skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lithium-ion cells have been slowly, steadily improving by a few percent a year for a long time now. A few percent is not a lot, but if these incremental improvements keep happening then that adds up to some pretty good progress. Cost is also decreasing quite rapidly as economies of scale continue to ramp up.

It's not as flashy as some magical new tech that comes along and doubles battery capacities overnight, but on the flip side li-ion is already good enough for most applications. We'll need some pretty big improvements before we can have electric passenger jets, but other than that we're already in pretty good shape.
Heck, I'd say I see an article about new battery developments multiple times a year.

I wonder if the delay has as much or more to do with economics than actual research and development. It might not be in the best interest of a lot of players, whether that's battery manufacturers, or device manufacturers, to produce something that has improved longevity if that means fewer sales due to batteries wearing out.
Cool. It's great to see my project on Hacker News!

Feel free to ask me any questions here, or using the comment system on the blog post. :-)
No, not like oil/gas. World production of lithium is about a hundred tons per day, says Wikipedia, and that's roughly the same as Purto Rico's production of oil.

Finding another hundred tons is a 100% increase in one case and about 0.0% in the other, because the other case has already gone through a lot of scaling-up.
The acquiescence of anti-democracy
Sadly, or biology is hardwired to be thrifty. It's better to be reasonably overweight than starved, especially if life expectancy was short.

Case in point: Once you exceed the set point enough you get leptin resistance. This means that suddenly your organism is more sensitive to any drop in general energy store state as it is transmitted via leptin system with additional inputs from insulin and amylin.

So, the right way to diet might be to actually diet while supplementing leptin or a leptin receptor agonist and only very, very slowly reducing it over time.
No, you don't have a right to see everything at the price you want to pay
Creating the Pink Screen of Death
Technilogy is elliminating distance
FORQY: Create a wonderful restaurant website for free
The Hello World Open was super fun a few years ago; code the AI for a slot car. Their site says they'll hold it again this year:

http://helloworldopen.com/
Yes, I have worked on agile Kanban teams. The experience was more or less the following...

1. What's the next task/bug/story we should be working on?

2. Build & test it.

3. Ship it.

4. Rinse & repeat.

We'd have meetings periodically to define new sets of tasks and figure out priorities, and/or to reflect on things that hadn't gone well. But these weren't necessarily scheduled on a regular basis. We did them as needed.
>Yes you are right but we can't make changes because the sprint would not finish".

That makes absolutely no sense because the sprint always finishes, on a scale far basis.

The only way to make a sprint not finish is to submit code that cannot be safely deployed, and that is a bug in the code, nothing to do with changes in plan.
Inside the Gigafactory That Will Decide Tesla’s Fate
I had thought it indicated clickthrough by Feedly users. How could they have overall clickthrough numbers?
Yes and the future for Apple in China is looking pretty grim since the government has recently just shut down the iTunes movies and books stores. It's only a matter of time before music and apps get similar treatment.

A government willing to block gmail of all things is not going to have qualms about killing an app store they can't control.
Nah, The Matrix code was the last screensaver we ever needed. Even nostalgia for Sneakers doesn't make the effect cooler. Probably just that the Matrix makes better background noise, tricking your mind into spotting patterns.
Humanity faces many dangers, one of the largest being itself That doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we can to reduce or eliminate other dangers (planet level extinction event).

