skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That wasn't the point that I was responding to (which is that it's difficult to move money around in traditional banks), but since you brought it up:

> The fees are dramatically cheaper (domestic wire transfers are at least $10, international are more like $30)

I pay no fee for the service I described. Not a penny.

> and there's no need to 'prove' anything.

This took a few hours, and was quite low-effort. Not a problem I'm looking to solve in my life, since I only did it once.

> With bitcoin, you can also do all this at anytime, not just within the 9-5 Mon-Friday, no holiday bank schedules.

As can I.
That phrase was not meant to be condescending. What I mean is that, while I can see why you'd want to share apps with your children, your adult spouse is their own person and can buy their own stuff. The article claims a 10-device limit may be too low for families, and I'm pointing out that two people remain two people even if they marry.
How can they not accept bitcoin donations?
Yeah, but there just isn't much installed PV capacity in the world yet, Germany is one of the few countries to have anything like a concerted effort toward it. It's also very much a first-world country in terms of power usage.

Importantly, the same investment Germany has made would get you a lot more power in sunnier places. Just within Europe, Spain, Italy, and southern France could be significantly more efficient, nevermind places like Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and the Americas.
I wonder if the nuclear plant will become the new unit of measure for popular discussions of energy production in a similar way that the Library of Congress is a unit of measure for data.

What's really impressive here is that Germany of all places is producing this much solar energy. One would better predict a sunnier climate as the place to do this. It's great work, but I can imagine that maintaining base-load is is still a difficult thing for the Germans. Anybody know how they are handling storage for distribution during winter months/nighttime/inclement weather conditions?
Show HN: How to write portable Node.js code
On HN, the actual rasterization of image macros takes place in the reader's mind.
That's a great question. Take the US as an example, since it has plenty of sunshine.

Nowadays investment in renewable energies is politically risky after the Solyndra failure, after the DOE gave Solyndra over half a billion dollars of loan guarantees.

After the dramatic failure of its own renewable energy initiative, it began attacking other countries' initiatives to expand solar use. For example: "The U.S. yesterday imposed tariffs of as much as 250 percent on Chinese-made solar cells to aid domestic manufacturers beset by foreign competition, though critics said the decision may end up raising prices and hurting the U.S. renewable energy industry." [1]

It's a sad state when the US government--presiding over one of the sunniest and advanced nations in the world--will not only refuse to sponsor domestic initiatives to bolster renewable energy development, but also punish countries that do.

[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/18/1092726/-250-Tariff...
Reread the last paragraph of my comment. You're talking about the noun, which I intentionally mentioned to head off responses like this. Yes, that word is offensive. We're talking about a different word.
I'm not affiliated with Facebook, nor do I own any of their stock, nor am I even particularly a fan of what they do.

But is there a point in beating this dead horse? Is there any new information in this link that we haven't already seen 50 times in the past week? I'm not opposed to talking about this topic, but can we have something more substantial than "Facebook stock tanking!" worded in 50 slightly different ways?
Inside Facebook security: defending users from hackers
Color me curious- what sort of lifestyles do solar panels and nuclear rods lead?
That's true. I just think of kilowatt-hours as a single unit, like Joule. That way it's no more bizarre than saying Newtons instead of kg m/s^2
Spreadsheets! That's nothing!

I downloaded their items DB (which they publish) and created a program that downloaded prices from eve-central and figured out the best tech 2 things to build based on predictions of how well the item would be selling in a week and what skills my builder had or could get in that time.

Took me a month or two. Once it was finished I only spent about 2 weeks actually building stuff. The UI is so terrible and to make a decent profit with the fairly low level character you had to set off jobs in the morning too. That was the beginning of the end for me coupled with my then alliance going under (roadkill).

Good programming practice though.

