skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Realise that virtually all your energy storage options have hugely pressing cost, capacity, or storage stability problems.

Pumped hydro's remarkably efficient, fast-responding (minutes), but extremely limited in scale. See Tom "Do the Math" Murphy, but I think you'd need ~1,500 or was it ~15,000 Hoover-dam sized project for US storage capacity.

Batteries are fairly efficient, but respond slowly (you can neither charge nor discharge them rapidly), and at scale virtually all have massive substrate / materials shortages -- lead and lithium particularly. Iron-based batteries should be abundant, and liquid metal or molten-salt batteries seem to be the most abundant. Storage densities aren't great, but if you're building stationary facilities, that's not a concern. The 600C - 800C temperatures may be though. Having a neighbourhood melt-out wouldn't be pretty.

Biomass might work for standby thermal generation.

Thermal salt storage also pencils out. But any thermal storage system, that is, hot stuff you use to boil a working fluid that runs through a gas turbine, suffers from Carnot efficiency losses, about 35-45 max efficiency. If in a desert area, you've got problems of cooling your working fluid without venting too much of it (or the coolant). Not insoluble problems, but an issue.

Heat also doesn't store indefinitely though it should be good for hours to a few days.

Fuel synthesis has the advantage of scaling fairly arbitrarily large, particularly with liquid hydrocarbons. Put them in liquid-proof tanks and they'll stay there. Storage stability is proven to 100s of millions of years, so there's that. They're also transportable and can be utilised on-site. You lose 50% in hydrogen electrolysis, plus 65% on Carnot, for a net return of about 17%, but if you've sufficient peak surplus, that's viable.

CAES has the hot/cold problem, but there's a lot of air, and there's a lot of underground reservoir. Again I'm not sold that it pencils out, but it's possible.

Other options include direct banking of heat for buildings and/or industrial processes -- these use a lot of energy, and direct application and storage avoids electric or electric-to-fuel conversion losses.

It'll be interesting.
Engineering the first iPhone is a completely different kind of challenge to engineering an EV - probably a lot easier in most ways that matter.

For the iPhone, it was a relatively fresh niche, so the minimum quality bar was very low (and considering how much better smartphones have gotten, you could argue that early models intentionally left a lot of room to improve). EV cars need to compete not only with "normal" cars, but also with generations of tesla's, and a wide variety of hybrids, including plug-ins that can to some extent provide the same benefits. A new entry needs to be much more competitive.

Then, the ingredients to a smartphone are fairly simple, and it doesn't actually matter that much exactly what you do with them. Anything vaguely affordable with a touchscreen and internet essentially works - and without much competition that means there would have been many paths to success. By contrast, there are quite a few physical limits cars run up against that make the details a lot more relevant (perhaps not if you'd have been developing the first car, but well...)

Cars have lots of regulatory issues and there is extensive safety testing. Even if this were trivial, it's likely still time consuming and may involve many iterations.

Totally different beasts.
The way the traditional car makes are offering electric vehicles as a niche side product makes no sense. There's no conviction to it. Electric shouldn't be offered as an option, like a sunroof or convertible. Its the future. The i3 is marketed like 'here's a quirky car for weird people who dont like dinosaur juice'. No wonder staff would rather work for a startup. Go to a dealership and ask them about the electric range - the dealers dont give a shit.
Isn't that fucked up ? Doesn't mean it has to be fucked up everywhere.
Uber Badges: A Little Reward for Every Ride You Take
The i8 (the second i-line car) was released in june 2014, which means that it'd be 6 years between the i8 and a third car. There were 4 years between the Tesla Roadster and Model S, 3 between Model S and Model X and probably 2-3 between Model X and Model 3.

If the next car in the i-line is planned for 2020, I understand that these 'young people' think it's slow. And it's obvious that it isn't a priority for BMW.
Once you've got electricity, FT appears to win. Though again, there's the ages of investigation without large-scale application, on a power-to-fuels basis.

