skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I beg to differ. I've done a substantial number of rooftop installations on 45 degree sloped roofs and water never was a problem, even a decade later it still isn't. The thing that matters most is that the mount is solid, not how many mounting points you've got.

Contrast that with the freestanding arrangements that I've seen that were literally nothing but trouble. Especially on trackers (see picture above, and that was (and is) definitely one of the better trackers on the market).

Most rooftop solar installations are retrofits, so the building is not designed with a solar installation in mind. The general way of doing this is to mount an aluminum subframe to the roof using stand-offs and stainless steel bolts. Copious butyl sealant will take care of any water worries you might have, inspections are typically done every five years. Bigger worries are having to - in North America at least - reshingle a roof.

The mounting is done in such a way that it meets up with the studs underneath the plywood in the roof. If you wanted to do that with too few attachment points they'd have to be so strong that the joist underneath would be the limiting factor.

Electical wiring is run along the back of the array, then passes to the aluminum frame and slips under the eaves into a conduit into the premises (which is then foamed up to avoid moisture and air from getting into / out of the building).

The aluminum subframe is then grounded to avoid lightning troubles. (if a panel or the subframe gets a direct hit it can be very interesting if you forgot this step).

The whole installation sits only a few inches away from the roof itself, very little space for the wind to get a grip and you can easily limit that further with a skirt around the edge.

Anybody that messes with a solar system when the sun is out will be able to tell you tales of arc welding with the sun.

I agree with the access issue, that is one of the reasons why the more clever arrangements include a hinge at the lower end so the panel array can be stood up in case there is every any trouble.
If you read the link I sent, the thread was about the original article incident, but the post was about another, where, among other things, it seemed Microsoft was throttling the bandwidth so that competing phones would appear slower.

This just plain dishonest.
Wasn't it Shortcut.js?
http://www.mattytemple.com/projects/shortcut-js/
Parse is great, I had some trouble with their iOS Facebook documentation and they were all too happy to email me the changes that recently occurred and update their documentation accordingly.
8tracks [8tracks.com]

As a hardcore music enthusiast I absolutely love 8tracks. Its tagline, 'handcrafted internet radio' sums it up pretty well. It's a service similar to Pandora, but where all the mixes are created by users of the site. This ‘handcrafted’ element is what really makes the site shine and differentiates it from others. It’s an incredibly open site and has a very diverse and active community that makes for a really interesting discovery experience. As someone who is pretty plugged-in to the music scene I’m always amazed at what I find through other people’s mixes and love sharing my own.

FFFFound [ffffound.com]

FFFFound is a pretty cool site for discovering amazing imagery. There are a lot of similar sites that compete, but (and I really don’t know exactly why) FFFFound is the first one I’ve ever really followed. It is an incredibly simple and bare site, but the quality of the submissions are top-notch. And, though there’s essentially no user interaction, you get an interesting sense of community from just browsing around as ‘posters’ are few and tend to be fairly active. Only complaint (though this probably goes directly to the quality of submissions) is the fact that the site has been in a closed beta for years now. The only way you can get an invite is by knowing someone who’s on the site, and they each have just one invite (since we’re on the subject, and in a complete act of self-promotion, if anyone reading this is registered and has an invite they’d care to share I’d really appreciate it!).

life + times [lifeandtimes.com]

One of the best looking sites around. It’s a music/general lifestyle blog originally founded by Jay-Z. Though it’s not the most active one out there, the quality of posts is great (and with many exclusives by way of Mr. Rockafella himself). All in all, what I love most about the site is the layout and design. I just think it looks cool; plain and simple.

