skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trump is the president-elect, and it's our civic duty to call out elected officials making misleading or outlandish claims, just like we've been calling out Obama for his stance on surveillance and whistleblowing for years now. This is especially true for the long-debunked claim that coal jobs can be brought back, despite the perpetual coal pandering of every politician under the sun. And I say that as someone who spent the first two decades of his life in Appalachia, though mine was a crumbling former oil town rather than a crumbling former coal town.
Has anyone tried to get Android Things (Brillo) to work with other micro-controllers than the ones they support out of the box?
You're far from correct. Large-scale energy storage is one of the biggest unsolved problems today, and there are numerous startups in the space. LightSail is an interesting one, and is using compressed air combined with micro-droplets of water to ensure stable, efficient energy transfer.

Renewables success is heavily tied to battery technology. The wind isn't always moving and the sun isn't always shining, so you need to store that energy. Right now with existing battery tech, most of the energy is lost in a storage process due to heat or battery wear/tear.

If energy storage was solved today, the oil/gas industry would be on their knees.
Developing Strategies for Operational Risk Management
Bashar al-Assad’s forces are taking Aleppo and slaughtering its civilians
It is incredibly difficult to site new pumped hydro in places like California today. It might work in other places, but it's almost impossible in California.
>Amazon's ability to prioritize the customer over themselves

Can you give some examples of times when Amazon HASN'T put the desires of the vast majority of customers first?
`Snopes, Politifact, Factcheck.org, and ABC News`

Nice to see a good mix of bipartisan sources. /s
... until import tariffs with China end the solar revolution here.
OK, so what you're saying is it boils down to math: N = Number of employees signing the pledge, Q is probability that an employee will quit their otherwise fantastic $300K/yr^ job because someone ELSE at the company is working on MuslimDB, C = average cost to replace and retrain an engineer, P = expected profit from project. If NQC < P, do the project.

Makes sense. I suppose whether it has an effect, then, depends on how many people sign it AND are actually willing to go through with it.

^(the salary commonly quoted on HN about how much the usual Googler makes)
Quite frankly I wrote this more like an exercise. I have never used it in practice other than the github test. I saw people picking up on the other post and didn't really like the indices going unbounded. Then I spent a few minutes thinking how to solve it.

While I think the implementation per se is not that useful (I agree with you), I believe the actual trick can be reused in a different situation or type of container.

Check out the github repo now, I added a choice of allocator. That is nice because the main use of this kind of tool is when you have a slab of mapped memory that you go partitioning.
Nice to see a good mix of bipartisan sources. /s
It sounds like he's advocating for one of the many solid alternatives, not HIS alternative. Seems like a very fair argument to me. Why do we need more half-completed projects masquerading as if they should be used by people as serious alternatives, when they are not? If people want to waste their time re-inventing the wheel then so be it, that's their prerogative, but I do believe it is fair to say that it's a detriment to the community when every one of these "learning projects" that has nothing to contribute to the current climate is shared around as if it's a valid alternative to something that is complete and well supported.
Overstock begins trading its shares on the Bitcoin blockchain
How to use Firebug and Firepath?
Rich people would get this first, but there'd be so much demand that unless there was something intrinsically expensive about a life extension tech (e.g. it required surgical intervention) you'd see geometric decreases in price. Then the patents would expire and it'd get mass produced in India for $0.05/pill.
You theory lends itself to validation. One aspect is timing - upvotes produced later after reading will be more thoughtful. The other aspect is effort - if upvote required certain effort over a length of time, that upvote too would be more meaningful. On the other hand, a short burst of heroic effort points to a reflexive reaction. If we could somehow inject effort into the voting we would get some really meaningful weights for each vote. This could be calibrated with manual review of sample comments. We could also use this knowledge to calm people down - confronting a person with a lengthy task might give them time to rethink their position.

So... how is that for an idea: having voted on something you get an option to return and double-down your vote, but no sooner than five minutes later. To try more things we could also show the user his recent upvotes, and mix in some comments he did not vote on, so that the user had to stop and think.
Solar did not help meet peak demand today in California: http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx Nor does solar help meet peak demand for 2/3rds of the year because peak demand comes after the sun goes down.

Solar can help during some summer days, but for much of the year it makes the system less efficient by requiring more ramping up and down of other generation resources.
I never said it wasn't fun or interesting. But look at the example you gave in the cartoon; it's not impressive unless you're heavily invested in the process.