Sasol, the South African energy company, did run commercial coal-to-liquids via Fischer-Tropsch, since the 1950s, and I believe may still do so. The US tried but ran into technical issues.
No, that's not true. Voting works properly, at least in my experience.

My current config: OS X, Firefox 45.0.2, NoScript 2.9.0.11.

What doesn't work properly is the search at the bottom of the page. For that I switch to Safari (with JS enabled).
The Community Edition also has merge requests and all the major and essential features. For the feature differences please see https://about.gitlab.com/features/#compare
Portugal’s Example: What Happened After It Decriminalized All Drugs
He was a government employee in 1905 when he published special relativity, Brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect. This work was done while he was a student studying under a government-funded scientist. He was a full professor by the time he released general relativity.
What is this "pun" of which you speak?
Mandatory xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/1597/
As a long time BMW fan who has a M3 on order, it really is kind of sad to see that the company is becoming less and less inspired and more and more focused on short term shareholder happiness.

One one hand, the company is completely ditching its enthusiast root, at least within its main non-M lineups. The current generation 3 series is one of the worst offenders at this. In order to pursue mass market profitability, the 3 series has been watered down, its steering became heavily assisted electric systems, its suspension is tuned for comfort for a more "floaty" feel, its interior looks good in photos but are filled with cheap plastic everywhere to save cost. Its brakes no longer bite as hard because BMW doesn't want to replace too many rotors under their maintenance plane. The old king of sports sedans now drives like an overpriced and under-equipped Accord with worse reliability but faster acceleration.

On the other hand their lineups are exploding like Samsung's cellphone lines 5 years ago. Just in the U.S. market there is the 2, 3, 3GT, 3 ActiveHybrid, 4, 4GC, 5, 5GT, 5 ActiveHybrid, 6, 6GC, 7 series, then there is the X1, X3, X4, X5, X6, Z4, and then there is the M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M5 GC, and X5 M, X6 M. Then there is the i3 and i8. They are really trying to go for market share, but are losing leadership positions in many market sectors that they used to completely dominate (ATS-V now drives better than a M3, C class now is just as sporty and way more luxurious than a 3 series).

And now they are barely dangling their feet in the EV front, while Tesla is charging ahead full speed (pun intended). M division is still doing good work technically, but even them are lost in the "spec game" and their new cars are all faster but less fun to drive than their predecessors.

My advice to BMW: Kill the i division, don't make EV a freaking hobby, do a serious EV within your main line-up and heavily push it. Don't be afraid to give it a sports tuned suspension with heavy and precise steering, add some of that old BMW magic back. Even if it doesn't become profitable in the short term it will create a halo effect for the whole company. Otherwise it's only a matter of time that the old school enthusiasts completely abandon you and the newer generations go chase after Teslas.

/rant
Visual Studio Code reaches 1.0
> could not care less
Glad you found the answer in our docs, thanks for updating your comment.
> Polish in-jokes

You can't just say that and leave us hanging!
Honestly, $50 smartphones tend to suck a lot. Even the highest-end Firefox OS phone for a while had major keyboard lag. Chances are trying to use things like Skype/VOIP over them would be painful....

I think if you're looking to invest in one useful thing, a good phone would be a great purchase. Maybe the Moto G at $200?

Amortized over a year, you're talking about a lot of bang for the buck.
Thanks! Comments like yours are an inspiration to us, I'll share with the team (now 70+ people!).
Squarespace status: major outage
Meet the Boss: Rome2rio Chief Rod Cuthbert
I love the British reaction.
They think (from what I understood) that the limit is "above pypy performance"
I agree. Apple /// and Lisa are overpriced for consumers and small businesses. Apple just doesn't understand that while corporate purchasing is the big money, you have to sell your soul to break into it. You need the strippers and steaks and slick salesmen to sell the product like IBM does.

That's why mainframes and the PC XT, as long as they're good enough and carry the IBM label, will dominate the business market. And they are good enough; Apple can't depend on being the only one with a reliable quality product in the market anymore. Being the best tool for employees isn't going to impress purchasing managers.

