skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great. Recently I noticed that Seattle doubles the cost of your electricity when you exceed a certain threshold. (http://www.seattle.gov/light/accounts/rates/docs/2012/Jan/20...)

With the API I'm going to write a little script to monitor usage and send me a prowl alert when we're close to the limit. Fun stuff!

Edit: I was considering adding PV panels to my roof. If my meter runs in reverse during the day, will WattVision still work?
The Wattvision doesn't appear to be anything new.

I had a CurrentCost Envi unit (that read with non-intrusive clamps over the leads in the breaker box) that did much the same thing, and would output its data over serial. Tied in with Google Power Meter and so forth.

Then, my utility installed the new "Smart Meters", and a few months after that they offered me a countertop unit that talks to the meter using ZigBee and gives me real-time usage information (and historical graphs, etc). For free.

Using the data I get from this, along with a Nest smart "learning thermostat" I installed last year, has reduced my "height of summer" electric bills to around $140/month from almost $300/month a few years ago.

I've still got the CurrentCost Envi setup, along with "web bridge" unit (Ethernet interface) if anybody in Houston wants one. Trade me a 12-pack of Mt. Dew for it or something...
Accepting my first credit card payment without PayPal, part 2/2
"service-as-a-service" killed me :P I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the conversation was Markov chain generated.
That's what this 1999 Salon article suggests as well: http://www.salon.com/1999/08/17/elon_musk/

Looks like Kouri is curiously little-mentioned prior to this obituary (at least, on the internet and in a quick news-archive search). Seems to have kept a low profile. The only thing anyone says about him is about one sentence worth: that he co-founded Zip2, is a Musk friend, and an investor in Musk's later ventures. No further bio, no interviews, nothing else I can find. I assume reporters have tried to contact him over the years, so I'd guess that he just didn't want publicity.
I think this has been possible more or less since PHP introduced exceptions by using `set_error_handler`:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-error-handler.php

along with a function that throws exceptions, e.g.:

function exception_on_error($errnum,$errmsg) { throw new ErrorException($errmsg,$errnum); }

You can't catch all errors (sensibly including compile errors and unhandled exception errors), but it can get you pretty far.

Not that there aren't other reasons not to use PHP, but this one is manageable.
The protocol that seems to have emerged with the people I collaborate with is to use Skype and ping the person you want to talk to with a message like "Do you have a few minutes to chat?". If they're busy, Skype just shows they have a new unread message and they can answer it whenever they choose. If they're not busy, the person calls you back. If a long time has elapsed since the initial message, they reply with "Sure, call me if you're free now". This is actually less obtrusive than being in an office because if someone comes to your door and asks "Do you have a few minutes?" it's impolite to ignore them whereas an ignored Skype message just means you're busy or unavailable.

I'm not really seeing the huge benefit here. If you work with others who don't follow such a protocol, set your Skype status to busy and you can't get calls. They'll then have to message you and you can initiate the callback if you're free. And is it really that much of an issue for people to establish calls immediately that there's a compelling need to auto-answer in a mannner that's different from Skype's auto-answer?

There's also the chicken and egg issue... nobody uses QuicklyChat and I can't see anybody I know jumping to use it given that everybody is already on Skype and it's 99% good enough with screensharing, full mobile support, forwarding to a phone number when unavailable, and so on. Plus, potential cross-talk issues: Facebook is likely preconfigured with a "green/ping me" setting but you may be in a Facebook video chat with someone when an auto-answer QuicklyChat session starts from their buddy... now your buddy is an unwanted third party in your Facebook chat. Awkward.
+1

I worked for a long time in Finance & Market Data - in Europe (UK/CH mostly). Most people would be surprised how much of it runs of Excel.

Particularly Fixed Income - a lot of the sophisticated instruments will be priced straight off Excel spreadsheets (so you use Excel to publish data, not just analyse it).
remote worker with majority of team elsewhere... I was just thinking of something EXACTLY like this... looking forward to see where it goes
A deep dive into programming robots with Node.js
This looks like a big gaffe by Quora.
iPhone and Android support

I'm curious why a small kickstarter would want to build specific apps for each device. Is this critical day one stuff for small startups like this and is there a real customer need for an app in a marketplace? Instead of just building a simple HTML5 site that'd work on all modern devices and browsers, that is.
Google allows this if you show the first page's content for visitors that came from Google. If Quora does this, it's fine - it's Google's concession to old-world media.
Unofficial content-addressable repo of Lua Scripts for Redis
For that matter, asking students at the high school level to derive the quadratic formula will likely be quite challenging for even the best students in the class.

Asking students to come up with the formulas for 3rd or 4th degree polynomials on their own is probably going to be beyond anyone below the very top tier of human capability. A teacher would be extremely lucky to see one or two students that can do this in their career.

