skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree with you about decentralization, onboard solar cells won't ever do the trick. Even for a home-sized array, I'm not sure it can be made practical. Here are some back-of-the-envelope figures:

To really replace a gasoline-powered vehicle, an electric car needs a similar amount of energy at its disposal. My car (a 92 Accord) holds about 16 gallons of gas. Figure it's about 50% efficient, and gasoline holds about 45 MJ/kg, and that's about 1 gigajoule of usable energy in a full tank. So to charge my car (without running the house at all) I have to collect and store 1e9 joules during the daylight hours. That's about 12 kW, if it could run 24 hours a day. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cells), a solar system can produce about 20% of its peak rating, so I need a system rated for about 60 kW at noon, in order to average 12 kW through the night. Assuming a reasonable conversion efficiency of 20%, that means I need to actually intercept 300 kW of sunlight. Wikipedia uses a figure of 1000 W/m^2 in that article, so I'd need a 300 square meter panel. In units familiar to me, that's pushing 60 feet square. Large for a house, never will fit the car.

Such a large system just to charge a car seems impractical to me. We can tweak parameters and dramatically shrink that size, since after all I would hardly ever need to charge the car from an empty battery, but someone who drives a larger vehicle over a longer commute might realistically have such high demand. (We could also argue about the size of the vehicles, but this is America: Suburbans aren't going away in my lifetime.)

That said, charging the car overnight would use vastly more energy than my house does on a daily basis. Solarizing the house is getting more practical, especially since the grid's always connected.
Cartelligent is similar in the sense that it provides a very convenient way to buy a new car. They are a lot more hands-on than CarWoo! (in fact, they are a broker, while CarWoo! is not), so the buyer won't ever actually talk to a dealer and Cartelligent usually will deliver your car to your house for you. However, it costs at least an order of magnitude more than CarWoo! ($500+ vs. $49).

Given that their business model doesn't scale very well, they've never expanded out of California, and only recently (after being around for 10+ years) expanded out of Northern California. CarWoo!, on the other hand, can help buyers anywhere in the US.
From the article:

"We took a combination of access logs and beacon data (previously included in the page) and filtered out all of the automated requests, leaving us with a set of requests we could confirm were sent by actual users."
I must admit that I have mixed feelings about this. Usually I post on my Python blog some code that might not be perfect or good enough but does the job for me. I post to show other people with no CS formation like me that they can achieve things with the language. The programming crowd that visit my blog, helps a lot, the science (biology, bioinformatics) crowd calls me dumb (not directly). I don't know if I would publish my code, I know my limitations and what in knowledge, but in a vain environment like the academic/scientific, I prefer to hide my shortcomings.
Ask HN: See only important submissions from previous days?
I've started using Hacker News to stay up on the latest trends. However, I find that if I don't check the site daily, I miss some big stories.

I feel like I'm missing something basic. It would be great if there was a way to narrow things down to all 100+ point or 100+ comment submissions.

How do you make sure you don't miss important submissions from previous days?
Why You Should Write As If Your Readers Are 12 Years Old
How should I do secure the ssh server on a Mac (running Snow Leopard)?

I tried using denyhosts (also mentioned in the article), but OSX 10.6 is ignoring /etc/hosts.deny, and it doesn't come with iptables. I do not want to disable passwords (i.e. use key-only authentication), since I tend to ssh to my home machine from various computers. And I can't change the port number due to firewall issues at my office.

Any other ideas?
The logo looks like you copied peerindex.net
If it's a small startup, the CEO will most likely be the one answering the phone anyway. If it's a larger startup, the most the CEO will do is transfer you to someone who can actually do something to help you.

The most likely scenario is that it's a marketing ploy, and that all customers curious enough to call to ask the rate of the platinum package will be talked into one of the lower plans.
See also the CRAPL: http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/
No, sorry, but a lot of them are close to the Caltrain: http://www.caltrain.com
Here's your sign: "7s of that was waiting on memcached."

