skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(I live in South Australia, and I've previously worked on electricity energy trading systems here)

This is a pretty good article, but misses a little context that maybe helpful to non-Australian readers.

1) Power bills in Australia have been rising rapidly over the last couple of years. The reactionary response has been to blame the new Carbon Tax, but the real causes are much more complex[1].

2) In South Australia at least it gets really, really hot. For example in February 2009 we had 6 Consecutive days over 40 °C (104 °F) and a maximum of 45.7 °C (114.3 °F)[2], and then in November 2009 we had 6 Consecutive days over 38 °C (~100 °F)[3]

These peak temperatures occur earlier in the day than the typical power spike (12pm-4pm instead of 5pm-7pm), and caused huge power spikes (from air conditioner usage), and this often causes power companies to have to shut off power (they have a policy of doing rolling blackouts when they don't have enough capacity).

This peak demand is much, much higher than the average peak demand shown on the linked article, and these are the peaks the power companies invest to meet. If these peaks are reduced by solar panel usage (which they should be, since the come during the best time for solar production) then it should reduce the requirements for larger power stations.

[1] http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/power-play-between-feder...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_2009_southeastern_Austral...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_2009_southeastern_Australi...
Top digital exec leaves News Corp ahead of company’s split
Put the actual datetime in a title attribute. Or have a sort by date option.
If you're thinking in terms of Facebook showing deleted updates to law enforcement to track down activists — or some rogue employee at Facebook HQ taking a peek — then we're talking about totally different levels of paranoia. Sure, that is a legitimate concern for the relative few who have something to fear from powerful governments.

For the rest of us, though, someone we unfriend (an ex-partner, for example) being able to archive and still access all of our old photos/updates is a much bigger concern. I argue that distributed social software should follow Facebook's lead and offer a sane default of not having such an archiving feature, and not going out of its way to make it particularly easy to add one, either. Otherwise the "creepy" aspect of not being able to rescind access to your photos/updates is going to be a serious downside to this new network, and could keep people from using it.

Edited to add:

Also, what's more secure in theory isn't always more secure in practice. Moxie Marlinspike observed that the original version of Cryptocat (which did end-to-end encryption in JS) was potentially less safe than Gchat. Why? Because if you compromised Cryptocat's server, you could make it serve JS with a hidden backdoor. And Cryptocat, being a one-man shop, would likely be a softer target than a company like Google, which has had plenty of time and expertise hardening their systems. How much do you trust the guy behind Cryptocat, versus Google with their reputation to protect?

Along the same lines, imagine you use a hosted Tent server for social networking — you don't have time to bother running your own server, but you've heard Tent keeps your data safe from Facebook, so it'll protect your privacy better, right? But then the random guy hosting your Tent account turns around and leaks your info. Or he's running old software with a vulnerability in it, and gets pwned. Suddenly hackers have all your data. Would that have happened on Facebook?

When I was curious about signing up with Diaspora, one of the open community pods had a cheeky note from the server admin saying basically that he would peek in and read your stuff if he felt like it. So this is not entirely hypothetical. I'm a huge fan of efforts like Tent, but let's not forget there are upsides to Facebook and Google's stewardship, and an alternative system can easily have as many privacy/security cons as it does pros. Tread carefully.
Sounds interesting, but I would only use it if it were free. Twitter, FB, and Google+ work fine for what I need.

What do I need from App.net? Friends who use it.
> If I'm correct, this is about patenting isolated genes, right?

No. Myriad claims they transformed the gene into something else in the process of isolating it. The court accepted this claim. So the precedent set here is not that isolated genes can be patented, but rather about what the threshold is for transformation such that something can be considered patentable.

(I'm totally against the decision btw, but I think it's important this distinction is understood).
>The one thing you need to focus on above all else is transparency and preventing scams.

While I think transparency is important. It's disappointing that this project attracts suspicion, especially in the light of Kickstarter projects for non essential consumables attracting millions with little to no oversight/transparency.

Watsi have done much more than the average Kickstarter campaign to show where the money goes and who's involved: http://watsi.org/faq#really-100-of-my-donation-goes-to-the-c...
Cut out of the cultural discourse again: "Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because it may contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights." Even if some may argue that it's not an important public discourse, it's still annoying in principle. (You can still find the video if you look around.)
Sure it makes it right...why the fuck do we have open source things if we cant take them to make a profit from them? If you don't want people to do that then don't release them and sell them yourself. SIMPLE AS THAT.

