skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The power is also proportional to the swept area of the rotor disk, which increases by the square of the radius. This means the number of smaller windmills will have to go up by the square of the blade length.

12m blades have an area of 452m^2

60m blades have an area of 11,300m^2

At the same efficiency, you would need 25 times more windmills to generate the same power. Even if Cringely's theory is correct that smaller windmills can be made to be more efficient (doubtful), requiring an order of magnitude more physical hardware (towers, generators, etc.) is going to be a killer cost increase.
Here's the thing about this kind of loan. Its like the junk bond market for corporate debt.

When things are good, as they have been from 2009 until today, then you can roll debt over and these high risk, high return loans look like a goo investment.

When things go bad, people stop having access to capital to roll their loans and it isn't one loan that goes bad, its the entire sector that goes bad.

The problem with this lender is that they can't show data for a period like 2008, when there were defaults all over the place. That's not their fault as they weren't around then but its something to keep in mind.

if you are getting above average return for loaning money then you are by definition taking above average risk.

Ask banks in 2008 how having their loans secured by the property worked. When someone defaults on their loan it isn't always because they can't pay, its often because the property is worth less than the loan value on it.
I'm pretty sure there's literally no other topic on which the HN community is so overwhelmingly positive.

There are a lot of commenters here, so there will a bell curve (or some distribution) on any topic at all. Picking negative comments from a tail is always possible, but it misrepresents the community, in this case completely. Posting indignant comments about it just adds to the problem and takes the thread off topic.
> certainly less security than I would expect for a cryptocurrency

The good news here is that a Zcash team member found this weakness in the Zcash protocol and it's being fixed before it ships.

Kudos to the Zcash team for employing aggressive internal security auditing.
They haven't tried it yet but plan to support CoreCRL on Linux (and Xamarin on mobiles).
Here's what happened as far as I'm aware: changes in radio station ownership in the 1990s created a much less competitive and more homogeneous musical environment, leading to less variety in hit music.

The details: 1996 Telecommunications Act (viewable http://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.txt ), string search for "SEC. 202. BROADCAST OWNERSHIP":

> NATIONAL RADIO STATION OWNERSHIP RULE CHANGES REQUIRED- The Commission shall modify section 73.3555 of its regulations (47 C.F.R. 73.3555) by eliminating any provisions limiting the number of AM or FM broadcast stations which may be owned or controlled by one entity nationally.

Prior to this, each city had its own local stations and they'd all compete with each other. This change paved the way for Clear Channel aka iHeartMedia, Inc to purchase pretty much every commercial radio station around the country, resulting in the same programs everywhere. I read a reddit post recently that went into more detail about the process but I can't find it.
Funny how I just installed OS X Server just today...
I'm in Nagoya. Maybe that is the reason? It's so odd——I just confirmed that this works for me: http://www.senate.gov/index.htm
As of 2012, the estimate is something like 225 thousand wind turbines around the world. The best estimates I could find for domestic cat populations is between 200-600 MILLION.
I predict that communes will make a comeback.

The conditions are ripe. A generation of hipsters (I don't say that in a disparaging way) that have a fetish for authenticity, craft skills, and clean living; are also financially stretched to their limits even when sharing houses; have a strong desire to be part of a community in a society that is focused on the individual, and can't afford to create a community the traditional way (i.e. by starting a family). Communes (not necessarily rural) are coming back.
For a developer of a tool frequently used to conceal "terrorism", this amount of paranoia seems healthy.

Also, no you cannot "speak with police freely" in the US. Anything you say to an officer of the law can be, and it should be assumed that it will be, used to incriminate you. To make matters worse, you can be forced to give up your right to self-incrimination by being legally compelled to divulge information which incriminates you.

In general one should never speak to police in the US. Not even as the whiteness to a crime. For a great overview of the seriousness of why one should never talk to US police, view this lecture by a professor and former criminal defense attorney: http://youtu.be/6wXkI4t7nuc

Incidentially, the American Civil Liberties Union of attorneys (ACLU) has created a series of mobile apps to record police encounters because of their tendency to be problematic for citizens. For example, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.aclu.mobil...
So an exchange who lost a significant amount of money in a hack recently is vocally opposed to a license that requires exchanges to perform security audits and to stay solvent?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11550765
> They can't compel you to DO something, as demonstrated by FBI v Apple recently.

