skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gabriel accused Washington of being "angry" about the deal that the EU struck with Canada, known as CETA, because it contains elements the U.S. doesn't want to see in the TTIP.

What would those elements be?
It would be outrageous if they asked for access. In this day and age, asking for an e-mail address, FB name, Twitter handle etc. is no more sensitive than asking for phone number or address.
Levelised cost of energy (LCOE) is a good metric for comparing energy sources on cost [1].

According to the table on page 6 of this EIA report for weighted average LCOEs in America before tax credits for 2022 [2], photovoltaics are projected to be around $74 per MWh. That compares favourably with $100 for nuclear, but unfavourably with $56 for natural gas, $59 for wind or $64 for hydroelectric. (Solar gets a weighted average federal subsidy of $16/MWh subsidy; wind $8.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation...
Cross-platform with a single code base has always been a bit of a myth, if only because different platforms have different conventions for things like how to lay out dialog boxes or the writing style used for buttons. If you want something that feels like a native application on different platforms, it's always going to require some level of customisation.

It's still useful to have a single UI library in your code that you can tell to make a text box or open a menu or draw some graphics and have it translate into the correct API calls on each platform under the hood. For all the much-touted rearrangements of UIs, particularly in recent versions of Windows, the reality is that most of the familiar GUI controls haven't really changed that much in decades.

I think the biggest difficulty for any attempt at a cross-platform GUI framework today is probably making sure it does properly handle the widgets or behaviours that really are different or unique on each platform. More generally, if you're building for multiple platforms you also have to deal with all the installation and updating and sandboxing and so on that tends to be completely different from one OS to another, and often the GUI libraries and UI integration is a big part of that too.
Well, from an engineering point of view, energetic cost of capture is one the inputs, not the end goal. Overall cost per unit capture is the end goal. So high energetic costs can be offset by low manufacturing costs if it results in a net overall lower cost.

Anyway, yes, direct atmospheric capture is much much more energetically costly than flue gas capture. CO2 in air is 0.04% and in flue gas is 8-15%. Depending on the capture technology and the storage medium, you don't have to build nearly as much infrastructure if you tap into the 8-15% CO2 flue gas stream. Atmospheric carbon capture is literally what plants do, and the manufacturing costs for them is basically plant seeds...done. Or hell, they do that naturally anyway, so it's really just stop-clearing-forests and you've gotten your carbon capture for free.

So even though atmospheric carbon capture is way more energetically costly, the manufacturing costs are basically zero, and plants are currently the cheapest solution. That doesn't stop lots of research going into trying to find something better. We found cheaper solar energy with silicon over plants (cost per watt on the grid from photovoltaics is less than biomass), so we may find something cheaper than plants for carbon capture, too.
The examples he gives seem like using complex features of programming languages for the sake of it rather than best practices.
This was a coherent argument until it got to the "shameless media who attack Donald Trump on each word he spells" and then cited RT about Syria.
every time Russia is mentioned on HN, folks just happen to want the narrative thread to be how unfairly persecuted Russia is by the western media.
This truly cannot be overstated. These 'architects' have it in their mind that they can create an app framework that can handle _any_ change that comes along and they sell the umpteenth rewrite of the software to management based on this fallacy.
Works for me (Sun Aug 28 1:52 Eastern US). Looks like a spreadsheet with names, universities, where they got their PhD, .. , up to photo url.
What Exactly Does a Visitor Management System Do?
The punchline:

- Python is popular at Facebook

- Python 3 is the default for new projects

- Changing to Python 3 needed an internal advocate to update build and dev tools to push the change

- Facebook is a big user of the new ``asyncio`` module

Perhaps the most subtle point of the talk is that Facebook managed to change from 2 to 3 from the efforts of just one person. Of course there were more folks changing code than just the speaker, but it appears he was able to heavily influence the culture change. Enabling 3 for the build tools probably made a big difference.
http://sciter.com

Embeddable HTML/CSS UI engine designed specifically for desktop UIs.

The "Embeddable" here means that:
- it is a compact (3...4mb) monolithic DLL/dylib/so without external dependencies.
- can be linked statically if needed.
- has simple plain C API of 20-30 functions - C++,C#,Rust,Go,Delphi,Python wrappers.

Same UI resources are used on all platforms:
http://sciter.com/images/sciter-clock.png

Check technology introduction article:

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/859098/Sciter-multiplatf...
> There is no large corporate here restricting access to content, this is a person who has put in work to create something and released it at a specific price.

