skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pixar doesn't use Azure. Pixar demonstrated a proof of concept that involved using Azure instances as virtual processors for a cloud-based Renderman farm that MIGHT be attractive for CG shops that can't afford, or don't need, a fulltime render farm. Maybe there's a shop somewhere that would be useful for, but it's certainly not going to be a Pixar or an ILM.

The biggest issue with a cloud farm like this is going to be bandwidth. For cinematic CG the models, textures and other assets are absolutely huge - it's not unusual for a single shot to come to hundreds of gigabytes. And you tweak and render, and tweak and render. Often the size of the data is such that when there is a need to collaborate with a different FX shop the files are sent over Sneakernet - HDD via courier or overnight FedEx.

If I was to guess, I would say this is basically virtualization technology developed for in-house use (which is very useful) that has been turned into a cloud demo for Azure. Why I don't know, but Pixar won't be switching to Azure anytime soon (or ever).
Sadly to say I don't leave in the US, so I have to learn by my self and with tips and ideas from others. I think programming is a mindset you born with and I think I have it, but discovered it late.
I actually wasn't all that impressed by OMSI. As far as science museums go it seemed quite small and kid-oriented, without all that much in the way of actual stuff to see.

Maybe it is, as another commenter said, in the top five science museums in the country, but if it were it would have to be a very distant fifth because it's nothing like the Smithsonian or the New York Museum of Natural History or the California Academy of Sciences or the one whose name I forget in Chicago.

I also think Voodoo Donuts is overrated, but that's just me. Dinner recommendation: Andina.
There is a one year clock on a provisional patent after which you must have filed for a normal patent.

The material you file for a provisional patent needs to fully disclose your invention and provide "support" for any claims that you make or will make. You do not need to file claims with a provisional patent. You may find that writing claims will help you determine whether you have fully disclosed your invention and identified all the limitations.

You should do a prior art search before filing the provisional so that you understand where your invention falls in the sea of other patented inventions. No sense trying to patent an "invention" which is not patentable over the prior art.

You can cut costs by doing the paperwork yourself, but before you file it is usually worthwhile to have the materials looked over by a patent attorney. I am not a patent attorney but I have had some experience with patents.
BS.

2.4Ghz radiation, at the levels produced by most computers and other devices, is non-ionizing.

Also, note the source - local news = most likely wrong.

I was interviewed by a local news station talking about wireless network security a few years ago, and the final produced piece took what I said totally out of context, to the point that it was no longer valid.
Ask HN: Sports/Concert Schedule Web Service?
Does anyone know if where Ticketmaster, StubHub, etc get the data for all of the events/tickets they sell online? Thanks!
You probably don't have enough space then. In most locations and for most homes or businesses, you can easily replace over 80% of your grid power. You could even replace 100% but the risk there is that most utilities have "no negative net metering" regulations approved by the local PUC that mean if you produce more than 100% of what you use, the utility keeps it for free. This makes installing a system at close to the limit uneconomic (and is also one of the reasons that Germany has more installed solar per capita despite far less favorable solar radiation than the US).
Does anyone know who actually deploys Windows based cloud/Internet-facing systems? All the big corporate IT shops I've consulted for only used Windows servers to support Windows clients and that kind of stuff doesn't move to the cloud well. All the big Internet companies (Google, Facebook, etc) deploy on Linux as far as I've seen. Most startups I've heard about deploy on Linux VPS/Heroku/AppEngine type infrastructures. I also though most of the 3D rendering was being done on Linux but maybe that is not the case.

The only example I've seen of windows deployment was dpreview.com, and the comments I read from them were in the line of "it's not as bad as everyone says it is and we're familiar with the stack so we use it".

Is windows a large percentage of EC2 for example? I tried to google for that but couldn't find anything.
Microsoft's CRM product is great and looks to only be getting better. I've always loved how support is handled in the US and very top-notch. Keep up the great work!
On that site I make $100-$180 month from affiliate sales, $5-$10 from AdSense.

If you are dealing with physical products then affiliate programs can work quite well.

Edit: On my friend's site is is all AdSense. His is non-physical product related.
Some of those crazy rates come from credit card companies that have discovered that people's procrastination and forgetfulness can lead to great profits.

Miss your payment deadline by an hour? $39.99 late fee. Miss by a week? We'll crank your rate up to 29.99%. Oh, and we'll report it to the credit bureaus so they will find out and other cards you have will crank up to the default rate.

Now you've got multiple cards at the max rate. The minimum payments skyrocket. Most of that is just interest, so your principal never goes down. In fact, if you keep making minimum payments only, the balance rises until you hit the limit. It goes on and on.