Many "open source" companies do this all the time, google facebook twitter list goes on.
Speaking of crappy user interfaces, his blog breaks the Alt+Left keystroke to go back. It takes me to previous blog entries, rather than back to HN. Grrr.
I don't think that they said that their fallback renderer was HTML5, but they did say that there were still areas of the app that still used that technology.
An interesting aspect of this is the "dogfooding" that seems to take place under Mathematica's covers. The internals use many of the same representation and communication techniques as are exposed to users.
I was quite surprised the Makerbot is that expensive these days, until Is saw it was the price for the heavily upgraded ready-to-print machine.

Together with some friends I built a 1st generation CupCake Makerbot about 3 years ago, the cost was less than $1000[1], only $750 for the most basic kit [2]. It took a while to assemble, but it was worth actually building it with your own hands and seeing for the first time to finally print something. Yet there were setbacks in the process, but the makerbot staff was always helpful in finishing the project. I assume the just can't provide that level of support for kits at the scale they are now.

If makerbot would offer an unassembled kit again they could beat that symbolic price again any time and show what the extra work is actually worth.

[1] http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-06/making-makerbot

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20100110133658/http://store.maker...
You still need the conventional energy base. You cannot have a grid reliant on solar, because sometimes the sun doesn't shine for days on end.

Solar can top up the grid, and correlates well with air-conditioning driven demand on hot days. But it doesn't coincide with peak load - especially in winter - and will always be a diffuse power source.

You would not only need a cost effective storage solution (and none is in the foreseeable solution) you also need a lot of available space. Even if the panels were virtually free - there still remains large problems with solar power as a baseload energy source. If you solved the storage problem - cheaply - you'd still need 4 - 5 times the collecting capacity to get close to being able to reliably produce power over even a 48 hour period.

It's a great boutique energy solution, particularly for remote usage. But large scale electricity generation will remain the dominant energy source well into the foreseeable future.
I'm pretty annoyed with it, even though it's fully within their rights.

I have a Makerbot Thing-o-Matic. I would love a Replicator, but it is very expensive. There are cheaper printers out there (especially as a kit), but Makerbot makes a good quality product.

The thing that annoys me more than anything else is the laziness. Makerbot's stuff is open source, but do you have to build a perfect clone? All they did was replace the two laser etched Makerbot logos with their own. They didn't change the dimensions, they didn't go with a different extruder, they didn't round off corners, they didn't use a different color of plywood.

It just seems so lazy to me, like they're not even trying. It's neat they offer an acrylic case, but that's not the one they're showing. They're showing the perfect clone.

I completely agree with the quote in the article that says they're over reliant on the Makerbot name. The announcements I saw didn't say it was a new 3D printer based on a Makerbot, they said it was a Makerbot made by a 3rd party.

Just one obvious enhancement would have made me so much more comfortable with the idea. The Kickstarter page lists a few simple ones (FCC certification, replacing a few plywood bits with plastic bits), but you can't tell that from looking at it.
Greylock's John Lilly and Josh Elman share investment strategies
WTF is my startup pitch?
I just want to correct a factual error in your post. I've noticed that the review process time used in a variety of responses continues to creep upwards -- here, it's up to three weeks.

As it currently stands, as per Apple's published status, 95% of applications are approved within 8 days.
Certainly an interesting microcosm of a type of democracy... I wonder how feasible this kind of model would be for actual policy making.
I have no problem with relative time stamps. They are conceptually easier for me to relate than absolute time stamps.

What does annoy me though is when you have 05-06-12, is that dd-mm-yy or mm-dd-yy?
Eh, almost. There is such a thing as legitimate killing, but murder is a crime by definition.
That is the best comment I've read on the matter. Great point. It will be unfortunate for MakerBot, but will hugely benefit everyone else.
I don't doubt there are people on the inside trying to change things, and I applaud their efforts, but I would hate to see their efforts hijacked by the political arm thinking they can sell us a bill of goods and get a bunch of free press.
Why start with iOS and not Android? Seriously!?
Whilst that's arguably true, UIWebView being the poor cousin of mobile Safari isn't evidence for it.
Advice to entrepreneurs: finding a cost-effective way to store solar energy for 4 hours will be worth more than another 2% increase in efficiency. And inventing instant-on conventional-fuel plants will also make a huge difference in GHG emissions.

This is a solved problem. It's called pump storage[1], and is in use world wide. The US has some existing pump storage power plants (eg [2]), but typically they are used to smooth out demand on non-renewable generators (Coal, Nuclear etc).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Stat...
When I don't know what my schema would look like I like using mongodb.

Also, when I don't feel like dealing with the OR impedance mismatch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mis...
Nice post. What really bugs people about bad process isn't just that it's stifling ... but that it becomes a shield for marching forward on the wrong road. It systematically prevents people from asking "Why are we doing this?"