Crikey, just checked, was almost 4 years ago. I re-subbed again for a month after the monocle fiasco, hadn't really changed much since then. They seem to be focusing on their new products.
Even if it does narrow spreads, it doesn't matter at the margin. If the spread is 5 pennies on average without HFT, and 1 penny with it, investors are losing out. HFT is charging them a penny to remove a penny of randomness. If someone offered you a a game where you could either:

A) flip nickles: heads you keep get the nickle, tails your opponent gets it
B) flip pennies: heads you keep the penny 98% of the time, 2% of the time some other third party gets to keep it (an HFT outfit), your opponent gets it

Would you take A or B?
Tell HN: I Just Bought $2,814 of Print Advertising for $15
I just bought a 1/2-page full-color advertising slot (retail rate: $2,814) for $15, with only 1 hour of work.

If there's enough demand, I'll write a blog post detailing the process in full.

Let me know in the comments!
US first spent a trillion developing nuclear weapons during WWII..imagine that the US spent more than $1 trillion in WWII
http://www.unendlich-viel-energie.de/uploads/media/AEE_Strom...

This is in German, but the only source i could find. It says PV produced 3% of the procuced energy in 2011. It is said the capacity grew about 30% since q4 2011, but the stats seem to be pending.

[BS]

In 2010 604,0 TWh where consumed [1], so that would be 604,0 TWh * 3% / 8760 h = 2 GW as a conservative estimate. But note the stats are all a bit out of date.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedarf_an_elektrischer_Energie...

[/BS]

As the graph says 612 TWh where produced, so 612 TWh * 0.03 / 8760h = 2 GW.
US companies continue to do business in China even after their businesses have been compromised and knockoffs are being made because it's cheap to do so. They clearly do not have a problem with it as long as the price is low enough.
Run Marketing at Mailgun (YC W11)
Mailgun's growth to date has been entirely organic. We are now looking for someone to build and run our marketing efforts.

We are looking for someone that:

- Knows how to sell a BMW to people who think their Ford Pinto is good enough.

- Has a technical background and wants to make the world a better place for other developers.

- Believes in data driven decision making over intuition.

- Has experience building scalable lead generation channels.

- Can write engaging content about technical topics.

- Enjoys attending meetups/hackathons/conferences and discussing hard problems with other smart people.

- Likes traveling.

We offer:

- Competitive salary and benefits.

- Meaningful equity.

- A complete marketing greenfield with the freedom to create your own strategies and implement them.

- The confidence and satisfaction that comes with marketing the best product in the field.

- The self-fulfillment of knowing you were essential to the success of Mailgun and all of the fame and fortune that comes with it.

About Mailgun:

- YC W2011 company, funded by SV Angel, Paul Bucheit, Yuri Milner and other top-tier investors.

- Located in San Francisco (Union Square).

If interested, email: jobs@mailgun.net
Another great one is Jenks. It doesn't do much to help with comparing magnitude between colored classification levels, but it can help visualize the fact the categories exist at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenks_Natural_Breaks_Optimizati...
Is it really such a bad wrap for facebook (the company). They've already said they don't really 'care' that they are a public company, and never really wanted to be one. It was just the easiest way to raise a boatload of money.

Now that they ARE public, why should they care about their share price? They don't plan on selling any more shares to raise money, and there's zero chance of a hostile takeover, even if shares trade down to $1. You think Zuck is worrying about the shareholders before breakfast? Not a chance.

Facebook (the corporation) has already sold all the shares it planned to sell, and raised the absolute most money it could have ever hoped to raise for those shares.

The low share price will keep employees holding on (and working for FB) waiting for shares to cross that magic $42 point. And it arguably puts a bullet in the IPO market, cutting off a major source of funding for competitors (like twitter). Could it have worked out any better for facebook?
I thought this quote was interesting: "With a high degree of certainty, we know who you would be friends with."

I guess if I solved one Knuth's hard problems in one of this books and then sent a friend request telling him I solved it, it would end up in spam.

