skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, I misunderstood what you wrote.

If the EROI is indeed 6.5 then yes you are correct.

But last time I looked at EROI they always cherry picked the best results. (Bright sun, perfect angle, clean new panels, etc.) They also usually ignored installation costs (inverter, wires, framework). Additionally as the cells age they produce less energy.

In more typical installations the number I remember was 20 years after including everything. Although it you told me it was really 10 years I wouldn't argue much.

Under 5 years seems unlikely to me. I'll tell you how I know:

Market forces. With a ROI (not EROI - but obviously they are strongly related) of under 5 years you will have people installing the panels as an investment, with no subsidies needed. Yet you don't see that happening, and I suspect it's because the ROI is worse than 5 years.

This is a bit of a backward argument of course, but the fact that you need subsidies to get people to install solar panels tell me the ROI is not good enough.

I would support subsidies only for one purpose: To initially stimulate the market, in order that scale would reduce prices long term. But subsidies long term are wrong.
> Fly ash is much worse, since it's also radioactive

My apologies, I was indeed talking about radioactive waste in general being hard to top in terms of pollution. It goes without saying that I'm not terribly happy with how this country is getting into coal lately. So yes, fly ash is definitely a concern as well. I just happen to think waste from nuclear fuel is easier to "not produce" right now.

> A pollution source that can be shipped on rails? And you only need to do it every few years? Does it get more ideal?

Yes, they ship it around and it radiates. Remember - in the US, they recently had to scrap plans for that one site because it meant the fuel had to travel there a long way. I was also off a little - it's pretty much an every year event, but I guess that's still not a threshold trigger for you.

Still, again, the real problem here is that nobody really knows where to ship this to and what to do with it once it's there. And how safe it will be the next couple hundred thousand years.

> Not for a long long time. Doesn't matter, in the meantime we'll just stick the nuclear waste somewhere where there are no people.

See - I'm just not really satisfied with that answer and I guess I don't see how anybody can be. Sorry.

> Why would you link to something that supports my position?

You were asking me to qualify 'horrifying' - seems like we have a different measure there. I find any radiation exposure leading to death by lung cancer horrifying.

> I'm glad you enjoy that since that's exactly what we are talking about: "Relatively speaking, since none are perfect, which energy source is best?"

Nope, sorry, that's not the same. Comparing two things is one thing - Relativism is something else entirely. That branch discussion was about discussing how extracting fuel from the earth is polluting. You qualified that by saying: Hey, there are a lot of things that are polluting, like iron/coal/oil/gas. Yes - I understand that - but that's not adding to the discussion.

It is inherently a better idea to not use fuel in the first place. No matter which one, you have to keep digging it up to keep it going and that's bad. It's also the crucial difference between renewable and fossil sources of energy. No matter how "little" fuel you need: on the long scale, it will fail with 100% certainty, eventually.

> And I'd rather not spend money on technology that doesn't work, probably can not work, and definitely is terrible while we wait.

Now I'm not even sure we read the same article anymore. That's not really a defensible statement in light of how widely used this technology already is. Or are you still hung up on solar?

> Nuclear power is not a dead end technology - it's the cleanest power we have, and more engineering can make it even cleaner.

Dead-end in terms of: "What technological progress does this provide on the side?". Sure, making it "cleaner" may be one form of progress, but I think "green" energy simply has more potential for innovation and collateral technological benefit for everybody.
Because the article showed photos of a music player, the weather, and a PDF. I can take a panoramic photo with my phone and share it to dropbox immediately. What they showed is the bare minimum, not even standard let alone a feature or newsworthy. You need to make someone go "ahh" not "Yeah they have the lowest bases covered, I guess."

No seriously, they demoed the keyboard for the article?
Google next up against Microsoft Surface
The difficulty with that "blatant" narrative is that the chair of the Board of Visitors is a woman.