In case anyone who's not familiar with the Apple case is reading this: The government didn't actually wait for the court to rule that they can't (which might or might not be the case, though my understand is that they would've probably ruled in favour of Apple), but rather withdrew the case after a third party unlocked the phone for them.
Probably to be more durable, because of the closed surface - the Eiffel tower has very high maintenance costs as it has to be steadily re-painted. It would probably not be necessary that much for modern steels, but unlike wind turbines the Eiffel tower also does not stand close to the coast or directly in the sea, where highly corrosive winds blow.
Tower strike, and less well known but probably equally important to longevity: tower thump.
I never claimed that they were, and bats and birds are prevalent in farmland.
Think of the government as a particular large, stratified enterprise IT shop with some weighty policy/legal requirements driving some of the internal barriers. I'm imagining that it went something like this: the group which owns the public web servers decides to start using HTTPS and slogs through renegotiating their CDN contract, purchasing and installing an EV certificate, etc.

As they go through compatibility testing, someone finds a problem. Maybe that's a bunch of legacy HTML which triggers mixed-content warnings, maybe that's a problem with some creaky old legacy application which expects HTTP and doesn't follow redirects or chokes on modern cipher suites, etc.

Since they can no longer say that switching won't break anything, someone pauses the project until they can fix the problems. Maybe someone suggests using a rewriting proxy to fix it but the people who own the server it'd need to run on are worried about performance/security. Maybe the legacy app is something licensed from a vendor who wants $$$ for a major upgrade rather than just making this one change. Maybe that requires a change in next year's budget because they've already allocated all of the money they're legally allowed to spend on that class of work.

It could be as simple as budget: they're using Akamai and it's likely that the contract they originally signed didn't include HTTPS, and at least in the past adding it was a non-trivial price increase. I could easily believe that this could be as simple as either a test pending a new contract or that a section of the website (or a subdomain) uses HTTPS but they added a general redirect to avoid paying the higher HTTPS rates for traffic which doesn't require it.
How to find the best platforms for your business model
Ask HN: How much bandwidth is actually used for sending a single character?
A single character is 1 byte , but how many bytes are actually used for sending a single character?
Assuming TCP is used
Even sexier (and less field-tested) than vertical turbines are windbelts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windbelt

> Prototypes of the device are claimed to be 10 - 30 times more efficient than small wind turbines. One prototype has powered two LEDs, a radio, and a clock (separately) using wind generated from a household fan. The cost of the materials was well under US$10. $2–$5 for 40 mW is a cost of $50–$125 per watt.
Women seem to heavier in my part of the world
Completely misleading title.
Babel is not "regular JavaScript", your import/export statements won't work when browsers and Node support them (you are required to include the .js extension and Babel doesn't enforce that). Babel also supports things like JSX and Flow.
Fixin' to Innovate
Looking at this from a Java perspective, the behaviour of the example attached to the bug is valid.

It would be a significant improvement if it gave a warning when an uninitialized variable is used, but apart from that I wouldn't make any changes here.
Nope, I don't think so. I am a rails developer myself. It might have sounded a bit condescending...
It was five-ish years ago, but we had a period where we listened to the radio a lot at my previous employer. Company Wi-Fi didn't allow for streaming music, and I didn't have a smartphone at the time. Occasionally someone else did or I'd bring in my iPod and play stuff, but it's a lot easier just to tune in and let someone else be the DJ for you. It also takes off the pressure of picking music that's appropriate/likeable for everyone - if a song that no one likes comes on, we all could roll our eyes and sit through it or we could just change the station.

Now that I work from home my radio usage is mostly limited to sports, though I take a lot of road trips for family purposes and it becomes fun to scan through the radio and seek out songs you know.

And I have called in to a station before - probably not for ten years, but I've done it! It's interesting to see how they cut up the conversation to fit the space they have.
A clip from The Simpsons is not a very compelling argument.

Setting the number of blocks at 2,016 per two weeks is completely arbitrary, as is setting the block size at 1 MB. None of these are "fundamental flaws" because they can be changed. They're hard-coded constants that can be changed in code in a trivial amount of time. The hardest part about changing them is getting consensus on the change and the time it takes the change to roll out to most of the clients on the network before cutting over. The existence of altcoins that have changed these parameters is proof that it's not a technological flaw.

A technological flaw would be some kind of vulnerability in ECDSA or SHA256 that would allow people to spend other's Bitcoins. Now that would be a fundamental flaw that would destroy Bitcoin over night. But coding constants that can be changed, and as time goes on, most likely will be? You are seriously over-dramatizing things.

All I'm getting from you is flippancy, Simpsons references, and strawman arguments. You have failed to make your case at all. If what we are talking about is a fundamental flaw, then every program you have ever written is fundamentally flawed, because I'm sure they've all initially had bugs in them that were much worse than what could be changed by adjusting the values of constants.
> I'm sure the thinking was that they wouldn't be able to slow the rocket down enough and that the speed of impact would punch through the barge.

Would any "expert" really believe SpaceX didn't run the numbers millions of times, and do millions of simulations to confirm they could slow it down before actually spending the money to buy and outfit drone ships, build landing legs onto their rockets, etc. etc. ?

