skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MacKay's estimate of areas needed to provide power from solar energy are technology-dependent. See for example:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c6/page_41....

"If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside, what is the maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we’d have 10% × 100 W/m^2 × 200 m^2 per person ≈ 50 kWh/day/person.

I assumed only 10%-efficient panels, by the way, because I imagine that solar panels would be mass-produced on such a scale only if they were very cheap, and it’s the lower efficiency panels that will get cheap first."

This assumption was invalidated by the actual trajectory of solar power since 2008. Nobody is building solar farms with 10% efficiency panels any more. Low efficiency is too expensive -- because it requires more glass and aluminum for the panels, more cabling, racking, and labor for installation. Low cost, low efficiency Chinese panels, like the GCL Poly ones used at India's giant new solar farm that HN just had an article about, are now in the mid-teens. (I looked up the data sheet after getting a glimpse of the GCL shipping crates on that Indian project site):

http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/PV-Specials/GCL%20245.pdf

If they used the middle-of-the-road GCL‐P6‐60‐240 that's a 14.7% module; 47% better than MacKay estimated as the best one could hope for from large scale solar projects. And the minimum competitive efficiency for even low-price panels is still creeping up. (Though large scale storage sufficiently affordable to get UK energy primarily from PV is still but a dream.)

MacKay also made the challenge look even bigger than it is by estimating the energy consumption of a "typical moderately-afﬂuent person" and then multiplying that value by the whole population of the UK:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c2/page_22....

This leads to large over-estimates relative to actual measured UK energy consumption, particularly from air travel and automobile travel.
Not many, sadly, but

The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, and

The Icewind Dale trilogy / Legend of Drizzt series by R.A. Salvatore.

Ember was a very nice take on post-apocalyptic fiction; a Steampunk city surrounded by absolute darkness that still managed to retain a semblance of normal everyday life. Something about the setting felt very homely despite its inconveniences.

The Drizzt series is of course a guilty pleasure full of good old-school role-playing fantasy tropes. It does a nice job of providing my Dungeons & Dragons fix while I wait for a new video game.
These would never be useful to me, because I've never had anything go wrong – said no one ever! Hah. I love these.
I assume "overseer" is a bit tongue in cheek.
I'll be waiting till async/await (ES7 maybe?) is available natively in browsers and node.js and its error handling story is cleaned up. Right now, in node.js if you're using streams2/3, it's quite the mess to recover gracefully already. Future of exception domains in node.js isn't clear to me either. Also, browsers aren't there yet either (eg. Fetch API error handling and aborting).
I said front-end webserver, not backend server. Not sure what lessons you are referring to. Lots of people use Node in production for large-scale applications. You don't need 20-30 years of experience either.
No, I don't. If foo is a (storage of) pointer to something, to get that something from memory I use dereference operator `*
so

*foo = 'a';

will write value of 'a' into memory at address that is in foo.

type* foo;

is declaration and

*foo

is dereferencing.
Michael, I appreciate this. I'm sure ClusterHQ was at times brutally hard work and you and team have worked hard on making things happen. I'm sorry it didn't work out and hopefully the future will be brighter with new lights.
Less than a day.

I had been thinking about it for weeks/months and knew exactly how it would work. Having mentally worked out all the problems simplified the creation so much. While putting things off is usually bad, sometimes continuously thinking about it solves problems before they come up. The only challenges I had were with learning new tools and not execution.

Wrote a hn post (on an alt acc) and sent a few emails and it had a couple nice traffic spikes and news/blog articles. I haven't touched it since though. I won't link it because I don't want my name attached to it.
I prefer that as well, but because the other option is possible and sometimes used, a few prefer to put the star close to the name as to avoid mistakes.
I've studied and written on the Banquiao Dam Failure, (1975, by the way) several times. It's an interesting failure, particularly as compared with nuclear disasters.

First and foremost, it was an administration, planning and design failure, compounded by weather, enineering, response, and other factors.

The background was adminstrative pride, ignored engineering warnings, insufficient spillways, poor communications, and no disaster planning.

The immediate trigger was an unprecedented "perfect storm" -- the collision of a tropical typhoon and a cold front -- unleashing 1,000+ mm of rain in 24 hours, completely overwhelming the dam.

The area was densely populated, what communications there were were down on account of the storm, and rougly 20,000 people were killed in the immediate flooding. The remaining 100,000 deaths occurred due to disease and starvation in the area as a result of no effective disaster and recovery response.

The most telling characteristics of Banqiao though are these:

1. Some 40 years after the incident, the region is not a nondiscretionary multi-centennary wildlife preserve and exclusion zone, but home to some 17 million inhabitants. That is, once a flood zone stops being a flood zone, it returns to its previous state relatively quickly.