Also, even though it doesn't eliminate our ability to wipe ourselves out, that it's a a step towards setting that capability back a few decades is also beneficial (it should be very easy to identify and destroy long-range nukes in space).
What exactly are these techniques that work in plain HTTP but not in HTTPS? It seems like the difference between the two does not pertain to the actual content at all, but I am more curious than knowledgeable in this case.
I'm talking about economic mobility.
If listening to someone who just discovered psych 101 is fun then they probably need to meet more people.
Slow to a standstill and cut the engines at the exact point where it pushes enough on the platform that when the engine stops thursting, the platform bumps back exactly to the bottom of the rocket.
It's also not really true. NYC likes to use other terms such as "rent stabilization" to describe the rent-control-like protections they have in place. Some 45% of NYC rental properties fall under such protections. The combined figure for rent control, rent stabilization and other controls bring just over 60% of the NYC rental market under pricing controls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_New_York
The more worrying part of this is that you need 1H capital to even try to get into this business if all you do is build the monsters. So that means few competitors (or even one) which makes monopolist behavior and unimaginative thinking likely.
What percent of highway traffic is delivery trucks? The trucks need 1 or 2 lanes, not 8.
The comparison to Java isn't quite right, as D has structs which are like classes can be on the stack and classes which must always be a reference. So there's a bit of a syntactic inconsistency, where you might think that "SomeClass object;" would declare an object on the stack like "SomeStruct inst;" would, whereas instead it only declares a null reference.

If classes can only be references, the syntax should enforce that more clearly. In Java, everything is a reference, so there is less inconsistency there.
It's not advert, it's nice and interesting story. Also it's interesting that all is about TODO app :)
Mark Shuttleworth Talks Ubuntu Watches, Unity 8 and the Future of Free Software
The demand seems to be quite inelastic at the current price levels, but the comsat industry has been gearing up for reusability. It is possible that there will be some price elasticity at radically lower prices, and the increased demand makes up for the lower unit margin. SpaceX need to kickstart a whole new trans-lunar economy for the Mars colonisation project to work, so it is within their interest to stimulate long-term demand.

If Musk wanted to maximize his risk-adjusted profit, SpaceX would never have started. Remember, he financed the cashflow out of his own pocket, and went from a 100-millionaire to not being able to afford rent during the process. He himself said SpaceX had less than even chance of success, and he is known to be both very meticulous in preparation, and an incurable optimist.
So you're telling Elon Musk he isn't an American?

He wouldn't pay you any mind.

I'm a other-than-singular national as well and I certainly don't care to hear I'm not American.
Hi, could you please tell details about Internship?
I'm not sure why you got down voted here.
This device could turn your skin into a touchscreen
That seems pretty harsh. From context, 'been there, done that' sounds to me like sympathizing with the article's author, not dismissing them.
I honestly don't get the appeal of Assembly Row. It reminds me of Bellevue, WA or the new developments in northern Virginia. Sprawling parking lots and boring outlets. Not really what I want the Boston area to become.
Elon Musk is not overly troubled by planetary protection
FWIW, British English specifies that acronyms only have the first letter capitalized while American English capitalizes all of them.

This has been causing confusion well before CRISPR. Exif vs EXIF fights in photography forums have been going on since modern digital cameras were invented & it's simply because the Japanese used the British version of Exif.
It's an operating system that runs server software. How does that not make it a "server OS"?

It runs a VPN service, an update service, it's largely based on OpenBSD, how are you defining what is and isn't this magical "server OS"?

Incidentally, I didn't actually need to purchase that, it just made my life easier. I was quite readily able to install OpenVPN on it via Homebrew and configure the pf rules without their GUI.

The only thing I couldn't do was to install the caching update service. Do you know of an alternative I could have used to update a network full of Macs? No mockery needed, just an answer will do fine - if you know.
SpaceX isn't planning to mine asteroids, that's Planetary Resources.
http://planetaryresources.com/
Double loops are slower in Swift than in Python and Typescript
No it isn't, it's a word. It exists outside the law.
Agricultura Regenerativa *Curso de Agricultura Regenerativa* 8 Sábados En Reus
If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN". Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

The constraints suggest there might be an interesting story behind its development. I'm curious if you would share it.
Using John the Ripper in the Research Lab
> People moving in can have children too, or be looking to start families.

Yes, but rent control doesn't force them to relocate or switch schools - the people who are negatively affected by this are people who have already decided to move. In contrast, the people who are negatively affected by removing rent control will be people who don't want to move but are forced to move by rising rent.