There have been new laws to limit this kind of behavior from the banks, but banks are pretty clever animals. They'll find new ways to make their profit.
Terrible!

This is akin to building a wall around your garden after you've invited a bunch of friends over for some tea and cookies. If I thought for a second that some business was trying to lock me in by making it super painful to leave and come back, I'd leave and never come back. It's not like there's any shortage of project management web apps.

However, I highly doubt this is what they're doing.
DumbledORM a novelty PHP ORM in &lt; 200 lines
In US units one square foot of roof can support 10 watts. So a kilowatt takes 100 sf of roof space. In much of the US you would generate 1,400 to 1,600 "AC sun hours" per year, so a 1 Kw system generates 1,400 to 1,600 kwhrs per year. If your grid electricity costs $0.20 per kwhr, 1 kwh then produces $280 to $320 worth of electricity per year.
That's a cool solution!

In answer to your question: because I'm still learning. I'm in my first year at university, and while I love working with microcontrollers, a lot of the knowledge hasn't quite got there. I'm working on it!

Also, I forgot about starting at zero (yeah, I know).
I've written a context sensitive affiliate adserver that serves relevant ads via Javascript. That works reasonably well, but I do need to optimize the ads themselves some.
It is true that the consumer side is pushing the enterprise a lot currently, but things that are core to larger corporations like the OS, Office, and backend services are no easy thing to switch-up. That is why you still see lots of companies running Novell/GroupWise. Do you really think it is meeting there needs? There is no one else out there that can support enterprise software like Microsoft (I'm not saying they do a great job all the time) and that is what the enterprise customer is really buying into.
Solar Shingles by Dow - http://www.dow.com/news/corporate/2009/20091005b.htm

Note: these are not cost competitive with "regular" CSI panels - they are mostly for people who put a premium on appearance.
I love the unattributed testimonial:

“Basecamp is so simple you can’t do anything wrong. It’s addictively easy-to-use.”

Why bother with the risk of the FTC cracking down for fake testimonials when you can just quote yourself!

With the popularity of Basecamp, I'm sure this is an actual customer quote, but I still think it's humorous. Perhaps I'll go pepper my blog with quotes about how awesome I am :)
Turbo Pascal 3 blew my mind them... after that was Scheme48 and then LiveCode. Oh and Scorched3D, the mother of all games.
You can be Yahoo, or you can be IBM.

Big companies can be changed.
Because in F# you can write that code today rather than in a year or two when C# 5.0 is released.

Also, the pattern used by F# to do this sort of thing is exposed to the user so you can create any kind of monad instead of just one for async. In F# this behavior is integral to the language and not just syntactic sugar for a couple 'special' cases. So instead of learning one syntax for continuations and another for async, sql, etc, etc. You just have one system to learn that can be applied to many different problems, and you don't have to wait for Anders to bless your problem as important enough to have syntactic sugar added.

The other thing to note is that there will be many 'special cases' about using this code that don't work with typical C# code because of its mutability. It's similar to all the weirdness around using the yield statement. Like how you can't have an out parameter on a method that uses a yield statement and some weirdness around exceptions.
Actually oil, gas and coal get more than 10X (in dollar amounts) the subsidy that renewable energy and technologies get. Granted, it is because the quantities are much higher, but it's not a "subsidized vs not subsidized" argument.
I've been reading stuff like this on slashdot and the rest of the Internet since I started using the Internet around 1998. With a few changes, this could also have been posted in 2002, 2005, or 2008. In 2013, will MS still be posting massive profits, and will people still be questioning whether Microsoft can keep it going? I'm guessing the answer is "yes."
http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/27/technology/microsoft_pdc/ind...
Not really. Most big users of power pay incredibly low per kwhr rates (in the US anyway). Without a realistic feed in tariff (meaning the utility buys the power generated, not the data center) the deal won't be economic (unless the data center agrees to pay more than grid for solar, which they won't).
Yes that seems a very possible result. Besides, I'm sure Apple already does UX/UI testing of their products as much as possible.
A very valid view, and one I subscribed to until quite recently, when an article pointed out to me that IBM still makes billions every year from mainframes.

The computing environment is not a zero-sum game. Mainframes were not replaced by microcomputers, except at the edges. Mostly microcomputers filled a space that hadn't been there before, and came to be a larger market, but a new market.

Mobile computing is the same deal. It's a whole new class of device that will end up being much, much bigger than desktop computing ever was. There will never, ever be "a computer on every desktop". The people who never bought desktops will buy mobile devices. This isn't blue-sky thinking -- they're buying iPads, right now.

