skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I can tell, (2) is already being taken into account. The original press release does mention that they need to see how the stacks perform when there's more than one though (because of shading).

Why does 45-degree panels reduce efficiency? I mean, it might reduce it when the sun is overhead, but solar power is generally measured in the total wattage it produces over a long period.
Am I the only one who was surprised that of all the pieces in that sentence, the author italicized "web browser" and "flash?" Those actually seem like the least hacky pieces to me, but I guess he highlighted those because they're at the end?
For clarity: having a symbol in a program named "FAIL" which evaluates to boolean truth is simply wrong, without room for reasonable disagreement. The errno trick is accepted because of the need to enumerate the "failing" space, it is never used in situations where there is only one kind of failure. And even if there were, it should (again, without argument) be called something specific (e.g. "NO_REAL_ROOT").

As to the latter point about a hypothetical machine I could use: I'd be very surprised if you had a tool which mechanically removes empty destructors, as that changes the semantics of the code (e.g. they can start being POD objects which get different initialization semantics). But in this code they were verifiably needless, which is bad style. Are you in the habit of writing other noop functions "just because?".

And I'm amused at your "not worth discussing" point, given that you jumped into a discussion about exactly that. :)
I came here to say the same thing. I had read about two paragraphs in and thought: "Wait, I thought this was supposed to colorize the code...ooooh nice."
Ask HN: Non-designer/developer UI/UX testing resources?
I've been asked how people "get into" being professional UI/UX software testers and what resources they can use to learn more. My answers so far have been things like "learn the names and functions of UI widgets", "study effective communication strategies" and read the guides on "how to write effective bug reports" and things like that. I've been unable to find any good books or comprehensive tutorials sites for those testers who sit down, try out software (and try to break it, record things they find broken/non-intuitive), and report their results.

For the record, these testers are people who do not write automated tests, create test suites, set up automation tools, set up crowdsourced tests, nor design or implement the user interfaces. Everything I've found so far are for people designing, implementing, (automatically) testing, and outsourcing this work, but none for the actual people who do the testing.

Lots of Googling hasn't turned up anything useful.
The monk, the Buddha and the false wishes - (Startup Initial Days)
The name is confusing. Vim-slime does not speak the swank protocol. But another plugin for vim, called slimv, does.

You could also use slime in vim with a rube-goldberg-esque combination of eclim (http://http://eclim.org/) and CUSP (http://www.bitfauna.com/projects/cusp/cusp.htm).
Mark Cuban and His Tips About Shark Tank
Let's try again with slightly different emphasis: The DMCA requires service providers with actual knowledge of their hosting of infringing material to act "expedititously" to remove or disable /access/ to the material.

The link to it constitutes access. Moreover, it's the link and not the data that determines infringement. The artist can upload the same data as an infringer, and the two pieces of data will be deduplicated to the same file. The difference between infringing and not is the link used to get to the blocks on disk.
You are right, of course, however, I have built quite elaborate LED-based backlight systems and have metrics on this too. A few years ago we did a custom system with a 1,000 Watt (yes, one thousand) custom liquid-cooled RGB LED backlight. Performance depends on many things, from aperture ratios to the spectral transmission characteristics of the filters as well as how they match the emission spectra of the backlight elements.

With regards to getting in touch, email me at martin_05 the domain is rocketmail and TLD is .com
First off, if we do go with variable pricing, the last thing we want is values to be denominated per MB. There is too much cognitive load on humans to think in terms of MB quantities.

Second, variable pricing makes sense if those who use very little data get a discount off the amount this currently use.
> Reasonable that a contest Microsoft is hosting to promote their own product is skewered towards their own product.

No. It's not reasonable at all. If you propose a challenge, I would assume you want to prove a point beyond how much you can stack the deck (we already know they can go very far with that).

