skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are technically feasible medium-to-long-term energy solutions involving nuclear power -- my favorite are liquid fluoride thorium reactors, but there are other good designs -- and the waste heat from those can be used for desalination.

To get some approximate numbers, here's a presentation from Dr. Per Peterson at UC Berkeley:

http://www.esd-ans.org/cms/index.php?option=com_docman&a...

A 1 GWe fourth-generation reactor, using efficient Brayton-cycle gas turbines, could produce approximately 100,000 m^3/day of fresh water, without decreasing the amount of electricity it produces or harming its generation efficiency. About eight of those could supply San Diego (1.2 million people) with all its water needs.
I didn't realize how much of the world Google had mapped... It seems like just last year that Seattle wasn't even included yet...
Possible solutions:

1) Join a good big company like Google where experience is not disrespected. It is natural for startups to prefer good and cheap young engineers.

2) Face the reality, develop and respect soft (management, talk, people, emotion) skills besides pure coding skills. It is a fantasy that coding skill is superior to other skills. Everything is engineering: your job is solving-problems, not mere coding.

3) Start your own company and work hard on it at least once in your career. If it fails, you learn valuable skills other engineers cannot compete.

4) Beat the average. Going extra miles to become better every year (if not every day). You will be surprised how far you can go. Most average engineers will never go outside their comfort zones, thus peaked after 5 years into the career path. It means: contributing to an open-source project; writing a blog; creating several web applications; Learning new skills (Machine Learning, Web Design).
How would this be different than any of the other online invoicing apps out there?

...Freshbooks, Invoice Machine, Less Accounting, Billing Orchard, CashBoard, BlinkSale, Bill My Clients, Harvest, Invoices Made Easy, Simply Bill, Simply Invoices... There are a lot of options in this space.
Well, it's on the front page, so I guess someone is taking this seriously.

This is not anywhere near a correct description of a sonic boom. A sonic boom is not "a large burst when [an object] “breaks the sound barrier”." It is a phenomenon that is associated with any object traveling at or above the speed of sound. A related phenomenon governs the crack of a whip, but is associated with unsteady flow around a subsonic object. (Yes, you read that right. The business end of a bullwhip does not need to travel faster than the speed of sound to produce an audible crack.)

What really happens in a sonic boom is, for a slender body traveling above the speed of sound, the local flow is turned "suddenly," and the freestream is not able to accommodate it in a continuous fashion. There then arises an oblique shock wave, a very small region where fluid properties change nearly instantaneously; Direction, temperature, pressure, and entropy all change. Because the change is not isentropic, there is a hard lower limit to parasitic drag associated with supersonic motion through a fluid.

Interestingly, there is an expansion fan at the widest part of, for example, an aircraft body that is isentropic. It's a broad region where temperature, pressure, and direction change gradually. Thus, there are three 'sonic booms' when an aircraft passes overhead at a speed greater than the speed of sound. There is one sharp one as the nose passes you, due to a compression shock, and another softer one as the widest part passes you, due to an expansion fan, and a third one as the tail passes you, due to another compression shock. This is analogous to Mach diamonds in a rocket exhaust stream.

This is all for sufficiently lax definitions of "passing you," as the shock and expansion fans propagate at the local Mach angle. You'll be looking downstream at the local Mach angle when you hear the boom, if you're following the craft with your eyes.
"You've been awesome all week! Don't break the chain!"

http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-pr...
Regarding the first point (socket as file), Plan 9 operating system is not using any system call for socket but use a pseudo file-system /net.

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/

Using the same approach in a fuse implementation would make sense.
add computation of U.S. sales tax/GB VAT/DE Umsatzsteuer/...
I like that everything is on the first page. Is it going to stay that way?
What an amazing, and obvious, handout to the credit card companies. Unbelievable.
"Chrome's default is to silently upgrade, and light a tiny orange dot when you need to restart."

I ended up with IE8 because I ran Windows Update, not because I had some desire to get a new IE.

My guess is that most Windows users are going to let the updater run, and get new versions of IE.
Thank the accounting gods for the comments saying credit card transactions aren't included.
Not bringing a computer? May want to bring a TravelKey to lock down cyber cafe computers instead. (Shameless plug) http://www.travelusbkey.com/
Another problem there is that there is no mechanism for a State to declare bankruptcy. There were several discussions about this on Megan McArdle's blog http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com (I think from last fall through early this summer).
I have added some more info. No screenshots yet though. Maybe I will add it later.

Thanks a lot
I'd assume it only attempts drops on streets. In which case, as badly as one in a few hundred drops on only streets? I bet it'd be pretty close. They've street-viewed an absolutely ridiculous amount of roads.
I don't know much about Wasabit Systems or BSDi. But gosh, get your Apple facts right.

a) Apple's kernel is open source: having used GPL would not have made any difference here
b) The other BSDs have openly stated that Apple contributed back and thanked them for it.

