skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah yes, the "West Texas Put" as the folks in the industry refer to it. Wind is cool, but getting power from the turbines to the consumers is hard; you can't time-shift generation to when you want to consume it; and if the wind suddenly stops blowing, you've got a massive problem on your hands (though because TX has a lot of natural gas generation, the problem is somewhat mitigated).
Its also simply quite cool to have Techcrunch - the leading Startup news site - feature your service, if you think about how many startups there are ... congrats!
Do you say "URL" as "You are ell" or as "Earl?"
This reply could be to the majority of comments on this post, I just chose yours because it's the first one.

I'm pretty disappointed with HN being party to the same smug, knowing, tongue-in-cheek Rails (and to a lesser extent, Ruby) hating that you constantly see on Slashdot and elsewhere. There are merits to Rails, and also drawbacks, as there are with every tool. It isn't magic, or anything close - the code is all there for you to read, and it is just Ruby, no pixie dust anywhere.
I lived there this summer and fell in love with SF, aside from the whole Silicon Valley thing. It's definitely for a certain type of person: you'll find incredible diversity and openness in the people. A couple of small things I noticed that really pleased me: (1) interracial couples are incredibly common, more so than any other city I've visited or lived in anywhere in the world, (2) people are genuinely open and friendly; the GLBT friendliness is just a specific effect of this, (3) you have incredible high-end dining near the Embarcadero, and incredible low-end dining in the Mission, (4) no matter what your "scene" is, it's quite likely that you'll find like-minded people, (5) if you want nature, drive 20 minutes or less; if you want tech, drive an hour; if you want city, drive 5 minutes anywhere; if you don't have a car, use Zipcar, (6) the city is incredibly small, which makes it a lot of fun. And some things I absolutely hate: (1) parking sucks, (2) the cops on the MUNI/BART are a bunch of assholes, (3) cabs are sometimes difficult to get.

People complain about the fog, but there's really never any fog in the south bay area/Silicon Valley.
Even if I did visit RedSoxFansWhoAlsoWearRedSocks.com a lot maybe I already have enough red socks. Which has happened to me recently in this example.

I have been researching a new laptop for the past three months. Finally I decided on getting a ThinkPad x201. Not once did I see any laptop ads on any sites I visited except the specific niche research sites. Now I see Lenovo ads everywhere. They're on slashdot, facebook, boy genius reports. These ads would have been useful to me before my purchase, not after.

My point is that using the topic of the site alone isn't enough. Even on facebook, which probably has the most detail about me than any site, they still get the ads wrong. I rarely find them relevant to my life and needs.
They didn't put a team on it cold. People from 3D Realms kept working on it even after the studio went under. Gearbox has some of these same ex-3D Reams people on staff now.

http://kotaku.com/5630192/how-duke-nukem-forever-was-brought...

See the "How Duke Survived" section.
"[Americans] are a people resistant to change." --MidnightRambler
MIT Media Lab Software Agents Group: Current and Recent Projects
> I am not saying Clojure's concurrency primitives are bad, I am saying we need to understand the basics, and Clojure's primitves are not always necessary or the right solution.

Your post seemed very light on actually discussing this point, which I think would have been appreciated. There are always a lot of trade-offs to be made in writing concurrent code. The shallowness of your post left me wondering why you made some of your choices, or if you even thought particularly hard about them.
Would be more useful, in addition, to have gyms generate power for the grid.
The problem with voting up main stories is that they become part of your "saved stories", and I really don't want this link to be there, so I'm not going to vote it up.
There's a middle ground of knowledge where this is true... but once you power through to the other side, and understand how Rails works, you can pretty much make it do anything.
You can almost always make a specified release date, you just have to be willing to cut features and/or stability.
Customer Contact / Community Engagement Representative
3rd option for "It doesn't matter, I don't really pay attention to which I use or perhaps I alternate between them... and I won't hold a grudge against anyone who says it differently?"

