skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
does it not follow that more intelligent humans are worth more than less intelligent humans?

I've come across a similar line of thinking before (possibly in an ethics class). That time we ended up at something like 'your pet dog is more intelligent/useful than a newborn human. So is it more valuable?' After that, we ended up in a discussion about 'potential' e.g human newborn has more 'potential' than the fully grown dog and so on.

I basically learned that the really interesting thing about such discussions is what it tells you about yourself and the other people.
The Real Point of Laziness
Interesting.. I have been looking into this market as well.. it would be great to connect with you via email or skype.
http://blog.notmyidea.org/
Germany has increased the use of renewable energy in a decade from 6 to 16% for the generation of electrical energy.
The laws and regulation have been put in place: the EEG. This law has been copied world-wide by dozens of countries.

The goal is to be at 100% with renewable energy in 2050. The closing down of the nuclear power plants is only one milestone on that way. The fossil-based plants will be reduced over time, too. As a bridge technology gas power plants are seen which make it possible to use heat and electricity. Those have an extremely high degree of efficiency. The gas supply is there. New pipelines are being built currently.

Closing down the nuclear power plants is one goal. They are extremely expensive and they need huge amounts of money which we need to invest in renewable energy technology. Also the nuclear industry favors the big corporations who prevent market mechanisms and try to undermine any new energy source. They are also not flexible enough to be used in a future energy mix.

Given that the goal is to go fully to renewable energy in the next 40 years, the nuclear power plants have to go first. The acceptance for them in the German society is also at an all time low.
Working link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l0Yrdc_...
Like I said on the last thread, this project has been in the works for forty years, and the latest milestone they've reached is that the ESA has looked at the idea and declared that there's nothing obviously wrong with it.

That's still a pretty darn long way from a finished product.
it's got bugger all to do with any gods or deities.

I can't help noticing that the natural tendency of the human species is to expand and adapt - that is what we are. I also notice that the various movements that advocate more basic living patterns have never really caught on.

So you are going to have two options:

1) Refuse to do anything about power, let it get more and more expensive until enough people die that you have a solvable problem

2) work on making it cheaper

I am sure the greens would say also:

3) everyone chooses to live a more basic quieter life against our natural instincts. Oh and all those nice rich and powerful people will also be joining in and not just taking advantage

and I will say

good luck with that (oh and if you try to achieve 3 without peoples buy in but rather through legislation you effectively are back to option 1)

it's 1 or 2 - and 1 is going to be f@#king awful so let's get working on cheap power
Actually, MIT solved the storage problem 2 years ago. It's just got to make it's way to market: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html
Do you change many settings? I rate what's not categorized (mostly netflix -2 and my project sites as +2) but leave default settings almost whenever I can. Its ability to give useful reports immediately is what I like about it.
Two actually. They are currently off the grid due to technical problems.

They won't go online again. The Bundesregierung has just annouced that both Brunsbüttel and Krümmel will not go online again.
This looks exactly what I have been looking for. I have just signed up, can't wait to try it. Thanks
I wasn't aware of Hyde. From skimming the site it looks like Pelican is simpler, not requiring Django and being easier to get up and running initially.

The only drawback I've found so far is the inability of ReST to reference sections in other document files.
My commute has been ~30 minutes each way for the last five years. Seems like a perfect distance. Previously, I had a 20+ mile commute (each way), which I did three days a week. That was not ideal.
Should ruby go the haml route and uses significant whitespaces? » Ruby Fleebie
Dancing and hugging in public will land you in US jail.
No mention of encrypted networks, so I'm assuming it only works on open, non-password protected network?
Oddities about JavaScript
There are many solid arguments against nuclear power.

The waste from the infrastructure might be large in volume, but most of it is not that dangerous - compared to the fuel and the chemicals that are used in (re)processing the fuel.
That's a good point. There is only so much demand for slogan t-shirts and llama socks.
> "This just leads to increasing energy imports."
=> Germany exported 9 billion kWh in 1Q2010, can hands-down afford shutting down nuclear power plants. Source: http://www.klimaretter.info/energie/hintergrund/6271-deutsch....

That's theory; compare it to practice:

Germany already imports electricity from France[1] -- during peak hours. The capacity your source cites is the optimistic variant. The industry simply can't run on the somewhat fickle solar and wind energy, so energy has to be imported. Of course there are ways around that -- energy storage of various kind, or vastly excess capacity, but those raise costs substantially. And that's the core of the problem: the green power companies shift the costs elsewhere, out of public sight. The sleight of hand works, because the numbers -- the optimistic capacity -- are right.

----

[1] sorry, no link here. They explained it during lecture in Greifswald's powerplant.
Wow. This could prove an invaluable tool for teaching. Great UI (love the way you can build the dataset with a paintbrush), top-quality visualization, wide choice of algorithms... Much better than R scripts if you want to show basic algorithms at work to a bunch of students. Many thanks
Yes, they are actually.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/29/inhabitats-week-in-green-...

