skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is ridiculous.

The designer, David Fisher, makes more detailed claims here: http://www.dynamicarchitecture.net/dubai-project.htm

Judging by the drawings of his tower (http://www.dynamicarchitecture.net/schema/schema_big.htm), it's about 300 x 50 m. Ignoring the narrowing of the tower as it rises, roughly 20% of the area is devoted to wind turbines. That's around 15000 x 0.2 = 3000 m^2.

He claims that the average wind speed in Dubai is 16 km/h, or 4.4 m/s.

Assuming a Rayleigh distribution for the wind speed, the average power available as kinetic energy in the wind is (6/pi) * 0.5 * (density of air) * area * (average velocity)^3.

The density of air is 1.2 kg/m^3.

That's (6/3.14) * 0.5 * 1.2 * 3000 * (4.4^3) = 290 kW. If the wind turbines were 30% efficient, which would be pretty good for a vertical axis turbine stuck in a building, the yield would be 100 kW.

This ignores the narrowing of the building, the lack of wind near the ground, and obstruction from other buildings.

The building has around 50 m * 50 m * 60 floors = 150000 m^2 of floor space, so the areal power density is about 0.67 W/m^2.

To meet the claims of a 10x ratio between energy generated and used, the building can budget 67 mW/m^2. That might be enough to light a single LED in each room.

Oh, and the average temperature in Dubai is 27 C. I guess they can run the air conditioning when all the LEDs are off.
So how does this compare with the 280 North framework?
Email Deliverability is crucial to achieve consumer Internet virality
Actually:

Upvote = "I'd like to see more comments like this" || "I agree with this".

Downvote = "I'd like to see fewer comments like this" || "I disagree with this".
Someone pointed out to me that Versions will work with sites using self-signed certificates if svn has been previously allowed to connect to the site (from the command line).
The background/foreground issue is still accurate. The window changes almost imperceptibly from active to inactive.
The first amendment does not enforce "freedom of speech" as you imply it. It limits congress from passing laws that limit your freedom of speech, i.e. what you say is none of the government's business. That doesn't mean squat elsewhere, you have no rights of "free speech" in privately owned places. If I don't like what you say I can kick you out of my house, my bar, or off my website.
From his edit, it is clear that it is not.
You aren't speechless. Accuracy, please ;p
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198526
The low average DH# of the comments only strengthens the OP's claims of people being unreasonable about it.
SIMBL plugin GreaseKit. Currently kind of sucks, but it's getting better.

http://8-p.info/greasekit/
Self-Imposed Psychological Life Hack
Robokill:  Superb new Flash game from News.YC members
Congrats for making the good experience list: http://goodexperience.com/games/

Their original submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84191
Ubuntu is no worse than the other major distros for building clusters, and if you are building things for a fully virtual environment you might want to take a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/je...
since it is designed for that purpose.

The nice thing about current (8.04) versions of Ubuntu server is the use of upstart which makes start up go fast. see http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
For on the fly css editing, you can use cssedit2. It's alot better than firebug's css editing, although firebug still has a bunch of useful features (like showing the box model attributes of a DOM item). And CSSEdit2 use's safari as it's preview browser. I tend to use firebug way more than safari's debugging tools.

The main reason why i stick with firefox is dTa & AdBlock plus. Safari has some adblock extensions, but their awkward to install and just dont work as well as AdBlock plus. Linkification, tamper data (lets you edit your http requests), the bugmenot extension, PicLens and what not also rock too.
possibly. though i think the difference is significant enough that many people (like myself) will not use Safari for that single reason. you might argue that just as many people will use it because of that reason. but if it's true that people go with what they are used to, then those fonts are going to look plain blurry to most Windows users, and not much is going to sway them

it would be nice if it had the option of using the standard Windows rendering. even without ClearType active it is distinctly better to me. i wonder how difficult that might be to arrange (i.e. is that part of the software open source?)
Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality
A 30-picowatt processor for sensors
"I am confident that if a user could see who downvotes his stories, there will be a lot less of that. If you are doing something you would not do if you knew your identity will be made public, then there is "integrity" in question here."