Startups need to ask that a lot. Big companies hardly ever ask it. So even though a judicious amount of process is necessary to Get Things Done, there needs to be some way (Friday all hands?) to ask: "Why are we doing this?"
Taking the median has problems just as serious. A better analysis is: http://www.american.com/archive/2011/september/middle-class, demonstrating that the real story may not be so bad for the middle class. As for hours worked, this graph suggests that the value rises and falls with recessions: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=w...
All this stuff reminds me of music from German speaking areas, only without a hidden message. We have also really stupid culture, if you are interested you can look that stuff up ;-)

Weird middle class youth culture from Austria: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krocha

You never know if it is a parody or not.
Most of it is from Kontor records.

Really popular band: http://www.youtube.com/user/atzenmusiktv

Another example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNUUCHsgRu8

We say "Ballermann" music to really trashy party crap: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ballermann+hits

The texts are disposable. Mostly sex, money, party, drugs and sexy women (and parts of their body).
Only REAL coders use the Supercoder 2000.
New rules for eCommerce
Just a note on the site, for an app website it doesn't look great on an iPhone currently.
If you push this argument further, missing time zones are a problem as well. I recently moved between continents, and the time zone difference sometimes results in gmail conversation threads showing send times ("On Aug 15 9:00 PM Someone wrote: ...") that appear to time travel.
In the US you could probably get away with this until you made a mistake and published the name of someone who could show they'd never downloaded your porn. And by the time their legal team was done with you your net profit would end up being, like, minus twenty million dollars.

I've always heard German law is more strict when it comes to privacy. Wouldn't something similar occur?
Really, what's the deal with this? Why is Germany the most problematic in this aspect?

Every country have such organizations but somehow it's always my German contacts to which showing a video becomes an epic poem.
Facebook has no demand, it's free. There's no way to establish supply/demand without a price.
In South Australia we are building a wind and solar powered desalination plant too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Stanvac_Desalination_Plant
I would believe that more if there were a single White House petition that resulted in action. Even their SOPA petition response was pretty murky.
This is a really good point. In an effort to have a more durable, packaged product, MakerBot has effectively abandoned the low end of the market. They're basically "Innovator's Dilemma"ing themselves in the space of a few short years.
Of everything that irks me about the app store (and I say this as someone who uses almost exclusively Apple computers / mobile devices), this is pretty high up there. It makes it damn near impossible to run a successful marketplace businesses on iOS: if your business is based on skimming a percentage fee off the top of your user's transactions, Apple taking 30% is more often than not a dealbreaker.

That being said, that's not an issue of native apps vs. web apps. If you want your application distributed through the app store, anything payment-related (or even potentially payment-related) needs to go through Apple's payment services. Period. Apple would complain just as much if you had a native app that had your own payment form, and they'd be 100% fine if you built a pure webapp (i.e. not on the app store) that accepted non-Apple payment.
They stopped offering kits when they stopped making the Thing-o-Matic. Tons of people complained, but on the Google group they explained the real reason: price.

At this point, they can build the machines much faster, and that makes them cheaper. Instead of having to measure out that each kit get 4 of these bearings, 2 belts, 78 screws, 107 nuts, etc, they can just keep them all around the shop and save all the time from that portioning.

I learned quite a bit assembling my ToM. If you consider that the Replicator has a larger build envelope, a better extruder, improved ease-of-use, and the LCD interface... the $1750 price isn't too bad. The dual extruders is pretty good at $2000.

That said, it's not cheap. If I was starting out again today, I'd probably try making some sort of RepRap Mendel. I still love Makerbot, but the ability to save around $750-$1000 would be too compelling for me.

They've moved up in the market some. They seem to be targeting professionals that could use a basic 3D printer more than they used to, and DIY hobbyists less.
Just so it's clear, I don't question the sincerity, stature or trustworthiness of these guys. They come across well in their video. My lines of thought are about the project, not them personally.

What I find confusing is why a big upfront investment is necessary merely to start the project and, perhaps more importantly, why it wouldn't be a true open source project and only open sourced at the end. Why not open source what they have already and see if it sells itself by attracting collaborators?

It's not clear from the page or the video if they've open sourced the work done on the prototype already, but if they have and people are already playing with it and seeing promise, it becomes a much easier sell. Many good open source projects got significant sponsorship or raised money for people to work on them after initially proving itself, and that's great.
They have rights for "every music", a reversal of the burden of proof and demand ridiculously high royalties from Youtube.
Exxon Ad at Saudi Aramco Hacked post on pastebin
I'm curious as to whether you think users want, need, benefit, or care about whether Facebook can deploy rapid changes via a "consistent cross platform experience".

In my experience, users want a consistent platform experience -- one that fits in with the platform that they're using. They're also not interested in your development processes, especially if it means rapid dispatch of potentially breaking changes. In fact, I'd say that runs counter to user's interests.