Hope I've understood this sentence of yours correctly. Actually in this case, Pluralsight, which the author of the blog post has published courses on, is a large corporate in the software/technical training domain and has acquired many other training companies in the last few years. Pluralsight is highly restrictive in that it does not allow downloads of course videos (just a limited offline cache using its proprietary DRM restricted player) or moving them to a device or system of the paying user's choice. Compare this to DRM free publishers like O'Reilly, Packt and many others (see my other comment elsewhere on this topic), Pluralsight is terribly restrictive for users (IMO).
Not sure why you're being downvoted, I assume the ~20℅ anti-subsidy rates plus the individual anti-dumping rate referenced in the below article are what you're referring to?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/u-s-impose...
> but for the average user it's barely worth mentioning.

a reduction of 5-15% in a year is huge. are you familiar with how compounding works? that means the price will fall by almost half in about 5 years, and will be a tiny fraction of what it costs today, in a decade. what's expensive today will be economically viable or even cheap in just 2 or 3 years.

look at the graph! it's right there with easy to read colors and shapes.
What can I say. I was trying to be kind.

It's a noob error -- and the worst part? People make these mistakes, create huge messes, then go on to other companies and do it all over again.

The general point is this: imperative, OO code has a known set of anti-patterns which good practitioners become familiar with and avoid. If you're fresh out of school, making these mistakes are just the way you learn the ropes. Using those folks as an example was much kinder than complaining about the lousy status of some programmer/architects in general. At least the college kids have a good excuse :)

ADD: I'll say this a different way. Yes, I've seen tons of it in the wild. I do not consider these people to be professional programmers. I consider them folks who got technically stuck at some point in their education.
oh well.. there's so many apps that do this nowadays, i got used to it by now. As soon as the 'non-subscription-model' of the app is no longer actively developed i just dump it and switch to another app. There are plenty alternatives anyway.
Oh, so that's why all these songs fucking suck.
The Choo framework looks promising! https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/choo
> If you're willing to look slightly outside the most desirable neighborhoods, it isn't that hard to find an apartment.

This is true for anything with less than 2 bedrooms. If you are looking for anything with 2 bedrooms or more (not a studio, one bedroom, or roommate situation) then finding an apartment within the northern Bay Area, including East Bay, downtown, or the peninsula, is quite difficult regardless of price.

Edit: from the post it does look like they were looking for a one bedroom place. They're using python-craigslist[1]. From the readme it doesn't look like it exposes the bedrooms under "CraigslistHousing" but the code tells a different story in __init__.py[2] and does seem to snag "bedrooms" and "bathrooms" as well as additional properties. Just in case anyone was looking to fork this and add some handling for the number of bedrooms or bathrooms.

[1] - https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist

[2] - https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist/blob/mast...
That was the joke I was making...
If Facebook wasn't famous for keeping all data they collect I would just swap my phone number for another, like a throw away VoIP line. Retroactive declarations like this should be illegal.
It depends on where you live. About 15 years ago, the geniuses of our power company decided that they could save on tree trimming near power lines. a few years later, they were bragging about the savings... and then, in the middle of winter, with about 3 feet of snow on the ground, we had an ice storm that took out power for well over half the city. My house was without power for 4 days, with highs in the 20F. There's enough population density our lives were not in danger, but the house was only habitable because we had a generator.

And guess what? 5 months later, the summer comes, the tree trimming still wasn't done, and half the city lost power again due to a summer storm. Out for 6 days in our house. Every day we reached the 90s. Good luck insulating yourself from that heat for almost a week! Having A/C was pretty nice. The power company now inspects and trims around lines every couple of years, just to avoid power outages so wide they can't bring power back at an acceptable timeframe.

That said, the situation is rather regional: I'd not care about AC or heating in a power outage if I lived in Northern California. Around here, where we can hit the 100s in the summer and go under zero in the winter, you have to care a bit. My friend in Alaska cares even more.

So first world problems? Depends on where you live.
Very light on investor protections and retains a lot of the EU regulations to be kept. In particular about food safety and similar things.
I believe this post is fundamentally misguided, but I can see how the author got there. In fact I see it as a sort of category error. When you talk about a style of programming being "good" or "bad", I always want to ask "for what?". I wonder if the author has thought about what would happen if everyone adopted the "scientific" style they are alluding too.

Most of what the author describes as the problems of code generated by scientist are what I would call symptoms. The real problems are things like: incorrect abstractions, deep coupling, overly clever approaches with unclear implicit assumptions. Of course this causes maintenance and debugging to be more difficult than it should but the real problem is that such code does not scale well and is poor at managing complexity of the code base.