Not only that, there are a lot of open source technologies that Apple has contributed to or is the main company behind it. In fact to find an example you didn't need to go any further than LLVM (discussed in this article). Apple is the company most strongly behind LLVM: they could continue in house without contributing any of the source, but they don't (and why should they? What advantage would it give them?).

Finally and I think the most important thing, is to ask: had those technologies been GPLed, would the companies have contributed back (as you seem to expect), dumped it all on their website, or simply have refused to use that code?

(edited for grammar)
That's food for thought. Thanks, I never looked at it through your eyes so it's hard to figure out what someone else sees as a 'first impression'.

I'm actually working with someone on improving the site, I'll definitely pass this on.
Come on over to Colorado... the tax situation is quite a bit more sane and we have..well all of that:)
Agreed. They're already using squirrels for reproduction / child rearing / getting them young 'uns out of the house. And once you control the squirrels, you're not far from controlling everything....
Usually the biggest single expense, but not usually more than half of the total expenses.
> A sonic boom is not "a large burst when [an object] “breaks the sound barrier”.

I had this misunderstanding for years (I blame nearly every description of sonic booms), and it made it pretty confusing for me to understand the hubbub about the Concorde traveling over land. I had thought it'd only generate exactly two sonic booms, upon accelerating past Mach 1.0, and decelerating again, and figured they could arrange it so those were located in sparsely populated areas. It wasn't until I realized sonic booms continue to happen during the entire course of the Concorde's supersonic flight that it made any sense.
I'm not at all surprised. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Hanzi and Kanji.

Actually I think it's the exact opposite for me. This is the beginning of where Hanzi and Kanji start to show their relative superiority (in some areas).

While Roman alphabets are phonetic, they have the trade-off that people with differing dialects cannot communicate. There is no 'Roman' language, there are dozens of European languages, learning all of them would be harder than learning one set of glyphs.

Similarly, because Hanzi and Kanji implies visual meaning, rather than being attached to sounds phonetically, they are more suited to communication methods like texting and email, where it's easier to discern meaning even if you don't know a word per se, and where phonetics don't matter at all. That native speakers often forget how to write words is testament to the effectiveness of 'spellcheck', and its reliability, reducing the need to memorize.

TL;DR The big downside to Kanji is the 'spelling', but with the advent of computers that probably will never be a problem ever again. Rather people who use these languages will be able to take advantage of their plus sides, including concision, visual meaning, and lack of phonetic dependence.

PS: The memorize ____ words to read a newspaper problem is way overblown, you'll still need to memorize ____ words in any alphabetical language too, and it's no easier than the asian languages.
> They did, of course, make [GCC code] available per GPL

If you're talking about the NeXT ObjC frontend, that wasn't a matter of course. It actually took legal threats to get them to meet that obligation.
A.A successful business doesn;t need neat technology or having brilliant engineers.
B.It requires a product/service meeting consumer demand at the right time in a sustainable way at a cost that enables a profit for the business.

Sometimes B isn't possible without A. Agree with the rest.
I have tried a couple of those and they had too many features for me -- overcomplicated.
title typo: dispropriately -> dis-proportionally
I find it ironic that a Java programmer is deriding other programmers (C# and VB) for not being "real" programmers.
You can already do that now.
I was really looking forward to the chance to bash suburbs. This guy stole that from me:(
At some level isn't that what far-flung suburbs are a reflection of?
I wasn't thinking about the ObjC frontend; the ObjC frontend, AIUI, was contributed by NeXT before NeXT became a part of Apple.

If you go grab the GCC tarball Apple provides, it has many, many changes from the GCC 4.2 sourcebase. Lots of those changes have not been submitted back upstream. The code is available, granted, but it's not available in a way that's helpful to anybody but Apple.
I dunno... it might serve as a sacrificial offering to the Seniors to keep them from eating the Freshmen. You'd think they'd be in favor of that.

Unless... they're using the Seniors to improve the gene pool of the Freshman...
Having 1 item with a price tag of $10.50 will display a total of $10.5. I'd have expected $10.50 :)
Yes. Better (by some margin IMO) than the quality of answers here, and across a wider variety of subjects. The format works better as well.
Also Amazon sells an MP3 collection of "The 99 Most Essential Chopin Masterpieces" for $5. I bought them because they were on sale for $1 -- that was the start of my real appreciation for Chopin.

I've started collecting recordings of different performances of some of my favorites. It's interesting to listen back to back and try to pick out the nuances of how different performers interpret the same score.
The 'boom' is relative to an observer. Just like a ship will produce a continuous wake but when you're standing on the shore of a canal the wake will pass you by.
I might argue that we should work "in an election year" voting OUT the idiots who thought this was a good idea.
Have there been YC startups by Indians who are not US citizens?
Have there been any YC startups where the founders or some of them are Indians or from other 'difficult to get easy visa' countries, who are in the US on non-immigrant visas?