Speaking of solar power, Japan unveiled plans to construct 10 new solar power plants in the wake of the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis, while Switzerland announced that it will completely phase out the use of nuclear power.
Because of the ongoing massive costs savings it is expected that within 2015 or so it will be cheaper for house owner's to produce their own energy with photovoltaic than buying it. (Without governmental support)
This will be a massive game changer: Decentralized, DIY, prosumer energy connected in a smart grid. The private rooth area and climate in for example Austria is enough to produce 1/3 of the electric energy used in Austria.

The Germans are actually ahead in this area because of current governmental price guarantees for selling self produced electricity back to the grid. This is stimulating accelerated cost savings development in the German solar industry.
Germany is currently planning to build two HVDC (High-Voltage Direct Current) lines to Norway. They will provide us here in North Germany with Hydro backup.

There is a lot of research going on in new storage systems.

In solar thermal power plants, there is already storage.

It is not that Germany switches over night to renewable. The shutdown process of the nuclear power plants will take ten years. The plan for the 100% deployment of renewable energy has a target of 2050.

Without a goal, nothing will happen. Germany sets a goal and the framework to reach it.
This is a false dichotomy. You need not choose between cheap energy and no energy, you can also have expensive energy, and I do not see how expensive energy implies North Korea.

(UPDATE: Although you can also have expensive energy that is unpleasant!)
> and should be completely ignored.

How about: "and should be educated" (from ground up).
Italy has always been nuclear free because it couldn't afford it. I guess sometimes it pays off being economically weaker.
Good News: Larry Summers Sees a Tech Bubble
That's why I actually like seeing the negative sentiment around current nuclear reactors. Because this way the status quo can be broke, and they will actually look int other safer technologies and put their money on them to improve them faster. I'd prefer if we'd use mostly only such power from the sun or wind, but I'm open minded enough to accept a safer nuclear power option such as Thorium based reactors.

And as a human race working with atoms like that is probably inevitable anyway, but we just need to make sure we choose the right paths. Perhaps the Uranium one wasn't the very best path. Hopefully we can even make fusion reactors in a few decades.
I agree with what you have said, here. There is definitely money in forums, and this is surely why I have seen motorcycle.com buy up lots of forums over the passed couple years.

You describe my biggest hit; people searching for something, finding my site and writing a post or a reply that helps generate more search traffic. I don't have to police much since the sites are very focused (not forums).
I've skimmed the comments and haven't noticed these two thoughts, so will add them:

1) Opening line of the article: Office Depot CEO Steve Odland remembers like it was yesterday working in an upscale French restaurant in Denver. Waiters won't necessarily remain waiters. We are all human beings, regardless of our current role at the moment. There are also cases where someone may be more important than they appear to be -- for example, managers run cash registers during busy times at my local grocery store. I have long liked collecting true life anecdotes about such things: Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin look alike contest and came in third; a bank turned down some long-haired, jeans-wearing young person for an account and then they were given the account when one of the younger employees recognized them as a wealthy rock star; someone in a bank was an utter ass to a guy in overalls covered in paint who threatened to move his accounts. She said something like "feel free". He was the owner of a construction company worth millions and did, in fact, move his accounts.

Treating people badly who appear to be your "social inferiors" at the moment is simply stupid. That person may not really be the "social inferior" they appear to be. And even if they are at this moment, they may not remain so. If you are an ass to them, they will remember it when the table has turned. It is shocking how often you run into people later, sometimes many years later.

2) Even if they truly are your social inferiors and will always remain so, it is still stupid to mistreat them. That waiter carries your food from the kitchen to your table. Do you really want to give him reason to do something to your food? If you think he won't, then you think he's a nicer guy than you are. Don't be so sure. People with power may be assholes to your face. People without power are very likely to reciprocate but in a way that covers their ass, so it is more likely to be done behind your back.

So aside from my hippie-tree-hugger, give-the-world-a-hug, we-are-all-first-and-foremost-souls-on-a-spiritual-journey idealism for trying to be decent to people I meet, I think folks who mistreat others in this manner are simply stupid. Last, I will note that my observation has been that folks who try to lord it over others in this manner are also usually insecure and hiding behind their degrees, titles, big paycheck etc. I'm not impressed by such behavior, at least not favorably so.
A plus-energy house from a German university won the last competition in the US.

http://www.solardecathlon.gov/past/2009/final_results.html
Four Years To The Day: Asus Announces Son Of Foleo
So APIs are not copyrightable?
+1 = me carpool

but seriously, 520 must be the most expensive route in the world, if you count the dollars wasted per qualified engineer
The time of cheap power is over.

