skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What ars is saying that he wants to take the complex and partially-saturated hydrocarbons in coal and turn them into a hydrogen-satured hydrocarbon. (Most coal has a lot of double-bonds and loops within the carbon, in addition to a hydroxyl groups.) Since energy is released every time you break a bond, you'll have more bonds to break in the end product, but with the same amount of carbon, so you're keeping emissions constant while adding energy.

Regardless, it would be interesting to start with CO2 rather than coal. But can it be sucked up from the atmosphere efficiently and in mass quantities?
Amen. I am in the process of educating myself in the classic accomplishments in the humanities after realizing as much.
The attack is clearly of significance though Linode has not made much information public. Many have been told that the attack is bigger and better organized than the typical DDOS attack. There have been multiple methods of attack, and when one is mitigated they change to a different one. Some have speculated that a competitor may be behind it. Others have speculated that the perpetrators may be demanding a ransom to stop.

I've been following the issue closely, and that is all I know. Linode support has been careful to avoid answering questions like: "How long will this last?" and "What are you doing to prevent it?"
For a .NET package manager, are you referencing Nuget?
I get that and I appreciate the intent, but it doesn't matter whether you're burning conspiracy theories or something else, you're still adding fuel to the fire. It's keeping this unseemly argument going, so please stop.
> don't buy all this conspiracy stuff about the police killing Ian Murdock, though.

I actually didn't state that police killed Ian Murdock, just that his (presumed) suicide could have been the result of the emotional trauma from the beatings. I can not speak for anyone else.
Conversely, what new non-technical thing are you looking forward to in 2016?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819516
This is exactly what bothers me about makeup companies (and the like) that advertise themselves as never having experimented on animals. While they may not be looking at MSDS sheets [1], they are looking at something that tells them which chemicals are safe. And, in doing so, they are relying on millenia of accumulated knowledge about toxic effects, paid for with a lot of human death and suffering and, possibly, someone else's animal experimentation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_data_sheet
I would use Leaflet for this simple map.

Lightweight and fast.

http://leafletjs.com/
When there's enough money to be made in it, private industry will just make it happen. We're not quite there yet, but it seems likely to happen as prices for solar keep falling. Politics don't have to enter into it, but government involvement has the potential to speed up the process.
Wow, I had no idea the fixed cost ran that high. That is very enlightening.
I built something similar because I was disappointed with what was already out there:

https://github.com/lucybot/jammin

I came across another CRUD package recently that seemed to have a good amount of momentum, but can't seem to find it now...
Wikipedia feels like a piece of software that's experienced massive scope creep. It's huge. People have pet pieces they're emotionally attached to. It's so massive and trying to do so much that it's hard to even tell how best to improve it or where to start. For every "bug" (bad piece of info) that's fixed, we push 50 new bugs (and tons of new and correct info, of course).

I've stopped editing because it just feels like a drop in the pond every time I do. When I fix obvious bias it just reappears by the editors with ulterior motives. And I just don't have the energy to fight them on it. I've stopped reading as much because I've learned that for any topic there are much better and more thorough sources. Economics and medicine in particular have very little... quality control on Wikipedia.

With that said it's still a fantastic source for an overview of a topic that I know nothing about, especially for non-controversial topics.

Wikipedia will live on as a good starting place for deep research and a quick explanation for quick questions. There just aren't enough editors to make it into the "sum of human knowledge" some people want it to be.
Jspm solves this by installing the module in a directory appending the package version. There is no maximally flat tree, the tree is 100% flat. At most there are several versions of the same package side by side, but no nesting.

It even supports circular dependencies.
Elixir now feels like node in 2011, Python in the early 2000s or Linux in the 90s. Your money's on the right horse.
I just made an issue on github, but the uniform distribution looks wonky at the right endpoint.
Sorry, could you explain what you mean by marginal tax impacts?