I mean, honestly, while the devil is in the details for an actual landing, they must have been pretty damn sure they could at least slow the thing down sufficiently.
Build a simple Android/iOS app using React Native with Redux
The Minimalist Animation of ‘Archer’
Nice. Appreciate the tips.
How to Enjoy Pizza and Still Stay Fit with These Simple Rules
Agile is "dead" because it isn't practiced. Where and when it is implemented, it's just fine. But 90%+ of "agile" is actually a sloppy, lazy, underspec'ed waterfall process hoping to achieve results in a stealth fixed-bid model, tracked on a kanban board.

The other side of the coin is that defending agile falls into the No True Scotsman trap too easily: Since people don't practice agile, failed projects aren't agile. Well, of course.

The real problem is how do you get the people who could be doing agile to be motivated to access the benefits of agile, and how do you get the borderline cases to acknowledge their limitations and address them.
Why Silicon Valley Recruiters Are Flocking to Ontario
How to tell when your comic has made a real cultural impact: 101.
autofs is great, combined with NFS4 and FreeIPA it's even not a total pain in the butt to configure on a whole farm of servers (having my home directory easily available with my ZSH configuration from every system I log into is great.)
"Right now, millions of people are working hard every day to make a relatively small number of landlords richer and richer. It's unsustainable, and I think some major societal change is coming."

Perfectly sustainable, because they're literally serfs (so am I). A new feudal age is approaching.
Wow?

I don't get it.
> Except when you want to test edge cases (specific error messages from the server, time outs during response, errors on the network level, etc).

Yep, these features are definitely on our roadmap. This is one of the reasons we chose node modules as a tape format: it's just javascript. For example, if you want to add a delay, simply edit your tape and wrap res.end in a setTimeout. Additionally, I want to [make it so tapes format the response according the content-type][1] so that you can easily edit them by hand and have complete control over the response.

[1]: https://github.com/flickr/yakbak/issues/2
Sounds like they looked at page 1 of Uber's playbook.
I love this. I love the movie. It's geeky and I went on a date to see this movie with a female friend of mine at the time (we weren't girl/boy friend at that time). Now she is my wife of almost 20 years (2017). IT was playing at the Midway Theater in Forest Hills NY.
This is spot on and the real reason. Thank for posting this, I was working on a much larger comment but yours is better because it says the same thing in fewer words.

If tower thump were not an issue then a one bladed turbine would be the best possible turbine (cost efficiency wise).

Further down he's even arguing for turbines with 12 blades, it's a ridiculous number and quite inefficient unless you want very high torque at low rpm such as for directly driving a mechanical waterpump.
Say what you want about SpaceX's plans for re-usability, nobody can deny they are making progress at an incredible pace. I've just checked on Wikipedia and apparently the first flight of the Falcon was in 2010. That's six years ago.

Compared to that, Arianeespace's target of 2025 (in nine years!) for Adeline is almost ridiculous.

Just checked: Stephane Israël just raised concerned after SpaceX's latest success: http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/05/05/face-a-spa...
This was intended as sarcasm ;)
Yes, I hope to implement it soon!
Keep in mind everything SpaceX are doing is with the goal of getting to Mars.

They don't want to use cranes, or parachutes or helicopters or complex landing structures, because none of those things will work on Mars in such a way the rocket just needs to be refueled and can fly again.
NextGen Leads Microservices Architecture
Boomers.
They inherited from their parents; and stole from their children. If any sector is due for a collapse or correction it's our social security. Let it die on those who bleed it out.
Because a lattice tower has much worse properties when it comes to interacting with the wind. The behavior of the air behind the rotor is as important as getting quality air to flow through the rotor.

Some early windparks used lattice towers, and some of those survive to the present but they are now known to be worse performance wise than tubular towers.
This pool of freshwater would need to be many kilometers in diameter to give a high chance of hitting it with an unpowered parachute descent (thanks to unpredictability of the winds). At this point you are talking about doing something that is much, much more expensive than the current approach of a powered landing. How are you going to get so much freshwater out into the sea, anyway? That's way more water than could be carried in the largest cargo ship that exists.
> They just need to solve the tower strike problem.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JustIsaDangerousWord
Fun to play with! Sadly, touch interaction is broken in Firefox: 1) multitouch doesn't work 2) tap and hold without drag doesn't work. It works well in Chrome, though. I was able to play with 8 fingers at the same time. My touch screen supports 10 fingers at the same time, so I guess it is a limitation in the app (the source code says "VoiceCount: 8")
If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it. ~ Mark Twain (apocryphal)
Darpa calls for Enhanced Attribution Project (tracking hackers globally)
I don't like recording requests/responses because of this. In these cases, I prefer to manually write the test without running the code because I want to make sure the test matches what I expect my code to do, not record what it actually does. I caught an error yesterday in which a recorded response was used as an expectation, so the test passed. The bug was only exposed when I wrote a new test and manually created the request/response objects based on the docs. The test failed and I found the bug (a field was being transposed during transform of the response).
Prognostication and the failure of the Web
This will arrive in future versions. Strangely, not many have asked for it.
I once read that one of the fathers of the Internet (don't remember who) said that the Internet should span the whole galaxy, because engineers always under deliver and he could live with a version that just spans the Earth.
Have we learned anything in the last 20 years? (1992)
LÖVE2D is fantastic, wish I had known about it cause it is exactly what I was looking for when I tried to help my oldest son, thanks. When my youngest son decides he wants to do sound I will start both of them down that path.