I am on an H-1B Visa and looking to apply to YC. Can any one give advice on how to go about it?
I love this idea. With everything on the front page, immediately usable, it would be my first choice for invoicing. If you add required user accounts and a huge site around it, I've got no reason to switch (optional user accounts obviously wouldn't bother me and I think some people would want them).
Does this mean we'll be getting more random Facebookers here?
It's likely because most of the founders who apply to YC are in their 20's (and to a lesser extent 30's) because they are in a better position to live on ramen than older founders. Fresh out of college at 22, you are still used to living in cramped living quarters, eating cheap, and staying up late. As you get older, as you get used to full-time work, you get used to a better standard of living add on expenses like cars, mortgage, and possibly a family. I'm sure there are some who can do it, but it's harder to get a whole family to live on ramen while you pursue a startup.
I suspect the implications are credit card transactions can be audited by the IRS anyway.
If you want to find great work, do that. Don't quit A to do B to get to C. Just quit and do C!
First thing I notice is that your site remind me of this demo that Chris Coyer published on his website:
http://css-tricks.com/examples/EditableInvoice/

What would your app offer beside a single editable page?
Hunch's Shaival Shah: API's as Business Development 2.0
OK, I really don't know how to help you now using this medium. You claim to have watching the Khan Academy video, but this question is answered in that.

The simple rules are these:

log(a.b) = log(a) + log(b)

hence

log(a^4) = log(a.a.a.a) = log(a)+log(a)+log(a)+log(a) = 4.log(a)

Therefore

if a = b^z
then log(a) = log(b^z)
so log(a) = z.log(b)

This is true for all bases. Then we have

log_b(b) = 1 : Log (base b) of b is 1.

Hence log_b(b^2) = 2
log_b(b^3) = 3

and so on.

In all this the basic rule is this:

if x = b^y
then log_b(x) = log_b(b^y)
= y.log_b(b)
= y

So if the base is 10, then we have:

If a = 10^b
then log(a) = log(10^b)
= b.log(10)
= b.1
= b

So now, start with the equation t=log(u), assuming the log is base 10, and use the above rules to change it around. When you do that, see if you can get to saying u equals something.

Finally, you need to study sections 1, 2 and 3 of this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithm

What's on that page will also help you to understand the questions.
Your admin is doing it wrong if updates of a few kb are clogging his network. Also, small labs can't afford to pay admins at night, and big labs surely can afford a few kb transfers on their networks. We're talking about gigabytes networks and admin can always use cache proxy so that chrome only taps the net once for the tiny kb update.
My apologies. I'll edit my post to reflect the reality of the situation.

Edit: as it turns out, I can't, so you'll have to make do with my apologies. :)
This is nice. I really like how easy it is to just bust out an invoice. I'm using google docs for my sidework and it's somewhat of a pain. However, it's offset by ease of access, storage and retrieval.

Some obvious suggestions: pdf/doc exporting and emailing, maybe an option to send to google docs for storage (and/or store them on your end through some kind of account service).
I don't know... I clicked a few times... the first time was a beautiful, picturesque spot in the Lake District in England. Every stop after that was some kind of inter-state or major road in the US, with basically nothing around but trees and a road. It got boring pretty quickly.

This would have been much more interesting if they'd allowed people to vote places that they were parachuted in up or down, and then displayed the distribution of interesting places around the world.

Also would have been nice if the "search" wasn't so slow.
How about the government start making it EASIER to start and run a business?

This is just the type of "friction" we don't need in an anemic economic recovery.
I might be a little tired at work, but I'd rather have the awake-and-creative me for myself. I don't get paid enough to give them that.

Wouldn't your company notice that and complain? Most software companies I know expect their employees to give 100% effort.
I literally don't know what you're talking about. A conspiracy to suppress hemp?
I found you a tutorial:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wtutor?tutorial=t-log

Work through that - it will help with your basic understanding of what's going on.
> When I'm struggling with what a programming concept means, I find it helpful to try implementing it in a toy interpreter.

That's my 'I have understood' benchmark. If I can re-implement something without any reference to outside sources.

My goal is to write a little lisp or scheme from the ground up from nothing but the lambda calculus and some bits & pieces. It'll be slow as molasses but it will help me to really grok it.

That's why I've been reading up on all this stuff over the past year or so. After that I think I'm ready for something more involved, like clojure. I realize that this is not a very efficient way of learning but in the long run it tends to pay off. Knowing what goes on under the hood is an advantage.
I was lucky enough to catch a ticket to see Pollini at CSO this spring. He played all of Opus 28, along with a few assorted favorites. I have yet to hear a more authentic yet passionate performance of Chopin ever.