Trust me, I know the great feeling when a piece of code works for the first time or some idea I have about signal processing yields an interesting result, or the excitement of getting the color of paint that I want because I learned about an interesting new pigment with excellent lightfastness properties. But nerd excitement isn't that interesting to other people. If you actually found a way to genuinely levitate, by contrast, people would go nuts just to witness it. When was the last time you saw people genuinely go nuts over something? I'm not talking about the last gushing article on the new Curiosity pictures, I mean something that people pay fat money just to have a glimpse of.

I mentioned signal processing above, which provides a useful counter-example. Synthesizers allow you to shape a signal (typically an audio signal) using various combinations of oscillators, filters, and modulators. This is tremendous fun if you're the sort of person who enjoys turning knobs and listening to bizarre sounds or watching them on an oscilloscope (thanks science). But it was also pretty expensive to make. Back in the 1980s as microprocessors became common people started using them or this purpose and it was so much cheaper to manufacture with microprocessors compared to analog circuitry, plus you could do things that were previously impossible thanks to digital precision, that digital keyboards and synthesizers took over the whole market.

After a while some people complained that the digital synthesizers were cool and all, but they just didn't sound that good for many purposes compared to the old analog ones. Proponents of digital argued with great conviction, backed up by lots of data, that digital synthesis could reproduce any imaginable analog signal and produce many other things that would be impossible to achieve using analog, and they were correct to a large extent. But as electronics manufacturing got cheaper, partly thanks to surface-mount technology and automation, and partly thanks to manufacturing in China, it became cost-effective to start making analog synthesizers and modules again. A few niche manufacturers did, then a few more, and a few more, and eventually (most of) the major synthesizer manufacturers caved and started reproducing their old analog designs and making new ones. It's not that digital was deficient, but people just prefer the sound of analog, perhaps for the same reason people often prefer to receive a hand-written letter to a printed one that elaborately reproduces the characteristics of handwritten text.
Video analyzing demo
I know the entire IoT sphere is completely pants on head stupid these days but... Android. On an embedded product. Even with no UI (assuming it will all be controlled through one gateway), Android doesn't scream "efficient with its resources" to me. 1GB of RAM on a microcontroller to get it running efficiently (what the Edison seems to have)?

And joy oh joy, another Google-made API to use. You can feel me bursting with joy at this prospect. They are of such good quality.

I guess automatic updates are sweet.
Escape from the former East Germany by hot air balloon
I don't see this as a workable solution. You can't neglect to cite relevant research ideas simply because they were published in a closed journal, and there often isn't an open alternative to cite. I think you really need to have authors stop submitting to closed journals in the first place.
I work for Fitbit. I don't generally talk about what I do and don't know about future features, but I'll make a one-time exception and tell you I'm completely ignorant as to whether there's any plan for laptop lock/unlock.

Despite my complete ignorance, I'll still challenge your statement "no chance Garmin or Fitbit gets that kind of functionality." If Fitbit Blaze can do bluetooth music control it doesn't take much imagination to think lock/unlock.
10 Unique Gift Ideas for Data Scientists and Engineers
Any sources? I ask in good faith, but it's also easy to say "from what I hear" then "that's crazy, if true" for nearly anything.
It already goes 100Mbit IF you're very lucky and happen to have the node right near your house (and then some poor sap at the other end gets 12).

And no, they cannot upgrade FttN to G.fast, no matter what they tell you. That requires shorter copper lengths than all but the closest handful of houses to the node have. Plus you need everyone on the same technology so that the vectoring (like active noise cancellation) can work.

Gfast drops off a cliff after a few hundred metres, and they have houses connected to nodes a kilometre away. Gfast and Xgfast are only appropriate for Fibre-to-the-curb.

FttN can never be meaningfully upgraded.
Shiller Index Worries:  One Way to Protect Your Gains
Monero in fact has 'view' keys so you can report, and prove, the transaction / donation to relevant authorities, without revealing your private key, and without making your transaction history visible to the general public.
Not that I hold out too much hope here, but given GitLab's emphasis on the enterprise and self-hosting, it would be amazing if they could put some effort into making disparate GitLab installations behave like one big network (think Six Apart with trackbacks/typekey/etc way back in the day).

Github's huge win is the network effect of having one account and being able to interact on thousands of issue trackers, create PRs, etc. It would super cool if GitLab could achieve some of that same experience without requiring everyone to all be on gitlab.com. It would go a long way toward addressing the criticisms that Github is too centralized.
Don't adopt babies off Craigslist
DeVry Agrees to Pay $100M in Case Alleging Deceptive Ads
NC legislature in surprise secret legislative “coup”
Not sure why this isn't all over the news; it amounts to a fascist coup; journalists have been arrested:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/12/15/north_carolina_legislative_coup_public_barred_from_chambers_reporter_arrested.html
This is a really interesting point. I've definitely passed on reading papers that seemed potentially relevant because my institution didn't have a subscription to the journal.
> In this sense everything is an arbitrary definition

Hmm, no, not really. While definitions are, indeed, by definition arbitrary, different concepts are of different usefulness, and as such, definitions that use more useful concepts can reasonably be considered better definitions of given terms.

