skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know very little about heavy industrial processes, but probably in many cases there are alternative processes that are not optimal in the case of continuous power, but with fluctuating power supplies they might become viable.

A possible alternative would be running some process which produces some valuable output, which can be stockpiled. What I'm thinking about is that rather than trying to store energy, one could rather make e.g. PET bottles (probably a stupid idea). Then if there is too many PET bottles, they are burned for energy, but otherwise they are slowly consumed.

What about making a small piece of some ridiculously grand project, slowly, little by little. For instance, building a train tunnel across the Atlantic with robots that only run when power is available? The bad points with that is that it will only be useful when ready, but perhaps a similar kind of mining operation? Dig a little deeper every time energy is cheap enough.

Surely most industrial operation would not work, because the startup costs are large, making the returns convex in the size of investment. But maybe there are concave operations? Many human operated tasks are. It is easy to make a good meal for 4 people, but much more difficult for 40. With robotics at least, one would think that operations with similar properties would be available.
Stackexchanges have policies set by their commununity on each corresponding meta site.

Mods don't really set policy they enforce it, and most "Is this kind of question ontopic here?" style scope-adjusment can be done on meta.
They do some of this. For example, the silver Necromancer badge is awarded when you "Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more"

http://stackoverflow.com/badges
I have not had the time to generalize these patches. I do note that alternate ideas for this problem landed in Linux 3.5 which are impossible to backport into Linux 3.3, so I have shelved the idea of working on generalization.

These patches were specific to the ar71xx hardware and unneeded on most other devices.
Better than using only one file with all css inside
I don't generally have a problem on StackOverflow. The last few questions I have asked have been quite high level and not been asked before and they tend to get some good answers / guesses.

I find that a well structured question gets some good answers, I find a lot of people leaving their question open to interpretation and people cannot be bothered to ask the same old questions because the poster has neglected to be specific in their question.

I find a lot of people use it being lazy as well, most questions are simply part of the language / subject they are asking about but they cannot be bothered to read up on it. They would rather ask insanely simple questions to get other people to provide an answer for it.
For solar, sure, but domestic oil and coal production can have far-reaching environmental consequences that aren't easy to calculate.
The Great Discontent: Aaron Draplin
Possibly a naive question: what's the difference between a simulator and an emulator?

Presumably an emulator copies the actual instruction set, while a simulator... only pretends to copy the instruction set?
New Songza mobile app is top iPad download
the bufferbloat project's end goal is to get to where the default firmware on everything is good out of the box, and that involves trying to fix upstream for the kernel, tools, and distros, so vendors take it and run with it.
You can put a bounty on your hard question if nobody answers it.
* highly-precise (nano-second or better) time has any intrinsic meaning at all (relativity)
Show HN: splashbe.at, a force graph of Wikipedia's list of music styles
Pregnancy Symptoms
This calls for an early detection of pregnancy symptoms that
will allow you to take utmost care and protection in the days
to come. Various symptoms will give you timely hints on the changing
conditions of your physical state; at the same time you have be
cautious to note as quickly as possible.
I for one am glad that Tweetie, Path and Facebook broke iOS UI conventions and innovated. Pull to refresh, stacking views, swipe to show options, FB's peak-a-boo home screen, etc. If not for these innovations, we'd all be stuck in tedious UINavigationController and drab UITableView hell. Everything would look like the Settings app.
Agreed - laconic is a tough sell for me but I can get over that. However having JQuery required as well!? Too heavy now for any mobile web apps I'd planned.
I've had this happen to me a lot, but I also have noticed that sometimes I see an interesting question that deserves a long answer and I want to answer it, but I have this nagging suspicion someone else is already working on an answer and by the time I write mine theirs will already have received some kind of critical mass of upvotes and my work will not get any upvotes at all.
why I would want one

I think that should be obvious. It's a computer.

two models with different processor architectures and significantly varying weights

God forbid they release models for the two processors they support. You'd never see Apple making different models with different processor architectures and different weights.

awkward portrait 16:9 aspect ratio

Sort of like every laptop on the market right now. They're all really awkward.

no mention of... vents and cooling fans

Perimeter venting. See [1] and search for "venting". They did mention this.

This strikes me as a reactionary announcement

Reactionary announcements tend not to be well-planned or thought out months or years ahead of time. A product with this tight of tolerances can't be rushed in a defensive move. Is it a reaction to the changing world of computing? Yes. It is a reactionary move as in immediately defensive? No.

The surface is trying to be all things to all people.

That's been Microsoft's mantra since day one. A computer in every home, on every desk. Running Windows.

[1] http://www.trustedreviews.com/microsoft-surface-tablet-for-w...
I think there is a general problem with Q&A/Forums in general.