If memcache is slower than your DB, you're doing something wrong.
"I really don't understand what's the big deal about making sure your site works without JS"

It's worth reminding ourselves that the business and technical constraints of different web applications vary widely and so strategies will also vary widely.

For example, if you are building a greenfield app and your purpose is to try to search for a product/market fit, it generally doesn't make sense to optimize for the 2% of non-js users yet. You haven't yet found a steady source of revenue meaning that (1) you probably can't afford the extra effort and (2) your app's features are likely going to change drastically.
Closed your website the second I saw I needed an account to continue.

edit: I'll expand so you don't get confused by my comment. I drop by auto sites every now and again and customize a car to my liking, as a game. The idea of getting a car is playful. Most of the time I'm not seriously thinking of buying the vehicle.

Now on your site, I can't customize a car. I can't even see what your site does. I could see myself playing around with models and brands and see a button at the end "We'll have 5 auto dealers bid on your dream car, $50. You'll save way more than $50 thanks to our competitive bidding process."

Or you can alienate all the random drop-ins forcing them to sign in, or associate their real life facebook profiles with some random site on the nets.

The value of your site appears to be in the bidding process. Not the customization process.
Introducing node-lazy - lazy lists for node.js
Good point on the 24 hour refund and our Android strategy since the market mechanisms are so different. We're currently working on our Android story and looking at how to get the best distribution on the different Android AppStores that are out there right now.
Lame: $100 Adequate: $200 Good: $500 Famous: $1000

Overview: http://www.headshots101.com/head-shot-price-ranges.html

Examples - get a sense in advance of how you want to present yourself: http://studiomark.com/headshots.html

Prices above represent 1-2 hours of work in the Bay Area. I've done a lot of business with still photographers for film projects, so they're pretty current. The camera is just the recorder. The 'look' requires 3 lights, some assistance from a makeup artist/stylist, and a sense of what you are trying to project as well as what makes you distinctive and which parts you want to emphasize, or not. If you don't have great taste in clothes, bribe a lady friend who does to take you shopping. What you like/dislike about the way you look/dress is not necessarily what appeals to others.

Have a few similarly themed choices - if you are a suit-and-tie guy, then you want a few different combinations, plus a few shots of just shirt and tie, or sleeves rolled up (for those 'straight talk with jdavid' articles) and one with your collar loosened 'jdavid's 2 cents'). Also you want a mix of closeup (head & shoulders) and medium (waist up) shots to give to magazines and blogs. Eventually one characteristic shot may become the best known, but it might not be the one you expect - have several and rotate them to find out what your readers like. Don't limit yourself to one great shot, or you'll seem one-dimensional. And don't put your picture on your business card unless you want to be remembered as a realtor and insurance salesman.

I can refer you to a friend of mine who's quite good and would probably charge you $400, but he makes his business mainly in family pictures with a little fashion on the side, so you may or may not like his taste.
Eh. It would demonstrate obedience.

It comes down to this bit of dialogue written by Aaron Sorkin: "If you're stupid, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you."

The Google Maps debut product was so astonishingly good it instantly changed user behavior. You had to use it just once to realize everything that came before was insultingly bad. Immediate loyalty. It was a cataclysmic shift in the space.

So, if it's me, and I'm hiring at MapQuest, and I have IQ that's expressed with at least two digits, I'm in a desperate search for smart people to come help me turn the ship. If they're using the competitor's product, that's fucking awesome. We're going to need as much competitive insight as we can get to make this turd into something people want to use again.
How to buy a car:

1) Do research, determine a reasonable price for the car.

The cost structure of car dealerships is complicated with incentives, to the buyer and the dealership from the manufacturer (holdbacks, etc.) There are spreadsheets and data available on the internet to compute fair pricing.

2) Call all the dealerships that you are willing to travel to. Tell them your price, ask if they will sell the car to you for that price, "out the door, including taxes and registration"

Many of them will say "we don't negotiate over the phone". That is fine, don't buy from them, they want you to come in and give you a hard sale.