Apple's products have always appealed to the people that are going to use them. Corporate purchasing doesn't work that way. The people making the decision about what to buy aren't the people that will use the tools.

Apple would be better off setting its sights lower, on academia and consumers. Maybe someday they'll figure that out. I, for one, am excited about the new "Macintosh;" that may be the future of personal computing.
Im in the UK - but this sort of thing must be quite common. There was an instance in Scotland -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34445201

Which was linked to a $1Bn fraud in Moldova
Grocery Trip Explained
you mean Andy Grove?
gitk is great if you are outside a terminal
The public has no clue what the papers are about and doesn't really care either.

Passing peer review is just the first step for a paper though. It also needs to gather citations to avoid being forgotten. It's up to the scientists to decide which paper to cite and they are usually a lot more qualified to do so.
for those who wish to know...

Life Assurance (as opposed to insurance) is an excellent investment vehicle.. and often provides a tax free investment after a specified period, providing life cover up until it is cashed in.

http://taxplanet.com/magazine/other-topics/107-miscellaneous...
Thanks for your response. We already have stages (pipelines) as part of the .gitlab-ci.yml definition http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/README.html#stages

In the upcoming release (this Friday is the 22nd!) we'll likely ship a pipeline view in the UI https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3743

GitLab CI is part of GitLab itself and won't support other systems. If you want you can mirror repositories on GitLab EE/.com with http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.html
Because they ignored electric cars for decades, or just did half-hearted trials. BMW is actually way ahead of the other German manufacturers, but I doubt they will be able to compete with Tesla.

Also, I think the i3 is crazy ugly.
Ask HN: Leaking hours and money. I need a tool to keep digital projects in check
I do a lot of online projects (one man show) with a lot of 3rd party's, licenses and time spend in each project. Can any of you recommend a tool to keep track of the costs and hours? Something that allows me to see how many dollars are left? (I'm constantly going overboard. I don't mean a time-tracking thingy). I would love to find a good tool... Thanks in advance!
It still runs on a single 7$ hobby dyno. Package and registry downloads goes directly to our CDN so the dyno only gets traffic for the HTTP API and website.
Basecamp includes chat, plus message boards for conversations on a specific topic and pings for 1 on 1 private communications.
Thanks! If people are looking for the docs please see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner#install...
Also, email is an open standard, with plenty of choices in both client and server software. Slack is a proprietary system. Why are we actively axing solid, widely distributed, open ecosystems for proprietary ones? It'd be like if everyone woke up one day and decide "eh, Linux is just not animated-giphy enough, let's all switch to this startup OS with a crippled free version."
I wonder if this is a strategic steps following Amazon Echo's nice overtake on speech-based assistant area. Apple is really the pioneer on bringing speech based UI to the masses. Maybe they sense a threat?
It feels mostly all fake.
Executives are not the development team

However in many cases they are the senior engineers of the development team. In this case the defection included executives who developed the i8 plug-in hybrid sports car and the electric powertrains for the i-series.
پکیج تور مشهد در هتل های ۳ ستاره ورود ۳ اردیبهشت ۹۵
Site is non-responsive for me. Cached link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:04x449v...
The Blue Packet
Ho Chi Minh kicking out the French significantly accelerated the end of the Colonial Era - all of a sudden, the impossible was proven possible: small impoverished nations could throw out their European overlords. The man is a much under-recognised talent.
At most (real, not software) engineering companies I've been involved with most of the executives where "actual engineers".
It seems like a very specific need. Maybe your best and easiest choice will be a well tailored spreadsheet.
I think "defection" is a strong word here. They simply left.
How to Choose the Right Development Platform for a Mobile App
Great set of tips. Unfortunately I find that so many post that suggest rebase recommend against force pushing. This takes a lot of the power away from rebase/amend. So much does this happen that is wrote a blog post titled "You should force push more"[0].