Noisey [noisey.com]

Shocker: another music site. Noisey is a pretty cool, still growing, ‘video-driven music discovery platform’. It has a fair bit of content and a nice (though frequently shifting) design. It’s a great place to check-out new talent from around the world and watch live shows and interesting interviews. The site is run by digital lifestyle magazine, VICE.
Honesty saves startups but kills headline-driven blog traffic.
vim-slime apparently also works with tmux, which has a much more understandable documentation in my experience. Might be worth taking a look?
So I guess they answered the question in the title of the hearing before it even started: theater.
I found the comment that points out that having both parties in the same hearing who are under oath and currently engaged in a lawsuit, might find themselves making statements or responding without the benefit of having their counsel present. Then one might turn around and subpoena that testimony into the lawsuit and add it in as evidence, fairly compelling.

That being said, it is how the game is played. If one of your representatives are on the committee I would recommend writing them a note, or calling their office, to express how you think they should oversee the activities of the TSA.

One of the issues which needs more coverage is that Security Theatre is not 'harmless mostly, possibly helpful' it is in fact 'harmful mostly, possibly helpful'. This sort of theater cuts into business productivity, makes folks on the planes grumpier, causes millions of dollars in losses when folks miss planes, and erodes the citizens trust in their legitimate law enforcement agencies. It is not harmless, it is harmful and that message needs to get to Congress.
Just emailed reps Welch and Guinta requesting that they read his testimony into the record. All the other witnesses are from the TSA, Coast Guard or DHS; one independent security expert should be allowed to balance out four security-industrial complex shills.
Congratulations, looks good. It didn't appear to have information for my zip-code (01267), but I was able to play around with pricing and get an estimate (which is frighteningly high for a 20 year old male).
Well, I think that improving IA techniques are a great work related to computer science. Is not a small field, and I think that, among others, it will be the future of CS.
Why "Don't be evil" is evil, and why Google isn't so bad
AWS Micro, is it the Devil?
If you forget about the iOS SDK for a minute, Parse is essentially a modern CouchDB.

Couch got a lot of things right, and with the advent of client-side apps I'm guessing the idea of database-as-API makes a ton more sense to people now than it did five years ago.

But because CouchDB wasn't made with modern web app development in mind, it has these awkward almost-right-but-not-quite features, like the way it handles push notifications (see http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/notifications.html), design documents, couch apps, map/reduce and so on. All of that stuff is great, but none of it works quite as smoothly as it should.

Anyway, I would love a database with these features:

* RESTful, with basic filtering operations built-in

* schemaless

* uses webhooks to provide push notifications, plugins (e.g. ACL, validation) and map-reduce -- meaning you can "program" your database using any language you want, couple events to background jobs etc.

* websocket support

* multiple engines so you can back a collection with Mongo, Redis, Neo4j, S3 (store/serve media) or anything else depending on your requirements, but still have all collections exposed to the web as JSON with a uniform querying interface

* smart view caching

The trouble with Couch is that you're supposed to be able to build apps that are backed with just your database and nothing else, but it never ends up being quite flexible enough to do exactly that.

But a database that would allow you to replace your entire back-end framework with just a couple of independent snippets of code to handle validation, authorization, sending email and what-not but with all the CRUD you need for an API-driven app out of the box... hells yeah.
Let's not forget "Meatless Mondays".
Geico offers all new cars extended warranty for 30/year. 7 years 100k miles, 250 deductible. This caused me to go with Geico, they also have very inexpensive road side assistance. $20/year for two vehicles. It would be nice if these types of add-ons are also included in the comparison.

Dealers hate Geico extended warranty. They try very hard to not let you talk to the Geico rep, because they want to sell you an outrageously priced extended warranty.

I had a bad experience with a Nissan Sentar (motor went at 90 k miles) and was looking into extended warranty for my next new car purchase. The Dealer tried to add the new car to my Geico policy without me talking to the Geico rep. Geico will not insure a vehicle with out talking to the owner. I ended up driving the car (2011 Chevy Cruze) off the lot without insurance (very long story).
Well, to be fair, they claimed to increase the output by 20x, not the efficiency. Though I do admit, I'm also skeptical.

