skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A better comparison would be how much fuel it needs to run for 20 years. But it's still a relevant question. And if we're ever going to stop releasing large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, solar is one of the essential ways to get there.

Solar is getting really cheap these days. It's very exciting.
The recent article in Esquire about rebuilding the world trade center sheds a lot of light into the particularly inept NY & NJ Port Authority mentioned in this bloomberg piece.

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/world-trade-center-rebuild...
Note: Varnish isn't available on the (standard) Cedar stack. Here's how Heroku suggests you approach cacheing:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-caching
Does anyone else have security concerns about wifi "on the chip"

I mean at the moment I physically control access to my servers and know that the ethernet ports + usb access can be controlled by physical access.

Eg check out the banks / other financial institutions that superglue shut usb ports/physical Ethernet disconnection alarms etc

With wifi on the chip this all becomes moot.

I know the access vector is a little esoteric probably on the level of a bios attack but I still see this as being a big old security can of worms.

How many iterations have we had of various wifi security that have been upgraded over the past decade as fallible? With wifi on the chip unless the chip is replaced you're screwed and accessible by anyone "within range". Talk about Bluetooth war driving this is a way bigger problem.

Cheers,
Dean
For me complex part is S3 pricing is IO requests. I have no clue how many requests expect. If you could find approximate values and make a list like: Webpage (1000 Read requests and 10 Write requests), Web Application (10000 read and 10000 write), etc. Or some other way to get an idea of what it should be approximately...

That's my biggest problem with pricing S3.. May be I am alone in that.
Hate to be pedantic about it but the oyster is a discount card (that everyone but tourists uses) - a single is really about 4 quid all zones
Looks like it has basic support for annotations, but is limited in its scope. I'm hoping I can use this to read annotations from PDFs so I can hook it into a journal paper reading/organisation workflow.
Aren't they using the term "pounds-force" when explicitly talking about force? I've heard that term used.
Non-Profits Require Philanthropists, Not Investors
Hopefully it'll be linux-compatible...
Maybe he has a plan to grow mattresses or make biodegradeable ones or something, but they will have a shorter life?
Are you writing code? You're doing it right now.
... but never as well loved.
Dealing with disabilities is definitely an issue for the bus system. Does society need a public financed transportation system for disabled people. I would say absolutely.

However, I don't think that should be the general bus system. Loading/unloading a wheelchair can take several minutes each way throwing the bus off schedule. Furthermore, to accomodate the disabled you need more stops. So you have stops ridiculously close together (like 40 meters in some cases). This further slows down the buses a lot.

I think we need some sort of parallel taxi/bus service for the disabled and to focus on making the main bus service fast and on time. How to fund this though or make it work. I don't know.
Thanks for the pointer. Was not aware of the existence of the Firefox Enterprise.
At some point, native would still be faster in the same sense a curve approaches the x-axis but never quite touches it.

The mobile web rendering performance might never hit the 0-grade latency standard where we put native, but it will eventually get so close to it as to not make any difference whatsoever to anyone but cold-hearted scientists the likes of whom whish they could keep their science drinks at absolute zero chilly bins.
The NYC price is for the discounted MetroCard as well.
Previous extensive Hacker News discussion of the better source mentioned in the first comment here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4502856
I used to use ELB, but later I migrated the whole app to a self-hosted private cloud on a dedicated server.

I'm using Nginx as the load balancer, and there're no session problems for me because I use the built-in secure cookie store.
Geofencing System with Ruby and Mongo (a small series)
Ask HN: Can I visit your tech business in NY City?
Hi, I'm a techy business dev. working for an app development company in Cape Town, South Africa.

I'll be in New York City on Thursday 27th and Friday 28th September; and would love to visit any New York based tech companies.

If you're doing something interesting; have a great startup culture that I could learn from; or just feel like chatting to someone from the tip of Africa - please let me know!

Any referrals or introductions would also be sincerely appreciated!

More info about me here: http://nicksmit.co.za or http://touchlab.co.za
You can also get in touch with me here: @nickste

edit: I'd really like to visit FourSquare - I'm really interested in what they're doing in the mobile space - so please let me know if you've got any contacts!
The McLaren X-1
Indeed, £2 seemed extremely low, especially considering a return ticket along the liverpool -> wirral line in the north is >£3.50
I store proprietary code on github, but I would never recommend storing actual secrets (like keys or passwords).
Or it's a free tool that will save time for some developers who aren't "pro" Obj-C developers. Not much to complain about.
God’s Unknowability
A bunch of right-wing baloney. The transportation systems in NYC are what make that city even possible. It is very easy for an uncreative bean-counter to look at the price tag of public transportation systems and then not be able "add up" all the long term benefits of having a city where people and businesses can thrive and get around and that are enjoyable and aesthetic.