I assume this is something along the lines of:

Employer: "We can offer you an additional $3k/year in income but it will be taxed at 40%. Or we can offer you 3k in health benefits tax free. Which do you prefer?"
You made it seem like this is released. Right now the official version is v2.0.0-rc4.
Concern about if what I built was too specific to me and if others would even use it.
I think it is fair game to argue against breathless conspiracy theories. It sort of surprising to see in this thread such complete acceptance for the "the police murdered him" narrative while noting the obvious reality, that this is extremely unlikely and the truth is probably much simpler, is actually extremely derided.
Useful resources for user story mapping
Having worked with and directed people of differing ethnic backgrounds, I would pick the Chinese as best to work with. The worst who shall remain nameless, were either augmentative dishonest or lazy and some were as thick as two very thick planks glued together. You had to speak to them in very short sentences and not use big words and still they didn't get it. I didn't experience a large enough sample to form an opinion as to whether it was environmental or genetic.
Yes, I was at Apple when that happened and remember being told not to approach people from Google. Here's the thing though: Facebook and many other companies here will still hiring. In fact, they were aggressively poaching from Google. So, while what they did was clearly wrong, I don't believe it was a conspiracy to depress wages (Also, Google pays very well and has amazing benefits). Once again, in the media, the simplistic narrative wins.

Interestingly, I quit Apple after that and went to a company that declined the no-hire deal with Apple: http://gizmodo.com/5978223/the-no-hire-emails-that-that-invo....
Thanks! Great question.

There is a huge variance in the cumulative gains as you pointed out. Because of the 100 win/110 loss edge that Vegas has you need to win over 52.5% of the time to register a profit. Even with a model that can win 52.5% + e of the time you are effectively flipping a (biased) coin. Over the 131 games in the holdout dataset this random walk will tend upward, but can vary widely (especially at the start). As the season continues on this should start to wash out (in the cumulative profit). We plan to write a followup post at the end of the season to see how it performs. You could also fork the code [1] and train/tune on '00-'13/'13-'14 and use the entire '14-'15 set as the holdout (or a similar combination).

The features can be found here [2], we don't use individual player stats or temporal stats, but it should be relatively easy to add if you wanted to try it out.

[1]: https://github.com/sigopt/sigopt-examples

[2]: https://github.com/sigopt/sigopt-examples/blob/master/sigopt...
I tossed 'founders helping founders' out to describe an idea. Don't worry, I haven't bought the domain yet...:)
Not just that, but they're working on making Node work with Chakra.
> we should be skeptical of React too, terrible for static HTML

It's easy when you use webpack and a static renderer:
https://github.com/markdalgleish/static-site-generator-webpa...
The Developer Formerly Known as FreeBSDGirl
Frankly? Because its worked fine til now, each client has their own VPS and linode has been very reliable for 6 years for me and 3 years since I started company.

But yeah I should have and did know better :(.
My only problem with representation here is that if you have differing opinions than one of the other groups, you get downvoted into oblivion. Hell, saying anything that goes remotely against the tide gets you downvoted.

I can understand what he means though, because most people that downvote me are "JS hipsters." Since these people comment the most, they have the ability to control the conversation, and thus leave a larger visible proportion of representation.

Everyone has this policing tone, too, and it's obnoxious.
Comment Spam War
Yeah, people always seem to forget that most deserts have life. Then there's the clans of nomads that live in the Sahara. The need for, at least initially, military protection and patrols. Someone has to keep the power lines/pipes from being destroyed. And, of course, the countries surrounding the area aren't the most stable either.

The systems needed to control the automated surveillance drones coordinating the security teams would be interesting though.

A green energy solution would be nice but I have a hard time seeing covering Sahara in solar panels being it. To many variables, to big a project. Besides everybody want local solutions for national security reasons anyways.