Eventually you will find one or more that are willing to sell to you.

3) If you need financing, get it from a credit union beforehand, unless the dealership has a special deal going. One less thing to negotiate at the dealership.

4) The basic takeaway is: Don't go to the dealership to buy a car without an agreed price. Test drives in the days beforehand are fine. If you arrive, and they don't want to honor the price, just leave. There are more dealerships, dishonest people don't deserve your money.
And I use the same to trigger LaunchBar, Quicksilver's super-fast (and non-free) competitor. :) http://obdev.at/products/launchbar
One difference that I notice in FLOSS contributions, is that a lot of the Web 2.0 company/founder/programmer input is in the form of the pieces of software, quite often reinventing the wheel a tad bit. Probably because contribution to the bigger existing projects takes a lot of time that startup members don't have, and frankly, is often beyond the usual skill level of a lot of them… (inexperience, wrong language etc.)
I've used http://buysellads.com with mixed results. Lots of sites on there, but mostly with a tech focus. The CPM's and effectiveness of the ads vary quite a bit (from crap to very good), so it's worth digging around to find some good cheap ones. And as always, track everything.
System 76 is good if you want to pay extra for the convience of having all the drivers ready to install. The machines work out of box, end of story. Thy are solid, fair battery life, and not an eyesore. However you pay more then an equivilent laptop with windows, and they aren't amazing from a design standpoint either. The service is good, your calls are answered in an office, not a call center in India. If you opt to go with some other brand, use nvidia for graphics, as the support for drivers is much better. Asus makes good machines, and I find ubuntu runs on them almost out of the box as well. MacBook pros are solid machines. If you are big on design, they look and feel great. However in my opinion it's not worth the extra $700. I have never tried programming on a mac, but the feeling I get from friends, and reading the comments is that anything besides web design/development and you will start to run into problems.
I dare you... :)
Computational science: ...Error
AOL, Private-Equity Firms Explore Bid for Yahoo
Hi Noel,

Thanks for pointing that out. We had never seen peerindex.net before. Its eerie how close our choice of colors is and styling is. They are also in a very similar market and their thought process is very close to ours. We'll make sure to keep this in mind before we launch.
Check your conversion:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&...

1 square meter = 10.7639104 square feet
Why do people continue to make these basic mistakes?
...until it hits a new equilibrium, at which point you're back to square one.

btw, from what I've been reading, it looks like you're right (ie. you can't heat anything directly to > the sun's temperature) but I can't find any explanation which makes any intuitive sense at all, just lots of stuff like http://en.allexperts.com/q/Physics-1358/Black-body-radiation... (note the hand waving) or else a bunch of hard core entropy equations.
A web framework let you work on the back-end, but had the interesting quality that anyone who used it pretty much had to admit it or contact you.

I wonder about this. Seems like there are plenty of rails / django / joomla sites out there, but not sure how many proudly display the "Powered By" badge, or contribute back.
A year ago, no. Today, very much so. I hope this is just a fad and not the future of the Web. I'm not confident though.
Well, as much as I'd like to believe it... a report from "Solar Energy Industry Association" is not a very independent analysis.

And there's the problem with presenting a bar graph showing linear growth over the next few years, followed by a text that says the claim is for "exponential" growth over the next few years.
This might work at a startup or a small company, but at a large company like EA, it is nearly impossible for a single individual to change the culture. EA has been a staple of bad management in the game industry for years, but it apparently did not impact their bottom line. Why would they change? I am all for not backing down, but you've got to pick your battles carefully.
Is there no way to validate code-signing on your app bundle? I would think that would still work even if the signing requirement was patched out of the OS.
Some journals already require this.

http://www.econometricsociety.org/submissions.asp#Replicatio...
That sounds right. Once you shift focus from defining the business model to scaling the business.
Good software even (I count the Skate franchise among my absolute favorites).
Having just worked at a company that installs solar panels, one thing was obvious - the use of solar panels was driven largely by government incentives, that are steadily being cut back. Perhaps the cost will drop enough over time to make up for the loss of those government incentives, but I don't think that's a sure thing.
Dahlbusch bomb
Gap's Failure Wasn't the Logo
I agree with the poster, but doesn't $150 an hour seem unusually high for a freelance developer? It is equivalent to about $300k yearly - no developer makes that kind of money by programming alone.
What about users without a paypal account? How will they get the money back?