On stuff like this, though, it's hard to tell if it's the "journalist" screwing it up, or if the original data is flawed.
Kind of failed just like the rigging of Nokia to choose WP over Android right MS? :)
Yeah, that's lame. If you google the link, google will take you there though: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/da8bc260-750f-11e1-90d1-00144feab4...
HP C7972A LTO Cartridge an Improved & Better Data Storage Solution
The growing demand for data backup storage has rapidly increased from most recent years, new online businesses, emails, increasing media’s audio and video archival backup, data transaction, huge database centers with very busy traffic of most valuable and sensitive information. Create a data backup storage problem for all sorts of SMB worldwide. With increasing requirement and pressure of data mounting, force all SMBs to adopt strong steps toward these mounting data storage problems. Therefore SMBs as well as the preservation laws have become more rigorous. On the other hand the data is also defenseless to natural disaster, hacker, virus, accidents, or human error could loss the sensitive and most critical data and that is means mislaid of very important investment and even this catastrophes leads to a total business collapse. These are those reasons behind thought as one of the effective and vital policy in a reliable blow revival plan for the future. LTO Ultrium tape format has solidified its position as the most economical and dependable tape media solution that offers multi vendor interoperability. Hewlett Packard and other tape media manufacture giants like Quantum, IBM, Fuji, Sony, and Maxell co invented this breakthrough LTO Ultrium technology back in 90,s and the first LTO formation tape introduced in year 2000
Britt Rathbone is pyscho
This guys a nut, really
FWIW, forum.xda-developers.com and phone modding forums like it often use cyberlocker services, usually for the same reason: you have a lot of folks who want a file, you don't want the forum software to have to deal with the traffic and you certainly don't want to have to email it to everyone who asks.
Please, don't do this. You don't need partners just to check off a box for yc. You should only partner with people that kick ass and who think you kick ass. Take as long as you need and don't worry about your yc application being incomplete. I bet they discount teams who have only been together long enough to fill out the application more than a single founder who's making it work.
How WebHooks Will Make Us All Programmers (2010)
Using Vagrant to Test Puppet Configurations on a Virtual Machine
You are looking at this from the point of view of what's currently in the market - insurance affiliates who compete on who can better game Google. There is no reason why Leaky should get a penalty, they are in the insurance comparison business, not the SEO business.

While many people (I don't know if most people) buy more plane tickets than they do insurance, when it comes to commission, the insurance market is more lucrative than the airline ticket market. Airlines pay very little for every ticket sold.

If Google does it's job right (which I agree it doesn't always do) than if Leaky is the best online insurance comparison site than it will be the first result for that search term. I don't think Leaky should be worrying about this at the moment. The way the site currently works is how most visitors would want it to work, clean, fast and intuitive.
No, but the average developer costs the company $150k/year at least. Fully loaded employee costs are much higher than salary.
South Korea's about face on digital text books
Hey Dan, sounds like you're getting a good deal! As for Leaky, the prices we show are based on switching/new customers - so there are longevity discounts and multi-line discounts (such as insuring your home) that aren't included in our current prices.
+1

I don't think HardyLeung understand that this kid had to handle every bit. Had to build his own integrated memory. This young man obviously has an incredible understanding of binary math. Beyond all this He had to deal with the weird physics, and rules of circuits in Minecraft.

If I was this kids parents, I would let him play Minecraft all he wants. In fact, don't stop playing Minecraft.
I'm not sure if I can see the correlation between the story being told and the fact that the author is female. It seems to be briefly mentioned in the first and last paragraphs.
I hadn't thought about it in the general case, but I do frequently find myself adding a sleep for PID mod some appropriate constant to the beginning of big distributed batch jobs in order to keep shared resources (NFS, database, etc) from getting hammered all at once.
A lady asked Dr. Franklin, "Well Doctor, what have we got a republic or a monarchy?"

"A republic," replied the Doctor. "If you can keep it.”

Feels like we've lost it: the monarchists have won it back.

The pity is they're not even very good monarchists.
> As a language enthusiast I envy Ruby for the blocks. As a Python programmer I never felt the need for them.

