skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yet another iteration of the soundly discredited "hydrogen economy" model. I'm really surprised this came out of Stanford, of all places.

>They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals, the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient amounts. And >recycling could effectively extend the supply.

>For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices that if one becomes short, you can switch,"

Cornucopian hand waving. It reminds me of Julian Simon and his assertion that if we ever run out of Copper, we'll find a way to just make it or substitute something else for it.

I'm really, really curious how they came up with their numbers on that. I'm also very interested to see if they accounted for the quantum limitations on solar cell efficiency.

I think i'm going to have to actually read the paper.
What exactly has happened to it?

If it "clicks" or seems to spin up then stop when you apply power (put in an external drive enclosure perhaps to control power separately), then possibly something on the "motherboard" of the drive has failed and the drive platters are fine.

In that case, buying a drive of the same manufacturer, size and model number as close as possible in firmware level to the failed one, and swapping the motherboard may work for you, as it did for me.

If there is physical damage to the platters you will need to spend a lot.

The two most reputable that I know of are OnTrack Data Recovery (http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/) and Drive Savers (http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/).
Intermittent renewables aren't a complete solution to our energy needs because they aren't available when we need them.

In a lot of places in the world, solar energy is more available generally when it's most needed.

That said, I'm all for non-intermittent renewables. Newer geothermal and tide-energy and wave-energy technologies could fit the bill. We could also develop infrastructure that would allow us to lob bulk cargoes cheaply into orbit, which would bypass the unfavorable economics of the rocket equation and enable orbital solar power.

I'm also for saving the earth with newer nuclear technology. (Thorium wouldn't carry the proliferation risk of current breeder reactors.)
There is a second option, which is bare survival.

What about the third option: get your PhD and work in industry? I keep coming across statistics and CS PhDs who now work for Twitter, the New York Times, and industry research labs (AT&T, Microsoft). Why isn't an industry job a viable option?
Kaizen and a little something to get you through your day.
Post by Sacha Greif -- hope you enjoy.
The 86-variants-of-a-pin trick is the best conference hack I've ever heard of. Thanks for posting this.
Exercise #7: Multiple Field Separators
> but how credible is he as a source if he can't even pass his quals?

Where did he say that?
Exactly what I thought. It goes from great grammar to absolutely terrible mid paragraph. You can actually spot where the copy paste ends.
Music Album Launch, Customer Spotlight: Hear & Now DVD Project
Extending the Joel test - 8 more questions for employers
I am definitely getting input from as many people as I can. Within a month, I'm going to start working with my potential users and their caretakers so that'll be real feedback.

I'm targeting http://ktype.net/wiki/research:disabilities which prevent people from talking or using a keyboard - Stephen Hawkings of the world as well as autistic children with major speech problems. There are many existing solutions out there to help people with disabilities but there are also very wide gaps in between. I'm trying to catalog everything I can find to help fill in the gaps and I will make my own bridges if necessary.

The new keyboard is an iPad app (Demo: http://ktype.net/wiki/dev:demo ) and it will be extremely customizable. On the iPad itself, you can already define your own keys/layout: http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110204

Additionally, I'm working on a vastly better auto-suggest feature: http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110209 than a cellphone T9. Also, I want to make it work with a variety of hardware input devices. If you are a researcher making a brain-reading interface for paralyzed patients, don't hook it up to Windows! KType will learn from each user's patterns and will be customizable enough to support easy communication. I'm also going to integrate Twitter/email etc. soon enough - http://ktype.net/wiki/dev:roadmap

Don't get me started I can keep talking about this 24/7 :)
Clearly, you have never been exposed to CLOS, the most powerful object oriented system of our time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Object_System

There is also Arc, the language Paul Graham and Robert Morris wrote for the web. This site is written it it.

http://arclanguage.org/
My buddy's non-rooted Nexus will lose connection to it's camera 1-2 times a month, requiring a reboot.
I never said he did. I think it's good to point out there's a lot of beginner C code out there involving significant memory management that's not much better or slower than the best JITs.

EDIT: Added "involving memory management"

EDIT: To students doing C programming: Be honest, now, but have you ever checked?
One OS thread per task is not the only way to parallelize a program. If you have a runtime system that allows the creation of light-weight tasks that can be executed by pre-existing OS threads, you can exploit very fine grain task parallelism. See The Implementation of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language: http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/cilk5.pdf
arizona should be paved over as a massive photovoltaic lot. you don't need to live there anyway you won't have water soon. as for questions of putting that energy into the grid, we already do it, just because energy is locally produced doesn't mean it is locally consumed.
What's the difference between getting locked into a framework someone else developed, and getting locked into your own framework that you end up having to develop?