If you get the chance to hear him before he retires (he's 68 and still going strong!), I would strongly recommend it.
Ask HN: Company wants to aquire my website. Can you give me some advice?
A company has been interested in acquiring my website and I'm looking for some advice from the HN community.

They turned down my initial offer, but expressed interest in negotiating a deal where they pay less up front and then continue to pay me based on growth. I would continue to work on the website and be paid as a contractor.

My website would become part of their large network of high traffic websites and through cross-promotion they say they could drive a lot of new users to my site, which I don't doubt, as my site fits in very nicely with their network of sites.

I'm looking for any examples of how a deal like this could/should be structured. Obviously I'm not going to be paid based on a percentage of pageviews, indefinitely. Should I propose we set up a number of traffic milestones and be paid when a milestone is hit? I understand it's hard to give advice without details, but some general advice and precautions would be very helpful. Has anyone here done a deal like this before?
Do you mean same brand or same physical store ?

I believe as long as it's a different physical store, it's probably possible to set a different price.

My impression (that would need more research) is that having two different prices for the same product at the same time inside the same physical store or on a website would be problematic; otherwise it's probably ok.

I think I really need to make more research - A/B pricing would definitely be interesting.
Do you really think people are going to go to the polls and vote to cut pay for prison officers, police, firemen etc
Economics will demand it at some point.

When they look at their tax bills, reduced 401k benefits, layoffs and uncertain retirement dates, damn straight they will.
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2010/06/01/the-milliona...
http://walnutcreek.patch.com/articles/walnut-creeks-100k-plu...
While I do think that higher education needs an overhaul, the larger problem is that HE is too often misunderstood. It's not a place where you learn skills that explicitly help you get a job; that's called vocational training, and a whole bunch of places do that extremely well. Hell, if all you're looking to do is work, you probably don't need college at all. Zoho's been hiring kid straight out of high school, with no discernible difference in productivity with their college educated counterparts (http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-crede...).

HE is a place where you go to interact with people and ideas fundamentally different from what you know, receive mentoring on how to consider such ideas, and how to create those ideas on your own. It does not claim to make you a smarter individual, and its value is largely dependent on your own drive to make the experience a success. In essence, it is exactly the same as YCombinator - even in the obfuscated and oft frustrating admissions processes, which is what I believe the article refers to.
While I wait for the page to reload I pretend I'm being teleported randomly from place to place. I spend a few moments figuring out how I would survive in this new environment or move down the street to see what is around the next corner before I'm moved again.
Linux Kernel Based Virtual Machine
It seems like it would be fairly easy to build up a cache of found places, and then queue up new ones across different users.

But still it's amazing, looking around the world randomly. It would be nice if there was a better virtual driving tool, or more zooms (aerial views). At the moment you can only double click repeatedly and you go about the same speed as a car.
If people did not consider those projects in significant in some way other than costing millions of dollars, they would cancel them.

Being insignificant creates a need of efficiency.
Christie is doing it:
http://blog.nj.com/njv_bob_braun/2010/05/nj_gov_christie_bud...

Approval rating seems ok:http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-conf...
Yes. I'm not surprised, to be honest. There is so much propoganda on this subject that most people are completely unaware of this plant's historical significance.

I apologize about the appeal to ridicule statement, your initial reply was unclear as to what you were implying.

I'll link some wikipedia articles to point you in the general direction, but do your own research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories#Dru...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont#Hemp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_for_Victory
So, a bunch of cities in the southern U.S. have stopped growing. Any chance global climate change is the predominant cause? The U.S. saw a big population shift southward in the second half of the 20th century. But if the southern U.S. continues what seems to be a trend of getting hotter and stormier, we might see a big shift back north.
> Shouldn't salaries reflect the value you provide to your employer

Maybe they do.

An hour of one person is not always worth the same money as the hour of another.

Experience is a differentiating factor, and older people tend to have more of it.

That doesn't mean that every older person is worth more than every younger person or that every older person is more experienced than every younger person.

But if I can decide between hiring two guys, one that is experienced and gets the job done by working 40 hours and has a life and the other that works 60 hours and has no life I'd go for the one that works 40, whatever the age.

So if you're afraid to be out of a job at 50 because you're going to be 'expensive' work smarter, not harder. Provide the same value without having to put in the same number of hours.

That's the best way to guard against obsolescence.
Sounds like opening a socket could be reduced to one call, so why not fopen()? Seems like it'd be an easy thing to get into a kernel, any reason not to?
Oligopolies, which are dependent on a limited number of competitors, are ripe for corruption, collusion, and cooperative behavior. This is pretty much exactly why the US has antitrust law. Its history is an interesting read on wikipedia if you have the time.
As an outside observer I find this a little funny. It's very much akin to how some segments of America constantly blame technological advancement for what they see as the deteriorating quality of youth.