skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My issue with it is the scaling. They had a test installation in sidewalk which proved to be woefully inadequate. Yet the pushed on, largely unchanged. They took two things which have significantly different requirements and tried mashing them into one.

Solar panels need to be oriented towards the sun to maximize energy, and need to get as much sun going through the glass to the panel as possible. You basically end up multiplying many variables together to get the end efficiency, and we're actively degrading 3 by a significant degree by adjusting the glass/plastic to withstand the weight of cars and semis, scratching the surface over time with the dust and sand, and mounting them flat.

Roads need to be cheap to install, need to be long lasting, and need to assist vehicles in stopping quickly. I'd love to know the difference in stopping distance and coefficient of friction between this and traditional roads.
It was a failure but I’m glad they tried it.

I'm not. Research funding is very much a zero-sum game. Because they spent that much money trying something that stupid, it's safe to say that some actual good ideas either didn't get funded or had to make do with less.

we learn more and more with every iteration

There was nothing to learn here. It was easy to predict the outcome based on well-understood models, and countless people did.
P++ Proposal: What Developers Need to Know
> Maybe expectations need to be adjusted, but experiments like this are worth doing! We don't know exactly what they will lead to, but they often add to progress.

Except we all knew this would happen. It was all in the predictions. This was a scam. People did the math on these things. We knew it wouldn't hold up to tractors and heavy vehicles. We knew there wasn't a good solution to keep things clean. The problem is that this wasn't sound from even basic engineering.

I wouldn't call it a scam if they were honest about this. If they said "yes we need to do more testing" and "this test will help us figure those things it". But they didn't even do the background research. They called everyone that did may sayers. There's a reason only the IFLS type crowd liked them and not actual engineers.

I'm all in favor of doing hard tasks. Using government money to take risks in science and engineering. That's something we need to strive for. But things like this make it harder to get support for that because this was a joke from the beginning. Experts knew it was a scam from the get go.
To expand on your 3rd paragraph, maybe that's the Ponzi scheme, with big investors playing along:

1. Start a shiny business that attracts customers. Never mind that you're losing money per customer.

2. Get some big investors. You are now valued at 2-digit-billion dollars.

3. Talk about IPO. The general investing public has heard about your shiny service/product because the news talks about how shiny and hip you are (are MSNBC just idiots so easily distracted?) and the public are about to bite!

4. IPO. Big investors cash out. Mom-and-Pop investors lose money.

5. Profit! For you and your big investors.
This is awesome. Is this $12/meal for one portion, or is it two portions?
You know, I always wondered why they didn't go for solar covered sidewalks, which would provide shade to pedestrians and power to everything that needs it. Roads seem like a better place for pressure-based generation (of anything, frankly).

Still, just for the enthusiasm they garnered and the continued push toward making renewable energy generation interact with the everyday, the idealists should be commended. The engineers... not as such, no.

But, silly question, knowing very little about this field, couldn't it be possible to (co)generate power from the heat and pressure that roads endure on a near-constant basis?
Those things are necessary to get the opimimum amount of electricity but the point of solar roads is to sacrifice some efficiency for the benefit of having huge amounts of surface area. The amount of paved highway in developed countries is enormous, so even massively inefficient solar roads could supply all the electricity necessary and more.
Dropbox would rather write code twice than make C++ work on both iOS and Android
"HaikuDepot" is just the name for the GUI interface. The package manager itself has no real "name." The number of similarities being so high, I am still skeptical you really did not come across Haiku before, but well...

On a different note, some key things we have discovered in working with this system for almost a decade now are:

(1) One really needs a dedicated kernel module for this. Managing the abstraction in userland only gets too tedious after a while, especially around updates and the like. Moving mount management to a kernel "packagefs" makes things so much simpler (and of course more performant). Not to mention that you can then write a dedicated file format which supports random access better.

(2) Perhaps the most powerful feature of this system, the ability to boot into a previous state, is virtually impossible without kernel support.

(3) You will be surprised at how many users want to change things inside packages; and how many Linux users refuse to switch to a system that does not allow this. On Haiku we have mechanisms for overriding packaged files and "blacklisting" files; but on Linux you may find people are far too wired into the "old way" to get a radical change like this off the ground.

(4) The second most powerful feature, the ability to install packages in ~ (or, eventually, anywhere else for that matter) sounds great, but it requires a massive amount of software patching, and for applications to use APIs (that Linux does not have) to iterate through paths rather than hard-coding them.

