skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very good point. But it doesn't make Tesla cars a folly so much as put a strong constraint on their long term economic viability: the invention of fusion power or some other method of making energy abundant turned to making hydrocarbons effectively renewable. But that could be decades away, timeline of practical viability is effectively unknown. Considering how speculative this notion of really cheap energy is (for now), I still think Tesla is a good bet. On the event of the floor dropping off the prices in energy markets, there will be few that are dependent on large energy barriers to entry that will emerge unscathed.

It is also effectively win-win. If such a thing becomes possible the costs in much of production will cut very drastically and the potential of things now open would be just incredible. So much of expense is due to energy constraints.
It's not that simple:

CO2 in atmosphere -> CO2 in water -> Ocean acidification[1] -> Change in ocean ecosystem

The oceans absorb OC2 from the atmosphere, which you could argue is good, but it is not without consequences. Putting CO2 in the water moves the problem from having it in the atmosphere elsewhere, but it's still a problem. In some ways then, this can be seen as a good thing, because it is undoing the effects that increased CO2 in the atmosphere has on the oceans. Obviously though, I doubt that its effects would be at all noticeable.

The wiki article already linked has a chapter called 'Possible Impact'.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
The Accidental Solution to the Retirement Problem
You are wrong.

Electric engines run at 92% efficiency. Car engines run at ~15%. So energy density need not reach equivalence.

That physicist is wrong too (Nobel prizes don't mean you aren't wrong - it just means people listen to you more) - jet engines on planes require oxygen to work - hence capped at ~10 km altitude with massive drag causing ineffecient travel.

10 years till battery tech reaches complete parity for lowest denominator cars, and 7 years before we start to see hyper sonic electric passenger jets being tested way up in the upper atmosphere (no oxygen needed, go as high and fast as you want - London - LA in a few hours - space views - cheap power).
I think this is their "extensive beta and data collection period". Just using the entire iOS 6 customer base as the experimental set.

If so that's an unfortunate abuse of their customers' trust, and will hand a big advantage to Google.

As you say there were many options like releasing a standalone test first to run in parallel with the google app, but perhaps because of hubris they were not explored, and so customers have had an unexpected downgrade on an app which is widely used.
Missed that. Well, Bash does it intuitively however you like:

$ echo {8..12}
8 9 10 11 12
$echo {08..12}
08 09 10 11 12
I'm not for putting more carbon into the oceans... just against taking the currently stored carbon out.
>The sort of dependency you describe ("emotionally hurt", "life damages") is foreign to me.

Try going somewhere important and missing it because of a Maps error, and you'll sing a different tune. You might not be "emotionally hurt" but you're sure be pissed off.
Somehow, I don't think a textbook should be something you write in a hurry.
Going to their pricing page and not getting the information, but instead having to sign up makes me not want to try it at all. Which is a shame, the demo looked good.
Bootstrap Toggle Buttons
Three lines weighted random choice with Python
This post shows how to implement weighted random choice in python in just three lines of code.
> when you're just sitting around in the ocean

Watch any of the documentary series about life aboard an aircraft carrier [1] and you'll see that there's essentially no "just sitting around in the ocean." But your main point is still accurate: If there's power available, putting it to work making jet fuel might be a good trade-off for the additional drain on the nuclear fuel.

[1] E.g., http://www.pbs.org/weta/carrier/
Encryption that isn't completely useless. Recovery records. Huge file support. Better compression in specialised cases (x86 binary code, multimedia). A nicer GUI - 7zip is a clunky, fugly thing and WinZip... urgh. Garish as Las Vegas. A real x64 version (for no reason other than OCD-ness about mixed 32/64 bit binaries). And tar.gz is grotty for random-access, I-know-it's-in-here-somewhere, use cases.

That said, I do still use zip for compatibility 90% of the time - but I was only going to pay for one commercial archiver for Windows, and WinRar was it. Why pay for WinZip? (this was years ago, amortized cost is now less than pennies/day)

Of course you could ask why pay for software at all, but that's a different problem. I'm happy to pay someone for software that works better, does things that otherwise can't be done or would be tedious, or is a de-facto standard of some sort. Hence at one time or another I've paid for Adobe Creative Suite, Cubase, MS Office, VMWare Workstation, Rhino 3D, Autopano Pro, and others.
The scope (Finnish Lukio class maa1) is very limited, making this quite feasible.
Telsa cars are expensive for the same reason Ferraris are - they target people who want bling.

A mass-produced commuter could be much cheaper, but there's a huge risk. Tesla aims to reduce the risk by validating the market, solving technical problems, creating infrastructure (recharge stations) and solving social problems (convincing people that range doesn't always matter, and educating them on the strengths and weaknesses of electric cars).

A low total-cost (including fuel and maintenance) electric car can probably be produced, but it's not the Tesla's top model.
Equally true for software but well
Which part of the TOS do you think this would violate?