I think one of the reason why Python isn't hurt by the lack of blocks is the difference in namespacing rules. Since defining a top level function doesn't pollute the global namespace, there's much less of a need for blocks and mulit-line lambdas. If I feel that I've got too many functions sitting around in one of my project's files, I can simply open up a new file, utils.py, and all my utility functions will be in their own namespace.

So, I agree, blocks are cool, but when it comes to re-reading code, I like that I've been forced to spend the extra few seconds to give my functions names.
I think the overusage of classes is directly related to schools teaching Java instead of C or lisp or... well anything else.
In Android, you can submit reviews written via a browser, just not via the Yelp app. Via the app, you can write and submit "quick tips" (which are often short reviews) and draft regular reviews with a star rating on your mobile device, but then you have to open the browser to submit them.
And thus we come to the real reason why data caps are being introduced by ISPs.
If you read the article carefully there are multiple mentions about this, specifically I wrote that RDB persistence is just perfect for this: a single-file compact representation of data to send far away :)
"They wrote their own BSON implementation which is 10-15 times faster than the one you can download."

Curious to hear more about that one. If true, I hope they open source it, because that could potentially make MongoDB a lot faster for everyone.

EDIT: It's apparently in their vitess code. Relevant code: http://code.google.com/p/vitess/source/browse/#hg%2Fgo%2Fbso...
My bash-fu is weak; can you break that down for me?
if that is true than no TSA rep involved in the lawsuit can also appear before congress..I mean common use some logic please!

The TSA excuse for exclusion is sham in of itself
Design Community Colourlovers Acquires Developer Network Forrst
Kim Dotcom Leaks Emails: Entertainment Industry Wanted to Work with Megaupload
OMGPOP Founder Charles Forman Made ‘Way More’ Than $22 M. in Sale to Zynga
Another Health Tech Incubator Springs Forth in New York
Booting Up: Robot Rock Edition
Best Tech Events This Week (Mad Men Is Back Edition)
The Unreasonable Application
FamilyLeaf (YC W12) Brings Your Kin Together In Its Own Private Social Network
Just thought I'd mention CraftStudio (http://craftstud.io/), the multiplayer game-making platform I'm working on. You could say it's a Minecraft-style engine but you get to make your own models, paint your own map blocks and (soon) write your own game rules (so you'll be able to make any kind of games, not just first person stuff).

Video of CraftStudio in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1QbJO3y_O0

Hacker News thread from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3751455
New iPad Act - Stockholm with Charlie Caper and Erik Rosales
The tip of your little finger held at arms length would about cover this image.
Considering that the biggest problem the Greens have right now is that basically every other party is pretty keen on environmental issues, too, and so they've become somewhat superfluous, I wouldn't mind the same happening to the pirates ;)
Following Your Fear
There is one common impediment that I see in all organizations I work with that prevents them from achieving their goals: fear.
Interactive Scale of the Universe
Thank you for not closing the site. It's an awful feeling to invest time into a community and product only to see it get shut down when they're acquired.
I've never found a company whose motorcycle coverage came even close to being as cheap as Geico's. So there's your comparison right there :-)
Schneier has less expertise in airport security than other professional security and law enforcement people who also disagree strongly with the TSA's approach to airport security.

My point isn't that "it's bad security" is a losing argument; my point is that Schneier isn't the only qualified person making that argument.
Ask HN: Should developers have access to production?
Should developers have access to production? If not, any efficiency hacks/suggestions?
If the world's population would live in one city, how large would that city be
Wadsworth to the rescue! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lGCC4KKok&wadsworth=1
An open letter to an early stage startup thinking about investment
Purple and orange and green and white on dark blue. My eyes hurt reading this.
Pick a couple of colors with relatively high contrast, and make sure the text isn't lighter than the background.
This comment basically presumes that I disagree with Schneier and that the way to rebut my point is to re-argue what Schneier has argued. But I agree with Schneier, as do I think most people --- particularly security-minded people --- who pay attention to the TSA. My point is that Schneier has a lot of credibility with nerds and a lot of credibility with Jeffrey Goldberg but perhaps not as much credibility elsewhere as, say, an FBI agent who also disdains the TSA.
Not true. Here's one famous case: Senator Kennedy was on the no-fly-list for a while, so security theater applies to congress members as well as you. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17073-2004Aug...)
Is Windows Phone Nearing An Inflection Point?
Here is what I'd like from a service (like this):

