with BMI, high blood pressure..

This diet made it easy (satiety perspective) to shed 60 lbs and take my blood pressure from 138/75 -> 112/66. So while I cannot speak for others I really must disagree for my own account.

>On a slight tangent, have you used the website, Cronometer?

Very cool website, thanks for the share.

Thanks for the interesting conversation.
Yep:

http://swiftstub.com/43404468

Obviously you should be careful not to commit such atrocities in any code that might ever see production.
Do you see regulatory hurdles as more pressing than technical hurdles?

Not yet.

Based on what I know of Google's efforts, I think your three-year horizon for Tesla is, well, optimistic. As many miles as Google has logged, they're not testing at highway speeds yet -- I don't think their driverless prototypes (as opposed to the modified Lexus SUVs) are even capable of highway speeds. Also, AFAIK, they're only testing cars in Mountain View and Austin, which means there's a lot of weather conditions -- and to some degree terrain -- that they haven't had to accommodate. The most recently-given figures they've supplied that I can find is that they expect to be able to commercialize their technology between 2017 and 2020 -- and they've been working on this project since 2009. Tesla'a engineering is good, to be sure, but I would be really surprised if they beat Google to market in this area.

Now, once somebody really does start offering these for sale to the general public (or just to taxi/rideshare companies or etc.), the answer to your question shifts from "not yet" to "yep."
While I will concede I failed to convince him, I think he was polite and civil, which amongst those who disagree is rare these days.
And I thought I was the oddball ;)

Yup, sometimes it's easier for me to understand somebody else's OCaml/F#/Elm code than Clojure code written by myself. I still love working with Clojure, though. Go figure...
I think open sourcing Swift was a good move. I see they have a Linux port already but no Windows port yet.

I haven't tried it yet because my PC runs Windows 10 and I run Linux in a virtual machine that is slow and I could install Swift there but I want to learn how it works first and get an IDE or text editor that supports it. I'm currently using Atom in Linux.

I'm used to Classic Visual BASIC, C, Python, Java, and Ruby on Rails but haven't learned Swift yet. I hope it can cross compile OSX apps as well as Windows apps as well on the Linux platform so it has some cross platform abilities.
I was about to jump on that bet too. Regardless of the technical hurdles, I would bet the regulatory hurdles alone are too big for 3 years. 5 year? Maybe not. 10 years? Hail no. But 3 years is a very short amount of time to get everything cleared up, especially with an election year coming up. My guess is that the interest groups who would oppose autonomous cars is a diverse enough coalition across the political spectrum that changing laws will not be super easy.
Earlier this year a very similar bug was already found in OpenSSL (in BN_sqr). So it's already a "twice in a year just in OpenSSL" event.
Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc. all typically report 'Gross Revenue' which is pretty misleading since the majority of Gross Revenue is passed through to the driver / apartment owner -- That may be what that sentence is in reference to. The interesting number is 'Net Revenue' which is how much Uber actually receives to pay their bills, etc.

Quick example, if 10 riders take an Uber and their cost is $20/each, Uber would report $200 in Gross Revenue. Since their driver split is something like 80/20, their Net Revenue would only be $40.
Google makes ‘largest purchase’ of renewable energy to power data centers
I stopped using steam because it seems to expect a broadband internet connection. It will often (sometimes without prompting) overwrite and re-download gigabytes of data
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How to handle a client backing out of a job at the last minute
That may be a certain relaxation point, way to entertain themselves. No need to seriously analyze something, just having fun going with it. Especially if you don't really care about what other people are thinking about you.
I do know Android Studio likes to rock Gradle. Clojure has Lein though, why would you use Maven then? :)
I can't disagree more with a blanket statement like that. I would never recommend Python / R to the physicists and scientists that I work with. They don't know how to program well. The code they put out is usually garbage, hard to read, and fragile. Software development is not something they do. Backing up for them is emailing themselves a .zip file of their work and revision control is saving their DocXs and PPTs with different dates in the filename.

My point is, coding is not something they enjoy, or care about, it's just a means to an end. The environment and tooling around R/Python still cannot compare to Matlab in terms of ease of use, for the things that Mathworks (creators of Matlab) care enough about to write a toolbox or gui wizard for. The value is not in the language, or syntax, but in the libraries and tooling. I don't know a single Matlab user who doesn't make heavy use of the toolboxes Matlab sells.

And this is why I believe Matlab is not going to go away. If being free and flexible was all that mattered, Linux would have arrived on the desktop already.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10666275
WINE Can Already Successfully Run Two DirectX 11 Games
Before Minecraft, the Blocks Were Made of Wood
People need to pay attention to the extremely narrow scope of the study - ALL subjects were gastric-band patients. Given the subsequent findings that stomach-reducing surgeries have significant favorable effects on hormonal balance unrelated to reduced food consumption, I don't see this generalizing well to other populations who lost similar amounts of weight via other means.
> non-lisp pretty-printer?

Brandon Bloom's fipp[1] works fine but the Chrome Canary dev tools have support for object formatters. I get reasonable results on .170 just doing a (js/console.log a-map).