AFAIK you're not under any obligations to show Adsense ads to all users, or all of the time. I know quite a few people who only show Adsense ads to search engine visitors, for example, or block ads for people arriving with certain referrers.

This seems like a similar move.
This works surprisingly well! I especially like it in apps like Messages and Finder (try holding shift to see the hierarchy of the UI). It's also a good measure of site accessibility when used in the browser. Cool!
Exit CIA.vc, enter irker
I'm pretty sure when your CEO comes out and says "yeah, we have a problem", that it's a pretty effing enormous problem.
>Please, macosx releases have an history of being bug ridden.

Compared to what other OS that was "bug free" on release?

Also, "bug ridden"? Please. Some people had issues with some features (and in some hardware setups). For most people it was a smooth ride.

>So much that one upgrade was free (the first one, if I recall correctly).

Yes, the FIRST version of a new OS, adopted by very few people at the time (most still run OS 9 still for one year more), and put out by a company with 1/1000 the resources of later Apple, was buggy...

>The man built his own legend by rewriting history and bullying press. And selling computers, phones and walkmans, too.

And changing several markets profoundly. Like the PC industry (taking Apple from 2% to nearly 20%), the music industry (iTunes, the #1 retailer in the US), the music player industry (made mp3 players a mainstream phenomenon, still holds 70%+ of the market), the phone industry (the iPhone was a game changer, at the time Google was not only not even started on their touch Android thing, but Eric Schidt appeared on stage at the iPhone introduction), the mobile app industry (made a huge quality jump from BS Java and Symian apps of the past, and a massively bigger marketplace), and the tablet industry (made tablets from a nerd niche and a tiny market to a huge success, still commands 70%+ of the market).

Also, "Bullying press"? Like doing what? I call BS.

It would be interesting to hear your ideas how somebody staring with a nearly bankrupt company, with 2% market share of the desktop/laptop market "bullies the press" or gets to the most valuable company of earth.

From your comment it seems like it all is some 'saleman trick' or some mass hypnosis...
It places my house 150m out to sea, and puts a rehabilitation centre that doesn't exist at the actual location of my house. In my town, a suburb of Melbourne AU, the Apple product is completely useless.
Yes, yes, yes, this.

And the thing is, Google aren't losing free users or pennies with this crap. I know of one SINGLE case where Google's silly Adsense banning policies lost the Big G 6 figures a year - because they couldn't be bothered to have a human get in touch and just auto-banned. As I've mentioned elsewhere, they've dropped low 5 figures a year by disabling my Adsense account with no clear explanation why.

I really, really cannot see what the business case here is. Can anyone enlighten me?
FWIW, Kickstrap has some crowd already http://ajkochanowicz.github.com/Kickstrap/
Sadly neither of those give me the search results I'm looking for. I've tried several times to use DDG especially but 90% of my searches were followed by searching again with !g.
You asked frontend or backend so I'll give you my answer, but this just comes from my personal experience over the past 10 years as a software developer, nonetheless I think its fairly true for the industry at large and will be for some time to come. The short of it - do backend. Why? Basically, if you know Software Design patterns, Java, C(++), a server side scripting language or two like Ruby or PHP, in tandem with some Frameworks, you can always get a Job - at least in my experience. I've lived and worked on several continents (US, South America, Europe) making software and its always been very easy for me to get a Job (my language skillset is C/C++/Java, Ruby/Jruby, and Javascript). I have collegues and friends that are frontend/UI designers and though they also always tend to be able to find jobs its not as easy because the demand is lower.

To go about learning "backend" I'd say start with c and java. Knowing c will force you to understand how your computer works at a very low level, and java will give you a solid understanding of object orientied programming and software design patterns. Stick with javascript too, because its only getting more important and you can do both Backend and frontend with it - also for someone starting out I think its a really easy language. I wouldn't say learn such and such framework, just read lots of source code and build you own apps, and make sure you're having fun and know you'll always keep learning.

Lots of luck!
Unimpeded? The color choice MADE the sales.
$3 a gallon is what the fuel costs today when it comes straight out of the ground. Claiming to be able to build and run a nuclear reactor and then synthesize the fuel through multiple energy inefficient steps all for the same price is a pipe dream.
Lack of public transit map information is what's keeping me on iOS 5. Not upgrading until I have confidence I can use iOS 6, as public transportation is all I use.
@chiefinstigator, thanks for this backstory and huge respect to the ZURB Foundation team. My only complaint is that I think you could made your point better without digging at Mark.
Follow the highs and lows of 3 startups
And in fact, here is another illustration of just how hard it is to replace conventional energy storage systems with electricity. High pressure steam stores an enormous amount of energy. EMALs effectively uses 4 flywheels as rotational energy stores, suggesting battery / supercap technology just isn't viable. It does have an efficiency advantage over steam though.
This "Enterprise Software" label doesn't make sense at all, anyway.
MIT Scientists attempt Molten Salt Reactor
>The assumption that past discrimination justifies reverse discrimination is a dangerous one, and gives lots of opportunities for those who want to discriminate to justify it to themselves.