So long as your code (if not necessarily its domain) is simple, you are fine. Luckily this describes a huge swath of scientific code. However system complexity is largely limited by the the tools and approaches you use .. all systems eventually grow to become almost unmodifiable eventually.

The point is, this will happen to you faster if you follow the "scientific coder" approaches the author describes. Now it turns out that programmers have come up with architectural approaches that help manage complexity over the last several decades. The bad news for scientific coders is that to be successful with these techniques you actually have to dedicate some significant amount of time to learning to become a better programmer and designer, and learning how to use these techniques. It also often has a cost in terms of the amount of time needed to introduce a small change. And sometimes you make design choices that don't help your development at all. They help your ability to release, or audit for regulatory purposes, or build cross-platform, or ... you get the idea. So these approaches absolutely have costs. You have to ask yourself what you are buying with this cost, and do you need it for your project.

The real pain comes when you have people who only understand the "scientific" style already bumping up against their systems ability to handle complexity, but doubling down on the approach and just doing it harder. Those systems really aren't any fun to repair.
Plus, teaching new hires to use py3 as default, putting in linter warnings to get rid of old bad habits, adding in 2to3 compat layer libraries by default and switching to 3 as default after that seems to have helped.
I saw a really good / fun post about writing a Hello World app by years of experience.

The first example was

print "Hello world!".

It gradually started adding functions, inheritance and other features with each year of experience.Then after ten years it went back to print "Hello World".

Thats been the reality for me. Understand the complex features of a language, but more importantly learn when they are appropriate.
The ability to have friends and a family without the use of Facebook and WhatsApp is "anecdotal evidence"?

Are you fucking kidding me?
An arbitrary one or a specific one?
Reply to all:

I don't want to officially compare NX with any other framework (performance or feature wise). I think this should be left to somebody independent if it is needed in the future.

I just wrote that comment for the request form the top of my head, but it is no way official. I think that if you would really like to know the differences you should try out some of the examples in the docs and decide for yourself.
It depends on what language you're using and your requirements, but my preference is Qt. It has bindings to several languages; it supports most common platforms; the API is consistent, stable, and well documented; and it's easy to get up and running on all of the platforms it supports.

One complaint people have about Qt is that it doesn't "look native" enough. That's not something I personally care about, and it's not a problem at all for the applications I write, but it's an issue for some people. IME, that's just a trade off of using a cross-platform GUI library. If the layout is good and it's easy to use, most people won't care if it doesn't look native. Photoshop doesn't "look native" either, yet it has a huge following and brings in a ton of money.
It's entirely possible to be opposed both to US and Russia foreign interventions. And yet you chose to presume the opposite about berntb post. Why is that?
Are you refering to this? :)

http://www.connexin.net/computer-software-humor-jokes/progra...
This article is anecdotal and ranty but I will respond anyway. I've spent the last 15 years working on various projects involving cleaning up scientific code bases. Messy unengineered code is fine if only a very few people ever use it. However, if the code base is meant to evolve over time you need good software engineering or it will become fragile and unmaintainable.

That said, there are many "programmers" who apply design concepts willy nilly with out really understanding why. They often make a bigger mess of things. There is an art to quality software engineering which takes time to learn and is a skill which must be continually improved.

The claim in the article that programmers have too much free time on their hands because they aren't doing real work, like a scientist does, is obviously ridiculous. Any programmer worth their salt is busy as hell and spends a lot of thought on optimizing their time.

Conclusion, scientists should work with software engineers for projects that are meant to grow into something larger but hire programmers with a proven track record of creating maintainable software.
I wonder what those elements are?
I'm 80% "software engineer" and 20% "researcher" and have to play both roles to write supercomputer code (I'm the minority, most peers are more researchers). These issues are important right now, as the govt is investing in software engineering due to recent hardware changes that require porting efforts. We recognize the pitfalls of naive software engineering applied to scientific code, and would like to do things more carefully. I don't think we should have to choose one or the other; with proper communication we can achieve a better balance.
> the US is only slightly better than 50/50 in winning cases

That doesn't account for (1) the asymmetry of the lawsuits - if the company loses, no big deal, but if a country loses, it has to pay up or change its laws, and (2) according to several articles I've read, many countries are afraid of ISDS lawsuits and the high penalties they might result in, so they will modify their laws just off the threat of an ISDS lawsuit.
>clojure.lang.Cons follows what CL's cons does with exactly one deviation: cdr must implement clojure.lang.ISeq

Well then, it's not a cons, is it? It's actually a particularly weird implementation of push, which stores the pushed item in another cell. If you're not going to put cons in your language, fine, but be honest about it.