How sad! The Internet is supposed to help folks get to the other side of the tracks.
Here's an approach that might move us toward "disarmament".
(Assuming that we wanted to achieve it.)

Make patent litigation "dirt cheap".

Everyone involved in this game knows most of these patent claims would never make it through litigation without being invalidated (i.e. from that point forward, not even worth the paper they are printed on). We just do not know which ones would survive. We do not know which are the "valid claims".

Everyone also knows that patent litigation is very expensive.
It's too expensive to answer the question-- Is this a valid claim?-- for each and every claim in each and every patent asserted against an "infringer".

And so it follows that by threatening a competitor ("infringer") with patent litigation, you can bring them to the negotiation stage, quite easily. They will be willing to make a deal.

Litigation puts patent claims under a higher level of scrutiny that the patent office gives them. For ease of reference, let's call it a "review".

If we make it inexpensive to do this "review", we can "disarm" these patents.

We won't have to go through the "review" process for each and every defensive patent. Because no one will be willing to negotiate based on threats when the cost to "call the patent troll's bluff" is affordable to anyone.

Patent litigation (the "review") is expensive. It is prohbitively expensive to separate the wheat from the chaff. This condition is a prerequisite for "patent trolling" to be a viable "business".

And it is a viable business. A former Microsoft CTO has used his own wealth to prove that to us. Opening the gates for a vibrant patent troll industry to emerge. Let us be thankful to him for moving us in the right direction. What a "brilliant" man is he.
I completely disagree that it's obvious to a skilled developer which parts are accidental/essential. Programmers (and everyone else) often don't realize they have a problem or are missing something until someone solves it for them. Similarly, programmers implement the exact same concepts over and over, and many of them don't even realize all of the things they're implementing are specializations of general patterns.

As for past silver bullets, the move from assembly language to C along with some extra tooling was easily an order of magnitude difference in development speed.
Video of station crew opening Dragon's hatch
A lot of the countries you're talking about are relatively poor. Many of them are going to need international help to make a concerted push.

Others are already working on such things, they're just behind Germany. Oil-producing countries, for example, have started to pay a lot of attention to renewable power and other green initiatives, so they can use less of their oil domestically, but it's just getting started.
To answer your question, no I'm not. My major problem was with the problematic question about the license, which I feel are impossible to answer precisely for an average small business owner with 5 minutes on his hand, which then leads to a situation where I pay a lot of money for an image but still may be violating their copyright, because I misunderstood their questions. Also, I really don't think these images are 100x better than the ones on iStockphoto, but they cost 100x more. But, if their business model is doing well, then who am I to comment on it.
Ah, damn, that was stupid! :-P At least it seems like Sweden is winning.
Since i've committed myself to invest and learn emacs i no longer worry about editors. Like the book Pragmatic Programmer book suggests, pick one editor that is extensible and be very good at it. Emacs was just my choice. Any editor is good. Just learn it well.
Solar panels need to be cleaned and at the end of their lifespan, several years if not decades, need to be replaced. I dont know about nuclear rods, but they do require security and safety measures.
In some countries there's less of a taboo in showing graphic war imagery than the US, and I don't think it's made them wiser. The injustice is when one small segment of your population endures the horror while the rest glorifies and romanticizes it. The extreme solution is if every time we as a country decide to go to ANY war, we conscript across all socio-economic lines. You really can't show or read about the cost of war.
Also, the loss of wetlands is a huge environmental negative in other ways. The oceans are in serious trouble, and that trouble often starts at the margins between land and water.

Also, cheap natural gas is helping fuel recovery of tar sands, which brings its own raft of problems.
"503 Over Quota This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later."

It is a shame he hosted this on a provider that has such limits.
Front page of TED.com

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_ren...

See 9:16. He arranges the power consumption of countries by per person per sq m. And renewables can sit on same scale, and his estimate for PV solar is about 20% of land mass of Germany needs to be covered.