>> "I think the past 263 years (since Franklin's kite experiment) have shown us electricity is a way of progressing

It would be more fair to give this honor to Faraday since he invented the electrical motor and other uses for electricity while Franklin proved lightning is electricity and invented the lightning rod. Having your house not burn down is beneficial to progress, in that you can spend less time building houses, but doesn't really fuel progress in itself.

I've always felt that Franklin steals the thunder by having a better, more dramatic story - the kite and all that. A genius in his own right though.
Pakistan drops demands for access to encrypted communication on Blackberries
Seems to me that reasonable people could disagree over whether POSIX should be considered the be-all and end-all of OS standardization.
It's not 100% objective, but for simple things, it mostly is. If you hop on the mailing lists you will find all sorts of people bickering about whether it should be `shop=ice_cream` or `amenity=ice_cream` or `restauraunt=ice_cream` as they fight over their self-made taxonomies.

At some point, I think, things will inevitably change. But for the moment, there's so many obvious things to work on that the confusing/subjective things don't really pop up too much.
18,000 TEU. Wow. So big it has its own container cranes. And LA just had a 15,000 TEU Mersk ship. The rail transportation corridor out of LA's ports can handle only about 12,000 TEU a day, on double-stacked trains. There's not 18,000 TEU of storage space in the entire port, let alone one of the subports. (The Port of Los Angeles is a landlord, not an operator; there are about a dozen private businesses with their own docks and container handling facilities cranes there.)

Sorting is a huge problem. Some containers go on truck beds at the port, and can head for a destination. The ones that go on trains may need a further sort; some of that happens inland, Fontana, CA and Coulton, CA being major transfer points.
> freedom
Why is it counter to freedom? The USA might be the only country on the planet with a definition of freedom that idiotic.

Personally I think it's the combination of anti-socialism brainwashing and the "I got mine so screw you" attitude too many people have.
Finland and Sweden also adjust the border between them every 25 years without drama.
Much of that is because the react histogram library I used. There are a bunch of issues with it. I definitely intend to replace it with something much better. If any of you recommend tools or libraries for that, I'd be very appreciative.
Maybe someone can help me understand the significance, because this seems perfectly obvious. I couldn't read the full article, but I don't think any scientist in the field felt like humans hadn't had any impact on plants and animals through massive agriculture and reduction or extinction of predators.
I think OP's point is more about storage than transmission. Yes you can transport electrons over a wire, but that has a cost and then you have a limited reachability. With liquid on the other hand, you can store in massive tanks and transport anywhere in the world to produce energy locally.
There's a sequel to Daemon, you might as well pick it up now!
Well, trees have been doing it for a long time. Where do you think the carbon in the trees comes from? :)
While I agree with your sentiment the problem is that solar panels in populated urban areas that are perpetually blanketed by geoengeering spraying practices are not going to be nearly as efficient as ones in dedicated remote areas not being sprayed.
I am referring to this fragment:

> Thus, for many applications, in order to successfully interact with humans, machines will need to explain their reasoning, including some quantification of confidence, to
humans.

No doubtful there are cases when an explanation is easy. Often this is because we have a very solid model like physics of a car. In fact since we know the model, we do not need an explanation, we must demand that the algorithm follows the model or declare it unfit.

But how can we expect an explanation for a behavior in a critical situation on a road that was not explicitly programmed and when the algorithm decided to turn to a particular degree bases on a non-trivial inference? Similarly, when an algorithm decides if a patient needs an emergency operation or if they can wait, why can we expect an simple explanation especially for the patient with rare conditions when algorithm again must perform an inference, not a deduction from 1000 very similar cases?
This is awesome! Have you heard of Augur? It's a decentalized prediction market: http://augur.net I wonder if the guys there would be interested in this.
Awesome!
I use Crystal Ball (http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/crystalball/o...) with triangular distributions and Monte Carlo for software project cost estimation. Crystal Ball costs thousands of dollars so I will be following this with interest.
She could simply be trying to say that nothing is ever free. Conservation of energy dictates you need energy to produce energy, no matter the tricks you use to get energy there is always a cost even if it is not immediately apparent.
The personal responsibility riff gets really problematic when you are faced with things like alcoholism or venereal diseases. People certainly have a choice to keep alcohol consumption down practice safe sex &c. But it's a reality that some people catch STDs or drink too much even though they should not, and these things have a way of affecting more than the afflicted individual.

