skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why the downvotes? Don't newspapers also reduce the interaction among customers... I don't mind cafes banning or discouraging squatters or switching off wifi, but why are they stopping people from checking email during breakfast even when they are using their own USB modem/connection.
Science is always unfinished. That's how it works.
Solar System Simulator
If you move from a central hub and spoke electricity distribution to a decentralized model, that alone is a game changer. You don't need to worry about the grid at all.

1. 3.1% seems low. Another estimate from 1995 says 7.2% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Los...). I suspect that the truth is closer to 5%. Also, the losses incurred are dependent upon the distance. Most power plants are located pretty far away from residential and commercial areas.

2. The power plant you're linking hasn't been completed yet. Plus, this is a cutting edge design. Most existing plants won't (couldn't?) be converted to this newer efficiency. And for cost reasons, existing inefficient plants aren't going to be shut down and replaced.

3. The fuel cell doesn't require natural gas. It can also run on biomass, which is completely renewable. And since this isn't based on combustion, you don't get the carbon monoxide, sulfurs oxides, nitrogen oxides, and heavier smog causing hydrocarbons. All of the nasties are produced with combustion. Also, since the CO2 is clean, it can be separated easily from the H2O and stored.

4. Well, they aren't burning anything, so 0% has been from burning fossil fuels. I'd guess most of it was from using natural gas as a fuel, but none of it was burned.

One interesting thing I've read is that they are claiming that this is a reversible process, which means it could be used to store PV energy collected during the day and reuse it at night. But, this system produces so much more energy than a PV cell that I'm not sure it would be of much use. You'd need a very large (sq footage) PV installation to generate this much energy.
it's too difficult to build a "one size fits all" application. as an example, target has one goal with their cashiers: a fast checkout process. so they start a timer when the first item is scanned, and that timer only stops once the receipt has been printed. i was just at a target last week and the cashier told me she had to pause the transaction while someone found something i had asked to be put on hold; she was actually worried about receiving a low score. the score looks like this: 92% A, or 85% B, etc.

so target's "reward" mechanism is partially built into their POS machines, while the other part is driven by their management. if you sell more than 3 target cards in a day, you can pick out anything in the store <$20 for free. that could be built, but it'd have to be tied into target's hardware to work. and how are you going to give those badges away in that case?

i guess i'm not sold on the idea because i don't see any specific examples of where it would be compelling. maybe web-based companies, at that point your main goals are things like code written or commits. so you could monitor all employee's github accounts (as an example) and send out a company e-mail with badges based on that. just an example.
The growing body of Javascript code also means Javascript needs more than just those 16 objects.

I don't know, I don't disagree with the sentiment that the standard lib is pretty bare, but I also think that's the beauty of JS. Also, there are any number of other libs (as the author points out) that add much of the desired missing functionality.

To the author's point of having many libs (jquery, etc) and no chosen standard, I don't see that as a bad thing. To me that just shows that the language succeeds in allowing authors to use it according to their own style and liking.
"If 100% of humanity were to suddenly believe that red is better than blue, would that make it objectively true?"

No, but it does make it subjectively true for 100% of humanity.

In addition, as a sibling comment pointed out: it is possible to objectively decide which of two actions is better than another for any specific definition of better. For example, one definition of moral "betterness" is the quality of being conducive toward the survival of a given society.
Adoption is definitely hard, although that wasn't my point. The kind of DNS replacement that many people want appears to be technically impossible.
My friend's applied for her green card 1.5 years ago. The best estimate for her getting the green card is 2017--about 8.5 years from the start of processing. That is the typical EB-3 wait time.

Are you saying you'd have EB-6 applications also take 8.5 years?
Usually you need a permanent residence permit (Greencard equivalent), and then it has to be a fairly recent one as the laws were only harmonized in the last 5 years. And even then, the permit for most of the EU isn't valid for the UK or Ireland.

In Germany the first permit that you get (an H1B equivalent) is tied to one job, and hence, tied to the place where you have that job. After 5 years of working full-time (and a long string of other checklist items), you're eligible to begin the application process for permanent residence (which I now have).
That's not how it works. Whatever EB-5's don't get used eventually trickle down to EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3. They don't just go unused. If EB-6's start using them up, then there will be fewer EB-3's available every year.
Can Seawater Raise a Crop of Jet Fuel?
US employers shouldn't have that power.

Perhaps not -- but if we're debating a realistic change to the visa system, an argument that begins with rejecting the basic principle under which most visas operate seems pretty impractical.

Adding yet another class of people with unfair power over immigrants, and yet another distortion to the market, seems like a very poor response to that problem.