I will generally only ever go to a website to ask a factual question if I cannot easily find the answer myself either from documentation or experimentation. If I ask a question on Q&A it's because the answer is not forthcoming , this may be because my entire approach to the problem is wrong or maybe I'm doing something that only a handful of people would ever want to do. In that case I am relying on the right people actually seeing my post which would have low odds, so I am better served using dedicated forums/newsgroups for the library in question.

So this really leaves opinion based questions as the best things to ask, which don't seem to be encouraged on SO and the format of correct/wrong doesn't work there so well anyway.

Another issue is that I'm usually asking questions related to work things that I am doing, and while I can easily justify using time that I am paid by someone else to ask questions it is less easy to justify spending work time answering other people's questions in order to gain rep.

Also giving a good answer to many questions involves showing sample code , or digging back into something I did a while ago so it's not really something I can do in 2 minutes.
So this means I either have to answer questions somewhat covertly or wait until I get home by which time I may well have other things to do.
The API doc does not make it clear if I am getting the recipient, subject line, and bounce type back.
If this sort of thing is interesting to you, the author and his colleagues wrote an excellent PLDI 2011 paper about their research which systematically checks various compilers for exactly these kinds of bugs: "Finding and Understanding Bugs in C Compilers": http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/pldi11-preprint.pdf

Perhaps my favorite part of that paper is the fact that there is no ground truth (section 2.6). They discover bugs by testing random programs against multiple compilers. If the result from any of the compilers disagree, then there must be a bug. (They guarantee that the inputs are legal.) In theory, it's possible that all of the compilers could be wrong in the same way, which means they wouldn't discover a bug. In practice, this is extremely unlikely. But you can't know for sure. (In practice, they never saw an instance where there were three different results from three compilers; at least two of the compilers always agreed.)
This is a fine art.

One trick: in weekly 1:1 meetings most employees will start by just discussing their current issues. Instead, start by talking about what you accomplished last week and its value, then move on to what's next. This is still a natural conversation (discussing the past, then future), but it makes your value and results much more visible.
Greplin becomes Cue - Intelligent "Snapshot" of your Day
DavidJGraph,

Totally respect your comment and I thought the same way before, honestly. One day I tried StartupPlays just because I wanted to know a bit more about some subjects.

What I ended up getting was a partner for a project, great feedback from a Play creator and a lot of positive feedback from the community.

Yes, I know I might get this from many other places but why searching if I have it in one place? StartupPlays has been a great help and would really recommend it not only to you but to anyone else.
There is the "bounty" system[0]: you (or anyone else) can offer up some of your own reputation as a bonus for answering the question. (For example: this Haskell question[1], and this C/GCC question[2] have had no/poor answers for a while, and the bounties have prompted more/better answers.)

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/privileges/set-bounties
[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11060565/tying-the-knot-w...
[2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11015672/gcc-removes-inli...
OK, perhaps I was a bit harsh. But there is already a very active place to discuss how SO should do things; it's called meta.stackoverflow.com. This discussion has been going on for years.

It's great to try to influence it, but as time goes on, the chances decrease that a newcomer has a point that hasn't been considered. That's just life. You don't see HN changing its format every week; newcomers adjust.

And if someone does have a good point, and it's not being considered, as we say, "fork it." The public Q&A data is available, or you could start from scratch.
It's harder, but also much more lucrative. Trying to sell software to hackers is like trying to sell bread to bakers.
A little late, but thanks!
A Way to Better Games: Establishing Functional Theory
Ask HN: How to get a good native english speaker.
We need a native english speaker who can help us to build our site content.

You can contact us at: info@smart-ad.si
Bruce Schneier: The Failure of Anti-Virus Companies to Catch Military Malware
The problem is that this money is spent not on how to make usable "green" energy but how to be more efficient in consuming gov's subsidies to "green" technologies.
So on the fly you open tons of text files to glue them? Seems i/o intensive.

Why not do the same thing on deploy?
The value returned by POSIX time is commonly said to be "POSIX time" or "UNIX time". This names a time system other than UTC. In my experience, programmers don't seem to confuse these two systems.

I have seen good programmers be surprised by the fact that POSIX time goes backwards in the event of leap seconds, as I was when I learned it. I think it would have at least as much punch if you edited your "falsehood 2" to be about UNIX time instead of UTC. As a bonus, you would also be correct ;)
I think you mistyped here: 42 is the answer, not the question.
I applaud their work, but have serious questions as to what this research really tell us.
It is interesting that some of these same criticisms have been applied to Wikipedia and the reasons remain the same too
Learning Python – The Interactive Way
Extended reply over here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4131818
Check out luca: http://Github.com/datapimp/luca

Sandbox: http://datapimp.github.com/luca
Given The Opportunity: Should You Do TechStars or YC?
"That guarantees the stagnation of their community"

Not from my perspective. I'm a Rails developer, and between our continuously evolving platform, the proliferation of gems, and my changing projects, I've always got new questions.