The "past discrimination" was mass abductions from their countries, SLAVERY, Jim Crow laws, lynching, segregation, fewer rights and a hugely disproportionate percentage of the black population in prison.

The "reverse discrimination" is ...getting some more jobs or better grades.

Suddenly when it's for the benefit of the other side this 1/1000 less discrimination is "dangerous"?

I think white america can shut up and take it.
Energy scarcity is a fundamental property of technology and economics. Aside from a few countries like France, nuclear power serves a fraction of our electricity needs, and electricity is a fraction of our total energy needs. Where are all these nuclear power plants going to come from? The technology described in the article is a way to transform energy. Not to produce it.
Link to the startup they founded : http://transatomicpower.com/company.php
The Usual Recommended Suspects for alternative ad networks:

- Media.net . Good customer service. They just teamed up with Yahoo to offer contextual ads - this one could be very interesting.

- Lijit. Run by the people behind Federated Media, they're, again, friendly and reasonably easy to work with.

- Skimlinks / Infolinks. Inserts contextual links into your pages. Many people hate this idea, but it does monetise reasonably well.

Of all of these, Media.net is the only one I've heard of equalling Adsense's payouts.

Other options that are a bit more work, but can generate substantially more than Adsense on some sites (advertising and copywriting know-how is kinda vital, though):

- Clickbank: affiliate sales of ebooks. Often sleazy-feeling, but can generate good revenue.

- ShareASale: Affiliate programs for physical products. There are some good, well-respected names running affiliate programs with these guys.

- CPA networks: now we're getting hardcore. Generate cash by feeding leads to MMORPGs, colleges, dating sites, and so on. Well outside the scope of a short comment - mail me if you're interested in this stuff and I can point you to some good resources.
Yeah would it be possible to have a .rar containing some VM instructions (maybe pulling data from a payload within the archive) that would automatically execute upon unzipping?
Hi Matt,
Would be nice if AdSense could go back to the 'old day's - that is, we could speak to an actual Human being, instead of being ignored via canned responses :)

I understand Google having actual Humans responding to their customers/publishers would be tricky due to the scale of things, but the current system seems too impersonal and I hear of these stories all the time? Not everyone has the luxury of being published in the mass media (which seems to be one of the only ways that Google will nowadays change its mind)
The Gary Halbert Letter - Organized and In Order (LINKS)
Comparison of a few build tools
I find it hilarious there is even a debate in these threads about this. I think it's pretty well established the patent system is entirely screwed. Alas very rich people have a good reason to keep it screwed. To stay rich.

The only thing that suffers is inovation. There is also a trending story floating around lately were some one posted a bogas story created by SciGen to a spammy security magazine. Look at the person who filed these patents... TL;DR just skim them... http://www.google.co.uk/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&#...

One would almost think he used the equivalent type script but for patents. HA!
I would use it to render huge fractal images, do interesting and complicated path tracing (ie physically-based raytracing in mantra or luxrender), and explore reaction-diffuson simulations. All assuming, of course, that completeley parallel and compatible code is available for all of these.
Edit: happy to write such code myself too.
Persistent reverse (NAT bypassing) SSH access with autossh
No, now there is unar, FOSS which will work for all rar versions.
The Messages app doesn't work too well at the moment due to a weird way they expose the attributes of the conversation list, but I'll be adding a workaround soon.

I'm hoping this app will cause developers to try to make their apps/sites more accessible now that more people benefit from more accessible UIs.
They are writing it during this weekend, but press release for hackathon was month ago (http://pastebin.com/sKKnRL19) and if I recall correctly he was hinting something about this project month or two before that. So there has been time for planning.

And like Tuna-Fish said, Finnish high school courses are quite limited and self-contained.
>It is not politically correct to say that women are riskier hires than men. But given biology and current culture, women of child-bearing age clearly are riskier hires. Women have non-trivial odds of getting pregnant, sometimes unexpectedly. In the event of pregnancy, moms usually require more time off than fathers, and are more likely to never return to their jobs.

Then the people should make sure that such businesses are PUNISHED, and women are free to take time of for pregnancy.

The way to ruin a society is to stifle it's reproduction. As for the business risk, it should be an _assumed_ risk of all businesses if they want to operate within a society of people.
I agree. Add too much salt to the food and people will say that you've ruined it. Some people won't notice it because they are less sensitive or for other reasons but the food, for some, is ruined.