According to what standard would this give VCs "unfair" power over immigrants?

As for "distorting the market", any substantial change to the visa system would distort the market in one way or another. The practical question is whether the startup visa improves the situation, not whether it is the globally optimal immigration policy.
GD. Quit stealing my potential recruits! :)
We're looking for pretty much the exact same set of qualifications. The only major difference is that we aren't exactly a secretive company.
That said, I won't shill on your post since you took the time and effort to write it. Depending on how tight lipped you are about your work, I'd love to talk shop with you some time. Maybe at SF HUG9?
I think EB-3 is "normal" priority. The Indian/Chinese EB-3 backlog is 9 years. The current "rest of the world" EB-3 backlog is a little over 7 years. See http://travel.state.gov/visa/frvi/bulletin/bulletin_4659.htm....
The remaining 60 chars should be enough for three URLs!
I think a better solution would be to find an innovative way to add interaction like "The Fun Theory" people:

http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/11/fun-theory-how-...
If science gets credit for healing the sick, does it also take the blame for deaths caused by nuclear weapons? Blatant, public, and verifiable. Praise worthy? Not in my book.
Then there are the times when otherwise solidly middle class people become radicalised by financial hardship and capricious and unfair actions of government and financial institutions. When the stable productive core of society is getting dislocated from it's niche and starts to see it's relatively moderate level of privilege erode; that is when you get transformational violence across broad sectors of society.

If you want to argue historical examples, both the french revolution and the rise of fascism in Europe followed this pattern.
Too Dilbertesque for my tastes, sorry.
I like it. I've worked at a few big corporations where you'd get special plaques or pins for years of service, good ideas, attending certain training courses, and so on, and although I personally didn't understand the appeal -- I'd rather have challenging and meaningful work -- the people who earned those awards seemed to display them proudly. I always wondered why that kind of "rep grinding" wasn't more prevalent than the usual winner-take-all "employee of the month" stuff.
You have to be very careful that people don't 'game' the system. Metrics like these are rife for exploitation - especially likely if the metrics and rewards are designed by people who don't have a deep understanding of rule systems.

"Ding! 10,000 lines of code reached!"
-- A recipe for a very bloated product
When was the last time you saw something say "Dr. Knuth"?

You won't see that very often -- Knuth is particular about including first names (or rather, their initials). He got quite upset with me when I wanted to be "Colin Percival" rather than "Colin A. Percival"...

That said, you will see "Dr. D.E.Knuth" in any sort of formal situation (e.g., a visiting lecture); even if "Knuth" by itself is enough, it's simple politeness to provide a full title.
Correlation ≠ Causality
I don't think this will work in the tech world. Don't you think developers will try to game the system just to make more points?

Joel already discussed this kind of renumeration, he gave an example of bugs. If you pay your developers more money if they produce bug-free code, they won't report bugs and it'll result in a worse result.
Heh. When I first saw the document I thought there is no way I am going to read all that now. Surprisingly, the sections that I did end up reading were quite easy to digest (and it's 5am here). I recommend bookmarking it and reading it later if you can't do it now. This is genuinely interesting.

The gem which you might be looking for is:

The queries executed on the GPU were an average of 35X faster than those executed through the serial SQLite virtual machine.

(my apologies to authors for reducing the entire document to that)
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Printing Photos On Canvas
Printing photos on canvas is becoming increasingly popular as it makes the photos come live. When you transfer photos to canvas, you will be able to use them as decorative pieces in your homes and offices. You can print all kinds of pictures on canvas. If you have the right equipment you can even do it at home, however printing photos on canvas has its own challenges.First of all, you will not be able to print on canvas sheets using regular printers.
I have tried doing this repeatedly for me individually and every time it has failed. The reasons:

1. Hard to define measurable goals: How many points for a bug fix. What if a bug fix requires 5 mins other requires 4hrs. Its hard to assign points to each individual work item and track 'em.

2. How to set good milestones.

3. Avoiding Karma whoring: How to stop from racking companionship points by having extended lunches

In a company scenario it would be hard to sell this idea to all employees and might deter some prospective employee to join as it might set the corporation's image as childish in the outside world.
I never understood them. Even if I had an ironclad memory of a kid's face from a poster, under what circumstances would I conceivably run into them? If they're trying to stay hidden, they're probably doing a good job of it, and if their disappearance was not voluntary, I hate to say it, but I don't think you're going to see them walking about in public.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. How is Bayes' theorem not deductive?

Are you talking of the difference between theoretical and experimental science? Because those both operate under the same paradigm: that the universe is causal and consistent.
I distinctly remember the internet being quite shady starting around 1995, but before that I hadn't really been exposed to those parts of the internet.