0: https://hugotunius.se/2014/09/08/you-should-force-push-more....
How I hunted the most odd ruby bug
Maybe the bots would develop some curious interests if training progress required sexual interactions with humans and there was brutal competition between bots ;)
Show HN: Log Wizard – a Log Viewer that is easy and fun to use (Win-Only)
Very nice idea. Good job!

I won't be surprised if we see something like that online pretty soon. If not from Uber, from some of their competitors.
From skimming the article it seems that I can't find the definition of 'managerial' that this article is based on. Can someone enlighten me?
What's the mechanism by which the LVT (Georgian Tax) prevents rent / property value escallation?
There was an inflection point with the E46 3er when sales passed those of the Ford Mondeo. The formerly boring-brand Ford is now seen as the niche interest for the manager-with-family who likes a little driving excitement and the BMW is a standard rep mobile!
While a nice idea most software cannot even use 4 or 8 cores properly. That's one of the reason Intel CPUs are still king compared to AMD in desktop space. If you can use all of that cores AMD tries to cram in their CPUs you can get good performance for a good price, but the single-threaded performance is an absolute desaster at the moment (and the one thing AMD has focused most on for their next architecture, Zen), which is still what many workloads use.
Those fields have scientific and non-scientific components. The non-scientific parts are not science.
It stays gzip'd once you've uploaded it.
The Three Types of Happiness
This is almost a perfect straight from template Graun piece.

1) Take something which is routine and well known to everyone except the Guardian's reader demographic (hysterically uneducable middle class outrage junkies).

2) Find an example of someone abusing it.

3) Blame it on Thatcher.

4) Profit!

3 is becoming increasingly tedious and of course when 4 actually happens, GMG are careful to use offshore vehicles to avoid paying any tax on it, which is OK when they do it, because reasons[0]

Guardian columnist strikes me as one of those middle class jobs at risk of being 'decimated' by cheap AI.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/22/b...
Apparently such clauses aren't legally enforceable in Europe, I'm not sure about the situation in the US.
Slightly off-topic, but could you recommend any books/articles/talks/resources on modern C++? I learnt the language in the early 2000s and haven't used it in years. If I picked up a C++ project today I would write code exactly like the above.
This seems terrible. If much rather people used proper support software like desk for support
— Can you change it?

— No.

— It won't replace passwords.
Completely agree with @mmaunder comment on setting time for checking slack and not using it other times. No matter what tool be it outlook or blackberry, you need to set timing for the communication and collaboration. For the people who have collaboration/communication as not a primary job like developers/designer/engineer etc..

Also it is completely unacceptable to call this checking a tool beyond your shift/work a culture and it is indeed a bad practice setup by lead/ceo to keep everyone working all the time. The companies pay you for your time, so unless u get paid extra allowance to check these tools after hours please do not do it. For emergencies situation let people SMS and if no response in 15 minutes then call and that too have roaster who will be on call in which week or month.

It is a job of the leader/manager to ensure people have work life balance and they should setup internal polices and procedure to ensure people don't get to appreciate the one who is always on rather the ones who contribute with in the work hours. The management should make a culture of people talking about it so that it does not become forceful as people start doing this always on and others fear that they would be considered contributing less if they don't be online hence everyone stays on line for no reason.

For a company like 1Password there is absolutely no reason to be online all the time except for the support folks(and they too with in thier shift and have enough people to cover 24/7) and dev's can be engaged on call as required. All they need is setup couple of core hours every body is online to communicate and status update. Even geo diverse teams you can have core hours that ensure everyone is online for about 1 hour or 2 at the same for each team , if it is absolutely necessary.