And what about the tax cost of 7 cents?
Why Python chose Mercurial
You're spot on - we actually built a tool based around the Gunning Fog methodolgy that lets you determine what "grade level" your web page is readable by:

http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/readability.php
If your website relies on JavaScript to work, then you're excluding people who can't use JavaScript. Disabled people with screen readers.

If you don't cater for those people, put some money aside for lawyers.
I wonder what the purpose of this move is? I know very little about this type of thing, but it would not surprise me if this meant any IPO is a long way off. It seems like they wouldn't bother making this rule otherwise.

On the other hand, perhaps it is close and they want to save their employees the grief of selling now at a much lower price than they anticipate shortly in the future?
You are forever away from fully charging a commuter vehicle with on-board solar panels.

given: the daily solar power on a sunny day is about 4 kilowatt hours per square meter.

given: you have a big roof and get 2 square meters of solar panels.

assume: You can have magical 100% efficient panels instead of the 20-30% you could have.

compute: You get 8 kilowatt hours of energy each day.

google: That is about 30 megajoules of energy.

wikipedia: Gasoline has 35 megajoules per liter.

thusly: Your tiny car with a huge roof covered in impossibly efficient solar panels will get you the equivalent of one liter of gasoline a day.

§

But I have to wonder: Why are you carrying your solar panels around with you? That just wastes energy. Let them sit somewhere and send power to the grid. Pick up the power where you need it, when you need it.

The only function for a roof mounted solar panel is to look really cool in concept art.
Yes. Yes, it was.
Stated another way, when people refer to "intellectuals" in this context, what they mean is "people who are completely detached from reality and critical feedback". They're referring to people who live in a world of pure theory, where advancement comes from impressing others who live in that same world of pure theory. There is some backlash and resentment against those who make a lot of money (often taxpayer money) without producing anything the public considers worthwhile.

I don't know any "anti-intellectuals" who resent engineers, doctors, architects, or capable businesspeople. There is a little resentment for scientists, but it's typically reserved for those in highly theoretical/abstract parts of science, especially those who make public policy recommendations based on theoretical work. And there is a lot of resentment for lawyers and politicians.
The investors behind New York's new tech boom
Live Feed of YC Q&A With Alexis and Harj in NY
That’s assuming you need all the energy of a full tank every day, right? If you drive something like 50 miles every day you will need something like 1.5 gallons with a current car which means that you can cut your large solar array in ten pieces. That’s 30 m^2 or 323 square feet.
After extensive testing (that is, a quick test), the answer is definitely "yes, you can". :)
It's certainly a promotion for LBS. I thought Mayer was already one step below the triumvirate, but maybe that wasn't right.
Right now we support both PayPal payment and iTunes card redemption. Users can save their payments towards a iTunes card which we will email it to them. Other redemption others are in the works.

As for the tax, state laws vary and we don't collect information about the user's location. So far this hasn't been an issue with our users but we'll collect geo info if this becomes a concern.
Tell that to facebook (http://i.imgur.com/9FdJa.png) :-).

The problem with bending over backwards for non-js is that you double your dev cycles (no AJAX, need regular forms for everything), lose dynamic menus (want to duplicate those?), lose a ton of instrumentation you may be doing, etc.

I think it's perfectly fine to say "non-js means you have a read-only experience". Even facebook doesn't go that far -- you can't even log in without js enabled! (And they're definitely in the camp of 2% * 500M).