If that's too long, you can just an option that reads "Doesn't matter"
No, not as far as I know from the people I know that are in that situation. Of course there are some things you have to deal with, but they are more than bearable.
It's more like a leaky dam that will eventually burst and explode. It slows down commodification of software, sometime to a significant degrees.
I wish they showed that logo in the US. I laughed at the last part.
Tracking my products and competitors.
shrug I never really had a honeymoon period with any other web framework I've tried, so let's see how long it lasts.
"The official way to pronounce MySQL is 'My Ess Que Ell' (not 'my sequel'), but we do not mind if you pronounce it as 'my sequel' or in some other localized way."

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/what-is-mysql.html

I only ever use MySQL, so have always said "Ess Que Ell". I work with guys who say "sequel" by default.... it's not caused any friction as yet.
Does PayPal actually have any legally-required responsibility for this?

If I write a check to someone who turns out to be a scammer, neither my bank nor the scammer's has any responsibility to refund me.
I run an open-source Twitter service (http://preyfetcher.com) and that's exactly what I do. I don't store my consumer key/secret in the public source, same goes for my DB/Twitter Streaming API credentials.

Again, for client apps it sucks because having to register your own API Client is silly for the common user (I would ignore a client that made me do it and I'm a developer). But it's not like it's an issue for _every_ OSS Twitter app.
Hi, I'm originally American but have been living in Zurich for the past 2 years (I also previously lived in Denmark for 1 year and Norway for 3 months). I moved to SF just for the summer to launch my startup. SF is great for many reasons, but it nowhere near compares to the infrastructure and quality of life I got in Switzerland, Norway and Denmark. That said, relative to the US SF is one of the few cities where it is even possible to make your way without a car.
Hey Andrew, sorry, we were experiencing strange mailserver issues--adoptahacker@gmail.com works in the meantime.

Ben
Who do you sell it to?
You mean like

http://www.ikvm.net/
Thanks for the link. I've known a few people who worked on the DNF project over the years and honestly thought they were a great bunch of developers toiling on a project under hideously bad management. I was really hoping somebody would bring on as much of the team as they could and just polish it off. The number of art assets alone must be worth millions of dollars in development time.
Ummm. There absolutly is a correct pronunciation for Linux. Any person who's been involved with it for more than 10 years will remember the AIFF file floating around:

"My name is Leenus Torvalds and I pronounce Leenux, Leenux"

And while there's some slack on how to pronounce SQL (because of the origins (QUEL from Stonebraker and then the whole SEQUEL/SQL issue), it's understandable and acceptable that people could pronounce it either way.

However with Linux, given that the author is named Linus and has named it after himself, I think it's fair to say, Leenux is the proper way.
Really? I've been working with it for nearly 4 years now, and I haven't had any problems getting it to what I needed it to do. I wonder what problems that it wasn't "built for" have you had problems implementing?

Also, while scaling may be a non-trivial challenge, going to over ~100,000 page views a day (95% are between 8am - 6pm) was pretty easy, and very little fuss.
Ask your employer. The industry norm may not be your company's, and it's better to be safe than sorry.
such as scaling to meet needs of multi million users?
Funny, I lived in SF for 6 years and just moved to NYC as well, for similar reasons... but I haven't felt the same about the tech scene, maybe because I just don't know enough people.

Any decent cafe in SF is full of startup folks, for better or for worse -- I've only overheard similar convo at the Ace Hotel.
You know youtube is a Python shop right?
How I won the DEMO 2010 spring conference (tips to 6 minute pitches)
Are you speaking from experience? Which things start to fall appart?

Regardless, I subscribe to the belief that scaling is a good problem to have.
Feels a lot like Rick Dangerous. Responsive, convincing weapon effects.
I agree entirely with the various posts as to why Blade Runner has held up so well - the keen visual style, the incredible craftsmanship of Trumbull, and least of which - Ridley Scott's brilliant directing.

There is one other thing that I pointed out 10+ years ago in a film class that's often overlooked - the hair styles of the film (and also Alien 1).