Wouldn't it be nicer if they actually had a superior product instead? If they have a superior product, like they claim, why do they need to manipulate the rules to favor their product?
Second bullet point:

"A price-per-MB that, off the top, feels reasonable."
Agile Estimation at the Company Level
Osmo Wiio: Communication usually fails, except by accident
It blows me away that a website built around a niche community as (apparently) narrow as colour palettes can be profitable, never mind profitable enough to be acquisitive. Congrats to both parties, but boy would I love to see how the numbers stack up!
(2) The best arrangement of solar cells is always going to be a single tracking array on top of a hill. But, as costs drop the advantage of a tracking system needs to be balanced vs just adding more cells. Using solar cells in the far north is generally a bad idea, but there are applications where it's useful. EX: Really remote stations that people vary rarely visit.
I'm with you alex, I tend to only use classes when I've got
to maintain state, I just use a function otherwise. Here's
how I'd likely code this ...

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <cmath>

using std::string;
using std::cout;
using std::endl;

static bool findRoots(
double a,
double b,
double c,
double &rootOne,
double &rootTwo,
string &errMsg
)
{
if(a == 0.0)
{
errMsg = "Parameter 'a' cannot be zero";
return(false);
}

double discriminant = b * b - 4 * a * c;

if(discriminant < 0.0)
{
errMsg = "Discriminant cannot be less than zero";
return(false);
}

double dSqrt = sqrt(discriminant);
double twoA = 2 * a;

rootOne = (-b + dSqrt) / twoA;
rootTwo = (-b - dSqrt) / twoA;

return(true);
}

int main()
{
double a[] = { 0.0, 2.0, 2.0 };
double b[] = { 1.0, 3.0, 1.0 };
double c[] = { 2.0, 2.0, 0.0 };

double rootOne;
double rootTwo;
string errMsg;

for(int n = sizeof(a) / sizeof(a[0]), i = 0; i < n; i ++)
{
cout << "a: " << a[i] << ", b: " << b[i] << ", c: " << c[i] << endl;

if(findRoots(a[i], b[i], c[i], rootOne, rootTwo, errMsg))
{
cout << rootOne << " " << rootTwo << endl;
}
else
{
cout << errMsg << endl;
}

cout << endl;
}

return(0);
}
The magnitude of coverage for something "uncommon in the wild" (I would add, 'if at all') supports your cynical side.
> does mention that they need to see how the stacks perform when there's more than one though

So how can they make this claim today? Besides that, that's pretty easy to calculate, all you need is one of these: http://www.solarpathfinder.com/index

It will show you quite precisely what the effect is of the object you place in the path of the suns rays.

As for the 45 degree reducing effeciency: solar panels produce power that varies with the angle of the incident light. So if you place one panel at exactly 90 degrees to the incident light (for both 'tilt' and 'pan' or elevation and azimuth if you want to be precise) then you have a panel that performs at maximum efficiency (anywhere from 15 to 30% depending on how much you were willing to pay for your cells). If you use two panels on a 45 degree angle relative to each other the amount of output per panel drops but since you have twice the active surface you can now combine the output of both panels. Since one panel is 100% and the output varies as the co-sine of the angle you now get 0.7 times the output per panel. This gives you 1.4 times the output of a regular panel for a cost-per-watt of 2.0 times the regular panel.
Well, they're just bytes OVER THE NETWORK. But once those bytes hit the telco at the other end, and go out over the POTS network, that's not free to the originating carrier.
A: Tunnels under the US/Mexican border are to be shut down because they are used to transport drugs.

B: Well the US Postal service is used to transport drugs as well, are you going to shut it down too???

ahem Do you really not see any difference between what MegaUpload used to do and what Google does? If so, I suspect willful ignorance. Again, I'm not arguing that copyright laws are sane, just saying I'm confused about the reactions of "how DARE they cast aspersions on MU and suggest that their model was based on piracy" when, well, casual observation of MU's case and the industry as a whole (RapidShare etc.) seems to strongly suggest that their model was based on piracy.*

Heck, I'll just say it straight: it's universal common knowledge that RS, MU, etc. build their businesses on piracy; people in this thread and on TorrentFreak who are trying to suggest otherwise are willfully ignoring the obvious in order to make a point. This makes the point weaker, so I suggest they stop. :)
Apple wouldn't lose.