In 10 years time hundreds of millions of people will still use desktop computers everyday, and I would be entirely unsurprised if their software was provided by Microsoft. Desktop computing is what Microsoft are good at. But billions of people will be using mobile computing devices provided by a bunch of manufacturers and running on, possibly, Android.

Desktop computing won't go away and Microsoft won't die. We'll just forget why it ever seemed important that Microsoft had a monopoly, just like nobody cares that IBM has a monopoly on mainframes now.
You win some, you lose some, but you learn every time.
I'll check it out soon, thanks for the tip!
they are not a direct competitor. their offering is not equal to paypal's. they only do a few things, but try to do them well.

the services they provide are similar to some things that people are doing with paypal.
Exactly, English isn't perfect, yet it's still a great example of how something that's "good enough" can become dominant. I'm not saying it should be dominant, but that it is and will inevitably continue to be (there are more students taking SATs in China in ENGLISH than in the US+Britain). Also I would argue it's not just due to Britain's empire, but Rome's and Germanic tribes creating a long evolutionary path up to American web pages.

Regardless LISP variants are still closer to all spoken languages you mentioned than other programming languages. The main difference why the linguistic languages don't look like LISP variants is that languages can only be processed sequentially\linerarly one sound\word\morpheme at a time, this restriction isn't strictly required for a programming language that is primarily absorbed visuo-spatially. LISP is more similar to ALL spoken languages, so there is a lot of evolutionary indicators pointing to the possibility of long term [ > avg human lifespan ] dominance by a LISP implementation.
Sorry you had a bad experience. It could just be the time of day you posted those threads or something else that caused most people to miss them.
and http://xkcd.com/224/ (Lisp)
How much of a fluctuation did you test? $9 vs $19? $49 vs $99?
I would think it's the opposite: for a small-to-medium shop it makes all kinds of sense to concentrate on your core (design, animation, client development) and just rent "rendering as a service".

a) If you have a small headcount, a dedicated server wrangler's salary would be better used to pay for a person with a more product-oriented profile. That's what makes the difference between you and your competition: you aren't writing your own renderers anyway.

b) When maintaining your own serverfarm it can be difficult for you to have the jobs pipeline full at all times, and you can either have a lot of spare capacity sitting around between jobs, or need more horsepower during peaks.

c) This also allows small-to-medium shops to tackle problems bigger than they could otherwise from a pure cashflow point of view. If you are renting rendering-as-a-service, your clients are paying for the hardware their jobs need, no need to invest, amortize, etc. Just pay an invoice coming in and an cash an invoice going out.

It seems to me that these are exactly the kind of problems SaaS is designed to solve, and that small-to-medium shops can benefit from this solution more than big studios who can:

a) amortize their server wranglers over bigger installations, so their sysadmin/creative ratio is lower.

b) keep the rendering farm working efficiently, or even rent it out if they have lulls in work.

c) afford big financial investments.
The best way is to complete as many projects as you can and read as much code as you can. You'll want to take a deliberate learning approach.

Check out out "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" by Andy Hunt. It will show you how to build a skill investment portfolio.
Well...I meant, this was a brilliant, subtle strategy from their point of view.

They aren't building a wall, they are simply sending a signal that the value you are currently taking advantage of is higher than you initially paid for it - and we realize it.

I see nothing wrong with the way they have done it. If they forced you to increase your monthly spend as a current client, then that would be more akin to your scenario. But they aren't doing that.

A better analogy would be, they have a nice lush garden setup with fruit stalls everywhere. As one of the first 100 people into the garden, you get all you can eat for $10. However, for everybody after that you have to pay $20. If you know this, and leave the garden and want to come in later....well, whose fault is that?
A Good Research Paper Outline is the Significant to Success in Writing the Paper
Research paper writing is a common task for all middle school and high school students. In order to ensure successful writing in the research paper area, students need to know how to outline their research papers. This will mean successful completion of the research papers.
Jason, will you be publishing the results of this test?

I would love to know if it makes more sense to start with plans @ $50 rather than $25 and the impact on new registrations.

Thanks.
Cool, thanks - "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" looks very interesting, is it a well-known thing?

Any ideas for a first project that'll get the wheels turning?
Wouldworks: My non-software startup
I wouldn't quite call it a startup yet, but I was inspired by Jeremy McAnally's WickhamHouse startup and when he posted about it a few weeks ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1795302) and this led me to start http://wouldworks.com.

I recently started tinkering in my garage, building little things out of wood. My tools were limited to a rotary tool, a jigsaw, and a drill -- extremely basic stuff when it comes to woodworking. Given what I was working with, I was never extremely satisfied with the quality of what I building. Despite that, I decided to show off one of my creations (a laptop stand) to my coworkers, and to my surprise they were all very impressed with what I had built.