The challenge will be to have enough power at all.
Do you have a link to GOLEM? Google didn't give me anything useful.
2011 Medium Haircuts
latest 2011 medium hairstyles, find the most popular shoulder length haircuts for women.2011 medium length hairstyle for women.Medium haircuts can be combined with so many different styling methods but the simplest ones can often be some of the most beautiful.
Germany does not want a different form of nuclear power. Nuclear power is no option.

The goal is to develop renewable energy to 100% over the next 40 years.
Android Market: 80% Apps Hardly Downloaded Ever
Please elaborate on how it works? Perhaps I got this very wrong; never used an Either<> class.

Would an attempt to access the value (if an error was indicated instead) cause error condition? Would it be similar in nature to an exception?
We have plans. Maybe you should get in contact with our government and check it out. There are a lot of publications from them about the future energy strategiy.
You're on.
60 Social Media Ideas in 60 Minutes
I'm also highly sceptical of tracking reduced age expectancy due to atmospheric coal pollution.
Ignored until they're educated.
They aren't glad.

The french can't even meet their own demand in summer and winter. They are importing electricity from Germany.
Script of the Week: Changing Terminal Color
Citation needed. Is this with photo-voltaic cells built with dangerous and scarce materials?
This is the classical view of people who see technical progress as a kind of god given fact or as the natural direction humanity must take.

It has seemed to be a pretty "natural direction" for humanity so far, at least, and technical progress continues to give humanity so much while costing us so little.

To me it seems no more bizarre a view that technical progress is a good direction for humanity to take as believing that education should become better over time, our life expectancy should continue to go up over time, or that, one day, it'd be kinda nice to travel to the stars. All those things need technical progress.
Or family and friends, or dealing with the bureaucracy of the craptastic health care that is against providing your autistic son anything besides false sentiment and lies. Unfortunately, the tech industry places too much value on things like Twitter.
Customize display of variables in Visual Studio's debugger.
In five years renewable energy will be MORE competitive, not less.

The government decision to increase the life time of the nuclear power plant was highly unpopular. In the German society the majority of people were ten years ago already in favor for the shutdown. You can bet that the next government will not have the FDP and CDU in power and that the move to renewable energy has broad support even then.
Phones merging more and more with PC's.

I've made a promise to myself that HDMI-out is a must for my next Android phone (currently I have HTC EVO 4G which has one, but is unusable as a phone since I'm in Europe).

This is even better, at least on paper.
Title should be fixed to "MapReduce is not the answer--if the question comes from an interview at my company." Zero content, let's move on.
Keeping old nuclear power plants running is not expensive, building them is expensive. Dismantling nuclear power plants is also expensive but there is no way around those costs, anyway.
http://kennethreitz.com ;)
Some subjects are just boring, but you still need to learn them. I had power points in my algorithms class, yet I was never bored.
I don't think anybody here in Germany would call the nuclear industry 'clean'. That's a french marketing term nobody believes here.
Very interesting article. Unfortunately there's usually a long way from the lab to industrial production, but of course if you don't try you won't succeed.
It's okay. It a bit generic and sounds a lot like "Oblivious" or "Obvious" -- but since it's not a consumer-facing brand, you should be fine.
To anybody curious about how LLVM looks on the inside, I recommend reading their excellent tutorial on building a front-end, which you can find here: http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/
>>The time of cheap power is over.

The time of cheap oil seems to be over.

For the rest: You know that you don't know what will happen. So why do you make blanket statements like that?

For example: Some analysts claim that solar energy will solve all energy problems in ten years. Maybe some of the small fusion projects will work? Thorium? And so on.

Edit: Yeah, since Germany has panicked like a herd of cattle, the time limit is so short that there is very little to do. But the way the electricity prices will go, solar will become attractive earlier.
I'm not totally sure about that. There is a lot of investment in this area (albeit tossed and blown on the winds of political trends). Things like photovoltaics are only a few years off being viable on a large scale (at current levels of investment which turns out to be the biggest problem).

But I agree it's going to be a struggle and one that may go badly wrong for a while.

But the key thing here is that we have to get the knee jerk politics out of it. It doesn't matter if there is global warming or not because if we stay dependant on fossil fuels there are just going to be endless conflicts over the them, if the greens can persuade everyone in the whole world to live a life of abstinence that's cool - but we need to bet that they can't - because their failure mode is that we all die horribly.
We currently have most of our nuclear power plants off grid. Nothing happened so far.

How do you come up with the number 50 by 2011???
Boring is a state of mind. No subject is intrinsically 'boring'. I tell my Scouts "Look at all these other folks having fun! If you're bored, its because something inside your head needs to change" It works, sometimes.

I got it from my Dad, who said smart people were never bored. Not accurate, but motivating.
> and developed their own chip.