[1] https://github.com/brandonbloom/fipp
Wear it a bit tighter and it will be accurate.
Google Hiring Committee story
you just seriously insulted iSheeps.
There has been plenty written on how those things could be privatized (see the writings of Murray Rothbard and Walter Block).

Regarding your earlier comment about "a debt to society", no one is in debt to society for those things, because no one contractually agreed to be in debt. Yes those services exist, and yes they provide real benefits, but the problem is they are not voluntary. Being in debt involuntarily is akin to slavery.

Now, that is the philosophical justification for one who believes in the non-agression principle. Obviously such a belief is more of a hope for a utopia which will never be realized in the foreseeable future.
> As many miles as Google has logged, they're not testing at highway speeds yet -- I don't think their driverless prototypes (as opposed to the modified Lexus SUVs) are even capable of highway speeds.

Tesla's autopilot functions at up to 90mph.

> I think your three-year horizon for Tesla is, well, optimistic.

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/obviously-drivers-are-already-a...

"Four days later, Reese, Mastracci, and Roy piled into a Model S and took off. They covered 2,994 miles at an average speed of 51.8 mph, a figure that includes the time spent plugged into Supercharger stations along the way. They had autopilot mode engaged 96 percent of the time, Reese says, using it at speeds around 90 mph. It eased the burden on the team, a big deal when you’re in a car for 57 hours straight."

96 percent of the time, at speeds up to 90mph, across 2,994 miles
Debugging Node.js in Production
This is awesome! Way easier than installing anything that tries to do everything for you, especially if you have a non-traditional setup.

One caveat: AWS CloudFront requires the domain key to be 2048 bits instead of 4096. Other than that, worked flawlessly for me and now www.a1k0n.net is finally SSL capable. Thank you!
There's one thing I can't understand about Apple's approach, and that is their pathnames.

As good as Swift is, putting it by default in asinine paths like "/Library/Developer/Toolchains/swift-latest.xctoolchain/usr/bin" doesn't help anybody (and a ton of stuff in OS X is like this).

A more Unixy way to do this would be /opt/swift-3.0/bin, where /opt/swift is a symlink to /opt/swift-3.0. Even Apple used to limit the path insanity to merely /Developer/usr/bin. Not sure what happened...
Follow Amy Hoy and crew creating a product in 24 hours
Both. In the 2000's, I worked at a startup developing spectrum-sharing radio technology.[1] We ran into a range of problems similar to what I believe will hold up autonomous car development:

1) When you scale from individual autonomous devices to vast networks of them you run into emergent phenomena that you simply could not predict ahead of time.

2) You have to spend enormous engineering effort protecting incumbents. E.g. there has been a ton of work on figuring out how to protect wireless microphones used by churches and stadiums. They are intermittent and have a "dumb receiver" (that never transmits), making them very difficult to handle using a "listen before talk" approach. And that's for fricking church PAs. Imagine the push-back when your technological edge case runs over a kid.

3) You can't deploy commercially until you change the regulatory regime. That can take years to decades if you're asking for seismic shifts in policy.

I would predict another 5-10 years before the technology works correctly at scale, rather than under controlled conditions. Then maybe another 5-10 years after that for limited regulatory approval, and maybe 10-25 years for widespread regulatory approval. I don't expect to be able to catch a self-driving cab in New York or Chicago before 2040.

[1] The end goal was technologies that could obsolete fixed spectrum allocation by letting networks of cognitive radios sort out for themselves what frequencies to use. There are various narrower applications, such as technologies that can take advantage of TV "whitespaces."
i don't think condescension is polite.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=android+watch+not+showing+correct+time
> Apple was on the brink of going out of business when Steve returned and stayed in business because Gates and Ballmer provided Apple with $150M to stay in business - a wise move at the time because Microsoft was in trouble with the justice department and needed to ensure that there were companies still in existence that could even vaguely be argued to be valid competitors to Microsoft.

I'm tired of this myth being propagated. The $150MM wasn't even the most important part of the deal for Apple: http://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-micr...
My first thought was to question the energy efficiency of this kind of system. However, it's interesting from the angle of secure document destruction: the system is essentially a high security shredder with a side effect of spitting out "new" paper.
Again, your basic scientific knowledge is lacking. There is no meaningful transfat in red meat, fatty or otherwise.
That quote isn't the smoking gun people hold it up to be, did he really believe this or was he just a salesman trash talking the competition? Steve Jobs crap talked a lot of products (e.g. tablets & then smaller tablets) right up until they day Apple was ready to sell them.
Coming from someone who earlier proclaimed, "i'm a keto True Believer[tm]", it's quite ironic seeing you say this. I wonder why I've struck such a chord with you?
Method Swizzling
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Really, with the ad hominem attack? Why not ask yourself why you feel threatened by mere information, rather than resort to childish name-calling?
Or PHP, if they're one of those very few people who still writes it like that.
The Samsung Gear S (released November, 2014) accepts a sim card and can make calls without tethering to your phone.

The marketplace for apps is fairly limited though.
> Swift is the first language I've encountered that works this way; are there others?