There are two things going on here. The first is that everyone is exposed to different parts of the internet at different times. The second is how rose tinted your glasses are when looking at the past.
I think a far better idea for the hypothetical Bor Ingsurance is to hire only WoW addicts, skip the ball-point-pens\star-stickers, and reward them with in-game items and gold.
Yes, that's one thing that has to be carefully watched. When you incent someone to do something, they tend to do it. It's a bit of the "be careful what you wish for, you just might get it". Along with that is the disincentive which he did mention. He mentioned it more from a "don't embarrass someone" point of view but again - some people see it as an incentive. Some people are completionists and feel compelled to "get them all". You have to be careful not to encourage bad behavior.
Presumably Target would know to throw out the outlying data points, but that doesn't mean the cashiers know they're allowed to take a few minutes to help the customers.
I would enjoy that unironically — play to the strengths of the medium, don't just syndicate stuff from elsewhere.

Post pithy commentary, triumphant twitpics of shit you're doing, praise/respond/slam others on the web talking about you (via RT where sensible) selectively respond to @repiles, etc.
How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive
A message from Richard Dawkins about discussion forum updates
Wow what great science writing. He made it sound incredibly cool, and normal at the same time. Like somebody talking about car racing.

Now I want to go and look up all this stuff.
Because it means that we end up producing more Ph.D's than can be supported by the job market. It leads to a glut of Ph.D's. The lower cost does not mean that taxpayers get more bang for their buck. The low cost has bad consequences. Right now, in areas like physics, mathematics, etc. it's simply not worth it to get an advanced degree. Also, increasing the supply of graduate students leads to a denigration of standards.

There are very bad long term consequences when a society is such that getting an advanced degree is not economically worthwhile. It typically takes 7 years to get a Ph.D. in mathematics. Pay is low during this time and usually have no benefits. It takes another 4 - 7 years to get a tenure track position and getting such a position is hard. A person is economically better off doing something else.

It is immoral to make people an indentured servant. This is the current setup we have in our university system. This is particularly true for poor people.

Our greatest generation was great because they largely had free higher education. We took a generation of people and paid for them to get degrees if they could get into school and finish. This was of great benefit to society. We gone from this model to the current model where a person pays for the chance to get a piece of paper in the hopes of getting a nicer paying job. For many, they end up being slaves to their debt and don't end with the nicer paying job. It's an immoral system.
I believe that this would only be really beneficial for a McJob-like work environment where the employees believe their work has very little importance or impact.

I would imagine that working at a start-up or at Google or at some other fast-paced innovative company would negate the need such a system and would possibly devalue (within the employee's mind) the importance of their work.
A company spanning system is a pretty lofty goal. Perhaps you should look into something smaller, say something at the application level. A good example would be Ribbon Hero for MS Office.
> does it also take the blame for deaths caused by nuclear weapons?

In my view, yes, it does, and science needs to learn from that (and countless other mistakes). It's certainly not universally praise-worthy. But it does provide a way for ethical people to reliably improve the human condition.
Also, obligatory-TED-video-exposing-counterintuitive-point: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Providing higher rewards decreases performance.
That is pure art.
Wow. After reading the article and some of the comments I'm realizing how different the cafe culture in Europe is. We have been living in the Bay Area for a number of years, so it's not like I haven't seen the droves of people sitting silently in coffee shops and tinkering away on their laptops. But the fact that this even generates a discussion.. :-)

A lot of European establishments I know have decided to never join the wifi movement. And even if many cafes now offer wifi it's very hard to spot people actually sitting with their laptops. Why would you want to, there are so many other things you can do in a cafe. Read, think, draw or just plain talk to the people in your party.
There is probably a pretty large body of work on employee motivation and reward systems in the academic literature. I'd suggest familiarizing yourself pretty closely with all of the research before going anywhere with this idea.
There was a time when I played WoW religiously, and actually had my own guild. This was back in the day, when guilds spent 30+ hours a week clearing dungeons that required 40 people to memorize and execute intricate strategies. Even though my guild was relatively successful, motivating people to show up to these raids was always a chore. Many players consistently left dungeons early, or avoided them altogether. Interestingly enough, these same players didn't mind spending hours grinding or fishing or hanging out in the city, doing nothing in particular. They did this despite the fact that raiding dungeons was more productive, stimulating, exciting, challenging, and potentially rewarding.