Just because a theory is possible does not mean it happened. As I stated before, I have heard no one, on any side, allege discrimination.
Full Show 6/18/12: The Socialists Win
Isn't it the classic innovators' dilemma? Or I guess it's the opposite...IIRC, the innovators dilemma refers to a leading company that ditches the low end in order to focus on the high end...Apple went after tht niche and did so well that it caused execs...the ones who give IT folk their jobs...to demand iPhone support even if it meant a change in infrastructure
Reading Chaucer is a good exercise for looking at how words are used, in "The Canterbury Tales" the word Horse is rarely (if ever, I'm not sure) used, instead very specific words are used to describe the type of horse in question Palfrey, Charger, etc.

In the modern world, we are the same with motorized vehicles, I drive what my wife likes to call a junker, beater, jalopy, hoopty car,

We make the distinctions that are important to us, that doesn't meant that we aren't capable of making finer distinctions if we need to

It's like huffman encoding...
Microsoft Surface Tablet – The Cure All Tablet?
JavaFX 2 Layouts: GridPane
He probably won't be very happy to know OpenGL ES 2.0 is not backward compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1.
Gates, Ellison both looking to buy Hawaii's Lanai?
YARN: Are the browser wars back?
I'm not sure if it's the original source, but the reply-all mishap from the hedge-fund guy, re: "confidential project", is mentioned in this article: http://www.readthehook.com/104250/important-alums-did-they-t...
Thanks for the kind words.

I'll send you an email with some thoughts on integrating custom events and where we'd like to go with it!
There is a hilarious amount of Silicon Valley culture in the organization of this article. Particularly in pimping your biggest name early adopters.

"Oh, someone from Stripe is using it! I'll bite!"
Quite true. But there is another word there "only".
Grow a Face
I said you, not us hackers. Perhaps an appropriate follow-up is, don't pretend you're HN. :P Others have answered about Apple and I don't remember everyone wanting an iPhone when it came out.

Perhaps it's because I haven't received my crystal ball in the mail yet (Soon! /crosses fingers), but people seem to be making absolute judgments of a few hours. Microsoft can have other ads and other ways to promote it; it wasn't 'one ad or die'.

My reaction? Looks neat; let's see what unfolds.
Interview with Cloudera CTO on CDH4
A much more fascinating read on this topic is Kafka's "The Castle", "The Trial" or even better Heller's Catch-22.
I know this letter was written for a UVA audience but there is almost no actual rhetoric about why he believes the administration to be wrong. I understand the power of losing every title and honor on your own,..but why not put more Ome into drafting a concise and powerful argument?
Is this a crime in the UK?

I'm no lawyer but doesn't something have to be a crime in both countries in order to be eligible for extradition?
This does indeed work. The problem is that there is a very large number of possible goals that a random tester might aim for, and we do not know ahead of time which ones are most important. Also, for complex testers like Csmith, it is not clear how to reach some goals. This kind of thing complicates the code a lot too.
What advice would you give a computer science student?
I am the creator of the PTN FUN TROJAN from 2003. I was just starting to learn coding and created this simple server/client program using visual basic and numerous code VB snippets I found online. I was able to open/close CD trays, turn off monitors, disable CRTL+ALT+DEL, send screenshots, hide the mouse pointer and other stuff. I created an autostart CD with the title "CS MAPS" and handed it around on private LANs infecting all my friends computers. I had quite a few computers depending on my mercy.
On one occasion, one of my friends realized, he wasn't in full control of his computer. He opened notepad and tried to communicate with me, the hacker, by typing messages. I could read his messages from the screenshots and found it pretty hilarious at that time. I responded by turning his screen up-side-down.
I was probably the last BlackBerry holdout in my group of friends. I think RIM is dead because nobody I know uses a BlackBerry device or expresses any interest in acquiring one. On the rare occasion someone is "still" using a BlackBerry, they get teased for it; people ask when they're going to upgrade.
I have the exact same setup at home, and am also a fan. It works well, is cheaper than a lot of other pre-built solutions (although obviously not as cheap as the original post), and seems to be pretty well made. I'm also much happier with the idea of a hand crank than an electric motor.