This, to me, is the most interest assertion in his whole prognosis. How would people use downvote if they knew all could see who had done it?
This post and conversation is embarrassing. With sophomoric ramblings like this at the top of HN, I wouldn't introduce this community to colleagues.
You've been roped into a constructivist education! In plain English, the people who make the OLPC are trying to nudge kids into doing something similar: specifically, while you just think you're playing with a cool toy, you're being encouraged to actually create things, and hence to think, and therefore to learn.
I suppose you have an IEEE $ub$cription or member$hip?
Wow! The refresher on writing style (with "warning" RegEx's) is worth the read alone.
There is actually a consistent inverse correlation between development level and fertility rate. Economically affluent countries have lower fertility.

This suggests that improving the standard of living is the most, perhaps the only, humane way of dealing with the population problem. Other measures, even measures like China's "One Child Policy", tend to have unanticipated repercussions. (Example: everybody in China wants a boy, to such a degree that some families end up abandoning newborn girls out on a street somewhere, if not resorting to downright infanticide.)

So the argument that raising Africa's standard of living will worsen the population explosion doesn't really hold water; the exact opposite argument can also be made.
"Not to mention the devs will have to rewrite these bits for 64bit support."

Huh? Why? "64bit" doesn't change the APIs, at most it should take a recompile to build against the x86-64 version of the libraries. And thanks to Universal (fat Mach-O) binaries one single executable can contain ppc, x86, and x86-64 versions bundled right into it.
This doesn't pass a minimal sniff test in terms of accuracy.

The solar energy impinging on the building will top out at 1kW/m^2, with an insanely optimistic 50% conversion rate, I can't imagine it generating more than 7500kW from solar.

That, by the way, isn't enough to run the hand dryers.
So, do you have an example of an implementation that doesn't have this problem or are you just assuming one exists? If there is one, it must be a well kept secret, because there hasn't yet been a social news site that's adopted it.

One I've considered is to temporarily suspend down voting after submitting a story. But this has some unintended consequences in that it unfairly penalizes the people who submit heavily, who provide a lot of value to the site.

Your assumption that people ordinarily upvote submissions they like isn't necessarily valid. I usually read the site pretty passively, and only upvote things I think are really spectacular. It doesn't mean I don't like the other things I read, just that they didn't really blow me away.

"counter to the idea of upvoting" is a pretty vague phrase. Counter to your idea maybe, my criteria for upvoting fits my idea of upvoting just fine. Not everyone thinks of a vote the same way, as another story on the front page right now points out, this is one of the problems with a site like this.
I discourage downvotes on articles..the main reason being that digg allows downvotes on articles and look where its gotten them?
Well done, gameplay is just fucking muhwhuaaa!
"Simply expressing an opinion is noise in a conversation often boils down to noise, and opinions on their own won't feed the starving mind: the meat of the argument lies in explaining opinions." - willarson

To play devil's advocate here (because I happen to agree with your comment on the whole), the argument could be made that a downvote (without attribution or explanation) is just this sort of noise.
PDF here:
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~vikas/publications/raykar_AISTATS...
ASP.NET Webforms versus Rails, Flex, PHP and Java stuff
Develop for Maintenance
Cache it all - Rails
I'll be coming back to play again... Neat! Can I ask how long it took to build, how many of you there are, and if there is any engine over the flash? I've never built a game before, so it's all foreign to me.
You don't get quotes in the NY Times like this every day:

> "The redesign is intended to address a problem of social networking sites, which is that many user pages have the aesthetic appeal of a 14-year-old’s high-school locker."

And the situation isn't so bad, MySpace is still trouncing FaceBook in revenue.
Hotmail Blocking Email
I run a legitiment website & I do require that users activate their accounts via email. Now i've tried sending email to my hotmail and it doesn't go into SPAM nor the INBOX.