And food deserts are a very real thing. If you live in one of those you haven't even much of a choice regarding obesity.
Definitely, keeping a close eye. Have long been interested in prediction markets. It would be nice to tie data from them and the Good Judgement project into tools like Guesstimate so people could make forecasts using other strong forecasts.
For completeness, on ewams' question: if the options are non-qualified (NQSO instead of ISO) and FMV at the time of exercise was $500, you would owe ordinary income tax on $400 ($500-$100) of income in 2015 tax year and long-term capital gains on $500 ($1000-$500) in 2017 tax year.

Not a tax pro; this is not tax advice; yada yada.
VMware is trying to hire angry employees from crashed unicorn Good Technology
I hope facebook at least displays a big red constantly visible warning banner to those users.
Bulk transport over the ocean is extremely cheap, so much so that oil speculators are paying ships to idle in anticipation of price rise.

Electrical transmission will lose you anywhere from 1%-1.5% per 100 miles depending on the voltage you step up to. Transmitting from the Sahara to the places where the load is gets you to rather large resistive losses.

Also, there are generation losses. A traditional heliostat boiler + turbine will get you about 15-20% effficiency. then you have to shunt the waste heat somewhere in a place with very little fresh water. Oops. PV doesn't get you much better, with about 18% efficiency, but you do solve the need for coolant, at the cost of another problem: Sahara dust on your panels.

The OP talks about using the thermal output from heliostats directly, which would probably (like you, I haven't done the math) be more efficient in fuels production than 15-20%, although you do have the coolant problem again.

One of us should do the math :) Until then, my intuition is that liquid fuels production from such a remote location would probably be more efficient.
> Cross-platform (mostly, at least Nix requires a unixy layer on Windows)

Not good enough, language package managers must work on Windows, with a regular command prompt.
Oculus announces “Touch” VR controller delay to second half of 2016
One is post birth and the other pre birth.
A distributed system of solar arrays intelligently placed on top of every building in the world, back-feeding into the grid or powering on-site batteries (Tesla Powerwall, etc.).

Or massive array in one geographical region susceptible to natural disasters, politics, or terrorism.

I'll take the distributed system.
If people are trained with the correct answers of IQ tests, they will get better scores.
There's been a sad habit of the Russian state nationalizing industries, reforming them as state-run corps, handing the reins to one of Putin's friends and then looting them of anything valuable. This doesn't bode well for the Russian space program.

To add a bit more value to my shorter post, here is a partial list of the extreme corruption in industries that Putin's government has gifted to friends of the President;

Russian Railways: http://www.reuters.com/article/russia-capitalism-railways-sp...

Gunvor Energy Trading:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8175406/...

Bank Rossiya:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/world/europe/it-pays-to-be...

Gazprom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazprom#Establishment_of_gover...

Etc. etc. As a final comparison.. The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver cost ~$1.7B Canadian.. The Sochi Olympics cost upwards of $51B.

The scale of graft is staggering.
How to Register Your Drone (UAS) with the FAA (US Only)
On the other hand, medical bankruptcy is reality.
You and me both my friend, who did you move to?
Why does that argument get applied to healthcare, and not to education? Those bright yellow government provided schoolbuses painted National School Bus Glossy Yellow aren't paid for out of educational transport insurance copays, you know...
Is there a meaningful way in which we can act?
Chemtrail citation needed.
This is the worst thing about Wikipedia. Experts with actual knowledge are discouraged and ridiculed while those who have built up longevity through tenacity retain control even if they know nothing.
NPM has some dumb legacy features like optionalDependencies. optionalDependencies are often native code dependencies that might fail but the package is still usable, maybe just some specific feature isn't. That's the most common reason I come across for errors.
Is there a non-login required link?