I submit my insurance profile/needs (cars, bikes, boats, RVs, home, life, disability and umbrella). Your service checks for a combination deal every month and emails me if a better deal is out there.

I buy insurance for many things and auto is only one of them. Usually I use the same company for all/most policies because of the combination discounts and the less hassle in dealing with multiple companies.
Makes me feel very small.
Just took a look. Underscore.js looks very promising. Thanks for the tip!
The example demonstrates an RPC-style HTTP API with pretty URLs. There's no hypermedia in sight. Oh well, we'll figure it out one day...

That being said, this is exactly the sort of documentation that's helpful for this kind of API.
I assumed the point was that it doesn't matter. Kids get interested in computers regardless of their gender.

But you're right, it probably isn't the most descriptive title.
> Will it still appear in git branch lists?

By default, git will only pull branches out of refs/heads/* on the remote repo. You can configure it to do otherwise though. This allows you to store branches on the repo that not everyone will necessarily pull down into their repo. This is obviously less useful with a smaller group of developers and/or a private repository.

> Is there a reason for the syntax in checkout
> being remote/branchname then? I care about
> consistency more than the specific syntax.

In git-checkout, you're resolving the branch name locally. When you sync to a remote, a copy of all branches from refs/heads on the remote repo are pulled down and stored in refs/remotes/$remote_name/branch_name. So, refs/heads/master on the remote repo is refs/remotes/origin/master locally.

The right side of the ':' in the git-push command resolves on the remote repo, but git-checkout resolves in your local repo.

Also look at the git-rev-parse manpage for info on the resolve order/etc for branch name shortcuts. It's the 3rd bullet point under 'Specifying Revisions.'
A Comprehensive Healthcare Plan Will Depend on America’s November Decision
yeah, it's true. But I still think it's much harder to compose two functional programs running in separate processes than to write one monolithic program composing functional libraries.

Compare to perl, where piping text is so simple that chaining perl scripts with pipes is no harder than writing functions.
TSA, TSA, Coast Guard, DHS.

If you showed me a witness list that read:

TSA, TSA, Coast Guard, Schneier, DHS

... I would suggest that the purpose of that hearing was to set up Bruce Schneier.
Since you call me out, I need to point out that you are wrong. I do understand what it takes to do that, and that he needs to handle every bit and memory and all. You're passing a judgment based on a shallow interpretation of what others wrote.

And I said I am very very (doubly) impressed. When it comes to the freaking next project, branch off, do something else, don't constrain yourself in the Minecraft world. Instead, this kid should use his immense talent/patience/creativity that he/she has and applies to something more substantial. That's what I said. I don't understand why I got downvoted for saying that. You see it as a criticism; But what I gave was a constructive criticism. If you don't see it, pay more attention to the words "very very impressed" and especially the word "next".
Cloud cost calculators: Helpful or more cloud hype?
No, that's the ambiguity I was addressing. RPC means two things. The protocol is used, for the most part, only by NFS. The concept is pervasive.
Game over: what the Internet did to High Street retail
I disagree. Replace Chomsky with Lincoln or Jefferson or Newton or Einstein. Would you object then? "Great" doesn't imply correctness. It implies only profound respect for one's achievements.

Furthermore, the OP did not appeal to authority. She cited a claim from a reputable source, and asserted that this claimed seemed to be evident in her own experience. She never asserted that the claim was true merely because Chomsky said so. Your criticism is no more valid than it would be for the case where she might document evidence from her personal life for one of Newton's theories.