Seriously, think about what a smart/bold design move it was to have everyone in such short hair - it's timeless. If you think I'm joking compare Alien 1 or Blade Runner to Aliens By James Cameron - a movie can be dated by mishandling such a small detail.

The other thing I love is how thorough Ridley Scott, Sid Mead, Dan O'Bannon and Trumbull's vision is in both Blade Runner and Alien (1); so dense and fully realized you get the sense that the doom shipped Nostromo departed Blade-Runner earth. Classic, incredible films.
I use it to hear about when people mention the Vagina Game. This normally happens on blogs and message boards so it's easy for me to swoop in and comment with a "I made a website for this".
We started asking that recently, after some odd (and impossible) deadlines started being created. The answer was 'nothing'.

Not really a deadline if missing it doesn't matter a bit.

Before that experience, I never really considered asking what would happen. I imagined all kinds of scary things. Now... Now I know to ask. Because the deadline might be a 'no line'.
I agree with regards to the business model, but the question is whether World of Weightlifting brings in sufficient new customers or decreases churn. My LTV to my gym is over $6k. If they convert the MMORPG crowd, they make money hats.
The average YSlow score for all sites is 69. Wah. Higher than I expected!
Wow, I'm a nomad. This metaphor has described every professional problem I've ever had concisely and poignantly.
When Green Tech Pushes Consumption (in French)
Yeah, still recovering from TC effect. Now it is time to start leveraging it!

I don't have it on the homepage (yet), but should A/B test it for sure :)
OpenSUSE Conference 2010 Announced
Moved here in May of '07. Never leaving. Love the people and the city. I've been to New York (born there, too) and hate it. Too big, noisy, and dirty. And the people are unfriendly as hell.
Privacy in an Age of Augmented Humanity
I've only overheard similar convo at the Ace Hotel.

That was probably me, if you were there last fall...
Trading = Zero sum
Investing != Zero sum
How the B-School Dropouts at Bump Are Filling a Big Gap in Mobile Communications
I'm confused by all the arguments that this feature should exist. Of course it should exist. Re-read the OP: The bug isn't the remote wipe ability, the bug is leaving it up to the administrators of the server to decide whether to inform users that the feature exists.

Google decided to do an end run around Apple's lack of support for push notifications by making Gmail an Exchange server. Until now, I had no idea that by going along with this I was granting Google remote wipe privileges on my phone.

Sure, Google do not appear at this time to want to wipe my phone for any reason, but how is it that I've been unknowingly trusting them with this power? This privilege is decidedly non-obvious. When I connect to an email server I kind of expect that I'm giving someone, somewhere the ability to read my mail. That's "obvious," and I don't need a warning dialog.

But what is obvious about granting Google the right to erase the pictures I've taken of my father-son Lego Jawa Sand Crawler project? Or my voice memos? Or the extensive notes I've been making of design ideas for my Javascript framework?

Let's stay on topic, folks. The question to be debated isn't whether companies should have remote wipe privileges, it's whether a device should allow a user to grant such privileges without putting up a simple warning dialog.
For Linux there most definitely is a correct way.
http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/
There is an audio file on that page for you to feast your ears on.

"Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux!"

How do you think he says it?
While you aren't wrong regarding the parent comment, I'm actually constantly surprised by how in love with RoR the HN crowd generally seems to be.
Well the question is which you use, not which is "right". I guess an option for "I use both" would be appropriate.
FP code can still be in mismatch with your thoughts about it, so functionnal programming does not magically "just work", nor does "it works or it doesn't work" (except in the dumb sense of this sentence which applies to all code). You still write tests even for pure functions to check that certain assumptions hold just like you would in Python, except you also have types to prove certain assumptions.

It is not always trivial to see pitfalls in pure code either (think of a complicated function like a parser). Whether you write your tests before or after you write code, you always have a at least one form of testing written (or infered) first: types. And yes, the shape of your code is influenced by your types and your tests (e.g. by making code easily testable with more meaningfull tests/propositions about it).
Compare-and-swap, for one, is a CPU instruction. There's no locking at any SW level with a CAS since you just call that instruction rather than locking, doing a compare, branching, doing a swap, and unlocking. Fetch-and-add seems to be a CPU instruction as well. You can implement these things with a lock, but it's not necessarily the case.