There is no such advantage in using the binary 000 to represent the first index, though, except in so far as it results from the binary 000 representing the neutral element of addition, which corresponds to the natural number 0. The latter is the part that's actually not arbitrary.

> there never is one for naming

Well, the whole point kindof is that it's not about naming, but about arithmetic. If you only want to name stuff, you can use strings and hash tables, or letters of the alphabet, or whatever other set of symbols that you can come up with, it's really to a large degree a matter of taste. But there is a distinctive feature of arrays vs. other collection data types: You can do arithmetic on its indices. And arithmetic with a number type that doesn't have a zero is braindead.
My house:

AT&T: 768kbps - $40

Comcast: i hate myself no matter the price

no other options
See my post for the real reason why. You must be right-handed based on your first sentence.
If perovskite pans out -- and it is starting to look like it will -- then solar is about to get a lot cheaper still.

See https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161020142037.h...
They didn't test this (or haven't yet) against normal aging in mice, only mice with progeria (unusually rapid aging)?
> I always believed that computers should serve us, not the other way around.

Amen! The idea that we should change our way of thinking because it somehow makes more sense for computers is preposterous.
seriously! thats from EIA their entire focus is on traditional not renewable sources. plus its misleading to quote prices from 2013 knowing fully well renewables have made a lot of cost reduction owing to economies of scale in last few years.

its only going to accelerate further.
Why did they use the mice with the progeria gene? Wouldn't the results be more impressive in wild-type mice? Were they just trying to get around the 2-3 year lifespan of a lab mouse faster?
Once we get our Tesla Powerwall batteries, that should help with peak demand, no?
> The, us against them (in this case miners, not exactly the 1%) is not healthy and OT.

Yeah, it sure is frustrating when people don't help promote social stability by refusing to love your preferred leader isn't it? Welcome to our lives for the last eight years, when we've had to hear about how "divisive" Obama is, as evidenced by the fact that people don't like him because he's so divisive.
You don't have to win or even bring charges. The mere prospect of criminal charges destroyed Drexel.
Your test completely ignores historical context.
It's interesting, but I'm skeptical of Google's first attempt at anything, particularly Android. It took them a few attempts at TV and Auto, and they're probably not done with those yet.

It's great that they've got something for IoT, but I wouldn't want to build anything serious with this yet.
Google Weave, aka libiota, is targeted at lower-capability MCUs like the Marvell MW302 with its 512kB of RAM:

https://developers.google.com/weave/guides/overview/what-is-...

Based on these two links (including the parent), it wouldn't surprise me if a Google Weave API was soon exposed on Android Things.
with grid tie-in your grid is the battery.
Great app. Is there a way to flag favorites. I think this will help fill time on my driving. But of course I don't want to tune and drive
But then it will be cost efficient to mine coal, and America will be great again!
> Then the patents would expire and it'd get mass produced in India for $0.05/pill.

Forget patents. This is the sort of thing that will flood the black market, and could conceivably be a target for eminent domain. In any case, it will make it out to the public in some manner if it becomes a reality, I'm sure of that.
> Trump is the president-elect

Last I checked he is not. Elections were years ago and we don't have presidents.

And now we are wildly off topic on what might have been an interesting topic, can solar beat wind.
You can't really compare Github to Gitlab, when the former has a fifth the features of the latter.
Don't get me wrong, I find the pledge to be a noble gesture, and it's good to see individual tech employees finally publicly take a stance on ethical issues. But have ethical issues ever hurt a company's candidate flow? I can't think of a single company so tainted by some ethical thing that they can't find engineers willing to hold their nose and work for them.

Have you ever been asked on an interview how you handled being assigned to write code that you had serious ethical concerns about, or whether there was any kind of projects you'd object to being assigned to? I haven't. Maybe those questions come AFTER the whiteboard hazing if there's time...

I've in the past objected to an ethically questionable assignment, and the company dealt with by moving me to a different part of the code base and hiring a contractor who had no problem with doing the deed. Had I quit over it they would likely have shrugged and hired someone else.
Making your own retro keyboard
Its very noisy to read these 'blip' articles, rather like following the stock ticker blow by blow ...

Its wonderful that we see these interesting reports every week, but as a non-specialist you never how it will impact human longevity, and when.