If you really want to talk about "gouging" the taxpayer, instead look at highway funding and regulations that practically enforce sprawl by requiring parking spaces, and multi-lane streets through urban cores.
If this interests you, I can recommend David foster Wallace's "Everything and more"
You know you're American when...
Absolutely, absurdly true. The D.C. metro is adding a new line, almost all of it will be above ground and on existing right-of-way reserved specifically for the eventual construction of the line decades ago and operate in fairly low density part of the system. It'll be 37km long and run $6.8 billion dollars. It'll have 29 stations.

Compare to the new Seoul Bundang line which is 32.8km with 28 stations in some of the most dense urban areas on the planet. It'll run a bit under $400 million to build or about 1/17th the cost.

Once open, it'll probably cost riders under a dollar for most trips, compared to over $3 on the DC Metro.

No matter how you figure it, cost of labor, eminent domain, legal, whatever, there's simply no way to figure the D.C. costs as making sense when a world away a similar line, in another developed country with far more difficult construction issues is much cheaper in every way possible.
It continues to annoy me that two of my banks will send out legitimate emails (new bill, etc.) that have clickable links in them.

This a million times. It never ceases to amaze me when I see this. It shows even the banks don't understand security!
Sir, I have long desired your unacquaintance
It does happen. It happens to divorce lawyers too. If you choose a profession where you put people in the most stressful position of their lives and then abuse the system to unfairly take everything they have, a small minority of them try to kill you. It's not right, but it is true.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20A13F7395A1...
Are we reading the same article?

The author isn't trying to say that the cost isn't worth it- he's just saying that it could be done much cheaper if the system wasn't so screwed up.
It doesn't sound like you read the article. The article doesn't say the US shouldn't spend money on transit (the point you refuted), it says that other countries pay less for transit because they mange projects better.
legally they operate as entrepreneurs providing services for customers sourced through a website.
This exempts them from many of the worker protections.

However, at least in Belgium this kind of micro-entrepreneurship is actively discouraged.
Contractors require an accounting-certificate or academic degree in order to setup a company (or sole tradership).

Skipping the basic step of registering as a company can leave you or the customer liable to all sorts of fines, depending if a court thinks the customer or the worker is at fault. The issue is sensitive because it involves manual labour, and there is a huge incentive to utilize black labour as labour costs are very high.

This renders a service like TaskRabbit a legal hazard for customers and workers, but the service itself can operate legally.
The numbers I heard a while was something like after first use uranium is 95-97% power, can be reused down to 15-25%. I haven't heard anyone getting this far with it, or even predictions of how radioactive it would be then.
Hollywood. Accounting.
9 years ago 37signals had no products
Well, it's true that database isn't horizontal-scaling-ready as described in the OP. But for many web apps, the database is not the bottleneck. Efforts should be spent on memory caching and NoSQL long before vertical scaling generates diminishing returns.

Of course, it's easy to add a master-slave replication to a single database instance when the need arises, even possible without downtime. So I assume most RDBMSs to be horizontal-scaling-ready.

The difficult part is the app stack. We need to be able to deploy more instances in minutes, not hours or days. If at the beginning we cram everything (Nginx, Unicorn and MySQL) into a single dedicated server it can be really difficult to increase the capacity in the future without downtime or additional expense. Instead, even if you don't need the power of several dedicated servers, it's worthwhile to virtualize a single server and split into a few boxes and make them horizontal-scaling-ready. Then you can clone, resize and migrate the instances.

This is what I do to increase the capacity of my app in a few minutes:

1. Create a new instance, and load the pre-built app image
2. Assign an IP address and add it to the DNS (like app-3.nameterrific.net pointing to an internal IP)
3. Add the app server to deploy.rb (for Capistrano)
4. cap deploy
5. Add the IP to load balancer

That's it. This stack can be used from day one affordably and it can scale to potentially billions of visitors.
Does It Get Boring To Be A Programmer?
Be a due process server and deliver court documents to respondents. Everyone is suing or getting divorced nowadays, so the demand is there.

Heck, you don't even need a car. I started the business in an afternoon and made deliveries on my bike. Other deliveries I had someone else do (gave him half - I did nothing but take the order and pass it off to him).

Get a simple three page website and some business cards made up and you will make your 20G.

One bit of advice: Get paid in advance, every time. Even if it's a legal firm. ESPECIALLY if it's a legal firm.
Less political influence due in large part to shrinking numbers. Greater chance of terrorism due to increased fanaticism among those who remain. There wasn't anything like Oklahoma City in the 1950s, was there?
That's how I see it, everything open, everything public, run by the people. My idea takes this far beyond a bank. If you're interested in this idea or you just want to help me shape it. . mail me @ ryan at uown.ws

I have an internet advertising & marketing company and I am growing an 'offshore outsourcing' company for obvious reasons.
How so? Looks like an opportunity to have some common code between the two platforms to me. Write your view layers twice. If you have a large amount of business logic write it once in Java and then part of the build or checkout process for iOS can be to translate this code to objective-c.