Atomic instructions provide atomicity, but not locking per se. Locking is just another means to atomicity. A lock says "don't schedule another thread to access this resource until I say so", an atomic CPU instruction says "don't execute another CPU instruction in the middle of me". Locks are, as is often the case, both far more powerful and far more dangerous to use.
I would like to see the outcome. lol
Seems for most purposes, a simplistic benchmark that represents some realistic scenarios is preferable to benchmarks designed to maximize performance numbers.
Ask HN: Experienced php/LAMP developers, what is your hourly rate?
I have been charging $45/hr for the past couple of months since I restarted consulting aggressively. I feel I am leaving money on the table. My clients are almost exclusively non-local. I'd love to know what fellow php devs are charging.
Is anyone using that here, and if, what for?
That matcher syntax is available in Rails 2, and better and more concise in Rails 3 (http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/the-lowdown-on-routes-in...)

match '/hello/:name', :to => 'hello#index'
"Twitter could turn #coffee into #starbucks."

Yeah, I'd like to see them try that.
This kind of attitude makes me keep looking for ways to move away from Python-land. The new "we're better than everyone else" attitude is seriously grating. I like writing Python, but it sucks seeing this kind of crap every time I go into a mailing list or just about every other public programming forum around.
vaginagame.com ? Genius.
I would welcome a replacement for R just because the new language's name might be easier to google. I hope they don't call it Q.
Create your own Ecommerce Templates
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Yes, like hulu or yellowpages.com
I'm not sure that he does, I thought the same of the ad and didn't say anything but I was glad someone did.

Reading in the graph and putting it in a tree structure is a reasonable problem, but not a 10 minute interview one.

Traversing the graph to find the optimal path? Wow, that's known to be a tricky problem. Brute force search will work but will take a while. Now, undoubtedly there must be some very clever proof that discards most of the searches for the special case of a triangle structure. And if you've seen that you're all set. If not, hopefully you have your copy of AoCP at hand to start looking for it. If you are in an interview and haven't seen it, you just need to recreate the conditions from 1 million BC to 1950 or whenever someone had the right insight to come up with a proof. Not really a reasonable assumption. In those circumstances it's only a test of if you've run into this issue before.

And figuring out the answer is necessary to determine the email to submit a resume? How foolish that hiring manager is. If he was Google, yeah, you can put the question on a giant billboard ad as a challenge and get some responses. He's not Google.

Reasonable question is if someone can parse some data and put it in a tree or graph.

Reasonable interview question is to bring this up and talk about approaches. Person mention's Djikstra's algorithm, well he's heard of Djikstra and knew he was big on optimal path searches. Mentions AoCP, he knows a good place to look for clever algorithms. Knows how to solve it on the spot? Probably pretty clever. Finding the optimal 100 node long path in a graph as a screening method to send in a resume? Funny stuff there.

Being a bit clever myself though I'll go a bit further here. I'd say you might be the person who posted that ad. But I think more likely is you want to apply for the job and have no idea at all how to solve that problem and are hoping by coming here and pretending it is trivial someone like me will give you some hints. Because if you really knew your stuff, you wouldn't be claiming it was trivial for any competent practitioner to solve and a reasonable screening question.

Sure, there is an easy answer out there for doing this search, that's almost certain. That everyone competent would figure it out easily? Nah.
Big Brands Could Suffer at the Hands of Google Instant
As a distance runner, I'm more interested in increasing speed, VO2 max, and duration. I'd love gym equipment that could measure and help me improve in those areas.