At least with something like CodeIgniter, you can go elsewhere for help.
From Forkly to Hipster to Launchrock. Check out Tresendas
"If you live on your GPS, then this would be enough of a reason alone to choose Android over Apple"

I dont live on it meaning I dont have to use it all the time, but when i'm going to a new restaurant for example I love being able to either search at home and send myself a map link or search on the phone and hit directions and have navigate open itself up with everything set and ready to get me to my destination.

I have used other stand alone GPS's and they all have their quirks about them but theres something about the full intigration of the navigation with Google that makes me love that feature the most on the Android OS.
Noam Chomsky on Wisconsin, Egypt
I'm definitely supportive of whats happening in the middle east, but I'm less convinced about the rightness of union rights in Wisconsin. Thoughts from the HN community?
It's ridiculous to say that you have abandoned something when it sounds like you didn't even take sides with it in the first place. To me those who choose the Android phones and tablets do so specifically because they want to customize their experience with it and even get the dev kit and make something of their own. After reading the article, I find that you're just another one of these "Oh, look at all the pretty pictures I can take, I'm so media-centric an creative now, I might even get paid for the photos I take with it". This in itself is absurd and, were you telling me this, I would have smacked the thought right out of your empty little head. This smells too much like paid advertising and I don't like it. If it is real, I'd dock you a point (-1) for Bad and inconsistent grammar, (-1) for Spelling Errors, (-2)for saying iphone (An overpriced piece of shit with an environment that's toxic to devs and more recently content publishers) is better than Android, which makes no sense because you compared only the iphone against one android phone, and a bad one at that. I mean, if you're willing to spend that much on an iphone, why didn't you just get a better android phone? And finally, you are docked for supporting apple, which the most bullshit company I've ever laid eyes on and deserves all the bad publicity it gets. (-1) Also, -1 for advertising for apple by not giving a fair comparison of solely the operating systems but the phones. That's a 4/10. All in all, a failing grade for a failing article.
To Facebook Tools are top priority
i disagree with this part of the conclusion:

> Summing it up, a framework tries to save you work by make you define an overly complex configuration, that has to accomodate every possible use case.

i use codeigniter specifically because it relatively simple to use, lightweight, and easily configurable.

can you use php without frameworks? sure. but in the end, it saves you development time. its not like the code you cut to replace the framework is going to be that much less buggy
From A Desk And A Chair In The Server Room To $116 Million In Revenue
Well I am not surprised that you are not treated well but I am surprised it's not racial. I am American and I apologize for what it is worth.. I think there is still quite a bit of lingering overreaction to 9/11.
Where did you get the notion that he couldn't even pass his quals? Moreover, what does that have do with the correctness of his complaints.

On an unrelated note, I find it mildly interesting you say it was your "fault" that you weren't cut out for academic research.
"Developers, Developers, Developers" ?
I abandoned Linux on the desktop five years ago, and I still occasionally hear some snide remarks about "defection".

Even though I still manage a bunch of Linux servers and advocate towards Linux whenever it makes sense.
BuildorPro - next generation web design through the browser
maybe there's a road network after the tunnel. That network is still on his land and lead to multiple exits, villages, highways. Another idea is to have surveillance sensors around the exit (IR, microphones, proximity sensors ) so that he'd know there's someone

But I think the biggest problem is when he's on the road. The batmobile gets noticed and it's easy to get blocked in traffic, or have a crowd around the batmobile when he finds a parking spot.

The green hornet solution is a much more practical. Get a vanilla-looking car, then add high-tech sensors, weapons, and defensive solutions in the car.
I always resented traveling to the US too because of border controls. Recently I moved to the US and felt relieved that I do not have to go through immigration there anymore. Seconds after that thought I had the epiphany that I now have to go through immigration whenever I am going anywhere else in the world.

The funny thing is that I have never had a bad experience with US immigration. The only time I had a non-smooth experience was in Canada, before a flight from Montreal to Atlanta. An officer waved me out of line saying "I'm sorry sir but you were selected for a random security check. You can thank Mr George W. Bush for that."

The two funniest experiences I had was when entering Dubai and Sao Paulo, In Sao Paulo the immigration officer did not speak a single word of English. I do not speak any Portuguese. We quickly realized this frustrating situation and I was waved through. In Dubai I was the first person in line at the customs and not knowing what to do I just kept walking. The customs people just stood there and looked at me. I was already quite far behind the customs people, nearly out of the airport, when I realized that I just walked past the customs officers without having my bags or anything checked. So I went the whole way back just to go through customs properly.
There's no single mechanism in neuroscience to explain learning in general, because the current understanding is that "learning" is a very vague term that covers many types of adaptation, and each has its own mechanism.