At least to me, it seems that people having to leave their neighborhoods because of rising rent is a larger negative impact (both to them personally and to society as a whole) than people who are already moving having to pick a neighborhood that is not their preferred neighborhood.
I lost a boatload of karma last time this showed up by daring to suggest it was ridiculous to give a $300 million scientific research vessel a deliberately stupid name that even the guy - who is not a teenager, like most of the people here droning on about what teenagers want - who came up with it for a laugh doesn't think should be used.

All you're going to do talking sense here is lose karma from self-styled non-serious people who actually seem to take this issue very seriously indeed.

Edit: And as if right on cue, the cry-babies abuse their 500+ karma again... Hahaha.
Lithium doesn't weigh much of anything (even compared to oil), so a ton of Lithium is a LOT of lithium. Since as a commodity it's never traded in metallic form (too hazardous and energy-intensive to get it there, and not much market for straight metal, even as an input to battery production). It tends to be traded as carbonate, so a ton of lithium carbonate still has a very small amount of lithium in it.

The article completely misses the fact that lithium is not the most important metal in a lithium-ion battery. More pounds of cobalt are required than are of lithium (remember, lithium weighs almost nothing).

Lithium traditionally comes from briny lakes and salt deserts like those in Chile, along with other valuable commodities like Iodine and Nitrate.

Lithium occurs throughout the US in ores like Lepidolite, but it's never been considered cost-effective to extract it. I've found a way.
>> "Source known only as John Doe says income inequality "one of the defining issues of our time" and calls on governments to address it."

Calling on any government to create change, not it citizens, is a mistake - especially on a topic like this.
Great points, that's why conservative underwriting and low LTV (loan to value) ratios matter so much. Look at PeerStreet deals, they are 75% LTV and under with a site wide average of 63% LTV. Every deal that goes up is stress tested against the last 20yrs of data in the sub market, then projected against the term of the loan and that's posted with each deal that goes up. But you are absolutely right that these things matter. In 2008, the banks were loaning at 100% LTV, that means the borrower has no skin in the game. And then lenders had guaranteed take outs of their loans. Those are some of the of the big reasons so much went wrong.PeerStreet is trying to take as many learnings from the securitization market as possible, both positive and negative and factor them in.
There is a ship a few miles away with engineers on it. Once the stage has vented all excess liquid oxygen and is safe to approach, they can return to the ASDS and secure it.
I can't load the senate.gov website with the HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin. The plugin redirects the senate HTTP URL back to the No HTTPS warning. It's easy to get around by going incognito, but this would seriously confuse the average user.
Introducing Schmux
Yeah, the world is screwed up in so many ways. How great would it be if you could assume every sex worker you paid for wasn't a slave?

But, I have a such a convenient solution, hear me out! We can just delude ourselves into thinking the world already works the way we think it should. We won't have to acknowledge the misery we perpetuate AND we can get our rocks off in the most awesomest way.
What you people are missing is that Americans don't care what you think.
Could kind of equate it to elections. It's essentially a huge nationwide poll. If the people they wanted to vote's choice wasn't good enough for them to name the boat Boaty McBoatface, then who's to stop the US government from thinking "ya, know what? We want Trump anyway." and throw the votes out?

Far fetched I agree, but that's the message being sent.

That being said, I'm happy with their choice. Sir David is a great thing to name something after.
Yes, you have outlibes the ways zoning is a stack of LOCAL optimizations that is GLOBALLY pessimal. Tragedy of the commons.
> I've found a way.

Need help?
>(can your method handle that?)

It's not "my" method. I'm not quite sure what I did to merit attitude and hostility, but to answer your question:

Yes. Third-graders are expected to do it with 3-digit numbers. You'll have to take my word for it that I'm capable of adding 4-digit numbers.

http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/3/NBT/#CCSS.Math.C...
I get the feeling that the best answer to the question is that empirical testing (perhaps by simulation) points out that three is the optimal number of blades.