2. Banqiao itself is far and away the most extreme accident of its type. There have been other major dam-related incidents, in India and Italy (Vajont Dam tsunami), but each was some two orders of magnitude lower in deaths than Banqiao.

The common elements in virtually all dam disasters are 1) poor understanding of risks, 2) suppression of criticisms, and 3) poor or no warning systems.

Keep in mind that dams are simple systems from an engineering standpoint: a large mass of material which regulates water flows. And yet these do fail with some regularity most especially in less-developed areas. The premise that the complexity of nuclear power plants will somehow pose fewer risks lacks credibility.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

https://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/the-forgotten-...
The Most Popular Language for Machine Learning
https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g...

>the program was redundant, captured data manually that was already captured through automated systems,

Nevertheless, solid step towards less tracking / more privacy I guess..
I thought the same things as GP. Anyone who has read K&R (as any C programmer ought to have) will know everything in this article.
If you can find it, Walt Lockley's "Brutalized in Boston" essay from 2007 is the best critique I've ever found of city hall, and what motivated the design of what appears to be an enormous concrete ziggurat fired point-down into what used to be Scollay Square.

I wish I had a copy-it is an enormously enjoyable piece.
Starch is not really the problem. It is overly simplifying to equate insulin release with problem. Yes, diabetics have a problem here but everyone else not. In fact the insulin release is critical for satiny.

Three factors constitute the main impact of carbohydrates:

1 How much of what hits the bloodstream

2 How fast is glucose getting into the bloodstream

3 How much is left over in the intestine

1) There are mainly two molecules getting into the blood: glucose and fructose. In particular the quantity of fructose matters from an inflammation and cholesterol point of view as fructose in processed in the liver and impacts triglyceride levels.

2) The faster glucose gets into the blood the more stress on the insulin system. Refined carbohydrates go faster. Fat in the meal slows absorption down (in that sense french fries are easier on the body than cooked potatoes).

3) Carbohydrates are easy energy for bacteria. Too much left over and bad things can happen (reflux, diahera, headache and if persistent other chronic conditions). Lactose intolerance and fructose malabsorption are conditions where this happens. Complex sugar alcohols (often used sweeteners with low/zero calories) can slow/block in larger quantities absorption of fructose leading to problems in combination with real sugar. Also even healthy people have limits in how much fructose they can absorb that are in the range of western sugar laden diet. Re-heated food is harder to digest than freshly cooked food as carbohydrates form longer chains when cooling.

While there are mainly two molecules entering the blood there are a large number of molecules in the food. They get broken down and are absorbed or they are passed through. The sugar industry is using this complexity to throw smokescreens. They have an interest in playing down the role of fructose as fructose is much sweeter than glucose and thus helps to lower the calorie count important for selling the product. A cynic may also note that fructose also does not trigger insulin and thus keeps the person hungry. Again to evaluate the impact of carbohydrates one just needs to ask: how much, of what (glucose%, fructose%), how fast and what are the left-overs.

Pasta: 100% glucose, medium fast, perfect

Sugar: 50/50 glucose/fructose, very fast, glucose perfect, fructose depends on quantity, individual and prior food in intestine

Beans: ?/? %, slower as longer chained fructose molecules, glucose perfect, fructose depends on individual

HFCS: 40/60% glucose/fructose very fast, glucose perfect, fructose depends on individual, quantity and prior food in intestine

Milk: 100% glucose, fast, glucose digestion depends on lactose intolerance

Sugar alcohols: 0/0%, is passed through but may impact absorption of fructose in other food
Apple's Search for Better iPhone Screens Leads to Japan's Rice Fields
We are 12 years in and the cat is howling away. Same feed time everyday.

She is evil. If her dinner is felt to be sub par she goes into the sleeping child and claws the kid. She has come very close to a final vet visit with this behaviour.
> IF they built B with unique symbol names, and built their apps against those unique symbol names*

This isn't necessary. If you're not going to load both versions into the same process, they can overlap symbol names. This is how Linux distro version upgrades work: the system installs libfoo2, then upgrades binaries that use libfoo1 to versions that use libfoo2, then removes libfoo1 when nothing needs it any more. At all times, the system is in a working state; any given binary will load either libfoo1 or libfoo2.

The trouble is that Linux distros tend not to want to provide more security support for libfoo1 than they have to, so if you have software that still requires libfoo1, the easiest approach is to use a container/chroot/VM/whatever with an older distro release, possibly from a different vendor, that's hopefully still under security support.