I have done some research and lots are stating that hotmail are dropping emails. (I read once this is illegal)

My server is in no blacklists and isn't used for spam purposes.

Any suggestions would be great.
if you like this idea, check out storymash.com!
I got this link, its probably the same:
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~vikas/publications/raykar_PAMI_20...
I think this is a better idea than relying on advertising, but do you think there'd be enough demand for a white label version for it to be the core of their model?

Another approach: Fred Wilson's post today on comments constituting blog posts suggests that maybe they're building towards a sort of blogging platform for non-bloggers, where the aggregate of a user's comments on other blogs would form a new low-maintenance blog (on the Disqus site).
Honestly, this post is exactly why we need downvotes (and I'm surprised it's been upvoted so much). I agree that the threadstarter is wrong, but explaining your viewpoint and why you think he's wrong contributes far more to the discussion than unnecessary personal attacks.
Social platform for data, Tablefy.com
Can anyone give a more insight on how these games are build ?
Common problem with Hotmail and a bit of a crapshoot. I assume you have done all the general SPF stuff. There is a postmaster website for Hotmail (guidelines, contact info and other tools) and also a whitelist that you can get on if you are ready to pay out the nose. Google around for it.

One thing you can do is to get an account with an external SMTP service (such as Authsmtp) and configure your email server (such as Postfix) to relay your email through that service. Many people use Gmail for this but Gmail requires unique settings that can make this kind of a pain. This allows you to piggyback on the deliverability of the other service.

If you are sending out newsletters, you might consider going with a specialized service such as Constant Contact.

If you look around, there are more blog posts and information sites that are more detailed. One of them is on hacker news as I type this. Good luck.
"I almost never downvote....The only time I downvote is if something is extremely inappropriate, .....I never downvote when I disagree....If I disagree, I reply with my disagreement.....Not much to learn from downvotes.......".

You explained why you believe downvotes are not the best option in your book. That is what I agreed with.

I apologize for going further and adding "Silence is louder than downvoting" as it may imply you said so.

"Exactly what did you mean? Just tell us, openly and honestly, and let us surprise you with our open response. For a community that puts a premium on the clever smarta$$ retort, we still value sincerity above all."

I have always been open, and honest, and sincere. And being open and sincere and honest has cost me a few karma points and so will they again when I hit "reply". I respect each and everyone here.

"So instead of worrying about the rules of the game, why not just explain what you meant and let the chips fall where they may. In a forum like this, that's pretty much the best any of us can do."

I take it you thought I was being sarcastic. I agreed with you and I failed to explain why I did. Again I have been participating "in a forum like this" for a few days and I respect anyone here and I would not undermine anyone's comment or post.

EDIT: I apologize if some users (Thaumaturgy...)have a hard time understand my writing. Indeed English is not my first nor second language, but I am trying my best to improve my communication skills. Thank you.
Wow, thanks guys! I'm kind of surprised to see it at the top, I actually submitted this when I first released looking for some feedback, but it was buried pretty quickly.

I've talked a bit about the technical aspects in another thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203952