I've recently been diving into mobile dev and the short list of good options on having a common code base between the platforms seems so strange to me.
I wonder why Bloomberg has such a problem with the NY & NJ Port Authority?

Oh that's right, Bloomberg is the Mayor and would rather give the contract to someone more cough _deserving_.
Misleading title (in the current political environment) because the gouging is done by contractors who've figured out how to exploit an antiquated (lowest-bidder wins) system. The article is not suggesting that we have "too much" mass transit, but that we pay too much for what we get, and this is undeniably true.

The gouging doesn't stop once the infrastructure is built. U.S. transit is also expensive when delivered (it costs over $100 per person round-trip to go from New York to Harrisburg, PA; for two people, it's cheaper to drive). Finally, we pay again through exorbitant real estate prices because our transport infrastructure, in this country, is so poor.
Yeah, I already write cross-platform code with C++ and it is really not as bad as anyone leads you to believe. Create one single C++ entry point object that drives everything else. Use sqlite for storage, jsonc for serializing/deserializing json, pthreads for threading and curl for making network requests. Your main c++ class has to also receive the events (like touch) and forward as appropriate. You can leverage STL and boost if you wish. For iOS, you end up dragging and dropping the entire project to XCode - valid C++ code is valid Objective C++. For Android, you just use the ndk to create a simple Java class that mirrors your entry point C++ class and the implementation is just JNI calls to the C++ class. It is common to have a secondary "utilities" class that does hardware specific things if you wish. Your GuI is quickly put together using the standard OS tools - but as long as you stick to forwarding the work to the main C++ class, all that GUI code tends to be minimal (except for really fancy platform specefic GuI code like transitions). Oh, and I use OpenGL for drawing most cool things, so I get to reuse that, too - not to mention all my code is really fast. There you go - cross platform iOS / Android / Mac / Linux / Windows development.
What Is The One True Android & How “Open” Is It?
So if you have two people in a cab, that cab is just as economically efficient as a bus. [..] We could replace AC Transit with a fleet of cabs.

Does that include the cost of increased congestion from the increased traffic?
First Film By Google Glass Signals Good Things To Come
Most manufactures create "standard efficiency" solar panels, which convert around 15% of the energy that hits them from the sun into electricity, while SunPower's convert over 20%. They also cost significantly more, so in practice SP's modules are usually the most space-efficient, but not always the most cost efficient.
This I believe is NOT news.
The page claimed the price was for Oyster, and it clearly is not. And certainly not in 2009 when the article is from.

And yes, you're being exceedingly pedantic, given that the vast majority of users of the underground system never pay the cash price. When a "discount" applies to the vast majority of journeys, it is that price which matters when discussing the price.
New York in general, or New York City?

It's around a 7 hour drive from one end of the state to the other.
The article says something too broad to be true (that if you're a programmer, you need to take vitamin D). However, a clinical trial would be overkill: you might need a clinical trial to determine if, say, cell phones are bad for you, but you don't need a clinical test to determine that 100% of people who stop breathing die. Where do you draw the line? Also, it spends a great deal of effort to make a statistically meaningful clinical test.

This could all be solved if, instead of prescribing supplements based on profession, the article's tone were more like "Hey, vitamin D defficiency is a thing and your lifestyle favors it. Go get yourself checked out and mention this to your doctor."
Why the answer to any sum is 10
My favourite example of infinity is this:

"You own a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all of which are currently occupied. A group of four guests comes and wants to rent a room. Do you have a room for them?"

The answer is that yes, you do in fact have room for infinitely more guests.
It's great to see companies installing big solar plants.

What's 20 MW in comparison to usage for a typical company? (I'm not bashing Apple, just for the avoidance of any doubt.)
Or, "Mac OS X _is_ UNIX, so all of the familiar UNIX tools work, but Linux is _like_ UNIX, so many of the familiar tools work differently." Where differently is generally a superset.
Seems to me like the author is very selectively shopping in non-US examples in order to just go on an anti public-transport rant.

In most places in Europe costs of mass transit projects are notorious for spiraling out of control, and unlike the Madrid example other Western countries tend to do exactly the opposite and usually spend a lot more money on prestigious design and architecture of public works than is common in the US.

And that's okay, because besides the notoriously crappy and corrupt management of these projects by government officials, the results are worth it.
>But for many web apps, the database is not the bottleneck.