Playing a MMO game in the gym as the article suggests? Not my style (distance running is an endeavor of solitude). It'll definitely appeal to some gym goers. You tend to have people who either do it alone, do it with a few select partners (weight lifting), or do it in more of a social way with lots of people (workout classes, team sports, etc...). The latter may be interested in something like this.
As far as what you hate, I can only agree with (3). Parking is great in a lot of neighborhoods, and not bad at all in others if you look around a bit. I've never found the cops to be anything other than polite, especially on Muni - how did you come to have so many interactions with them?
What's the incredible high-end dining you're referring near the Embarcadero?
It is people like this who I blame for no space cars and a base on the moon...
I disagree. I think it sounds great. It deals with two of the key things I like least about my gym:

* It's a space with so many social possibilities, but 95% of the time everyone acts as if everyone else were invisible.

* All I get for entertainment is banks of TVs with mind-numbing rolling news coverage, mind-numbing sports, and mind-numbing (and slightly pornographic) music videos.

If I wasn't in the middle of a PhD I'd be tempted to have a go myself.
While 100k views/day is good traffic it's generally not at the level where I'd consider it 'scaling". Unless you app is very complex or CPU intensive 100k/day should be achievable by out of the box settings on a single server. I've done this with a few different JBoss based applications with zero performance tuning tweaks or issues.

To me real scaling is where you're having to run a cluster since a single server is inadequate to handle the traffic, where you're having to implement or leverage various application caching schemes, etc...
I wish I had more than one upmod to grant you for using the phrase informed consent. That's really the heart of this entire discussion.
Google Alerts has the most effect when it comes to understanding your market in near real-time, particularly around what your (1) competition is doing and (2) how you can utilize current trends for your own company's press.

At Scoop St., we use it for looking at some of the bigger companies in the daily deal and group buying space. I have this set as a daily email digest that comes in my email late at night - making my inbox more manageable, rather than an immediate email each time a phrase is mentioned. I get to see what sources picked up stories on the competition as well as what and why they wrote about them.

From a press perspective, this is where Google Alerts shines. Most startups I've spoken with are looking for that "perfect moment" to reach out to press - most times at the company's launch or some new feature. With Alerts, you get an inside look where the press is covering stories - particularly around themes in your industry. More often than not, you can reach out to the reporter or blogger and introduce your company as it relates to the post they just wrote about for inclusion in their next piece.
I hear Lenux more often than Leenux, though I have to say my preference is Leenux, given that his name is Leenus.

I said Lie-nux for the first 5 years or so that it was around, based on the way I read his name as an American.
I could be ok with Lie-nux or Leenux, but I've never agreed with Lenux.
I'm sure many people won't read this bc it will be buried, but if you want to give a frat a shot you should. I graduated college about a year ago from UT, and it was the best time of my life. However, you don't need a frat. I had plenty of friends that were in frats, but I chose to party on my own, I feel like you meet more "genuine" people outside of the Greek system. I'd love to talk to you about how to be more social in college if you are up for it. Not sure if you can PM in HN, but look me up on reddit or facebook.

Take it easy and relax, don't stress about meeting people, you will come out of college with the best friends of your life.
No, no--what's coming first is farmville/foursquare style workouts and tracking.

"Poiesis is King of the elliptical trainer!"
"Achievement unlocked: 200 pound club"
"New badge: Power Hour"
"Most consecutive workout days: Poesis (42)"

Add an iPhone app maybe for cardio workout tracking that's harder to cheat.

This would be totally awesome. Maybe stick a leaderboard up on one of the big screens. Only problem is that it would encourage people to visit the gym, which is a bit of a problem for the current business model. You might have to switch to pay per use. Or maybe charge extra for the frequent users? But then there's a monetary barrier to working out.

I have to ruefully say that if it weren't for the fact that this actually actively contradicts the current business model, it's a great idea.

It'd at least do well for retention I'd wager.
Wow. You don't actually know what Godwin's Law is?

To paraphrase:

> As the length of a discussion grows, the probability of there being a comparison with Hitler, or the Nazi party will approach one.

It's an admonishment against exactly what you're doing. As someone's argument is shown to be weak, they inevitably invoke Naziism, not only inappropriately, but in a way that casts light to the weakness of their argument. ... Which is what you're doing.