I'd love to answer any questions anyone has, and I'm especially interested in getting any feedback on the purchase proposition and payment process if anyone does decide to buy it.
Excellent and humorous analysis. Thanks !
This is quite impressive! An only usability detail: why do you need all users to approve access to the file system, if that functionality is only required for saving games? I'm sure most users will be scared by that banner.
For $9.95, I think you would do alright on Xbox Live Arcade/PS3 Network... have you thought about developing for those platforms?
Thanks a lot. I just spent the last hour playing. Very cool though! Great job.
Very low amplitude noise. I'd rather folks downvote than spout nonsense just to say something in opposition.
Bravo. Love the Zelda-dungeon-esque level design, the warp points make getting around easy, and the death penalty is extremely well handled. A joy to play, just lost an hour to it and never noticed the time pass. Well done.
Intel converts ET: Quake Wars to ray-tracing
Paper from Google Research in a related area:
http://www.cs.nyu.edu/web/Research/TechReports/TR2007-903/TR...
I had more simple problems with Hotmail. I had many cases where people sent me mails to Yahoo and Gmail accounts and if they came from Hotmail mail addresses, they just didn't reach me at all. Some Hotmail users I knew had difficulties even to subscribe to Google and Yahoo Groups too (for the same reason). Mail sent FROM Hotmail accounts many times doesn't even go to spam folders.
Hmm Thanks for your suggestions. I might actually just get hotmail users for now to just go via an alternate activation method.
It used to be better IMO. But, like many things online, as the crowd grows, the content tends to get diluted. Or, at very least, the topics and themes start to shift, change and move from where they were.
We've had this problem a lot, even with specific in house policies for how mail should be sent from our web applications. I've found that making sure the SPF record is correct and very 'tight' helps a lot. Also make sure before you're mail server isn't running as an open relay well before you send a test e-mail to Hotmail (make sure everything is perfect before you send to hotmail).

After that, don't just start sending a large bulk of e-mail to hotmail, send a few (they'll run some tests, open port, check SPF, etc!!). After a bit then start shipping mail out to hotmail.

Even after all of this you can still be up the creak, we've gone to using AuthSMTP at work now (having Postfix directly proxy the requests on). It's fast and we can deliver to hotmail (a lot less stuffing around).
Just curious, where did you read that dropping email is illegal?

It may be against the terms of service or perhaps violate a service contract but for it to be illegal there would probably need to be evidence of some other nefarious activity.
You're not forcing something to evolve if you try and break a system. You're breaking a software system. Software is not biology, and it's developer's time is very valuable. I'd say that this site in particular is very valuable, because the developer behind it is PG, and there are a lot of readers who are hackers and founders.

If you want to game a system, please go game some other system like Reddit, or Digg. Please don't mess with Hacker News. It's hard enough to maintain the signal to noise ratio as it is without people purposefully gaming the system.
Well, it depends.

I co-wrote Pro VB 6 & XML, back around 2000. I was lucky; it was a topic I (at the time, at least) knew fairly well, and a good part of what I wrote was based on a project I was actually building at my Real Job. There was some time spent researching technical details for the W3C XML DOM and VB this and that, but overall I think the time O spent for the money received worked out quite well.

So you might that that was a good thing, except, being my first real writing job, it gave me serious misconceptions about making money as a writer.

Not too long after that book I contracted with Wrox to write Beginning Ruby. Long story short, it was tedious and painful and I got next to no money before Wrox went bankrupt. Even had they not, and had the book been completed and published, I seriously doubt the time/money ratio would have beat simply getting a job as a waiter. The tech book market had, at that time, turned to crap, and Ruby was barely a blip on anyone's radar.

A bigger issue was that such a book required far more technical research. Basically, it meant a lot of work to ensure that what I wrote was actually true.

I've done assorted writing since then trying to be more careful about picking assignments, but it's not often like that first time.

That's not to say people can't or don't make money writing tech books, but it really helps if a) you can write with authority without having to keep looking stuff up to verify accuracy, and b) you manage to hit a sweet spot in timing and audience interest.

(Or, c) you don't give a crap about the quality of your work and happily pump out drivel that gets past shoddy tech reviewers prior to publication. Please do not do that; there is enough of that already.)
That's an interesting thought. At first, I was thinking what you were suggesting would be very Tumblr-like, but Disqus would centralize your comments elsewhere, and maybe you could opt to pull a subset in to make your new platform?
I think the constructivist opportunity only works on a particular kind of person with a particular kind of computer.

Alan Kay's vision is that everything should have a sort of "view source" so you can see how it was done. I had an Apple //e, back in the days when it came with a built-in BASIC interpreter and the manual, and computer mags were often filled with BASIC source listings. Which was not great, but not bad either. I assume the Romanian kids got Windows XP and there is no obvious path to hacking with that OS. You're just a consumer.