I also ended up getting an anti-fatigue mat as well. I thought that other standing desk folks were overrating the mats, but after the first few days standing at my desk (on a hardwood floor, no less) I saw the light.
Founders stories
I put together this page of founders stories. What do you think? Feedback is welcome.
Elon Musk Shows off the Dragon Capsule, Back From Space (video)
I put together this page of founders stories. What do you think? Feedback is welcome.
Although I think it's better they say this upfront than take an opportunity to lie to the community if there is no plan to support Linux properly in the future.
I was wondering about that. It's the same at the end of the Surface video.
Dell to bring Ubuntu laptops to 850 retail stores in India
Maximizing relevance is the thing that most sites fail at. You'll still need traditional marketing to attract eyeballs to a site (or service, product, etc.) but this is more about tailoring the product itself to the specific needs of that particular customer at a single point in time.

There will of course always be limits to this approach in that you cannot know what a customer wants, especially if the customer doesn't know that either. It's certainly easier to aim for retention since a customer has already demonstrated a desire for the product and a usage pattern.
My understanding is OpenGL ES is intentionally designed to be a subset of OpenGL so mobile devices can be simpler and therefore cheaper. It shouldn't be surprising mobile hardware and software is more limited. If deleting 80% of the platform features made your iPhone $50 cheaper and last another hour on battery, surely that's worth it?

Also, I believe the reason glVertex was removed is because it is a very inefficient way to draw. It wastes a lot of CPU time in "jump in to glVertex function, do a tiny amount of work, jump out of function, jump in to glVertex function, do a tiny amount of work...". It's to the extent that glDrawArrays is always faster. Take a buffer, fill it with data as fast as memory can transfer it, then a single function call to send all the data in one go, resulting in negligable overhead. Interesting anecdote: at least in my work in 2D games, modern GPUs are so fast they can render a quad faster than you can write its vertices to a vertex buffer on the CPU. So performance is limited by the CPU overhead! So this really makes a huge difference to the performance of some applications. And on mobile performance is usually more of an issue. So by removing the old functions, you're forced to do it in a more efficient way which may boost your framerate. Not so bad, huh? Unless, of course, you write a compatibility layer on top, which will reverse the performance gains.

Another reason there isn't a compatibility layer is it isn't OpenGL's job: it's supposed to be a super thin layer on the hardware so you can interface to the capabilities of the hardware as efficiently as possible. I also expect writing a compatibility layer that is standards-compliant in the general case is extremely difficult - check out all the effort that went in to ANGLE, for example.

So I think it's just a misunderstanding of the purpose and design of the tools. In future, I guess porting from OpenGL ES to desktop OpenGL would be a lot easier. 0.02
Actually, he's not being charged with anything yet. The warrant is simply to require him to come to Sweden for questioning, after which time the prosecutor will decide whether to charge him with any crime. At the moment, he has only been accused of a crime.

Also, it is my understanding that the accusation was brought by the police officers after reading the statements given by the women in question. They had only come to ask if Assange could be required to take an HIV test.
955 Dreams: A world where ads are beautiful
Indeed I was. That was in the shortcut when I originally looked at it. He has since edited it out. Thanks!
You could check out the first few pages of google scholar for "evolution of language" restricted to "since 2011" for a start. E.g.

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-...
I don't know much about OpenGL ES in particular, but backwards compatibility arguments are very tricky in general.

On the one hand you have all the people maintaining legacy apps and not interested in improving their code. They'll scream at you for breaking BC.
On the other hand you have other people complaining that the library sucks due to all the old stuff and why they don't just remove all the crap.