Really? I think the database is usually the bottleneck in most web apps. That's why you cache data: to avoid hitting the database.
In my location, those sorts of disabled facilities have more than one use, so if there's no disabled person taking the space, then parents with prams or buggies use them, if there's no parents, then standard passengers use them (they have more leg room and are close to the door). They are always busy spaces, so not sure why they'd be a problem.
We've yet to see how real this decision is. Only today it was announced that new reactor projects will still go ahead: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120915x2.html

Which seems... odd!
Actually this has nothing to do with Java developers, as much as people here likes to look down on them.

This has to do with calling a single command and blasting out an app for IOS once you have already written an app for Android.

If you note carefully Google could have done it the other way around, by implementing IOS shims on top of Android.

This would have been easier (as Google controls Android) and because Objective C code is low level code that is easier to port to high level Java code.

And it would have given an incentive to those who have already written IOS apps to port them to Android.

So why not do it that way? Because then everybody would develop for IOS first and Android second and few people would use the Android specific features. By going from Android to IOS, Android is the primary system, but Google still lover the cost of development of Android apps by having the IOS market articficially subsidise it.

It is the classing Jole post (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html) with the twist that Google is lower the price of the complements to its complements (ie. smart phones are complements to Google ads and apps are complements to smart phones).
I'm not trying to pick a fight here, but the United States strongly rejects, on a cultural level, the notion of a professional class of government employees. From the article:

> A huge part of the problem is that agencies can’t keep
> their private contractors in check. Starved of funds and
> expertise for in-house planning, officials contract out
> the project management and early design concepts to
> private companies that have little incentive to keep
> costs down and quality up. And even when they know
> better, agencies are often forced by legislation, courts
> and politicians to make decisions that they know aren’t
> in the public interest.

All you ever hear about at election time in the U.S. is "big government waste." My colleague from Spain tells me that in Spain everyone goes to work for the government, and that entrepreneurship is lacking. Perhaps that means that in order to have cost-efficient mass-transit projects in the U.S. we need a Spanish-style government and culture.
Good point - New York City! I've edited the primary submission to reflect. Thanks for the headsup!
This is the first I've heard of this approach and I want to hear more.

Do you have any code you can share? Are there any resources in general I should check out?
At my college (www.ii.uib.no) they've restructured the "programming paradigms" course (basic compiler/language theory) from using Standard ML to using Haskell for the strongly typed functional bit. While I appreciate being forced to 'learn' Haksell -- I found Standard ML much easier than Haskell. I did manage to implement a small language for calculating numbers in both, in the end.
I'm assuming that you have a hotel with a countably infinite number of rooms all of which are occupied. In that case you have room to accommodate a finite or countably infinite number of new arrivals.
We used New Relic for a while with Heroku but turned it off because of a number of performance and stability issues we seemed to be seeing with it. In particular application boot times (for the first requests anyways) seemed to be negatively affected.
I'm surprised why they don't use those "sunlight lamps" in Scotland yet. I guess whisky does a better job ;)
On the flip side, I was identified as a genius level IQ at an early age, joined Mensa, was utterly bored to tears by it and then proceeded to go be as 'normal' a child as I could be.

I fell in with the cool crowd, cut more school than I attended, graduated with a grade .01 points above failing (I'd become an expert at doing the minimum), learned about recreational drugs and spent years in a drug-induced fog.

Later in life I decided to start applying myself and join the work force in IT and found myself utterly unprepared. Work was never hard, naturally, but it took me a long time to get up to speed on the normal, expected social interactions between co-workers.

In summation, while I like who I am and what I do now, I'm often plagued with pangs of regret at having wasted away all that time to rack up accomplishments and get something done with my life. There's still time, naturally, and I don't have a pressing need in life for anything more than I have, and things just move generally slower with a family involved.
On the flip side, I was identified as a genius level IQ at an early age, joined Mensa, was utterly bored to tears by it and then proceeded to go be as 'normal' a child as I could be.

I fell in with the cool crowd, cut more school than I attended, graduated with a grade .01 points above failing (I'd become an expert at doing the minimum), learned about recreational drugs and spent years in a drug-induced fog.

Later in life I decided to start applying myself and join the work force in IT and found myself utterly unprepared. Work was never hard, naturally, but it took me a long time to get up to speed on the normal, expected social interactions between co-workers.

In summation, while I like who I am and what I do now, I'm often plagued with pangs of regret at having wasted away all that time to rack up accomplishments and get something done with my life. There's still time, naturally, and I don't have a pressing need in life for anything more than I have, and things just move generally slower with a family involved.

By the same token, if I could travel back in time and warn myself of the perils of slacking, I wouldn't have listened to myself either. And by the same token, I don't know that I would ever actually go back and make that warning either.
Essentially talking about edge side includes [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes].
It's the new Australia for convicted felons.
This is what linting tools like pyflakes are for. Running it as a prerequisite to running the test suite means that I don't have to run all my tests just to find out that I misspelled a variable name.