I'm not familiar with any network-level mechanisms, but there are many local (synapse- or dendrite-level) ones. The one I'm most familiar with is spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) [1], which modifies the strength of a synapse based on the millisecond-level timing of action potentials. When cell A tends to fire just before cell B, and the two have synapses connecting them, then cell B will increase the strength of its synapses to A. The reverse is true too: if cell A tends to fire just after cell B, then the synapses will decrease in strength. This is a form of Hebbian learning [2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike-timing-dependent_plastici...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
I really liked this article. It generalizes very well, and dovetails neatly with Aaron Griffin's excellent rant:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=147321#p147321

As he says so well: Rails/Django/Turbogears/etc etc - Frameworks overly designed to "make it easy" while "hiding details" and "providing event based functionality".
I got news for you.... these "details" that are hidden, they're less complicated than these frameworks.
Ask HN: My web startup is growing fast what next?
Dont ask me whats the url of the startup. Let us assume the question to be hypothetical.

Our website is in beta phase and I am the only coder in the team. Looking at the idea some investors have given us a decent amount of money.

We launched this site through invitations to 100 people. Within a week we hit the 1000 registered users mark. Till then we had hosted our site on rackspace cloud with a server with 256MB (thats not a typo) machine. The tech stack was LAMP.

Sensing the growth we increased the RAM to 1 GB. The number of users at any given time was around 40. The RAM was more than sufficient for such a scenario but still the site started slowing down.

I immediately shifted the mysql server to a different machine. That really did not make much difference.

So I looked at the most frequently used operations (which was some queries with joins). I indexed all the tables accordingly and installed memcache to cache the queries for half an hour or so (wherever possible).

Now the number of online at any given time is increased to 120. Total registered users is 9000.
Our investors are happy and co-founders think we are successful and now trying to buy an office for ourselves and build a proper team.

However I am clueless as to think how we can scale hence forth.

Can people give me some pointers as to the different paths I can follow?
Please note that we cant host the server ourselves, we would love to continue with rack-space.
Building Autosuggest Textbox From Scratch
Unfortunately, it appears that India is among the countries hit particularly hard. Anecdotally, it is noticeably harder for an Indian to get a US visa (business or visitor's) than an average foreigner (from a country where a US visa is required).
Last.fm founder says Apple F'd over online music subscriptions
IIRC one of the options presented in “Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air” paper (http://www.withouthotair.com/) was setting up an array of solar panels in North Africa and selling the generated power to Britain.
American Taxation 101: If you have money or might make some in the future, they want some of it.
It seems to me that strongly-typed languages—functional or not—are going to make a strong comeback to web development. The current trend is to narrow down your webapp to a REST[ful] API. Any HTML you generate is only to bootstrap your client-side application (and load initial state) and to accommodate non-JS-enabled clients, which in this date and age should only mean search engine spiders.

The advantage is a uniform interface, like a file-descriptor in Plan-9 (an analogy used in latest InfoQ interview with GO/Newsqueak creator), the HTTP protocol.

And for that, languages like OCaml or Haskell should flourish. Especially functional languages, since typical REST API request should be nothing but data+auth token (whether that's cookie or oauth token).

Applications developed in that model—besides being much simpler to write and test—are easily cacheable and more secure by default. The added bonus is that object oriented languages, that have been most successful in GUI programming, can be once again utilized purely for that.

If not embracing this model one is left with little appealing options: 1) continue to process text in perl-like manner with RoR/Django/etc., coping with nondeterministic behavior and security 2) to invest in frameworks that hide HTTP at all, coding to widgets instead of pages, and to let framework decide how to push that over the wire, which usually means that some sort of continuations are employed, which are inherently HTTP-unfriendly and uncacheable outside of the app's context 3) to replace HTTP with something else, probably some sort of RPC
99 percent of the Developers have not heard of this language called Lj4
Nevermind, I'll create one myself..

I always wanted a better feed view of HN. I guess grouped by automatically derived tags and instant live-update could improve on that matter.
The idea of Batman could work in somaliland (no government, lots of corruption, rampant crime). Mexico (drug war) would also work, or any other country with corrupt or non-existing police forces
Non-functional perl code testing - automated code review
Many of my affiliate based site don't use any frameworks. Just a couple of php lines to get the data and voila. It really depends of your needs. In this case, there is not even security needs...! Why bother?
Yes, recurrent connections are one of the mechanisms that could be responsible for learning. These are used to 'steer' front-end neurons, for example to focus on a certain feature.