So if you are going to make such a big, systemic change, why not just ditch Linux for Haiku instead of re-creating what we have spent so long making work already?
For large amounts of money, I think the best way is to open your new account, wire transfer (not ACH or check) the money to your new account, confirm that the funds are received, then close the old account. This will likely cost ~$25 depending on your old bank but it avoids the hold periods you'll otherwise get with a check (even a cashier's check) or ACH transfer, as well as issues with moving physical cash.

You don't need to worry about AML/KYC laws, those are the bank's problem. In fact, using smaller transfers to avoid hitting the $10k threshold is illegal.
Self-cleaning glass is a fairly mature technology and will work effectively on a rooftop solar installation. That won't work on a solar roadway, which a) needs a textured surface to provide adequate grip for vehicles and b) can't retain any sort of coating due to friction and c) is constantly being covered in axle grease, tire rubber, brake dust and the innards of various wild animals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cleaning_glass
Perhaps "taste absolutely terrible to me" would have been better phrasing. I think Soylent has its place, and I'm glad it exists.

In terms of price, food is expensive to make (especially in the Bay Area), but as we scale we think we can leverage automation to bring the price down to $6, which is not as cheap as but in the same ballpark as Soylent.
> they should put water pipes to utilize the heat

Missed by most people is that roads flex under the weight. (Stand next to the train tracks when a train goes by, you'll be startled at how much the ground moves.) Flexing of the roads it the primary cause of road maintenance - cracking and crumbling.

Silicon chips in the roadbed, wires, pipes, etc, are all very vulnerable to cracking under bending loads. Putting water pipes in the roads mean you'll get innumerable leaks in short order.
Why is building PV panels into the road better than putting them next to the road? Or in giant empty fields along roads?
Go visit them before you buy.

I visted the WeWork office on Bloor last year, and it was more like a party than I would like. Seems like a great place to meet a future spouse. Not necessarily a great place for quiet, deep work without noise.

They have a lot of social events. Seems to be their big selling feature. So if you are looking to prospect for customers like a real estate agent or something, maybe it's worth it.
If McDonalds lost money on their restaurants and their executives profited from multiple conflicts of interest, McDonalds wouldn’t have become a successful business.
It looks a very interesting project! I notice there looks lots of 3D models you've created, I'm wondering if there's a picture of the assembled physical system? (Sorry if I missed something).

I just had a little look at the second link you posted too, I'm kind of curious if you could hack an old 35mm film scanner to scan 35mm or smaller cinema film.

I've got the Canon CanoScan FS4000, you normally have to load the film into a plastic caddy, and push it in, but I was thinking if you cut a hole in the casing, if you could maybe feed the film through (I've not looked at the internals though, as maybe there's something in the way that prevents that).
I bought a shortwave receiver a couple of years ago. I have great memories from when I was around 9 or 10 (end of the 1970's) playing with a table top radio and listening to all kinds of stuff on the shortwave bands.

With my radio, all I could receive were terrible religious stations. Shortwave is dead in the US.
The GPL's very nature cripples commercial use because a very large number of companies rely on being able to control distribution, or need to participate in markets where distribution requirements cannot be met if the GPL is used. Good luck navigating the specifics of deploying GPL tainted software on a closed down app store or a console for example. Companies don't have any obligation to 'give back to the community', and I'm not arguing on whether anyone thinks that is fair. The GPL is commercially-friendly in a very very narrow set of examples. Imo, to call it 'commercial friendly' in a general sense especially within the context of other FOSS licenses is insincere.
12/portion (500 cals)
I feel managers, directors, etc. who cannot code should not be managing, either.

You have two classes: management and individual contributors, when there shouldn’t be. Management ought to be able to solve any problem people they serve (i.e., their underlings) are facing, given certain amount of time to familiarize.
Another alternative is to say, "How much time has passed since the last frame?" and update the game state based on that.

When your computer can't hold a constant framerate, the game doesn't slow down.
Panels at the side of the roads?
Complaints from (junior) developers against solution architects
Yes, but the idea is that software changes as customer needs change. If not, then that is an out of date product, and by the time it would have become "mature" it would be out of fashion anyway. Good software is software that changes often, yet it maintains quality. Unlike in waterfall where it probably takes 2 years to release it, and by then it is already old. For "enterprise" software such as oracle or ibm products, that would not be a surprise, but for highly adaptable products, 2 months is the maximum something would not change.
I don't think there's any alternative open standard that can do what Sonos does - group speakers arbitrarily, do line-in without requiring separate computers/phones, auto-balance speaker volume/lag for room positioning, have the same speaker set switch between surround sound and other inputs with minimum hassle, etc, and all wirelessly without a specific server hub needed.