(If you do care about loading both libraries into the same process, you need symbol versioning / two-level namespaces / direct binding / whatever your ld.so wants to call it, which means that every reference to a dynamic symbol specifies which dynamic library the symbol comes from. The names themselves remain unchanged, but they're referenced by a tuple of library and name. This works. Again, I've shipped software that would crash horribly if this didn't work.)

> Both the software developers and the package managers never intended for incompatible software to be installed at the same time.

I'm not sure that's true for software developers: I can't imagine that, say, the OpenSSL developers do their work by replacing their system OpenSSL every time they recompile. They already know full well how to test an OpenSSL in ~/src/openssl and keep it separate from the one in /usr/lib, without using chroots.

It's true for package managers, but that just means that package managers are failing at delivering a thing users want.

In particular, forcing upstream software to follow conventions and building all software the same way, and patching things as necessary, is the entire job of a distro. If two versions of a distro package conflict, that's because the distro chose not to make them coinstallable. If only one version of a library is available in a distro, that's because the distro chose not to make other versions available. They might have reasons for this (e.g., security support effort) but none of it is fundamental impossibility.

(Also, if you mean B1.1 in a semver sense, or equivalently a libb.so.1.1 sense, upstream is promising that it's backwards-compatible with B1, such that A can dynamically use B1.1 despite being compiled against B1. If that's not true and B1.1 is ABI-incompatible with B1, either upstream or the distro needs to rename B1.1 to B2 / rename libb.so.1.1 to libb.so.2.)

> Devs get to pretend they know how to deploy software or manage systems

I submit that the only valid measure of whether you know how to deploy software or manage systems is whether systems get deployed or systems get managed.
Pokemon GO Now Available for Apple Watch
Sorry for the delay in answering your question. I don't use anything elaborate.

I use the following Firefox addons:

- uBlock Origin

- Disconnect

- Decentraleyes

- Webmail Ad Blocker

I make the following changes in Firefox's about:config:

layout.css.visited_links_enabled (Toggle to false)

media.peerconnection.enabled (Toggle to false)

network.prefetch-next (Toggle to false)

network.http.sendRefererHeader (Set to 0 (zero))

network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferer (Set to false)

I also sometimes set dom storage to false, but this can sometimes interfere with some webmail clients.

If you're unsure of a setting, reference the Mozilla KB:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries
Are there any plans to do a security audit on Riot? The useful report by NCC [1] looks at libolm (which implements the end-to-end encryption) but of course that's only part of the whole product.

[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2016/11/21/matrixs-olm-end-to-end-en...
There's no guarantee that an arbitrary C/C++ task will map well onto/into FPGA. Ideally there should be a large number of subtasks that work in parallel with the end result that the overall pipeline (for lack of a better word) is shallow. FPGA clocks aren't fast - order of magnitude slower than CPU - but you can have a lot of simultaneous balls in the air.

Definitely there should be a purely software model, long before you start thinking about Verilog/VHDL and the actual hardware devices to fit them into.

I don't think the developer needs trading experience, especially if a high level model already exists. It should be a well-defined and testable black box.
I understand the libertarian ideal of being free to choose how to give away your own money, but how do they reconcile that with the ignorance of the elite as to the social problems they never encounter? Even given the inefficiencies of government, it's hard for me to imagine that the same amount of social spending could do more good from the hands of individuals than collective agencies.
I believe you have to use the mobile app to go through the Dash set up procedure again if you change your local AP (or get a new one, etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center for example is close to and up river of NYC.

So, as an average 100,000 seems low even if the median might be below that.
We need a billionaire to buy it, shut it down, and then sue everyone in to the ground who tries to fork it.
It was a comment from someone who understood that 2 digit year notation was bad and explained why he used the full year notation. At this time memory was still counted in kilobytes so it probably was an expensive use of two extra bytes.
Curious if you've tried gluster at all. Using Kubernetes also and about to cross the threshold of stateful data - performance is important but not critical since we're using it in a fairly low volume, low throughput way, but it will grow over time and we want to future-proof it a bit. gluster seemed like the best-case fit for us but have done no empirical testing yet.
"R for Data Science" by Garrett Grolemund &
Hadley Wickham was recently completed.

http://r4ds.had.co.nz/

The ebook is free online, you can buy from Amazon & O'Reilly too.
I gauged it off of my personal gut feeling, which includes a coefficient for "well I don't have a strong enough internet connection so I get google's spinner instead - and then it fails."

Occasionally, android gets the words right (as demonstrated by the onscreen text) and then flubs passing the correct intent because of "loss of connection", which is just about the most frustrating ML fail.