Meanwhile, new technologies keep appearing to become the New Hotness.
As the saying goes, "change your company or change your company." That is, if the ample evidence that productivity typically peaks somewhere around thirty hours a week doesn't convince your boss, quietly start shopping around for another job where the management aren't bozos.
Stop claiming you’re profitable
That's false on a number of levels.

A) It's not just solar.

B) A lot of the manufacturing actually happens in Germany. It's just that recently, China is spinning up the competition. Market at work.

C) "costs more energy than it produces for decades". Even if that were true, it would still be a better deal. You provide no source for proof because there is none - Particularly considering technological progress, this will soon be even more laughable.

D) It's not about frigging CO2. That's part of the deal, but reducing it to that is dangerously close to obfuscation.

E) "except maybe pushing the cost down" - there is a gold mine of discovery and realization being brushed away with crushing ignorance there. "pushing the cost down" is quite the magic thing in the history of mankind, you know?

F) "The one and only technology" - Yeah right. Tell you what, there is an article linked at the top which talks about the actual, one and only technology. It's already working and being implemented.
I think this issue generalizes to other content management systems. Drupal aims to allow users to create sites without needing to understand the underlying HTML, and most general-purpose Drupal modules produce class-heavy HTML because that is, once you understand the class naming conventions, relatively easy to style without needing to change the HTML structure.

This represents a trade-off - 'uglier' HTML and extraneous CSS classes in return for a drastic reduction in development effort and the knowledge required to bootstrap a typical project. This trade-off makes sense if an in-depth knowledge of HTML is not your strong point (and even most web devs are not fully-fledged "front end developers" conversant with the finer points of the W3C's latest magnum opus), and if you would benefit from having a lot of boilerplate stuff (user registration, access control, content management, RSS, caching, RDF, email notifications, widgets/blocks, templating engine, etc.) for free. Sure, if you're willing to do all of that stuff yourself, you can ensure that no CSS class is wasted (or, indeed, no CSS class is used at all). But most people can't make that trade-off, and even those who can would struggle to justify it beyond the most trivial or superficial projects.

The best solution is probably to take a framework and modify its output to look the way you want it to. That's why the swipe at Drupal is odd, as pretty much everything Drupal does can be modified via hooks (kinda like AOP) and templates.
Launching may be the only way for real data but how does one find out if an idea is even worth putting the time into? Other people talk about all this testing they do and pre-signups... Are they just aquiring these people through search results/real world marketing/agencies?
I once went to a birthday party. When the cake came out and everyone was singing "happy birthday", I said, in a loud, authoritative voice: "You know who really deserves a party is..."

Needless to say I wasn't invited the following year. ;-)

[The above story is totally fictitious, in order to make a point.]
Closing questions - no, deleting questions - really really grinds my gears.

Nothing is more frustrating than finding a google result to SO, clicking through, and arriving at a 404. Nothing is more frustrating that searching for that great answer I read last year and not being able to find it because the question has been deleted. These are often questions that have been kicking around for 4 years, and, well, gone.

Of course, if you have enough SO points, then you probably don't care whether you've deleted a question, you can still see them.

While we're at it, SOers have always been, and are increasingly... well, jerks! If you are a new programmer, then of course your question will have incomplete information, because you don't know how to ask a good question yet. So stop downvoting into oblivion, please, and give people a little bit of time to acclimate and improve their question before closing.

I am in the top 10% of SO users as measured by points (lol.) What can I do, as a community member and hacker, to fix these things?
San Francisco Vs. Silicon Valley: Where Should You Build Your Business?
Leaked Documents Show the U.N.'s Internet Power Grab...
One way would be "mean time to an accepted answer."
Everybody here is discussing his idea, but I'm more interested on the "I'm not ready for" side of the story. This is something that has always striked me, specially if the idea comes from a less experienced friend (such as some freshmen I know). Most of the times I get myself trying to stop their naive dreams of implementing a mobile social app and sell it for billions, Instagram-like, without even stopping to consider why their app would be worth a penny at all. So often that I started to feel like I'm being that guy.

I'm used to assume that if I'm too optimistic with my plans without actually picturing the whole scene, then I'm being too naive—if I really knew what I was doing then I would 1) be able to see some deterrents to the idea clearly or 2) have the whole problem solved. OTOH it's clear to me now that I cannot wait for a complete-and-with-every-detail plan to start anything, from software to a startup. Bets got to be made. This realization is what moves me away from analysis paralysis.