There are proprietary competitors (Alexa is moving into that space, and Bose has an even more expensive equivalent), but nothing to allow true interop, and Ikea trying to build out that same functionality from scratch would take huge effort and expense, certainly a lot more than the simple-by-comparison requirements of smart bulbs.

Personally, I'd be happy to see Apple eat everyone's lunch here (they're already partway there with arbitrary speaker output from arbitrary input devices), but that's mostly because there's preexisting homebrew that will that bridges arbitrary speakers to virtual Airplay devices and arbitrary input to virtual Airplay streams.
Thinned silicon is actually pretty flexible FWIW
Not true because of trading costs. Both the non-random strategy and its inverse would lose money.
Solar roads are a prototypical example of an idea that looks/sounds cool to regular people, but is in fact totally useless.

Why not just build a solar ceilling?
Seems like you'd be much better off floating them on a lake. There was a project a few years ago to do this both for power and to reduce evaporative loss in reservoirs, but I don't know if anything has come of it.
Solar panels and roads have different properties for all sorts of good reasons. Why people want to compromise both is beyond me.
> Seems like self-driving cars could be designed-and-programmed to drive over just specific parts of the road meant to handle their weight, while the gaps between those load-bearing parts can have solar panels.

if you can drive that precisely, why even put anything in the gaps?
This, plus the fact that a programming language and a command prompt are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. One is made to be written "once" and then compiled or run many times. The other is a real time interface that should be thoughtful on the amount of effort required by the user to do things, and as such should not take a lot of typing to get things done (and secondarily support scripting).
Does that work for the "no"s? I didn't buy or sell any stock yesterday; with that definition of "inverse", wouldn't I have to perform all possible actions? For any time, stock and amount, the inverse of inaction would be "yes, buy/sell X shares of stock Y."
I think the word architect is a failed metaphor for software.

What is the role of architect in the real world? In some high profile cases they are designers - even to the point of doing something like project management/business development (the only reason we funded this project is because of the awesome ideas we got from the architect, we worked with the architect to make sure the building would meet our dreams for this project ...). But more commonly — I understand their role more in construction to me more in the realm of being a maintainer of documentation — maybe they have some role in proposing the original design but the majority of their time is probably spent ensuring that these plans satisfy all required regulations — and updating the plans in response to what actually happens during building so that the building itself will pass all regulations ...

This is nothing at all like the nebulous responsibilities generally associated with software architects. Some projects could benefit from this level of book keeping requirement — but a lot of projects which contain “software architects” probably would reject paying someone to maintain specifications to a similar level of accuracy as is required of real world architects — especially if that was basically all that was being asked of them to do ...
I've come in to an "agile" (whatever that means in practice) project one year into it's life as a project manager (on the customer side), forcing it in to production after prioritizing all critical things (taking an additional year). It was an e-commerce website built on a standard platform.

Btw. The supplier was one of the leading and most hip e-commerce (consulting) companies in my country.

I've seen and been in involved with others too by all kinds of companies. They are everywhere.
The solar industry knew that it wouldn't work. Anyone with a high school understanding of physics could figure out that it wouldn't work. The early trials failed spectacularly and nobody learned anything new. Subsequent trials also failed spectacularly and nobody learned anything new. People are still funding trials with exactly the same flaws as previous failed trials, presumably due to some sort of magical thinking.

Science should at the very least be informed guesswork - if you don't start with a reasonable hypothesis and don't update your hypothesis in light of the evidence, it's just alchemy.
Partially agree:

It seems to me that he would think interfaces between major subsystems would be architect level while any database table that only gets used within a single sub system is implementation level.

Trying to be careful as I realize HN is the kind of forum where he or a close friend of him might show up to correct me :-)
There was a different comment recommending parking lots, and i summed up all my thoughts in the comment above. To me it sounds like France could use some shade as well as some clean energy. Calling it quits is just not an option given the crazy heat waves of recent in Europe, and we should hold onto to anything that improves what we have right now even if by 1%.
... is that emacs is an old OS in dire need of a good text editor?

;)
>Adam controls the majority of voting right to the company

This alone should be a massive turn-off for investors, nevermind this kind of personal eccentricity that makes this absolutely insane.
any google worker here?
Saying Soylent tastes like food is a bit of a stretch.
Search engines should treat searches on individuals as a separate, special category. Laws need to be protect personal information from Google's excuses. When federal laws on personally identifiable information were drafted, they weren't intended for a world where a megacorp indexed it all, and made it widely accessible, with no course for challenge.

U.S. laws need to catch up with reality.
Slides and Videos from NuttX 2019 International Workshop
You can't subsidize a tax break. That doesn't make any sense because you don't need to spend money to give people a tax break.
> Solar roads are a great idea.