While I use an Android 2 phone, I must admit an Apple iPhone would be a better choice if all I wanted was a smartphone. What took me to the Android one was the things I couldn't do with the Apple product.
Grouping and alignment and the web
Panels are arrangements of cells. Panel efficiency is measured in $/Watt or as a percentage of incident light over the total area taken up by the array including shade, not in output per square unit of area under the array.

If you want to do a really nice job in measuring panel efficiency you set up equal area arrays (equal areas of cells with the same packing density on the cells themselves) and measure them side-by-side over the course of a year.

The 'control' should be a non-tracking array that you correct for elevation once every month and that points due South on the Northern hemisphere and vice versa.
> (1) You can't improve on solar panels by a factor of more than 5 because 'regular' photovoltaic cells are already ~20% efficient.

They're ~20% percent efficient in terms of the light that hits the ground they're mounted on.

But part of what makes a difference here according to the article is that it captures more light at times where traditional cell arrangements does really poorly because their arrangement means less light actually hit them.

E.g. early mornings, late nights, when most of the light won't hit a traditional arrangement.
Very rational approach to the rationale. Good read.
The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

I'd like to learn more about this because there seems something deep here regarding the current explosion in online communication mediums. The trend of more communication equals more value must at some point inflect (if it hasn't already). I'm curious why and how, and what it means to the next stage of the internet. Is the problem simply solved by filters and aggregators, or is this simply the continuation of an evolution?
Those names all seem pretty distinctive, short, appropriate, easy to spell and pronounce, likable, extendable, and protectable.

And for my childish reponse, a equally valid article could posit "Is this an Apple tablet or feminine product?".
"Here is your laptop and the phone you proved is not as good as the one you currently own".

Priceless.
It's a truism that if a business person starts talking about trust, especially in the context of one's own job, you run the other way.
This is even more C++11-ish:
(Not tested, my compiler at work is not C++11 compliant.)

constexpr tuple<double, double> Roots(double a, double b, double c)
{
return (a == 0.0) ? throw invalid_argument("a has value 0.0!") :
tuple<double, double>{
(-b + (sqrt((b * b) - 4 * a * c))) / 2*a,
(-b - (sqrt((b * b) - 4 * a * c))) / 2*a
};
}
Because renewables (especially solar) are the new fusion - perpetually right around the corner from become practical.
Splendid! I know that I am in good company in looking forward to the launch of CreativeMarket.com.
No way. Autocomplete is an absolute necessity for slow typists and mobile phone users.
There isn't any place in the DMCA that suggests any limit to the number of notices that can be provided.

There is no limit on notices. The limit is only on the direct-deletion of links, without review or notice, by parties like Time Warner. In other words, in addition to handling notices, Megaupload gave "Delete" buttons to certain parties that allowed them to directly control which links were available, but that button was limited in use.
Simple (yet important) tips to make a great first impression
I love the part on faking data. I take the viewpoint that only software testers care that the comment count is exactly correct in the majority of system. Users don't care.
I agree there is some language snobbery. However, I moved from PHP to Ruby and love it.

My two biggest gripes with PHP:

1) No standard package management system. I worked with some VERY smart developers at a PHP-only company, but nearly every part of their complex system was coded in-house, from the ORM up. Rubyists practically never code things that are available as well-tested gems, saving tons of effort, debugging, and training new people. That's a huge boost to Getting Things Done.

2) Little discoverability. If you can't remember the string method you want, you'll have to Google - and make sure you notice the order of the arguments. In Ruby, you can do `'foo'.methods.sort` and see all the methods available on strings. Since it's OO, you don't have to pass in the string itself, so there are fewer arguments to know in the first place.
FTC stops short of calling for new 'Do Not Track' law
Textpad's "Constrain the cursor to the text" feature is what I miss the most. I have never seen it present elsewhere.
RIM: ‘Grim and getting grimmer’
Not sure how we got to Scala, but in (non-varargs) C linkage the whole metaphor of "funtion arguments" is inherently a "tuple" to begin with. They only exist in tandem with each other, never in isolation. There's no real value I can see to trying to double-abstract it.
Not at all.