This is one of the many problems of the renewables debate - apples and oranges. The Germans have done an incredible and positive thing. Massively upped the feed into the electric grid from solar PV. And electrical consumption is where nuclear plants feed - so the two methods are direct competitors.

But electrical consumption is only about 1/3 of goal energy budget of western countries, rest is evenly split between transport and heating and about 5% for everything else like rocket launches.

So 50% of about 30% says that "Germany has 15% of it's total energy from renewables, will need to increase that by 7fold, give everyone an electric car and heating that uses electricity and not ....

Yes it's a great step forward. But really, we are going to have to change our lifestyles beyond belief to meet even 80% energy use from renewables. Forget driving to supermarkets to pick up refrigerated milk and tomatoes flown in from Africa.

Watch the talk - his book is very good too.
On the iOS App Stores, everything is region-locked and DRM'd, even those which are free. Sticking to free apps isn't an opt-out of iOS's DRM.

For example, even though Apple advertises "the App Store", there isn't an App Store. There's one per country. I've seen some cool apps mentioned on blogs and such that I would love to have, but even if they are free, if I'm not in the right country, I can't download them.

(Yes, I could probably 'jailbreak' my iPod, or sign up for an Apple ID with a fake address, or some other nonsense. Doesn't change the fact that Apple's DRM has such restrictions.)

It seems funny to me that Amazon has no trouble shipping pretty much any item from any country to any other country, but Apple can't deliver bits across borders.
Still waiting for the very excited paper on zero point energy that explains it in non-leagalise. If she figured this out, why not use it to run a generator? They again, who wants to get power off the heat death of the universe -tanstaafl -3rd law of thermodynamics
I'm guessing he meant lifetime, it's next to "lifestyle" on android's suggest list.
But 4chan has some sense of community, no?
Thanks for all the answers to my rant. I'm a regular customer at iStockphoto, but for some reason I wasn't aware of higher-end options like Getty. Based on some of the comments is this thread it seems to me their business model is like "Enterprise Sales", some guy landing on their page getting a good price is not how their model works. That sucks, because I wouldn't mind paying 5-10x over iStockphoto for a great picture, but 50-100x is too much.
Looks a bit like a Faraday cage.
How many nuclear power plants are their in the world? How many have had failures from "earthquake shock, fire following earthquake and tsunami"? How many failures have occurred for other reasons? From that standpoint it is hard to argue that the premiums would have been significantly different without that clause. I'd also point out that such a clause is hardly unusual in the insurance business. You'll see the like on all kinds of property and liability policies.

To prove your assertions, you'd need to come up with a nuclear reactor which was constructed in an unregulated environment. ;-)

Look, I'm not making claims one way or another. I'm simply suggesting that your claim doesn't seem very credible once one has applied some very simple logic. I could be missing something, but I think you ought to have some evidence to back up such an extraordinary claim. As someone else pointed out, your typical coal operation ought to have a higher incident rate and cost, which means it ought to be even more expensive...

Realistically, you can calculate the costs without coming up with your silly example. It is sufficient to simply add up the costs needed to cover the disaster, and then look at the premiums paid for covering similar sized disasters with similar rates of occurrence, making your best effort to extrapolate over any gaps.

Alternatively, speak with an actuarial who works in the business and they can extrapolate what the premiums would be. In a truly unregulated market, I'd imagine the incident rate would be higher and the recovery costs a bit lower, so it might be hard to get a real cost, but go for the costs in the existing regulated market. I have a hard time imagining they'd be prohibitive, but I'd be intrigued if you proved otherwise.
Workshop Facebook
+1 Sinatra is amazing convenient to use. In the last month I have written two REST style web services for a customer in Sinatra. I sometimes also use Sinatra instead of Rails for for simpler web apps.