What will people do who have js disabled? They'll get a tech friend to help, because that disabling was probably a misconfiguration :).

At some point you have to prioritize your time to work on the features that help 95% of your users.
"I once asked Ivan, 'How is it possible for you to have invented computer graphics, done the first object oriented software system and the first real time constraint solver all by yourself in one year?" And he said "I didn't know it was hard."
-- Alan Kay on Ivan Sutherland.
Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway
It's really hard to grab users' attention in the App Store.

If you have a great app but don't have a big brand associated with it, it's hard to crack the top 25 or even the top 50 in your category. As long as TapZilla can maintain high app quality in their daily deals, this can be a big deal for app developers.
What's the precedent on masks in public these days? Surely it would fall under some form of protection from terrorists?
LinkedIn Labs
I use NoScript mainly due to the prevalence of XSS attacks. If a website doesn't require me to enable javascript, even a trusted website, I wont. All it does is open you up to XSS attacks. Lets not forget that google, facebook, twitter, paypal, hotmail, yahoo and countless other big name websites have all fallen prey to these flaws, and will continue to fall prey to them.
Much of the time, it's just:

1 - Click a download link

2 - Do other things until the DMG opens automatically

3 - Click and drag the application into the link to /Applications right next to it

4 - Yes, I want to run this downloaded application, the first time you run it.

Deleting the .dmg is something that I don't do as part of this process, but as part of a separate garbage collection process every few weeks.
Yes, and I happen to have Yahoo! sites on my whitelist, which tells me that their stat is not reliable. The actual percent of users who block JavaScript may be higher, given selective blocking, as provided by Opera and Firefox's NoScript.
The games industry is exactly like the TV or movie industry. Entry level jobs really, really suck. But if you can stick around long enough to become established (read: ship a successful title) then you can write your own check. Experienced game developers never lack for good offers. Heck, most of the people I've seen fired for incompetence were able to find new jobs within a few weeks if they'd shipped before.
Freelancers can't rely on a steady 40h/week of billable work.
That is a REALLY cool tool, thanks for sharing.
Woah, this could actually help me a ton with getting my mediocrely-popular apps out there! Contacted.
I wish there was more awareness in the general business community about how much effort goes into developing mobile apps. So few potential clients I encounter fully realize how much work goes into it, and when you give them an estimate the gap between their expectations and reality is glaring...
Walking could protect brain against shrinking, US research says
One time I worked on a power grid simulation that wanted to release its code but it couldn't because it used algorithms from «Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing» which has a pretty asinine copyright policy with respect to openness : http://www.nr.com/com/info-permissions.html

Even worse are the researchers who keep their models and data sets secret due to paranoia that some colleague will publish first, which admittedly does happen.

Cultivating a spirit of genuine cooperation and sharing in academia would do wonders for the progress of the sciences, but there are so many hurdles that need to be removed. It's not just a matter of knowing that it's good to release source code or feeling confident in including it as the article suggests.
IDC: Apple's now third largest PC vendor in US with 10.6 percent market share
Migrating CentOS servers from Linode to Amazon EC2
I stand by the approximation. 300 m^2 is about 17.3m on a side, 17.3 m in feet is a touch under 57 ft. Rounded to one sig fig because I'm not carrying any sort of precision through these estimates.

Edit: Or are you talking about the "60 feet square" bit? I don't mean 60 square feet, I mean 60 feet on a side. I suppose I could have picked a clearer idiom.
How do we check it out?
A few months ago I read:
"The Impact of Virtualization on Network Performance of Amazon EC2 Data Center" (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~eugeneng/papers/INFOCOM10-ec2.pdf) which has some performance numbers (latency and throughput) for small and medium instances.

Unfortunately, I can't recall enough of the paper right now to give you the nickle-and-dime overview, but it has graphs you can look at!
I got in, but as a student in Austin, there's no way I can afford $500+ for a weekend, even if it is Startup School weekend. And now there's a distributed open house?! I'm super bummed.