This leads me to the question: is it possible to determine a good rotor design by using optimization techniques such as simulated annealing or genetic programming? Or are the simulations too costly?
When sites don't use https, China MITMs the page, and inserts malicious javascript that enters the user's browser into a botnet that launches a DDOS attack on the github pages of human rights organizations, causing github downtime.

If you don't want your website viewers to be entered into a botnet, then use https.

https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/
No, but if you take out housing that's a big part of the variation. And, historically, it was assumed that many on a "fixed income" would own their houses and/or move to a lower COLA area (e.g. the stereotypical retire to Florida or, more recently, the Southwest).

Property taxes are a potential wildcard which is one reason why increases are often capped--which isn't popular with the "they should just move out" crowd.
Same deal with most forms of assembly language- the values you work with are just numbers, and the operations to which you apply them are what give them a particular meaning at a particular point in time- addresses, offsets, integers, booleans, etc. It's possible to argue that such languages are "unityped" rather than "untyped", but I think to do so is to produce such a loose interpretation of "types" as to be uninteresting.
People have this victim complex where they think minorities and women are playing their cards to oppress white men. Fantasizing about imaginary abuse must be fun.
They are. Think about the fact that a lot of data exchange occurs via URL parameters (e.g. access tokens), so it would be a huge problem if they weren't also encrypted on HTTPS.
Nice little round-up:

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/130380-future-batteries-comi...

The comment about protecting commercial interests isn't wrong, but there is indeed a threshold coming where that won't be a valid reason to hold the technology back.
That is interesting. Could you share a source for your claims?
Which world population?

Domestic cats surely dominate all other cats in population.
Messaged you.
>No, not like oil/gas.

Like oil and gas in the sense that if prices are low it stays in the ground.
The Rolling Stones’ Guide to Business Success
I've only seen the British English acronym thing be the case when the acronym is pronounced, and I think it's mainly the BBC that does this.
You're confused only because you're trying to pick between a false dichotomy. Nkoren basically stipulated that US rocket scientists were too shortsighted/ignorant/stupid to look past their tiny niche to realize that their hyperoptimization for liquid hydrogen was a net negative. Masklinn asserts that it's not true that they were so hyperfocused on liquid hydrogen that they ignored tradeoffs and alternatives, and that in fact they were flying kerosene rockets the entire time as well.

I'm absolutely certain that Masklinn did not assert that the optimal design was used every time or that NKoren's comment was completely lacking any accurate information. Neither of these assertions needs to be made to dispute the central idea that US rocket scientists are too incompetent to even consider alternative fuels or broader design tradeoffs.
WebAssembly just makes a better target for transpilers, it doesn't really do anything to make developing "desktop" apps inside browsers easier.
I'm kind of fascinated -- and not necessarily in a good sense -- with how unbelievably conservative the aerospace industry became right after its greatest moment of glory. That would have been Apollo in 1969. Seems like after the Moon landings everyone just said "welp, that's it, nothing else will ever be done."
These are first position liens on business purpose, non-owner occupied properties. Often these are fix and flip or buy to rent properties.
Storytelling and Code: Developing for the Amazon Echo
You're getting downvoted into oblivion, but yeah, that's basically how I feel. Cultural differences, I'm sure, because I'm not USian; but every time I see it on the youtube videos it makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Absurd comparisons and moral equivalence all in one! Let's all pay for sex!!!!!!!
I tried - increased it to unlimited and it still had the same error :-(

I have zero knowledge of Go, so not even sure how to start troubleshooting.
His basic assumption is one I've often seen... that a lot of very smart engineers working in a fast-moving and big money industry all make the exact same design mistake, because they're lazy and stupid and follow conventional wisdom rather than clever new thinking.