I suspect one of the appeals of doing repetitive, mindless things like fishing or grinding in games is because... they're repetitive and mindless. There are real-life equivalents: clicking around on Hacker News, slumping on a couch for hours watching television, etc. These activities are much less mentally exhausting, much less stressful than doing actual work.

Anyway, I think your idea is a great one, but there are some hurdles. If you reward people for menial activities, then they'll waste tons of time on it because it's mindless and easy. Chances are this type of work is not what any company would want its employees doing. If you only reward people for actual demanding work, then chances are you won't really be adding anything.
Wow, what extreme reactions on the negative side. It sounds a lot like smokers being angry at no smoking laws for bars.

There are two issues: 1) Whether a business has the right to limit what goes on in that business (and a worthy debate that is); and 2) How serious your addiction might be if it provokes that much anger.

Step away from the keyboard.
He seems to be arguing that the existence of multiple javascript frameworks is caused by it lacking a standard library, but I don't think you can conclude one based on the other; as a counter example the Java language has an extensive standard library, yet it has many, many 3rd party frameworks as well.

The other thing most of these frameworks provide is cross browser compatibility. If there were a large standard library built into javascript, I fear it would just be more things for different browser makers (especially Microsoft) to implement with different quirks, and you'd still need a 3rd party compatibility framework layered on top of it to be cross browser compatible, only now it would have to cover a large framework instead of just 16 objects.
If only there were some sort of tokens employers could give employees as an incentive. The tokens could then be exchanged for goods and services. Perhaps the production and circulation of tokens could be managed by the government to prevent abuse..
Apple exec Tim Cook talks Apple TV, iPad A4 processor, more
Well, [organic] chemists are "famous" for low average life span.

I heard claims that the life expectancy was much better these days, but the person making the claim had an obvious interest in selling people on doing more courses in the subject. (And the subject is fun; if it had been possible for me, I would have done more org chem.)
> This is true, but you are forfeiting any active management position, authority and likely control, which is basically the same as being fired as CEO.

Again - no, being deported doesn't cause any of those things. The owners of the biz are the ones who make that decison.

Since we're assuming that you're being deported because you're not satisfying the conditions of the startup visa, what are the odds that said owners would have kept you on anyway?

Advocates of the startup visa said that they wanted to bring folks into the company to create biz. Fair enough, but what should we conclude when they complain about deporting folks who don't do what they wanted?

And, what should we conclude when they make up stories about the consequences of deportation?
There are few times I care about voting, but for this I'd vote 5 times ;)
Sieve of Eratosthenes Implemented in CSS
Joel hits on this on the first page (Subversion Re-education). My understanding, as a DVCS virgin, is that you commit far more often (to your local repository) than with Subversion, and so Hg can more intelligently merge things.

My guess is that there is some intelligence that can tell that "foo missing there, and foo added here" is actually just "foo moved from there to here", unlike SVN, which attempts no such heuristics. I hope someone can correct me if I'm wrong here :)
I applaud the effort. I've always thought of cafes in a romantic way as conversation/idea factories but this illusion is completely shattered when I walk in and people are clanking away at their keyboards. So it's nice to see somebody is trying to bring back the romantic image even if it is just for the weekends.
You got all that from the Wiki page? :-)
Wasn't this already submitted a couple hours ago?
I'm not a programmer by trade, so I can't relate to that specific interviewing process. I do have to say though, not all interviews suck. I've been through a fair number of interviews. Some have been good, some have been bad, most are somewhere in between.

I've been offered jobs for most companies that I've interviewed with. I have two pieces of advice. First, be honest. If you don't know something, tell them you don't know it, but stress that you are willing to learn. Second, paint with broad strokes, and fill in with details as they ask for them. And third (I know, I said two,) be prepared, but not rehearsed. This will help to keep you calmer. If you are prepared, answers will come easily, but if you're rehearsed, when you start to forget exactly what you were going to say (and you probably will start to forget) you'll have a harder time improvising.
Except those tokens are currently handed out by a person instead of a unbiased machine who could dispense them based on measured progress for some task. Still made me laugh, you get my vote :)
Probably true, but that doesn't mean there isn't a market for such a idea. What do you think the ratio of McJobs to Startups/Google jobs is?
A good video explanation of Chat Roulette
There is a HBS Press book that goes into this in detail.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/142214657X?ie=UTF8&tag=...
Your mind always knows if it's working or having fun. Every way to trick the mind in confusing the two fools it at most for a short time, then it catches up. I guess that's because your mind is about as clever as you are yourself (and it knows what you're trying to do!).

Also there are already reward systems which are real. I like to be proud of what I do. I like to be rewarded with fair payment. I think stuff like that works better for me than an artificially added point-system.