Then again, most people could easily solve these problems if they know what terms to Google :)

Anyway, as I recall the third- and fourth-degree cases require clever substitutions (whereas the derivation of QF is just completing the square with general coefficients).
NASA to test X-51A Jet that Goes 5 Times the Speed of Sound Tomorrow
Wasn't that Google Buzz?
it's completely nonsensical duckspeak, the hilarious part is how much it sounds like some of the actual conversations in silicon valley.
This is from a study done between 1984 and 1986. Case closed.
Here's some more information about the study: http://dwp.bigplanet.com/pdkconsulting/nss-folder/pdfdownloa...

It is interesting to note how vastly this has changed in recent times. I'd wager that at that point, there really wasn't that much to learn about programming, it was a field in its infancy; hence, any differences between programmers were purely based on their inclination towards programming. At this point, there is so much to learn and so many different perspectives to see things from, that knowing the right things might be a huge factor in productivity. Also, its possible that when the study was conducted, programming wasn't sufficiently developed to require significant skill.

Very interesting to see overall, I'd love to hear others opinions on this.

Also, business insider apparently has no clue that this is a 30 year old study. No mention of that at all. ><. 30 YEARS!
It's funny that there are a lot of people who think doing the below is okay, but copying some GUI elements is not.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p5akC0fNzZQ/Tfdnlsy7e0I/AAAAAAAAAY...
I really shocked and really saddened by this, I spoke to Greg just a few weeks ago. He had contacted me after seeing our startup featured in TWiST.

He was a smart, genuine guy that really cared about helping us. From what I'd picked up he was a close friend to Elon Musk and had backed him @ zip2, paypal, tesla and space x.

He gave us some great advice, and took a lot of time out to make intro's and give us feedback.
This led me to take a look at Zapier and I'm glad I found you guys!
On amazon at least, it's possible to counteract this effect using 3-star reviews. The kind of people who dislike a product but aren't vindictive about it and still see its strong points tend to be even-tempered folk.
As far as education, his AngelList page (linked by 'rabble' in another comment) says University of Western Ontario. Doesn't say what major.
I don't think that's OK - carbon copying Windows95 is just sad :)
Has this person never seen Flask before? Why bother?

EDIT: OH GOD THE CODE, YOU MAKE KITTY SCARED
100W increments isn't really fine-grained enough to isolate lots of small devices (presumably why the B&D is cheap).
Hey, neat! Thank you for taking a moment to point that out. It's kind of cool that just two values imply the entire probability distribution.
Yesod (Haskell) lead dev picked up by FPComplete
No, the NZ judge ruled that the search and seizure of DC's assets was illegal.
honest question - does anyone use quantlib in production?
The 1st gen Wattvision already has a web interface.
I can't tell what they mean by this: "If all goes according to plan, over 50% of all web browsers will support this capability in the next three to four months."

There are only five browsers that count, so why didn't they just say "three of the five major browsers?" Or, if they mean more than 50% of browser installations, are we really at the point where we can get 50% of all browser installations updated within a couple of months?
Seems they're doing something little similar.

Buffer and us have specific focus. Buffer focuses on delivery & sharing, and we focus on being a home for your links & information. Archiving and sharing the stuff you care about.

We also try to be as open as possible with a API, and for example our extensions are open source.
I keep hearing good things about Metafilter. Maybe it's the solution to my ever-growing problem of what to replace reddit with.
I think what I'm saying is that you're upset about a thing that is a necessary reaction to the telling of truth.
While you acknowledge it's not the case, you're still making the mistake of thinking of reddit as a single community that is run in a homogeneous way. But subreddits have successfully and neatly separated the wheat from the chaff.

Dig a little and you can find some great niche communities that don't exist outside of more archaic forum-style sites (communities that sites like quora would love to capture).
U.S. Seniors Find It's Never Too Late to Learn Social Media
Are you implying that browsers save passwords in cleartext? A quick search indicates that all major browsers encrypt passwords to user accounts, and some give the option of a master password as well.
Mathematicians are basically just accountants, right? And the IRS has gazillions of accountants who only really work during tax season...so, if our math programs suck, let's move our tax due date to overlap with schools' summer break, fire all the math teachers and replace them with those IRS guys!

It might be better than the existing system and it could hardly be worse. There's already been some work done on a curriculum (warning: PDF link): http://www.cs.amherst.edu/~djv/irs.pdf
Comments like this are part of why we have "Fear of Money":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377054

It is one thing to say "Wattvision costs too much for me; I think they should lower or restructure the price".

It is another thing to say "the way this startup has structured their pricing is insulting to me".

The fact that you were easily able to come up with a market substitute for this offering just underscores how silly the idea of being "insulted" by pricing is.