A country can be simultaneously enriched and exploited if the people in the country are not equally enriched and exploited, which is usually the case. It doesn't have to sum out.

Also you need to consider that you can be enriched by one factor and exploited in another. Say I pay you $10,000 for your kidney and you agree because your family is destitute. I have both enriched and exploited you.
Well, the words, in and of themselves meet most of the requirements (though I'd disagree on appropriate). But they're never just that. They always bolt on acronyms and buzzwords.
> The best arrangement of solar cells is always going to be a single tracking array on top of a hill.

I know: http://pics.ww.com/d/90257-1/IM000384.JPG ;)

But even that is not the most cost effective, and it is somewhat maintenance intensive compared to a static array.

This was in Northern Ontario.
NY Times: Madonna Launches MDNA on Fab.com
Graphene gets commercialised in new battery tech
Iran Still Stuck With Stuxnet
Girls and Computers
Facebook: Evidence shows NY man's lawsuit is fraud
A universe of self-replicating code
What (a) means is that any evidence that establishes MegaUpload ever knew about and failed to act on infringing material is going to damn them in court. For instance, if they can establish a finding of fact that MegaUpload paid site members it knew to be infringers, or even that it targeted its promotional marketing towards other hubs of infringement on the Internet.

The DMCA isn't a computer program. That section (a) does not mean "here are the steps you must take when analyzing your logs". Think instead of a graph and a path through that graph that starts at "Kim Schmitz driving around NZ in a Veyron" and enda t "Kim Schmitz in a minimum security prison", where one path involves edges between vertices involving how much MegaUpload knew about, catered, promoted, or knowingly benefited from piracy.
I am a dvorak user because I never learned to touch type properly on qwerty, meaning, without looking.

I still believe that the layout is more efficient, in spite of studies which say otherwise, but I really don't care one way or the other. It works for me.

I am currently working on qwerty touch typing, without actually switching. I see no reason this should not be possible. I know people that can play mandolin, guitar (picking style), and banjo, and can successfully transition from one to the other as needed, and that is a similar skill.
Data point: nginx-1.0.14 has 124 574 lines in the src/ directory.
Get advanced warning of tube disruptions with I May Be Late
Too true.

Personal anecdote: In college, I distinctly remember feeling like all the time that was spent on drilling automata theory into our heads seemed like senseless busywork. Fast forward a decade into my career, and I've come to suspect that there are two kinds of programmer: Those who choke on state machines, and those who don't.
What you did there I see it.
The linked page say "The typical C solution is to create a structure to hold the quadratic equation parameters." That seems like sticking 'C with classes' into something which doesn't need classes in the first place. Why wouldn't the standard solution for C use pointers to pass the return parameters? Something like:

#include <math.h>
#include <errno.h>
int findRoot(double a, double b, double c, double *root1, double *root2) {
double discriminant, q;
if (a == 0.0) {
return EDOM;
}
discriminant = b*b-4*a*c;
if (discriminant < 0) {
return EDOM;
}
q = -(b+copysign(sqrt(discriminant), b)) / 2;
*root1 = q/a;
*root2 = c/q;
return 0;
}

This style is quite in line with a number of math packages I've used in C. Since the author used a numerically unstable solution, I suspect there's a lack of domain inexperience in what library users expect from a math package. Eg., why would I go through the overhead of copying my input parameters to a temporary struct when I could just pass them directly to the function?
Our early customers were probably 50% or more YC and we got a bunch of great initial feedback. So yes, this helps a lot.

There is a pay-it-forward mentality -- Justin.tv serves as an early customer for many YC startups.
The press release is a bit misleading.. The "story" is that this accordion arrangement of solar panels increases the solar power generated from a given area.