Engineers and product managers seem to be the primary cheerleaders of "consistent cross platform experience". I don't see why a user would want that. I do see why developers and product managers would want that.

> If anything we should all be lamenting the failure of HTML5 as a truly viable app replacement at this point; I can't blame Facebook for wanting to believe it would be possible.

I'm not lamenting HTML5 as a viable application platform replacement, because it never was going to be one. The web industry consistently ignores 30+ years of experience that the desktop (and now mobile) development industries have in bringing high quality applications to user's devices. The web universe eschews common platform conventions, common rendering approaches, common widget libraries, and instead has attempted to force everyone to individually reinvent application development on top of DOM, CSS, and JavaScript -- a SGML-derived history-laden mess that served documents well and applications poorly.

The lesson for the web industry should be that they need to figure out how to bring align whatever ethos they have -- presumably of a common, open platform -- and bring them to bear on implementing something genuinely competitive with the native development platforms.

DOM/CSS/JS is not it.
My reply to Phil is that MakerBot says "It uses the same plastic as Legos" in all of their videos. This is true only in the most technical sense. Both use a type of plastic called ABS, but the formulations are very different and more importantly neither the strength of the parts or the surface finish are of equal quality. Still they leverage all the good will Lego has built.
"...the user-level design of Mathematica has remained compatible from Version 1 on. Much functionality has been added, but programs created for Mathematica Version 1 will almost always run absolutely unchanged under Version 6."

I wonder if this is the case because of dedication to backwards compatibility or because the original syntax was based on some fundamental mathematical concepts that are sound and thus don't change the same way most APIs do. Can anyone with more Mathematica experience weigh in?
I like it because it provides a flexible material for development without committing to a schema.
How the new Windows 8 license terms affect you
I can agree with that. Even just changing it from

include("views/articles.php");

to

return view ('articles');

would be better...
How to fix our broken traffic light system
Recently I got a red light violation notice through automated photo enforcement system. I think It was not my fault. This is how I am going to contest by mail.

--------------------------------------------
Respected Sir\Madam,

I am very sorry about the violation (notice no. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX) but I would like to plead not guilty.

As you can see from photographic record, I am already past the stop line so it was not possible\safe for me to stop. I remember very clearly that it was yellow light when I just crossed that stop line. I was driving at the speed limit of 25 mph which is the max speed allowed on that road. I am sorry to say this but I think our traffic lights system is broken. This is high time we should fix it to avoid more confusions, accidents and save precious lives.

The solution is very simple - When it is not safe to cross the yellow light why don't we turn the red light on along with it so that driver comes to know that time has ran out to cross the intersection and it is better to stop.

With Warm Regards,
[DRIVER]
This is "Death panels" in a fancy suit. Bid on life saving medical treatment from a thumbnail? By someones looks? and a possibly fabricated story?

So now we the internet get to decide who lives and dies? Who has a healthy fulfilling life and who lives with disease and disability? Idk about this idea. Its well intentioned, but oh so wrong all at the same time.

This type of charity should be first come first serve to be fair. Not some bidding war over who's the most sickly (but still cute) looking child, or who has the most compelling story. A human is a human.

The good intentions are there, but something about the way this website presents itself is twisted. Why should any of these people receive preferential funding over any other of them? Why should I get to choose? I'm not an expert on their medical conditions, or who needs more help than others. If this gets people to give money to a good cause, thats fine. But Idk. Still seems odd.

Sorry if this is the kind of "negativity" hacker news is trying to avoid these days, but this is genuinely what I feel.
High Frame Rate Video Playback
Seems like it matches the situation of wanting to release your additions to a GPL codebase into the public domain. Doing that is perfectly fine[1]. It feels like a hole in the GPL for some reason though.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#RequiredToClaimCop...
I found this on their page:

What if I purchased VMware Fusion 4 before July 25th, 2012?

Customers who purchased VMware Fusion 4 before July 25th,
2012 can upgrade to VMware Fusion 5 Professional for 50%
off the regular price or buy a full license of VMware
Fusion 5.
I certainly interact with my co-workers at work and talk about the normal stuff (sports, news, politics, etc.), but outside of work I see my co-workers 0% of the time, unless I coincidentally run into them.

My outside of work socializing is simply people I've either met on my own or through the 2-3 people I knew in the city befor I moved here 2 years ago.

I would recommend Honolulu for your relocation, but cost of living is a little steep (but manageable...and worth it) and our tech community is definitely in the development stage (though it is existent and fairly active).

EDIT: I want to clarify that I probably do underestimate the benefit of my work interactions. The reason I go out and socialize so much is that I find myself feeling isolated and lonely on nights/weekends where I choose to stay in.