Lisp, of course :-) Common Lisp's SETF and related macros work this way. E.g.,

(incf (ldb (byte 3 5) x))

would increment the "byte" (CL's term for an arbitrary bit field) of width 3 at offset 5 of X.

INCF is defined in terms of SETF. Of course, the set of macros that can update a place is user-extensible. So if you wanted one that multiplies the value in the place by two, you could just write something like this (the trailing "f" in the name, as you might guess, is the convention for such a macro):

(define-modify-macro doublef () (lambda (x) (* x 2)))

then you could call it like this:

(doublef (ldb (byte 3 5) x))

to double the value in the bit field.

(EDIT: used lambda expression instead of helper function.)
Yep, or one certificate for multiple subdomains (SAN certs).
What's harder, making another Uber or making a self-driving car?

Double-sided networks like Uber are hard to gain critical mass. Uber did it, which is extremely impressive, however, whoever comes up with a self-driving car will eliminate one side of that network, making it substantially easy to compete.

I personally don't see how Uber's infrastructure minus the driver network is that important.
That would be a very financially-imprudent move, in any case. Just extrapolating from my car payment, that's like a $1200 payment. Moreover, are you going to make any more money from fares than if you had bought a used SUV at $20k?
Yugoslavia turned to be an unnatural union and was swept by tidal forces. It lacked glue and unifying ideology expired in the end.

This is a lesson why you need religious or ethnic union, or nationalism. Why else you are country X and not country Y or Z?
Any optimising compiler for a mainstream language that can't do this optimisation reliably in this day and age is crap.
> Dalai Lama is not the head of Buddhism but the head of Tibet

Which seeks to be combined theological and political state in the vein of Russian czars, Japanese emperors, North Korea, and countless other ruling parties. You can even argue Great Britain still abides by this.

> we would not confound Iranian political independence with Shia Islam

Why would we not? They are 2 sides of the same coin. Religion is quite often the basis of political power such as in Iran.
>>It is interesting to think about what [Gates], Ballmer, or Stallman would've done in academia.

Considering the current state of academia and the many articles regularly posted here, they probably would have burned out and left. That would have been the real waste in my opinion.
Yeah, I hear that argument a lot from people who don't understand how the service container works. Laravel is really quite easy to understand if you have a decent knowledge of PHP. You can replace entire chunks of the framework for basically no cost if you want something to work differently.
Intelligence and nuttery/crackpottery are two separate things. In fact, intelligence can even enable nuttery because an intelligent nut is better at rationalizing his own nuttery than an unintelligent nut. Someone can be literally a world-class brain surgeon and still believe that the pyramids were constructed to store grain, for instance.
>I love writing Clojure(Script) code, but I hate reading it. It fits perfectly with the way I think (when I'm writing code), but horribly with the way I try to understand code I wrote months ago.

I've used Clojure for 2 years - I feel the same way. It's a wonderfull language that exposed me to great ideas and showed me that simple things can be simple but boy does it get nasty when things don't fit the provided primitives and actually start getting complex - the language has no tools to deal with complexity it can't simplify.

Also a - for CLJS from me is that they haven't abstracted out the (do ...) macro from channels (ironic with all those talks harping on how simplicity is about disentangling things). The biggest pain in JS/DOM ecosystem is shitty semantics, poor standard library and callback stacks. ClojureScript fixes first two really well and does a half-assed job at fixing the last - channels are too much overhead for such task (from both performance and conceptual POV - putting a queue in front of every callback is silly in a single threaded model).

I feel like Elm is a language designed to explore an idea not to be practical, this is why I haven't tried using it for anything serious.

TypeScript has potential in theory to bring ES6 + type safety to avoid semantic pitfalls - but in practice it's supposedly biggest strength of leveraging the existing JS ecosystem is also it's greatest weakness in that you're still left there with shitty JS ecosystem with zero consistency, most libraries deal with JS pitfalls in their own unique way which doesn't mesh well with other approaches or with TS, fragmented build, packing, dependency management, module loading tools - all trying to solve the same problem in different and incompatible ways - it's just a pile of junk that wastes more time trying to reuse stuff than it takes to build anything - which is probably why most of it is in the state it is - and very few things are actually maintained so the argument that reinventing something means you need to maintain it yourself is not really convincing.

Dart has a built in package manager, has had tools for dealing with async code for a while now (both async/await and streams), it's familiar to the Java/C# devs but it's surprisingly concise (quite a few nice touches like constructor property-parameter mapping or => getter syntax for tedious stuff), the standard library is great and avoids all the JS pitfalls.

The downside is that you still need JS interop because there's no way around it (for eg. emscripten) - and talking to JS from Dart is still nasty - much more involved than CLJS or TS.

Having used all 3 mentioned for non trivial work I like Dart the most and the new JS interop could make it even better.
I was really surprised the first time I saw banding in a 24-bit gradient image, I spent many years thinking it was impossible. But I'm still not sure if that's an inherent limitation of 24 bits, or whether my display is not capable of displaying all 24 bits with full fidelity. The LCD manufacturers are using tricks to squeeze the last couple of bits out of panels that aren't up to the task.
Reagent – JavaScript Testing Utilities for React