That said I installed Bottle and played with it - looks nice!
I think the REAL issue, is that they lock up IDEAS. Ideas by themselves are inherently worthless. It's the EXECUTION that matters. Everyone has ideas. Some are great, some suck. The idea by itself is really meaningless until someone does something with it. Ideas, to me, are like knowledge. They should never be locked up, and should be freely shared.
My thumbs already hurt
You put mirrors in space.

But seriously, solar power generation by huge space stations that beam the power down to earth, then use mirrors to feed it where it is needed.
You might be right - I've never been in the situation - but he claimed to have taken it from some other site without any obvious copyright notice. Obviously not a smart move, and he did pay a price for it. The whole topic got brought up because I was planning on interviewing in one of their Rails shops and by doing research on the company I had stumbled across stories of people that had this exact thing happen to him, so I was shocked when he explained that it had happened to him as well.

I don't think the "fee" is unreasonable if a few hundred dollars is the going rate for licensing the image (although I personally would never pay that much), I just find the automated process of hunting these people down and asking for money right away (no option to just take it down immediately) a little distasteful, and in a similar vein to the RIAA's tactics.
Farmville reinvented: Internet gardens bring real fruits
If this post wasn't on Hacker News, how would someone reach this page without knowing what R is? Would you expect a JavaScript tutorial page to explain what JavaScript is? Or a statistics tutorial page to explain what statistics is?

More broadly, your suggestion makes a lot of sense for websites about software projects. For example, the R software project page (the first hit if you Google for "r") says that R is "a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics." However, when would anyone seek out a set of tutorials about something without knowing (at least at the one sentence summary level) what that thing is in the first place?
It's even worse - Angela Merkel responded in parliament that missing nuclear power plants will be replaces with NEW power plants on fossil fuel.

The problem with photovoltaic is that it needs 100% backup in traditional power plants.
Something doesn't add up though. From those calculations, it would seem that 3% of Germany's land mass is "covered". I strongly suspect that isn't the case.
You want a citation that proves it's a common opinion now? People express that opinion on here all the time. You're not going to find them in the Apple threads, obviously. Or do you want me to painstakingly back up this opinion with citations of how their closed ecosystem, strong arming (or outright disallowing) of their competition in the app store, and patent bullying is making them evil?
Volunteer's Dilemma and the Nash Bargaining Game have more complex equilbiria, so they're not quite as good if you're looking for an introduction to game theory. Stag Hunt is basically a game about whether the players know they are in such a game and can communicate about it, so it's not the best for learning about games themselves. Prisoner's Dilemma really stands out among the basic games.

But really, Prisoner's Dilemma is uniquely fascinating in iterated form [0]. Iterated Stag Hunt would be boring, and Iterated Volunteer's Dilemma would be crazy, but Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is a very deep game which seems to have things to say about Biology, Politics, and Computer Science all together.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeated_game
This.

There is a reason I don't update my apps as often as I would like. It's because you can't just click update all, enter a password, and be done. No. You have to be careful when updating.

I cannot believe Apple's QA have ever looked at this element to their OS, or if they have, they simply don't care at all. And it's these parts that show how much Apple really cares about its software.
Uniform Function Call Syntax in D
For the newest, most efficient panels, it's about 5 years.
Its not giving me that. Did you try refreshing?
I can remember when SPSS had no GUI. It seemed much more responsive back then, running on a VAX.

If we can achieve bigger and better things by teaching a new generation of users how to use the command line again, maybe it's worth considering?

No, absolutely not. Totally unrealistic. Forget I mentioned it.

My favorite thing about R is that is has no GUI. To me it makes it more powerful.
There is a biblical reference [1] and also some quote attributed to Mark Twain [2] on keeping silent.

I don't consider myself a fool, or ignorant, but choose to remain silent most of the time because of the exceptional insight many have, and I love HN for it. i just skip over the negative stuff and look for those nuggets of insight so prevelent here.

[1] http://bible.cc/proverbs/17-28.htm

[2] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/marktwain122650.h...