So if you have a square meter of space, you get 'x' Watts/m^2 by laying a flat panel on that space and you can get 'some number higher * x' watts/m^2 by stacking a bunch of panels up above that square meter of space. Forget cost of panels, that's not mentioned. All that is mentioned is you can get more Watts per square meter by stacking more panels. You may be paying 200x more money to get 20x more power.

Each individual panel will be less efficient because it is not normal to the incident angle of the sun's rays, however you make up for it by having so many panels that you end up with net more energy. (Most of those panels are wasted though, by not pointing directly at the sun.)

It's kind of a dumb "discovery". As a thought experiment, you could even stack your accordion of panels up several miles if cost is no concern. You'd even be able to generate power after sunset (at sea level) :)
Bsddistmake - distributed extension to bsdmake
Just making sure that every single customer has an amazing experience. It is the core of what we do and there is nothing more important.
There's a very interesting comparison between libumem (mtmalloc) and Hoard at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-d... (HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755621). How do you view this class of allocators to tcmalloc, jemalloc, ptmalloc3, etc., specially in the concurrent multi-cpu scenario?

Here's what I'll be reading on allocators tonight, any further suggestions (following all the links in comments is part of the deal)?

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

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scalable-...

http://locklessinc.com/benchmarks_allocator.shtml

http://blog.reverberate.org/2009/02/20/one-malloc-to-rule-th...
I think that is why it is so recommended it is intended for people that are just entering into programming not individuals who have learned the common sense through experience as such it's value is very much dependent on where you are at in programming when you read it.
Spring Pet Clinic Goes Grails and Sharded on MongoDB With Cloudify
Racket's Easter Egg
Typhoeus: A ruby library to transparently run HTTP requests in parallel
I wonder how long it will be before someone creates an open source clone of this that you can simply run on any cloud service such as Amazon.
I still don't get it....why would I want to do this?
std::sort is stable, IIRC. Otherwise, they are similar; and yes, std::sort is typically faster.

Do note that instruction caches are not unlimited, though: bloated code does have a performance cost (sometimes, caches are hard.)
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I believe Udemy.com does very similar to this and has a wide variety of courses.
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MS Office email client is one such program that every person would have liked to use at one point. Not being inclined towards switching the programs that manage my work and personal files..
Because prepaid limits risk. You never end up at the end of the month with a bill for 100s or 1000s of dollars and at the first sign of trouble you can switch provider.
When there is an oligopoly of telecoms, you don't determine that. The existing market prices are what telecoms deem reasonable.
His gaming examples are pretty weak. Outside of World of Warcraft, all of the games he mentioned were played by more players on console than they were on PC. He even says "Phones and tablets now have power and graphical grunt to rival dedicated consoles." Then again, he might consider consoles to be PCs, or part of the "PC era."

I always assumed post PC meant there was also some kind of console or set top box in the house for things people want to experience in there living room, and it didn't mean only phones and tablets.
Steve Jobs named 'Greatest Entrepreneur of Our Time' by Fortune
"File storage" actually only counts large files that are stored with PFFile / ParseFile. It does not include data stored in objects or index space; those are all covered by pricing for API requests.

We do track queries and accesses to create appropriate indexes on the fly. Whenever we used databases in the past, indexes always seemed like something that should be done intelligently out of the box, so we decided to make Parse work that way.
Box.net bought Box.com domain for almost 1 million
Is there a good primer for someone who's curious about the differences between different databases? My work made the decision to use MS Access long, long ago, but I have no idea what that means vs. MySQL, MongoDB, etc. (other than the fact that it's a proprietary system).
Thanks, but I'm in Seattle.
Thankfully you're right; compilers have come a long way and Clang in particular has done a lot for easing the pains of template programming in a number of ways.

I'm knee deep in the development of several header-based, fully templated libraries, so I still certainly feel the pains of compilation times. And while the tests/samples I deal with tend to be somewhat extreme in their (ab)use of templates, I think you'll still find that the average Boost user would give a lot for yet speedier compilation.
It would be better if I had a usecase. It's basically a callback app. As long as you have a HTTP endpoint that responds to GET you can hit that endpoint at any time over Twitter.