What I'd like to read is a well considered "state-of-longevity-science" report - by someone not Aubrey DeGray (give the man a medal) but equally cognizant, perhaps more conservative - that actually explains and weighs the torrent of advancements as they happen and gives them some context.

What is the likely impact of crispr, of rosveratrol, of telomere-foo, of gene-therapy, of blood cleansing, of stem-cells on logevity in 10 / 20 years ? Where and why should we rationally allocate research money ? What is likely to benefit Alzheimers patients in the 5 year term ?

Its the kind of state of play you need updated on a monthly basis, due to the pace of progress.

Does such a report already exist ?
Solar peaked at 8% of total production today, which looks like it matches the comment you're replying to: "At modest levels of penetration..."
> 59GW of wind will almost certainly produce more electricity than the 70GW of solar.

What do you mean? These are not some peak figures, they are expected energy production figures.
The comments on this thread make me super sad
The good thing about solar is that it leverages off the semiconductor industry, whereas other renewables do not. For example, in the case of smartphones, before they existed accelerometers and GPS IC's were crazy expensive, but now they are cheap. Solar probably has years and years to go before it is as cheap as possible. I would not be surprised if solar hits $0.10/watt in 10 years. Basically because as the demand picks up and money is being made, more companies will be saying, "if we can just increase our efficiency by 20% or so, we can lower the price and win huge contracts.." so they will be trying things like multilayers, changing the structure to improve efficiency as the panel heats up, coatings, lenses, etc that can all be done in low cost ways. Definitely would be interesting to compare how much it costs to run/maintain a solar farm vs. a natural gas power plant. Basically you have to deliver the fuel to the plant, maintain all the stuff, pay for the workers to make sure stuff doesn't blow up, etc. Seems like with a solar farm you basically need a guy with a truck and a leaf blower.
I have high hopes for ARES [1]. just a heavy train on a hill with a regenerative break. Add lots of tracks, multiple trains per track, solar above the rails. Avoids needing all the water for pumped hydro storage. none of toxic stuff to deal with when batteries have reached their end of life. Zero carbon emission (aside from whatever is required for manufacturing) is just hugely appealing.

If solar prices continue as they have for another 3-5 years, the question is going to be pretty clear, how do we store all of this insanely cheap power. I'm a little mystified we're not taxing carbon emissions and subsidizing storage. But hey, there are clearly powerful forces at play, that don't agree with me.

[1] http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/
From personal experience neglecting debts I believed to be unjust, I've not gotten any dings on my credit rating inspired by collections companies who acquired the debt for the cable box that I never returned, after paying 3x its value in rental fees.

This didn't stop them from calling me and threatening my credit rating, but it seems their threats had no teeth. /anecdata
That's good advice, but I don't think getting paid to produce a specific result is anchoring to "free". I guess it depends on how precise the scope is. If it sounds vague and up to the client's discretion, that they just want free work on spec, then run away. But if it's easy to define and measure, then it's a useful way to signal competence and avoid anchoring to a rate instead of the business need.

Anyway, I'm happy to say that I avoided this customer (and others that care excessively about timesheets) and I have no regrets.
> Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do.

I think this says it all. Even if you don't retaliate, if the way you deal with a whistleblower who brings illegal activity to your attention is to explain to them why it's okay rather than do something about it, then you shouldn't really be surprised if whistleblowers lose trust in the organization's ability to police itself.
They created this culture where people came from certain schools and certain backgrounds. That is a very, very hard culture to change.

What kind of 'background'? Economic? Social? Education? They're inter-related, yes, but for actionable initiatives to take place, the lack of diversity along these dimensions have to be isolated, acknowledged, and prioritized. Otherwise, it's just recasting the problem and expecting companies to spit out answers. If Engineering schools became more diverse, I have no doubt there will be more diversity of engineers in the workforce, too. Without establishing diversity in these earlier funnels, such that people's background are more diverse, companies will continue to have to "overcompensate" for diversity, as to avoid criticism.

In the case of these particular companies having a lack of diversity, I don't think it's inherently a 'culture' that has been formed, but more so about the network. Network and compound effects makes it harder for these companies to course-correct. A person's set of friend is not a random sample. Potentially, people are more likely to form friendships with people from their own race / culture. This is not to say they are discriminating or racist. An H1B worker who went to school in Asia will likely have a greater percentage of Asian friends, and by transitivity refer more Asian people. Again, if the earlier stages in the funnel, such as education, more diverse, maybe people will have a more diverse set of friends, in the aggregate, and refer a more diverse set of friends to their employer, in the aggregate.