I wish startup ceo's understand this and account that 8 hours a day is what person can reasonably put in work and if you need more hours it is going to cost business and that is part of the budgeting process. If you can't afford that then you are not yet ready to start the startup or do it it yourself. For god sake it is 21st century and if you are going to change the world first change your mindset and change the your company and make it a first class and make it 22nd century company where employees are not exploited because they can be(in the name passion, happiness, blah blah blah).
So much for philosopher-kings...
There is a similarity, but there is also a difference. The general difference (among PyPy/Pyjion/Pyston) is "what to do with CPython C API". As far as I understand:

* Pyjion says "we gonna add a JIT API to CPython" - so no touching the C API at all (or the object model)

* Pyston says "we gonna implement our own object model supporting CPython C API", but they seem to have copied large portions of CPython. This is a semi-rigid approach compared to Pyjion, because it's not runtime-swappable

* PyPy says "we gonna implement a fake layer on top of our own object model" which means that while C API is feasible (and mostly implemented), it's gonna be always a compatibility layer with slower approach, but the underlaying data types/GC can change at will

Hope that helps
I've a BMW i3. I think the manufacturer said that the majority of people buying the i3 had never been BMW drivers before. Certainly true in my case. It's a perfect city car, and good for my 70 mile commute. The REx makes it practical for long distances (by EU standards).

That said, I doubt I'd buy another BMW. Over-priced, poor apps, crappy in-car computer, every halfway decent option comes at a ridiculous price, maddening missing options (no heated steering wheel!), and a UI that's basically junk.

I don't know if that's reflective of the general BMW "way" - reading online it seems to be - but it's like dealing with a company from the dark ages.

BMW have proven that they can build and design electric vehicles. They now need to concentrate on why people don't want to buy into their brand. Maybe they can make it as an Apple - ultra-expensive luxury for people willing to turn a blind eye to imperfections - or maybe they need to concentrate on a superior user-experience from purchase to drive.

The tech is there and evolving - it is just the company which is stagnating.

(My review of the car, if you're interested - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/09/i3-electric-car-review/ )

Edit: "How many i3 buyers are new to BMW? About 80 percent"

Source http://europe.autonews.com/article/20140606/ANE/140609922/bm...
DigitalK Startup Competition
> I think it's simpler to pass state as an argument to your functions instead. That's less complex and easier to test.

I completely agree with that sentiment. But I prefer to execute those functions with swap! on my application state.

That way I can always inspect it in the repl during development and production. Which is not so easy when it's just bound in the local variable of some thread somewhere.

As for transducers, tbh I haven't encountered the use case you describe yet.
Amazon HPC cluster environment StarCluster
Twenty Seconds Curriculum Vitae in LaTex
Show HN: The First Swift logger for development and release (950 GitHub stars)
> I still get a new phone every 1-2 years because the upgrades are worth it

Really? About the only reason why I'm getting a new phone every so often is when the old one stops being updated. (My Nexus 4 lasted 3 years, and it would have done another year.)

Planned obsolescence, if you want.
Yes - we do this. At the same time we think we could collect more feedback in parallel.
Swift Modules – a searchable Swift package catalog
Distributed systems in practice, in theory
A bicycle can be stable without gyro effects or fork trail
Top Money Saving Wedding Planning Tips from Seychelles Wedding Planner
This is the problem with a lot of longform essay writing. It takes so long to get to the point that unless you wholeheartedly agree from the start you end up skimming. This is why the abstract was invented. I didn't read this article because there is no abstract, and the introduction is obtuse. I have better things to do with my time and brainpower
Brotli, Google's general-purpose compression algorithm
B.Y.O.B
Ask HN: Is cloud computing decimating platform/infrastructure engineering jobs?
Cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are providing more and more tools that allow companies to build applications with far fewer engineers to handle the backend.

Does this imply a gloomy long term outlook for engineers in other companies who do platform and infrastructure development? Are there any leading indicators of this trend?
Isn't it ironic that chatbots are touted as a more natural, conversational interface when they are basically CLIs? Back in the day GUI adoption over CLI was driven by conviction that desktop, drag and drop and point and click are more natural metaphors.
Overheating was indeed an issue, but I think it didn't affect all the units to the same extent. It was a problem for me, and increasingly so if I remember correctly with later macosx releases, but another machine bought at the same time worked much better.