Apple did not "develop their own chip" in any meaningful sense, especially not in back in 2007 when Nvidia acquired PortalPlayer. The iPhone used an off-the-shelf Samsung part (the S5L8900), and PortalPlayer was in the business of audio SoCs for PMPs. The first generation Tegra was more than two years away at the release of the original iPhone.

Even if Apple had wanted to contract PortalPlayer for iPhone, they could not have.

Since then, they've mostly kept to off-the-shelf blocks, even the A4 only has minor restructuring of the blocks at the SoC level, the GPU is a standard SGX block.
So, in your opinion, crime is a net positive because it reinforces the need for police?
Look at it from a different perspective: The engineers failed to convince society and have only themselves to blame.
I found the calculations I made over a year a ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252512 . If you don't mind following the link, it answers your question.
This is great background for newbies.

My kid is learning programming on a VM where he's admin. I went through the first example and discovered that I don't have banner on my machine. I apt-got it and realized this will be a nice learning opportunity for the kid, a tiny real-world hiccup and here's how you solve it and get on with the task.
There are huge electr. pumped storage hydro power stations in use in Austria und Switzerland for decades...

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpspeicherkraftwerk#.C3.96ste...

Also smart grids (trinding price due to current demand and consumption and intelligent consumer hardware automatically controlled by this price) are emerging.

Also the weather forecast and therefore solar and wind energy producing forecast for the next 24 hours is very accurate nowadays. Far-sighted and intelligent planning of the energy-mix in the smart grid is therefore possible.
Ask HN: How to build a laptop
I need a new laptop and I'd like to build one myself from components. But I'm struggling to find anywhere to buy components (in the UK) or even help on how to go about building one. There is a lot of info around building desktop PCs and I have built some in the past. There are lots of desktop component suppliers too, but I can't find any for laptops.

I know for most of you, it just makes sense to buy a good readymade one (MBP or Thinkpad), but I would like to try and build a laptop myself, to learn how to do it, to see how much it costs to make a good one and to have fun!

Another motivating factor for me is that I can't find any Linux laptops here in the UK. Dell used to sell them but I don't find them on their site any more. System76 (USA) charges $150 to deliver.

If I built laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed, I could probably sell them to other people too.

Do you have any good pointers on how I can get started?

Thanks!
Corroborating data point: A few jobs back, a contractor bragged over lunch about smuggling large amounts of spirits through Norvegian customs on his holidays. A week later he was found out lying about the hours he billed and promptly fired.
It sounds almost like "devious", which might be negatively connotated (but English is not my first language, so what do I know). It's also phonetically a bit close to Mevio (a podcasting company at http://www.mevio.com ), so if you're in a similar business, perhaps it could be problematic.

Otherwise it sounds and looks cool, and good luck.
Germany exports electricity to France, already.

There are two things going on:

* there is an energy market. Energy is traded for different prices at different times. Sometimes energy from France is cheap (well, it is government subsidized anyway) - sometimes not. For example the Nuclear Power Plants of France are idling a lot on the weekend, when the demand is low.

* there are times when the nuclear power plants have not enough capacity to power France. In winter the demand is possibly very high, like last winter, when it was cold and France was heating a lot with electricity (which we do not that much in Germany). In summer the nuclear power plants have to reduce their capacity, because the rivers are dry and there is not enough cooling water for them.
Unicorns? I must have missed that.
I do remember seeing ox and leviathan though.
Don't quote me on this in a court of law but I'm pretty sure all of my current main sources of income (other than consulting) started life as side projects, including a site I sold for 5 figures, a technology I sold for 6 figures, and most of my current sites which provide a day to day income now (the biggest of which was set up as a side project to try and help promote a book I was writing at the time). A personal blog I started in 2003 as a laugh made mid 4 figures every month in 2008 with Adsense (but almost nothing now, bah). I started an e-mail newsletter as a side project in August last year.. now up to 12k subscribers across 2 newsletters and making a little money some weeks.

Side projects rock! They sniff out your true interests and true motivations. But.. I doubt they're for everybody, naturally.
Victims of a rather harsh bait and switch 40 years ago; "Prior to the cancellation of Black Arrow, NASA had offered to launch British payloads for free; however this offer was withdrawn following the decision to cancel Black Arrow."

Ouch!
> Would an attempt to access the value (if an error was indicated instead) cause error condition? Would it be similar in nature to an exception?

Either is a tagged union (actually a sum type), you have a value OR an error, which are typed (haskell uses Left and Right as the constructors for Either, by convention Left holds an error and Right holds a value, because right is correct).

You can not just "cast" your Either, you have to type-check it with a case (or use monadic operators) to unwrap it, and with the right flag the compiler will ensure you're not missing cases. At compile time.

Either is basically Schrödinger's box (the computation resulted in both a value and an error), and the compiler checks that you're set for handling both a dead and a live cat, or it will not let you open the box.
My Job As A Pre-Launch Startup CEO Was To Buy Sandwiches