Things cost what they cost, not what we think they should cost. As a general rule, we HN'ers suck at thinking about what things should cost.
Sounds like someone passionate towards helping humanity move forward in a big way.
Yes, I think Chrome and Firefox can achieve that within 3-4 months.
Who specifically are you referring to? I haven't seen anyone endorse ReactOS yet at the same time vilify Samsung.
Agreed, but people are having conversations on Twitter. This seems like a low-friction way to get them to use a better tool for the job.
For reference for others:

NAT (Network Address Traversal): exposing only your router's ip address and hiding your own to outside traffic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation]

ROAP (RTCWeb Offer/Answer Protocol): main voice protocol [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTCWeb_Offer/Answer_Protocol]

JSEP (JavaScript Session Establishment Protocol): protocol for setting up P2P connection [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Session_Establishme...]

Following are all technologies for punching through NAT...

ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Connectivity_Estab...]

STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN]

TURN (Traversal Using Relays around NAT): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relay_NAT]

(Disclaimer: I know nothing of these technologies, I just looked them up on wikipedia myself)
You are clearly the kind of unimaginative person Samsung is out to hire!

Oh, Interface Builder 1986.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder
It often bugs me when EE/CS types talk about biology. Biology is much, much harder than tech.
This is a totally fair concern, but if your alternative is "not having any kind of fine-grained monitoring of power at all", know that you are very likely throwing money away; it does not take a lot of renegade appliances (or, in my case, renegade incandescent bulbs) to offset the cost of the sensor.

I have bought very few things that had such a clear ROI so quickly after I set them up.
It would be great to see an extensible, "Devise" like solution for asp.net
> How hard is it to get the master password when one knows 1. the encryption method 2. the encrypted password 3. the decrypted password ? (I don't have the foggiest idea about it, really)

If your password manager encrypts each password separately, and stores that output separately, then that simplifies the task, because you can mount a known-plaintext attack and potentially reduce the complexity.

However, if your password manager stores things correctly, all the passwords are stored as a single "blob", with no known-plaintext anywhere in the blob, and the entire blob is fed through the encryption algorithm as a single block encryption using a single key.

For example, the password safe format ( http://passwordsafe.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/passwordsafe/... ) the master password is both salted and passed through a work-configurable key stretch function. The result of that operation is used to encrypt a 256bit random key using the Twofish algorithm. That 256bit random key is the actual encrypt key for all the password records, again using Twofish as the encryption algorithm.

So deriving the master password is made difficult by use of the key-stretch function, and deriving the actual 256bit random key is as difficult as otherwise breaking the Twofish algorithm.
I'd pay a few bucks a month for the value I get out of facebook.
Find a way to push for challenge-response authentication with a token that can be put onto a USB key. No, it's not easy to change the infrastructure to handle it, but IMO, it's the best chance to have secure authentication.

"This USB key is your identity card." is a simple concept to understand, and better than a password.
1. If you already addressed this with him and he's not communicating, its over already. And the way he's acting is not going to be good moving forward. Why is he working for the VCs?

2. Another reg flag for me is if there is one thing I hate more than anything is people who purposely lie about what they know or what they can do for no apparent reason. If he can't code, he can't code. Simple as that.
Come on, you were going well until you threw around the fanboism argument.

But I'll bite: I do not think cloning a UI is fine. I think drawing inspiration from a UI is fine, because indeed, any new thing stands on the shoulders of what came before it. But actually cloning a UI (your words, cited) is making a clone, a copy, whose result is certainly not evolution or innovation. You're making a facsimile, doing no real creative work (or innovative work) to cut corners.

To me, this is less about it being Samsung and Apple, but about cutting corners in a blatant way. It's dumb, it's misguided, and these guys should know better. Just as you shouldn't ever say that cloning a UI is fine.
As always, TIMTOWTDI.
Chrome + Firefox are around 60% of current browser installations and both currently self-update so that is likely where he got that figure.

It does neglect to mention that not all Firefox browsers do self-update so that would need to be factored in.
Fear of money is definitely a big problem, especially among developers. But the situation is more complicated.

There are two important things to understand here, which I've learnt the hard way.

1. The entire business model, not just the exit strategy, of almost all VC-funded startups is selling the company. They start with selling little chunks of the company to investors, culminating in the exit, when they sell the whole thing to BigCo. IPOs are black swan events in this respect.

There's no fear of money here. When you can get millions selling chunks of your company, purely based on "engagement", why would you break your head trying to sell product?

Founders who are well aware that this is their business model are very good at talking big and using visionary rhetoric. They avoid talking about mundane business details and use phrases like "passionate about X" and "ripe for disruption".

Founders who are actually interested in building a product-based company and running it for the long-term are rare. Drew Houston is a great example, and I respect him a lot for it.

2. If you do not intend to raise venture capital, then following the business tactics of VC-funded startups can mean death. Free and freemium have unfortunately become the default for all software now - even apps built by bootstrapped solo founders. This is a huge mistake.