I noticed this in particularly in the context of PHP. People really hate some parts of the language (for good!) and commonly demand a big BC breaking release that fixes all the bad parts. But every time something is fixed (obviously breaking BC in some way) there is a big outcry about wtf the developers have been thinking and whether they are all braindead - well, the usual stuff.

So really, before you start calling people idiots because they didn't keep comparability with an older version (or here even a completely different version), think again. There probably was a lot thought put into the decision. It's not like people just say "Oh, let's drop this, just so everyone can change his code!"
Customer service via the medium of rage comic
AI programming challenges from Interviewstreet (Summer Games)
Apple, Google using "military-grade spy planes" to make new maps, says senator
Another point is that, fundamentally, if I'm looking to hire you then what I'm willing to pay depends on how much I expect you to make for me (directly or indirectly). If I state a range I'd be willing to pay most people, I might put off someone who I'd be willing to pay more. Conversely, if I'm putting up the most I could possibly pay, I'll be creating unrealistic expectations in those I'm willing to settle for. As someone who's done (and will likely be doing) way more jobhunting than hiring, this logic doesn't make me happy - but I totally see it.
http://imgur.com/w9AaA I think I win this round....
High chairs make a lot of people's legs go to sleep.
Part of the story here is that OpenGL ES isn't a new version of OpenGL, it's a different API for different platforms. It's nice if you can take old code and make it run on a mobile device easily but overall that's probably a small consideration compared to having an clean API that performs well.

If we want to focus on immediate mode specifically, it arguably shouldn't be used even in regular old OpenGL. It's slower and results in overly verbose code. Most people seem to use immediate mode because that's what most of the tutorial examples use.

Maybe one way to tackle the switch from immediate mode -> vertex arrays (and maybe quads -> triangles) is just to make some macros that take old code blocks and generate new ones.
Even if a Chinese speaker casually considers the leaves and the sky to be the same colour, it does not meant that s/he could not make the distinction if prompted. It would be similar to asking an English speaker to distinguish different shades of the same colour. For example, historically, English lacked a word for "orange" (which was borrowed from French) such that "red" and "yellow" covered greater spectrums respectively. Clearly, it wasn't that English speakers couldn't distinguish red, yellow, and orange because modern-day English speakers can do so perfectly.
That and the whole idea that "standing desks are better for your health" even though no research has proven that statement correct. It is just as bad for your spine as sitting straight up as far as I'm concerned.
wishful thinking is dangerous in politics. you die without knowing how.
You're comparing completely incomparable tasks. JWZ did nothing but write a thin wrapper. The committee didn't omit such a wrapper because they couldn't accomplish it, they ommitted it as a deliberate design decision.
The moderators have struck again. The title used to be "What happens when you ask people to pick the lowest prime number no one else will pick."
Ask HN: HN post upvotes vs comments
My last two Ask HN posts received more upvotes than comments. I realise the cognitive load / workload to respond to a post is greater than to simply click an 'upvote' button, but I'm wondering does there come a point where the ratio has meaning, i.e. lots of upvotes vs few comments suggests a question that is of interest to many, yet few people know the answer to. This would have more value than a post with few upvotes and many comments. Just thinking aloud here, is there then a metric that would cross over to the business space, where a business problem has a wide impact but few people tryin to solve that problem.
Standing gets easier as you do it. But doing it all day is rough. 2-4 hours spread out through the day is more like it (I use a sit stand desk which is a geekdesk legs with ikea gallant top).
for the past two years, I have been trying to love android, but I couldn't.
I recently purchased a android game, and it was so buggy, it's barely playable.
After using three different android phones and two android tablets, I guess my next phone will be an iphone.
Was there ever any question over whether an iPhone could run a full OpenGL implementation?

Perhaps the people JWZ should be complaining about are those who decided to provide OpenGL ES instead of OpenGL proper on the iPhone in the first place.
Not only that, but it appears to be a federal crime that the individual teller is guilty of, and possibly subject to jail time.