But why?

There are plenty of arguments against it and hardly any in favor?
The electron half of a pair produced very centrally within a star is very likely to be captured very quickly into a nuclear reaction.

This can produce central regions of pair-producing-but-election-capturing fusion, and a substantial excess of positrons. There are plenty of electrons away from these central regions for these positrons to meet by mutual attraction (and positron-positron repulsion). When they meet they annihilate, producing a gamma which can go in any direction, and which most likely will quickly deposit its momentum mostly-elastically into a nearby nucleus.

Very centrally produced gammas push nuclei outwards from the centre of the star; and the less centrally the gammas are produced, the greater the chance that the nuclei are pushed in some other direction (including inwards).

More detail at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726189
Solar roads and sidewalks are a PR stunt. Abrasion is no joke, nothing optically transparent survives on the ground. You can see this easily in the cellar "pavement lights" common in NYC and other old cities. Light still passes through after a century, but maybe 20% and very diffuse. Bad for solar panels.

Roads don't absorb enough energy to generate power, they're not flexible enough. They're designed to not absorb energy since it hastens breakdown. Potholes are a good example of a road surface energy absorber :) .

Solar roofs are a far better bet. Elon is onto something there, but time will tell if costs can be brought down enough. Besides the good PR, solar roofs substantially reduce heat absorbtion, important in the sunny climates solar works well in. And we have a ton of wasted roof space. Many companies would willingly allow roof panels to be put up for free if the economics for power generation were good enough.
Could you talk more concretely? What is the back of the napkin calculation for total power if some percent of all highways were solar?
A shining example showing that the flood of advertising is not unstoppable. Some US states have also limited it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard#Laws_limiting_billbo...

Hopefully more will follow.
I get this issue and I share the frustration but is this really a comment on the article posted?

In this case we seem to be talking about huge military projects like GPS or Drones and that there is a divide between the hardware parts and the software parts that might have made sense in the past when the interfaces between the hardware were simpler and software was mostly internal. But now when software is such a big part you need to involve software people earlier looking at the bigger picture from the beginning. It will also drive how hardware will be developed, i.e. what you can do with software will drive how you should develop your autonomous military drone fleet.
True story: I once worked for a company that rented 3 of 4 floors in a building. The top floor was empty, and we were expanding, and we wanted it, and it should have been easy.

It took years. The property company would rather that floor to be empty earning no rent, than to cut a deal on it. And they won, the company paid their price and signed the long lease they wanted.

Property companies don’t blink. They will not cut WeWork any slack.
I really feel for these people, but if Google gets into the content moderation business it will never end. They could spend all their resources trying to manage the floodgate that would open, but it wouldn’t be enough trying to appease all the different jurisdictions, advocacy groups, and lawsuits once they become anything besides a neutral entity.

Actually I really don’t like Google and would love to see them drown under the onslaught. Plus a lot of people would get some temporary relief until search moves to someone still neutral.
Relaxed JSON is pretty good.
http://www.relaxedjson.org/
XML manages to be difficult and complex for both computers and people to read. That's why it fell out of favor.
The streets without all those signs look much more pleasant
Exactly. Reserve buyers exist for exactly this purpose
Where is the Ponzi scheme element?
There are hundreds of news outlets around the world covering China that aren't biased towards PRC...
Firstly, he said he has never worked with an effective architect: you have changed his meaning completely to imply he doesn't think architecture matters.

Secondly, you can't know he hasn't worked on mature systems (he didn't say). Most people learn by working with a variety of systems that are at different stages (greenfield to twilight), and more importantly with different quality (poor versus good architecture/systems/teams).

A long period working on one good system may help a few people learn, but from what I have seen, it often doesn't (I have worked with crap programmers on mature systems).

Hopefully GP answers for themselves.
Totally agree. If you don't know to code and but are an architect you pretty much live in permanent la-la land. I bet on paper I could architect a whole company within a few hours. It would look good on paper but in practice it wouldn't work because there are a ton of implementation details that make my design impossible or hard to achieve. Much better to empower the devs to be involved in architecture from the start so they can give real-world input quickly. I have seen it so many times where managers and architects decided on an unsuitable stack because all they do is listen to sales reps and read whitepapers.
>I hope something was learnt here (other than learning not to do it again)

I'm afraid not - the trials played out exactly as the naysayers predicted. Most of the panels cracked under load and failed due to water ingress; those that didn't became woefully inefficient due to soiling. They were dangerously slippery even in ideal conditions, they cost much more than a conventional rooftop installation and they never generated as much electricity as a rooftop installation even when they were brand new.

The whole exercise was a complete waste of time and money.