But I don't think it was the machine that mattered. Plenty of my friends had the exact same computer and all they did was trade games and play them. Given a computer, I immediately decided to write programs with it. I'm just that kind of person.
When I learned to play piano, I immediately tried my hand at composing. It greatly surprised me that my musical training courses were all about learning to play rather than learning to write music.

I suspect the same is true of any hacker; for us, the point of learning anything is to synthesize.

My point is, I think Alan Kay et al. may be crafting educational programs for ideal students, who do exist, but only as tiny fractions of the population.
You said it.. the plugins / add-ons.

Anyway, besides that, Firefox 3 doesn't seem to leak memory like a sieve like Safari.. the main reason I switched back to Firefox again.

If I use Safari for a few days, I can guarantee it'll be using 700MB->1GB of system memory and I'll need to quit and relaunch. Firefox 3 tends to hover around 200MB no matter how long I've been running it. That's a big deal, even with 4GB of memory.
Firefox 3 works on the Mac. It looks fine, and it's amazing there are people dedicated to whining about the minutiae of a few pixels here and there. Get on with your work people.
This is private property. You have no rights here other than those granted by the hosts. Start your own site if you have a problem with it.
That's a Flash problem - you can possibly use more space than the 100k default if you have five profiles, and Flash will fail silenty when trying to write to it unless you ask for the block up front.

And the Flash prompt is pretty badly worded - it's just the Flash cookies that it's talking about!

The whole thing has driven me crazy...

Edit: Oh, I see what you mean about waiting until the user saves. The game saves transparently when you walk around so there's no other good time to pop up with the allocation popup. Would have been much easier if we used a 'choose slot to save' kind of system when you are back at base.
We have, but we'd need to scale up a bit to be able to get on there. There's a lot of red tape involved!
I had used Firefox on my Macs for quite a while, mainly because Firefox had tabs while Safari did not. Even once Safari got tabs, I continued using Firefox, just out of habit.

Then one day, GMail refused to load in Firefox. I tried multiple times, and, while I never found out why this happened (a Firefox update? a GMail update? maybe someone here knows), I quickly ditched Firefox for Safari.
Ask YC: Hiring a Freelancer with High Rates
I'm about to hire a guy to add to the team who currently lives in the world of high-end, expensive freelancing. Salary isn't very flexible since we're working on somewhat of a budget, and remaining conservative with our funds.

Currently his hourly rates are above what we're capable of meeting, but he remained optimistic about negotiations.

Have any of you gone through a circumstance like this, and if so what were your experiences in the long run?
It took two of us about 3.5 months to build. There wasn't any engine over flash except for what was built during development. A lot of development time went into optimization, caching etc though (I talk about that in the other thread I liked to here).
Start here: http://postmaster.msn.com.
Our culture is very comparable to that of Google.

You know, this isn't a big recommendation for me any more. When I think of Google, I think of a grand deception, or a gilded cage. Or a company that used to have productive chaos and now just has internal disorder. A place that encourages regression to childhood dependence, rather than mature creativity.

Maybe you should say "Google circa 1998-2003"?
I find it hard to be played with the touchpad of my laptop.
EBay Opens Up Just a Little Bit More
I am on the other end (a freelancer who often quotes clients more than they were expecting) and I would say you get what you pay for.

Higher rates probably get you better work, but they also include better customer service, someone who is responsible, meets deadlines, etc. If the freelancer can't guarantee those things, then ask why he is charging so much more than his competition.
Fast Ranking Algorithm
http://www.reddit.com/info/6nh28/comments/c04d5l0
Precisely. Then add simple tools for categorisation, design customisation and so forth.

The point is that there are probably 10 active commentators for each active blogger. Perhaps Disqus is building towards a platform for people like this, who comment actively but who don't want or think they wouldn't be able to run their own blog.
I miss PG. The mods need to get back so they mark deads.
Seems that population growth and resource depletion would be co-dependent variables over a multi-generation time frame.