If you are not actively working the market to sell your company, to investors in chunks or to an eventual acquirer in bulk, you're digging your own grave by giving away your product for free.

Better start actively working the market to sell your product for hard cash instead.
Hah, where I work there's about 10 people PAID to read the internet all day. Thanks social media.
What is the agreement on equity, etc? Is it concrete? What are the chances he will remove you from the company? What is it worth to you to go after him if he does that? Is he just leading you on so you keep doing work on a prototype or project he may just abandon - though expect ownership from still? What are your overall skills? Are you working on other projects to pay bills? Do you have other ideas you'd enjoy working on? I could ask more questions though the issue really is the lack of transparency. It doesn't sound like he's explaining anything to you. Him getting hired by VCs sounds a bit like conflict of interest, though it could be innocent, especially if he has said that he's still expecting to raise $X amount.
IMO, I don't think any of your "vs" go beyond normal "similar features" of any IDE... certainly nowhere near "carbon-copied". They don't even share the same icon set or rounded-ness. If I were a juror and I was given those as evidence, I would vote "not guilty".
I understand people's outrage at this invasion of privacy - but honestly why do people think that anything they have ever done online hasn't already been tracked and recorded (not being paranoid or anything - just being realistic).

There is a lot of value in figuring out who someone is, what they like and don't like and what they are likely to buy (ad networks/trackers etc.).

Hence you MUST assume that everything you have done, and ever will do, is, for all intents and purposes, PUBLIC FOREVERMORE.

Not "whisper public" but shared across YouTube public with 100 MILLION PEOPLE.

Once you assume that situation you attempt to mitigate possible pitfalls and these things don't bother you so much (they still will - but the sting isn't nearly as strong).

And no - the web isn't going in the opposite direction - privacy is dead - long live privacy!

You can try and shame or regulate it away - but seeing the web as it is today and where it's going - there is no turning back.
I like the interview, but the transcription is annoying whenever it discusses dollar amounts. So I present my hacker's guide to pronunciation:

Phrase How it's pronounced
------------ ---------------------------
100 One hundred
$100 One hundred dollars
$100 dollars One hundred dollars dollars
Show HN: Appeio (App.net) Started at midnight, still going.
What's with the asshole response? Why so condescending? Did you have a bad day? I'm sorry about that. Yes, SHA512's output is 512 bits (the clue is in the name), but paste this into your shell `ruby -rdigest/sha2 -e "puts Digest::SHA512.hexdigest('foo').length"`. You'll see 128. I'm talking about the length of the string in characters and that's quite obvious. Feel free to bog yourself in semantics and pedantry. Also none of your comment proves anything, and you make more assumptions than I do. Is anything you said a sane reason to go to the trouble of precluding a user from choosing a password > 32 chars?
>encourage each of our users to select a passphrase, and even scour yahoo news from the past year, and other sources for three consecutive words, that the user can easily remember, such as "that truck driver" or "what he did". This in practice causes users to have a much better space of possible passwords to begin with

And with a wordlist of the 10,000 most common words, if you are not also using a key-stretch function (bcrypt, pbkdf2, etc.) all of those examples become quite trivial to a john-the-ripper ( http://www.openwall.com/john/ ) type attack. I.e., a three word phrase consisting of one each of the 10,000 most common words has at most 10000^3 combinations (1e+12). A 10 digit random password selected from letters, numbers, punctuation (94 digits) has 94^10 combinations (5e+19). 5e+19 is significantly larger than 1e+12)
LA Startup Goes from 0 to 100mph In Three Months
The reddit thread in question had an absurd amount of victim-blaming.

Not to disparage reddit as a whole, but there's a lot of close-mindedness and misogyny in the more populated subreddits.
Second on the website. I mean no offence, but the current design of the website would cause me to never hire your girlfriend. The logo font is pretty bad and the design is too wide. Make it really simple and responsive.

I'd recommend doing away with the categories that you design for and just include a page with sample work basically a portfolio.

If someone is looking for a graphic designer they are going to be turned off if your website looks pretty bad :( The logo also needs some work if you expect someone to pay you to design a logo.
The investors should know what's going on, even if just between you and them.
I'm color blind and frequently turn off colors on webpages. Try this bookmarklet to remove the colors to get a standard black on white page while preserving (most) everything else.

javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='* { background: white ! important; color: black !important } :link, :link * { color: #0000EE !important } :visited, :visited * { color: #551A8B !important }'; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'"); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); } })();
I can't help agreeing with Patrick here, but I'm not Colin so I can't really presume too much.

In any case I always thought that Colin could get out of the low price quicksand by launching an entirely rebranded service with updated pricing based on value to customer, etc. sure, keep the original guys around too. Throw in some perks on the "new" service that are attractive to enterprise customers. It's not every day you have a product of this quality and (potential) customers willing to pay so much.