Several of them were interested in a stand of their own, and someone suggested that I should sell them online. Well, I really like doing stuff with my hands -- building stuff, fixing things. So I started thinking about it, and after hearing Jeremy talk about his business (we're coworkers) and how well it was doing, I thought why not?

There was one problem, my shitty excuse for a woodshop.

I didn't have the money to go out and but a bunch of nice tools. Hell, I didn't have the money to buy a bunch of cheap tools. I had all these ideas for other tech/gadget-related accessories to build, but no means to do so. I thought, how could I make this happen?

I tried setting up something through kickstarter.com, but unless you're making an indie film or back-to-the-future shoes that tie themselves, they're not interested. I found another site that wasn't so picky (gofundme.com) and set up a donation site there. I just launched it earlier today and I've already gotten a handful of donations.

http://bit.ly/wouldworks

Check it out. If you like what you see, make a donation and I'll send you something cool and hand-made in return. If you don't like what you see, but you think there's something I can do to change that, then let me know.
Since you are a trad climber, there are three great places real close.

Broughton Bluff is in troutdale (just a couple mile drive) and has some great climbs: http://www.mountainproject.com/v/oregon/broughton_bluff/1057...

Farside (Washington side of the gorge, 40 minute drive): http://www.mountainproject.com/v/washington/farside/10686252...

And the infamous Beacon Rock (Washington side, 45-50 minute drive): http://www.mountainproject.com/v/washington/beacon_rock/1057...

Beacon is great - trad only and a good set of locals. Broughton's has more douchebaggary going on, but it's trad only aside from 3 top rope routes. Farside is a locals joint as well, mostly trad but lots of toprope (rappel down, climb out).
What mailing list?
PeerTransfer Attracts Financing From Spark Capital
Darpa Builds the Starship Enterprise
From one student to another:

The best advice I can give you is to just build something.

Pick some small annoyance you have and give yourself a strict timeframe and then build. You'll learn best by coding not reading.

Just pick a language, anyone the ones you mentioned are great. Don't worry about which is easiest or has the best guides. Just start and when you get stuck do a Google search for your problem then move on.

Some small ideas to get you started in case you have none: A personal todo list or a comment system for a website

I hope that helps and good luck!
Short answer is yes you will need a checking account.
Link peertransfer.com. Sounds promising.
Why you should vote
I just spent a week in Portland last month, and agree with everything posted so far (also agree Voodoo is overrated, but I'm a health nut so it was difficult to stomach the maple-bacon donut without dreading the aftermath).

I haven't seen anything about Multnomah falls to the east or Cannon beach on the coast -- both are beautiful places to check out if you're renting a car and like nature.

Here are some pictures I took on the trip, since they might give you a good idea of some of the places others have mentioned: http://www.jasoncazes.com/photos/portland/
Voodoo Doughnuts
Ground Control
PDX Japanese Gardens
OMSI
UGG Liberty Boots
I just signed up for an account to poke around. On their "create a deal page" they taunt merchants not to goof around with their discounts and to offer 50% or more off. Pretty annoying.
And visit some waterfalls on the way to/from. There is a whole sequence of waterfalls along the south side of the Columbia. Multnomah, Bridal Veil, and [I forget the others' names]. All that rain's good for powering the scenic wonders.
Loans that you have to pay back even if you don't make money? Startups get a better deal.
Research Proposal Example from Databases Online
The research proposal provides the readers with an outline of what the research paper will contain. The proposal therefore, needs to be written in the correct manner. Many students will be benefited by obtaining research proposal examples from online databases.
Great, thanks. Yeah, to some extent this is all procrastination, isn't it? I'll start off with the two you suggested and then move on!
Of course this would make its way to the front page of PG's website...
Not possible on all phones... the g2 for instance is unrootable.
Ask HN: Finding people in London?
I've lived in London my whole life however I've never really been able to find like minded people within my social circle.
I'm an ex-military digital security specialist and looking to start some kind of company down the line, but right now I'm looking to just meet some people within the tech industry.
Is there certain places you guys hang out or any specific meetups I should be attending. Failing that does anyone here want to share some stories and ideas over a coffee or a shot?
I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet:
http://dorkbotpdx.org/
It meets every other Monday at Backspace(on NW 5th Ave just north of Burnside). So, for your time window that will be at 7pm on November 8th. You will at least get a chance to meet the originator of the wiki(Ward Cunningham) who is a regular. The crowd ranges from artists, electronics & robotics enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs who have hardware and software products in all stages of development. It is a very informal beer filled atmosphere with live demonstrations of projects and discussions of topics common on HN.
Those sound like the words of someone who hasn't been getting nearly enough sleep recently.