>Further, when I'm using deftype, if I implement the right interfaces, the core clojure sequence functions like conj, first, rest, map, filter, reduce, etc will all work on my custom type, without me inventing a namespace worth of custom implementations for those

So you have high-level collection functions that act the same between collections? Good for you guys. Lisp and scheme have had that for ages. But don't call your high-level functions by the name the low-level functions are expected to be called, and expose those low-level functions: sometimes a function wants to know what sort of structure it's manipulating.

>Clojure code isn't written using Lists, Vectors, Strings, Maps, Keywords, and Symbols? I guess I'll stop writing macros then. No clue how they ever managed to work.

Okay, yeah, I miswrote that, it doesn't violate homoiconicity. But I disagree vehemently about the reader. Assuming the readtable is in the same state, anything you write out can be read back in to give the same structure in RAM: that's why you can use write to serialize state.

Also, by the above, clojure violates commutative equality, which is bad in any language that claims to support FP: If a property is false on an entity, than an entity that entity is equal to cannot have that property be true. Otherwise, they're not equal.
I usually watch the Apache projects.

Apache Arrow (https://github.com/apache/arrow/) is very interesting and promising project. It is in early state; you can watch the design decisions taken and how they are implemented. Plus it is multi-language project, you can find code in C++, Java and Python.
Ha! I never looked up "the official video" for that song before.

I think the guitar riff is the part using odd timings in that one. (since the rhythm guitars are almost percussive)
I'm one of those that can have a cup of coffee and fall asleep. The reason is not because of tolerance (though I do drink a fair amount). I can fall asleep after coffee because I have asthma and caffeine is a bronchodilator. A cup will help me breathe more easily, letting me fall asleep... sometimes.

I can't recommend it as a sleep aid, though.
This one's on the longer side, but it's worth the read. It starts out as an article about a high-class dining experience, but ends with a twist.
In the commercial world, specially at enterprise level, coders are only allowed to follow beautiful designs of UML layers created by business analysts, solution architects that haven't written a single line of code in the last 15 years.
What is so dire about the Russian situation ?
The pun actually does work in French, amusingly enough, although in French one says that working devices are "walking" (marcher) rather than "running" (courir).

Bonjour. Est-ce que votre réfrigérateur marche ? // Oui... // Ben il faut aller l'attraper alors !
> Even good programmers would need days if not weeks to understand how software like card processing AI works

I think there will be a shift in how we design software. Right now, software is mostly organized into monolithic packages which are about the maximum size a professional developer can make sense of in 40 hours per week. For the most part, all corners of the codebase are written with the expectation that they will be read by an expert in the language who understands the whole codebase. Lots of side effects, advanced control structures, etc. In order for programming literacy to take off, we will first have to start organizing some of our software for widespread human understanding.

Instead of one giant pro-level repository, you will have a toplevel layer which is mostly configuration code, but which is written in very domain-relevant language, using only simple programming primitives: functions and literals. It will be boxed into small, understandable modules, and editable in a browser like any simple document.

The next layer down will be generic algorithms and data structures, also written using simple programming primitives, and designed with very forgiving APIs, again using as much domain-specific language as possible and pushing non-domain specific implementation details down into libraries.

The third layer will be implementation-specific code, highly optimized, using the full spectrum of language tools and programming constructs. Only the domain of professional programmers.

Everyone, including children and executives will dabble in the top layer. Domain professionals (everyone in your organization who is not a full-time programmer) will work in the second layer, only in the part of the software that they specifically interact with in their work. Full-time coders will maintain the third layer, and will think of their role more as a support role, building tools to support the organization, rather than maintaining total control over the codebase.
Note that the article is about big solar, not home solar. Big sites with lots of sun and no clouds are very cost-effective. Mojave is filling up with solar panels. Random house roofs, not so much.

The head of Applied Materials solar operations had a useful way of looking at costs. He'd draw a latitude line on a map, saying that below this line (Northern hemisphere) solar could beat out other sources of power without subsidies. About ten years ago, that line ran through Spain and Southern California. As the costs decline, it moves north. This is more useful than looking at costs over all locations. Solar is a location-specific thing. SF's BART system once looked into solar panels at stations, and decided that only one station in the whole system (Contra Costa) got enough sun to justify it.

Tesla is making noises about "solar shingles" for residential installations. The idea is to replace the roof, rather than sit on top of it. Others make those now; CertainTeed Products, for one. Dow Chemical just exited that business. Solar shingles work, but high installation cost and lower efficiency make it unproductive.