No doubt android's voice recognition is spectacular. I can prompt it in three different relatively orthogonal-sounding languages (English, French, Japanese), and it can figure out which language I'm using and usually get the transcription correct. Notably, I can't activate the italian/japanese pair and get useful results - which makes sense if you know both languages.

Google voice is horrible, however, at transcribing voicemail.
It is? I think the problem is how we (mis)interpret the data to mean anything more than what it actually says.
Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and inventor of the Z-buffer, has a great take on mistakes and failure in his book Creativity, Inc. Here's a pretty decent summary:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-c...

Essentially, we're going to fail. It happens. Might as well get it out of the way.

Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation.
I did a job on vWorker which was implementing a trading algorithm. The guy had a system, was using it to trade and had a paid service for people to buy it from him and had a paid subscription video channel of videos of him trading the previous day.

When I used what he thought were signals he was following (exponential smoothing, direction finding and spread detection iirc) it generated plenty of "false" trades.

It ended up he refused to pay because "obviously" my code was applying the rules wrong, not his rules didn't work.

I eventually got 50% of the fee and learned quite a lot in the process of why trading algos will struggle to work when faced with real random walks.
Those are very good and appealing features. Nobody questions that. On the contrary, the point is that those features are meaningful and valuable for the users. The amount of code and people used to implement them is not.
Pikachu, Red-Cheeked Mouse Thing a Pokemon Holiday Parody Song
Donald Trump: US must greatly expand nuclear weapons
> You presume being loved and cherished involves having to live together.

I presume no such thing. Although any feelings a six year old has of feeling being loved and cherished are greatly enhanced by living together with their parent(s). That being said, what I do consider abandonment is being raised by au pairs and shipped off to boarding school by age six.

> I moved out quite early on myself, and my relationship with my parents is quite fine. (From the US for context)

Moving out of your own free will is quite different from being put into boarding school at age six.
Any chance of you recording this (the cat, not the distressed wife)?
The "poor" you know are richer than kings of 1000 years ago? Well sure if you're measuring in dollars they are. Otherwise, what on Earth are you talking about?
>>>Since you can use Cloud9 on your own hardware pretty easily

Can you provide me with a link or two on how to do that?

The last time i looked, i think it was "just" their IDE on Github (or other) with next to no documentation on how to set up all the other bits and pieces - hopefully this has changed and i can make the whole thing work the same as if i would give them my money? :)
I could tell you exactly what you'll see when you go to Big Sur, but that still would not spoil your trip should you drive down there yourself.

You cannot spoil The Great Gatsby just by recalling the major plot points. Indeed, the novel's beauty is actually in between the parties and deaths of it's characters.
Thanks for posting, Michael, and I hope good things for you in the future.

Do you foresee Flocker living on in opensource form?
>>It's sad that you seem to think that we need to "accept" man-made disasters.

There will never be a completely safe man-made system.

For example, when designing a system for Functional Safety[0], none of the applicable standards (IEC 61508, ISO 13849, etc.) require that the product eliminate risk completely, because that is literally impossible in any complex system.

Instead, you reduce the risk based on the expected harm according to the function "[likelihood of dangerous incident / time unit] * [amount of harm caused if dangerous incident occurs]" until that expected harm is below a certain threshold.

Even accounting for Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, etc., nuclear already outperforms other sources of centralized power generation when you measure the deaths per unit energy produced[1]. Politically, the public may never accept this simple truth, because we are afraid of "big" things far out of proportion to their average actual danger to us. But it is a simple truth nonetheless.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_safety

[1]http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energ...
My understanding is that the attitude of NASA management changed from the Apollo era's "Prove to me we are good to go." to one of "Prove to me we can't go." Some might put it: Gene Kranz retired.

Source: Anecdotes from an old friend who is a quality assurance engineer. He was one of the boys on the ground in Huston that brought the Apollo 13 crew home.
Thank you for this little nugget of wisdom! It puts one of my past employers into a relevant context.
Announcing Rust 1.14
I was wondering the same. He doesn't present it that way.
Same issue on Chrome/Win8 :)
Yes, RMS's obsession with clever wordplay is really a great example of Newspeak. It's always bothered me, but I hadn't made the connection to 1984 until you said it. This frustrates me, since he's otherwise fighting a good fight, but the rhetoric is marginalizing.

A little bit of wordplay is charming, but RMS just takes it so far.
> Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation.

Celebrating failure and being failure averse have nothing to do with each other other than celebrating failure means you're probably not failure averse (but I would argue you lack empathy for the people you just lost money for and for the people you just lost jobs for).