Edit: Here, http://www.logicmatters.net/tyl/
What about water usage? At scale, doesn't it take a significant amount of water (for a desert) to clean the dust off the panels?
Unfortunately this captures the problems I face developing with JavaScript (frameworks and libraries du jour) in general.
It's not really related but it made me think of a friend's PhD thesis on uncertain data. If the subject interests you, be sure to checkout the summary of his (impressive) work: http://a3nm.net/blog/phd_summary.html.
Write up what? Sandworm's syndrome of the progressive dysfunction inherent to hierarchical volunteer communities? Talk to anyone who has worked as a volunteer coordinator. They see this all the time.

As for keeping volunteers equal to avoid the problem, that need not mean keeping everyone identical. Leadership roles can rotate, with finite term limits. That way every leader today knows they will be the underling tomorrow. (This also keeps everyone interested and motivated as nobody is every stuck on one task/job).
Can they make it so I can spawn a process and not worry about whether I'm spawning on unix or Windows?
That's Citizendium.[1] 16K articles total, 1219 "developed" articles, 160 "expert approved, citable articles". It has about 10 active contributors, after 8 years of operation.

[1] http://en.citizendium.org/
In recent years, the BL have worked closely with Wikipedians to share media under free/ open licences, including over a million images on Flickr Commons, and releasing audio recordings of birds, to which they own the copyright. I've worked with them on both projects. They also employed a Wikipedian in Residence for a year, and generously hosted a Wikipedia conference and other Wikipedia events.
Yes, I was part of that class action, I'm very familiar with it. In fact, when my boss went to a competitor, I actually had a conversation with Steve Jobs about it. My impression was that he was more concerned about losing expertise and trade secrets about the iPhone than wages. The ensuing battle over Android underscores this.

I'm not really ignoring the broader point, just responding to the specific point about Silicon Valley.
Improve Your QA in 2016 with Heroku Pipeline
We're already solving the problems of globalization, and even if we weren't governments are getting more and more de-fanged to resist the corporations. People by and large don't care about the environment, most say they do but if we told them we could save a big portion of it by eliminating Amazon Prime, most people would opt to keep the quick shipping I think.
Thanks for the reply. I don't know if I have sufficient interest to actually grab the code and try it out. However, I will try to remember to look for your update post at the end of the season.
Honestly, my favorite resource for much of this is the book How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard. He goes into detail in understanding the value of information and how and why to use Monte Carlo Simulations.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4fHGTsZZD8
Book: http://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Busin...
Aw, come on, lighten up, it's just an online forum. Maybe people develop Asperger traits from working in this field. Like one time I asked a college did he know what the time was, he replied YES and walked off :)
A good percentage of npm modules are <1.0.0 so you're very likely to get dupes.
Well, privately insured patients pay for their privilege when they're getting old, when the insurances hike up their fees to no end. Everyone knows that, but people that earn enough to qualify are in denial because it provides them with a bit more disposable income in the short run.

The situation of having that many insurances is certainly bloat, but interestingly enough, it led to the situation where some of them operate with a deficit, while others operate quite efficiently. With the current legal situation, and literally hundreds of companies still being around, I'm not sure this is something that can be streamlined in the next few decades. People would lose jobs, after all.
Wow. Thanks for opening my eyes to do that. I was wondering why I would use another package manager.
A "Rumsfeldian" visualizer. Neat!

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/rumsfeld...
More like: "We can offer you $3k/year in health insurance, but your take-home income will decrease by $1.5k/year as well."
We've come a long way from the days of unloading individual items from ships by hand. The NPR Planet Money podcast had a great show on the invention of shipping containers: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/04/248883212/episo...