For now I've thought a bit and it would be pretty easy for me to abstract sprites and text drawn to a canvas with clicking and keypresses so I think I will do that first when the time comes. My youngest son was EXTREMELY happy this morning and began porting letters2player to JS before school.
That so negative. Of course they don't do this all in one go, it is incremental, step by step to get it to work. And each step is one closer to that goal and something to be happy about. If there are 'unexpected challenges right at the last moment' that's a real pity but those will be met just like all the unexpected challenges along the way. Yes, it's difficult, not it does not seem to be so impossibly difficult or different from what they've done to date that we should assume that it will not work. It will work, the bigger question is when.
Hugely popular with retirees. My parents own a condo in Sarasota Florida which has tons of retirees. I believe the last estimate I heard was that the population can grow up to 10x during the winter months.
Agree with your points, but if capital gains taxes were phased in and ratcheted upwards, and the tax is deductible if people are using their gains to purchase a similar value UK property, I don't see hysterisis being a major problem. I'd actually be more worried about avoiding inducing a selling frenzy and crashing prices in the short term.

Offshore registered properties without named beneficial owners are only a problem if you allow UK freeholds to be held by shady foreign entities and don't have an especially punitive tax regime just for them.

Council tax style systems suffer from property owners (particularly private householders) often not having disposable cashflow remotely comparable to the value of a house they might have acquired many years ago, especially pensioners and especially in London.
(whilst I'm sure in practice, private sector equity share schemes wouldn't be too unhappy to lend the house-rich the cash, I can't see council taxes as aggressive as hypothtetical capital gains taxes being politically possible)
I didn't get in on the survey and got the old box in the A/B test, but I would 100% prefer the white one with the illustration for my subscription. I order my candy to the office to share and people usually see the box from Japan and are curious so they ask me about it and I tell them about the candy subscription.

The white box would be better advertising for you in my case :)
You can have your cake and eat it too. A funny name can only help.
>Is it me, or did the 80's just have better music. Maybe it's just the when you become cognizant of music.

That can be part of it, but some eras can have better music than others too, period. The same way some centuries have tons of important artistic and intellectual works and others are mostly void of them: societies changes, new models, etc.

This is especially the case with respect to specific genres: e.g. not so much good bebop in 1990-2010 as in 1940s, even though there is some. Genres have their peaks and lows. This holds for genres like rock and r&b too.
> Anyhow, that was a tangent

It's also untrue, US rocketry kept varied propulsion types throughout its history including both RP1-only and LH2-only as well as mixed stages, HTPB and Aerozine. Your painting of rocket scientists as some sort of confederacy of dunce unable to get a grip on tradeoffs is not only inane it's insulting bullshit.
Microsoft could be modernizing Paint in Windows
Upstarts event-driven mess made it extremely hard to debug and rationalize about your dependencies for a service. systemd's approach of a basic dependency graph for services is a lot easier to work with, plus some bonus features like socket activation and work directory creation that upstart doesn't have.

I have a python webapp hosted inside uwsgi reverse proxied by nginx, adding `RuntimeDirectory=mycoolapp` to the unit file automatically creates and destroys `/run/mycoolapp` every time the unit starts and stops. I just plop my socket file inside the runtime directory (which is automatically created with the correct uid/gid based on the user/group the unit runs as) and fly away, I don't have to manage some directory inside /var/ and deal with an rpm scriplet to ensure the correct owner/group are set on it after install.

It's all the little things that systemd does that really make one appreciate it, they add up.
Not for the first launch we won't. They might get something a cut over an rc car with an iphone taped to the top, but with the time line suggested there is no way to slap together something that will do anything new: the trip will be purely to show the trip can be done, and not contribute very much for science.
America is growing weary of butt hurt euro-whiners. Soon Europe will pay for its own defense or reap the whirlwind. Also Musk is extremely patriotic so piss off and do something worthy in EU.