Makes me glad I don't work in retail.
The big factor was the advent of 3g, before that RIM with there more effecient transport protocol had a real adge which also gave better battery life than anything others were doing, let alone allowing email to work and well. Since 3g phones become mature and the extra value aspects RIM have been playing catchup to a new market that allowed them to ignore there hard core market. They are now on there last shoot and it is to the moon and bust and sadly I agree, alot of the media have already given up, but what do they know.

It's not released yet, RIM's marketing is terrible and until the final product is out it would be silly to pass any form of judgment.

I hope they do well, I truely do.
Now that smartphones and tablets have respectable GPUs in them, is there any reason why they shouldn't implement the full OpenGL spec?
Wasn't the whole point of the reduced API surface area in ES so that implementors only had to write the code that actually interfaces to the graphics hardware and let higher level libraries and engines deal with abstracting it appropriately for the task at hand?
Check these out for starters... lots more under development:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hojoki/id525010205?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wine-box/id525182844?mt=8
http://needanaccountant.org/MobileApp.aspx
Nice try with the jab at Apple—MacBook Pros have a small green light to indicate whether the camera is in use or not.
Are you sure it's fair to call it a different API? OpenGL ES is officially described as "well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL" [1], which would suggest it has a great deal in common with desktop OpenGL.

[1] http://www.khronos.org/opengles/
> the majority of Radeon cards have full 2D/3D support in Open Source drivers (and those drivers actually have developers from ATI working on them)

And yet, the performance is still an order of magnitude worse than the proprietary driver (last time I bothered to compare them, anyway).
I'm not terribly experienced with either method as I don't usually do web development. However, I've seemed to notice that it's generally easier to create using a WYSIWYG editor, but it's much harder to maintain. Whereas hand-coded are more difficult to create initially, but maintenance is easier.
Sprint says it's 'a little behind' on Galaxy S III shipments
Nobody ever got fired for using Hadoop on a cluster
It's hard to say. And I have mixed feelings about saying "I hope so" or "I hope not." On the one hand, I think freedom is it's own end, and that we have sacrificed far too much and given our government way too much power, and that it'll take a revolution to roll things back a bit. But, I sure hate the idea of a bloody armed revolution and all the death and suffering that would entail. sigh I dunno man, I just don't know...
I think the first is true, lots of upvotes less comments, probably because people are in general interested but not knowledgable enough to answer the question.
The second, it might be that people who comment don't agree with the question, and see an upvote as a vote for your question.
Russia and China have no interest in increasing the power of the UN; they want to increase their own power relative to other nations, and in this particular case they think that the UN will be a useful channel to do so.

In other situations Russia and China fight to reduce the power of the UN. Mostly situations where western powers are seeking UN legitimacy for piercing national sovereignty, such as in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Today Russia opposed UN intervention in Syria, and I think China does as well.
There's a lot of potential with personalization in marketing, helping customers find information and content that fits their specific interests.

Another marketing trend that also relates to creating dynamic, rich websites and the information/data explosion, is content curation. Content marketing has been around for a long time, in the form of white-papers, branded research reports, and so on, however marketers are now starting to use content curation to build rich, timely sites/pages for prospects and customers.

Two interesting examples are CMO.com, an Adobe initiative, and IQ by Intel (iq.intel.com). These follow other successes in content curation, from TechMeme to Daring Fireball. Yes, John Gruber presents a lot of original content, but curated articles and quotes are major components of the Daring Fireball experience.

If you combine content curation with personalization, you end up with something that's very interesting. Content curation yields enough content to serve the needs of a diverse audience, while personalization ensures the content you serve is uniquely relevant and valuable to each visitor.

We're working on a content curation platform at Intigi.com. And this article has me thinking that we need to find ways to personalize the curated content for different types of traffic. Food for thought...
Download a mouse driver from Dell and it asks you if you are going to use it to design weapons of mass destruction!
I'd like a desk that can change easily between sitting and standing.