There is also 'Hebbian learning', which means that the connections between neurons that fire at the same time become stronger.
It is worth it. Good luck!
This is precisely why I've been repeatedly extending my E-2 visa. Of course, by wanting that freedom, all my payments to US social security are definitely going to waste...
The author forgets that by making UI more complex, application filters out less experienced users.
End result: remaining users are more experienced and productive on average.
But it's not because users are getting better, but because weaker users are filtered out!
I doubt his friends are really "dumping" this guy over his choice of phone. What kind of sociopath would void a friendship over something like that? Most people don't even have access to one person that nuts, let alone a plurality.

I would guess that they're probably just tired of him preaching the superiority of his new phone and have just phased him out a bit. I mean, he is a blogger. They're not exactly known for holding back.

My suspicion is that this guy is probably just feeling the effects of Miguel de Icaza's "Well, actually..." syndrome (http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html).
Take the opportunity to learn OCaml, then in a year go make the big bucks on Wall Street implementing trading systems for hedge funds.
A Have and Have-Not Venture World
You're clearly ignoring the fact, that it's mostly US-only issue, and it doesn't have to be that way. We, non-US citizens, can't do much about it, and we'd like to get attention of US folks (who often are less affected), because they (you?) can.

I'll probably get downvoted for it, and I'd like to be mistaken here, but I'm getting the feeling that some of you get offended by critique, justified or not, of some of US politics.
Hint: If you're stuck for something to publish and present at an OO conference, just reimplement something done in previous decades with CLOS/Lisp or Smalltalk in a newer 'hipper' language. This is only a half-joke. This actually works!
Tunepresto uses algorithms to generate custom music for a video or presentation
“This is not pre-recorded music. This is not music loops. This system is actually making original music. It is generating the music based on the information that it is extracting from the video and the selection the user makes in terms of style of music. It is making new music to suit that particular video.”
Definitely a smart move. The reason ios is so popular in the valley is likely that that is what the geeks got their hands on first.
It's your choice to compile a kernel. You could also have just used a distro like ubuntu. I think for a hacker, the difficult part here is to forget about all those tweaks that are possible.
Another case of shooting themselves in the foot
Stock Droid owner here. I love my Droid, and I'm admittedly biased against Apple, but I agree with his complaints about the camera. I've never done any OS modification at all (even rooting), and I've noticed the Camera app is the crashiest thing I've got on my phone. Even when it starts up, it takes about 10 seconds before I can actually take a picture, and the quality is...lacking, overall. I'm no photographer, so it doesn't get to me too badly, but I can understand his frustration even from just using it occasionally.
-Drastically cut defense spending (The cold war is over. We aren't getting into any dogfights or naval battles. Concentrate spending on urban/guerrila warfare.)
-Reform social security and medicare
-Cut where you can elsewhere
Is it?

Thats $87 per citizen in SF.

That accounts for 0.39% of my taxes in a given year, and I don't even make that much money because I just graduated college.
but if you have written the framework, you don't need to go anywhere for help.

You just fix the problem because now that you have written it and it's tailored to your application, you have a pretty good idea of the problem and how to fix it.

This means that you can progress more quickly and that your project doesn't get littered with "workarounds" for "bugs" in the framework (i.e. hacks around stuff the framework hides for you or you don't know how to access)
The dynamics of this change completely for "enterprise" software where your customers are paying extra for support. In that case there is little incentive for you to put FAQ's on your site. In fact you want to make it hard to run your software without a support contract.
Not really. For instance, people have been looking for 5'-3' DNA polymerase for decades, because it seems like it would be a simpler mechanism for DNA replication than how it really works. But it doesn't seem to exist anywhere.
Android Gingerbread & Honeycomb Will Combine to Form Ice Cream
Totally geeking out on this at the moment. This is absolutely awesome!! The only thing I would say is that you might consider adding an additional simple interface (like a mobile interface) for the less savy viewer. I think the ability to visualize the forecast is really powerful, I'm just picturing my mom looking at this and seeing too many options.

Options are great for us data geeks, but a very simple city forecast page that harnessed your forecast visualization technique could be great for a much wider audience as well.
Looks interesting. Pre-generating asset files for deployment might also be a nice alternative to the usual tricks[1] for using SASS (or other CSS generators) with Heroku, which have rack middleware reading a cache.

(Unfortunately, the code samples were a hard for me to read, in both Firefox and Chrome --- all the newlines seem to have somehow gotten squeezed out...)

[1] https://github.com/pedro/hassle
"There is a philosophy called Contextual Design, every designer at Nokia has been trained in it by the guru Karen Holtzblatt. Everybody has attended her courses and got her very expensive book signed. The idea is that you ask the users what they are doing, then design something. If you think about Apple, they don’t ask anybody. The idea of users as designers is a catastrophe."

I agree. As does this man:

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new." – Steve Jobs
Offtopic: you should consider using typekit faces for titles only... this is the first time an article about outsourcing makes me cry :)