Which is sometimes true, but far more often, it's because those engineers know something you don't, because working on this problem is their job.
Someone needs to get their space craft there....
Yeah, another example that comes to mind is Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants, where the efficiency of power generation is actually lower, but the heat that's normally wasted is made useful.
This is only partially related to my other long post here, but it should be mentioned. This article appears to be largely about potential to disrupt the wind industry with outside the box thinking. But in the more than a decade I have been working in this industry the single most disruptive change in project performance was targeting low wind speeds rather than high, and accepting that turbines will have to shut down in higher winds.

The main way this is achieved is to take a huge rotor and put it on a small generator. More energy is lost at high winds, but the ramp up from no generation to maximum is much faster. Since most projects spend the majority of their time along that ramp rather than at rated power this results in large gains in annual energy.

This means that some sites once considered to be marginal to end up being good to very good. One area I've been working in saw a more than 25% increase in predicted energy for the same capital cost with the new turbine types.
You do need to know about variable scope with modern BASICs like FreeBASIC and GAMBAS.
Key reasons why small businesses don't trust marketing firms
Fair point, I was just responding to the idea that wind turbines would kill all the birds, which isn't realistic. As a percentage of the bird population, it's negligible.

I don't see any reason why bald eagles would be more likely to be killed by turbines than other species of birds. If only 0.01% of birds are killed by turbines, then they would only kill 1 bald eagle a year out of thousands.

Regardless, this is more of a reason to invent solutions for repelling birds from turbines. Maybe we could come up with noises or lights that repel them. Or drones, or a water cannon robot. But I'm not certain it's even an issue.
In the book Permutation City, rich people could upload their brains into computers, but they were running very slowly. A billionaire loaded a copy of his brain into a supercomputer and ran an optimizer on it. After a few years it spit out an empty file and said, "This program produces no output". I liked that book!
Newton's approximation for impact depth [1] gives a way to calculate how thick the barge deck would have to be to survive a high speed impact from the rocket stage. The impactor punches through until it has displaced an equal mass. An empty F9 stage masses about 23,100kg and has a diameter of 3.66m. [2] Steel has a density around 7,700 kg/m^3. Doing the math, the deck would need to be about 29 cm thick to survive a high speed impact. Estimates are the actual barge deck is 25-35 mm thick [3], so 1/10th that thickness. If the F9 stage came down onto the barge completely uncontrolled, it probably would punch through!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth

[2] http://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-v1-1-f9r/

[3] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8842/what-is-the-sp...
This is exactly the approach that CEOs use to get around insider trading laws. It is called "stripping".
Regarding your last part, some rockets have balloon tanks, which means that the tank requires pressurization to keep its shape.

The Falcon 9 has a sort of partial balloon tank. It's strong enough for ground handling without pressurization, but it requires pressurization to handle flight loads.

Note however that it's pressure, not fuel, that provides the extra strength. These tanks are still pressurized even when almost empty.
People but their exurban houses, forgetting that everyone else also buys an exurban house and they don't get the idyllic pastoral life they imagined. Instead they sit parked on the highway.
> It's a relative handful of cities--mostly coastal in the US. There's plenty of affordable housing in Detroit and New Orleans.

NOLA is on a coast.
Unless you actually use four/five-finger swipes to change apps, you may want to disable it at Settings > General > Multitasking > Gestures (switch to OFF).
Well, this is true, and it's also true that it's only certain areas of certain cities we're talking about as well. I'm living in/near one of the desirable cities that's struggling with issues of affordable housing because of the large influx of new and wealthy residents. And yet, there are still many places in the city where housing is cheap. It's just not desirable because of poor schools, high crime, poor infrastructure, and a lack of interesting places within walking distance.

So I agree with you, this talk of cities is misleading. The real issue is that the supply of the kind of places that people want to live in doesn't meet demand, and that these things are extremely inelastic in the short-run (it usually takes years to build up these kinds of neighborhoods).