I feel like this is something that can't be taught, but I'd like to hear from you guys. There's a gray area somewhere in between both and I can't find a place that satisfies me.
Thanks. I didnt get that fully, because i saw that reply as phrased as a critic to my statement, whereas it supports my point (which was, that high demand/low availabality because of the summer is unlikely in that scenario). Or not, but it is not a real critic on my statement.

Of course such scenarios happen, especially the situation you described.
+1
Not to mention that a stylesheet named "_dynamic.php?v=blehbleh&lx=12&vs=4.3.3" isn't really welcome.
bookmark it (using the so interface - click on the star thing) and look again in a day or so. by then it will be clear if it's going to be answered or not.

main trouble with this is that some simple, dumb answer may have been marked correct by then.
True, venture labs doesn't make the material clear until you sign up. The material is from a Stanford uni course, you can find it going through this blog http://eesley.blogspot.co.uk/. With startupplays, you can't sample anything until you pay first.

Virtual/online incubators like this are popping up seemingly weekly. Making startups pay at the point of entry will just move them to services that don't, cash tends to be one of the biggest problems for the target market.
> If you think the crisis is temporary and a one-off, it might be worth it to log long hours for a month or two

I understand your point, but I'm going to have to disagree with you here. In a company run that irrationally, if you think the crisis is temporary and a one-off, let's be honest, the probability of this really being the case is smaller than the probability that you have talked yourself into believing what you so badly want to believe.
Nokia to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide
Mandrills honestly scare the hell out of me - they are vicious animals. I'm sure most people don't have that association though...
The mods on programmers are even worse than the mods on SO, in my opinion.
I confess to just scanning the code and being cold on C right now, but isn't ++x a post increment? That is, it occurs after the rest of the expression has been evaluated? (as opposed to x++, which is a pre-increment) Just guessing that the perhaps the issue is when the actual overflow is occurring.
I think you touch on a rather important point. Germany has to make these technologies work, because the alternative is having to rely on gas from Poland and Russia and nuclear energy from France, oil also from Russia and coal from somewhere not nice either. I'm not a big fan in government spending on less efficient technologies, except that in this case I believe the wars and uncomfortable partnerships that can be avoided this way will make it pay for itself.
Here is something which will give ipad a run for it's money
First of all congratulations! I was hoping you would be developing such a product after I saw last year's announcement on STS. One question, is there a ruby gem to work with the API coming up, or is it left up to the internet to develop that?

edit: Missed it, seems it is being worked on: http://help.mandrill.com/customer/portal/articles/464808-api...
I'm not sure it's a problem. If every PHP question you want to answer is already answered, hooray! Google solves your problems instantly. The PHP section is stagnant, but it's still helping people. The supply of answers scales down to the demand.

Meanwhile, some people start switching to Node or something else, and a new wave of Q&A starts on that. Rinse and repeat.
Is it just me or do the "features" of this trojan resemble a late 90's Netbus
I'm not sure that making it easier would convince me to part with my hard earned Bitcoins any easier.
Here's why it guarantees overall stagnation (not necessarily on a specific topic):

Let's say you have 10 super segments, eg: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, etc.

Once you build those out to a high degree, reasonably the amount of new content possible in relation to existing content, will plunge. Then if you add a new language that becomes popular and mass adopted, the best you can hope for is perhaps an addition of 5% to 10% to your content base. It all becomes modestly incremental, and the excitement overall is guaranteed to fall in that environment.

Ruby can be hopping as a subset, but the likelihood the whole thing will be is vastly reduced once the overall build-out slows. What's left to be excited about in the PHP section, once you've answered 97% of what is important about the language? How many ways can someone ask about error reporting?
Don't stress about down votes, life is too short.
Here's one that uses an electric motor to power it - but no electronics:

http://hackaday.com/2011/03/25/mechanical-turing-machine-can...
City of Ruins
Far better and far more important STILL than 90% of startups that don't go anywhere anyway. And from a huge part of the 10% that do have any success, come to think of it.

Far more important contributors to CS and technology have worked in IBM and similar companies than in startups. Including the guys that built UNIX (AT & T) and the pals at Xerox Parc. Not to mention people wanting the even more lax and easy going environment of academia, from Knuth to Djikstra.

Decades of important research in any CS related area, and tens of thousands of original results (patented even) are far superior to messing with RoR and NoSQL trying to build a Heroku for rollerskaters or Facebook for Slugs, pulling all-nighters and screwing your work-life balance over.

Not to mention that a reasonable work-life balance is far more progress for the whole of society than any start up product. In their deathbed no one regrets not going more to the company lunch.
Unlimited cloud storage for $39 a year?
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