This happens a lot with the software development where one simple bug in your application makes the user say that "it doesn't work". We, as developers, tend to get mad when all our work is deemed unfunctional because of a simple error but we usually don't see that it is a "simple error" only from our perspective.
Also the 5% isn't evenly distributed. So for some people the 5% is going to look like 20% while for others it looks like 1%
So having fun means nothing?
Can anyone explain the business case for Adsense's no-contact banning policies?
So, there's a lot of noise around Adsense account bans or suspensions right now, not least from me, and it's got me wondering.

Google are smart people. There must be a reason they're doing what they're doing.

But what they're doing is dropping 4, 5 and 6-figure sources of income, in their hundreds if not thousands, rather than send a single email.

As I said elsewhere, I speak from experience here. Adsense was disabled on my own site - which does about 600k page impressions a month - in late August, for some very vague reasons. I received a single email which copy-pasted a large section of the Adsense ToS, and that was it - ads disabled. No indication of what ad was breaking the rules, or even what rules I was breaking. No personal contact.

How on earth can a business justify dropping $10k+ a year in revenue without even making an hour's attempt to fix the problem? I know Google staff are highly paid, but I'm assuming most of them aren't on more than $10k ph!

Given this is far from a limited phenomenon, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Google have lost 7 figures - maybe even 8 figures - of revenue over the last few years by not being willing to have anyone get in touch with website owners.

I'm genuinely interested. What on earth would justify this as a business practice? How do you possibly make the case that it's not worth thousands of dollars to have someone send an email?

There must be some thinking here - I just can't figure out what it is.
Very belated 2nd point: No tantrums.

Yeah, Google, Marissa left. Get over it. Stop with the petulant feature gutting. Who are you trying to impress?
Indeed, Qt is a great C++ API, although its design style is quite different from STL, boost and friends.

In particular, Qt is a very good example of a well-designed exception-free API. That is, it doesn't make any use of exceptions, and yet you don't have to check for error code after each low-level operation.

For almost every class, Qr provides sensible "null-like" objects, i.e. they don't simply return stuff like NULL pointers, or JavaScript-like "null" objects that crash a bit later (when you try to access properties). You just get an object that behaves sane to the most possible extent, so mostly it simply doesn't matter to your code that some operation returned a null-like object. And in those rare cases where it does, you usually have to check later, and only once, in your code. You don't have to check after every single step.

This is quite hard to describe, but I think that sensible null-like objects make it possible to combine all advantages you usually get from using exceptions, without the disadvantages that arise from disrupting your control flow (which would make it harder for you to reason about your code and to ensure proper cleanup after each operation).

All in all, the Qt API taught me a lot about design concepts you usually don't find in other APIs.
In what way? Everything is speculation until we actually find some evidence for life. I don't understand how it helps that we prove that there were flowing rivers for example.
Interesting bug that I was just running up against which might be related. I was trying to draw some text in a small box, but, while it worked in all other browsers, Chrome 22 was adding what appeared to be extra line height for no reason. The code looked roughly like:

<div><span>TEST</span></div>

div > span {
line-height: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
font-size: 12px;
display: block;
height: 12px;
}

Yet the text was being drawn dramatically outside of the box!

Turns out that this only happens in Chrome 22 when it's inside a list with list-style-type: disc.
What? 10 years until battery technology has advanced to the point of parity?

Gasoline has an energy density of 132 MJ/US gal, or say 1500 MJ on a full small tank. Modern engines hit 30% thermal efficiency, but then there are drive train losses etc, so I'll give you the 15% as an absolute worst case, AND give you a 100% efficient electric motor / drive train. Therefore your car needs to provide 225 MJ of stored energy for parity.

The best commercially-available Li-ion battery has an energy density of around 245 Wh/kg, or ~ 880 kJ/kg. Therefore you need at least 255kg of conventional batteries for motive energy parity (ie. not counting heat/AC/light etc.). The equivalent in gasoline (0.77 kg/l), weighs 35 kg.

You are asking for nearly a ten-fold increase in usable energy density in battery technology in ten years, at price-parity with gasoline, and with the charging infrastructure to support it. I don't think it's going to happen - assuming lithium-air batteries ARE commercialised on that time scale, the cost of charging that kind of energy in reasonable time, safely, is going to be the real problem here. Every gas station is going to need its own nuclear power plant!
"I can get my feet wet with parallel processing on a multi-core PC just fine"

No, you can't, unless you pay severals orders of magnitude more than $99. (Affordable)Multi core today means 2,4 cores at most . You can get your feet wet with the graphics card though. I did, and this is the reason I'm backing this project.

Parallel computing is a different paradigm that serial, in fact is almost the opposite, instead of a big central memory you program for small distributed blocks of memory. Taking this into account means x200 faster than just not.

Once you have a parallel design you can change it for different platforms or even hardware.(witch is parallel by nature), very easy. But you need a platform that is flexible(more than FPGAs) and near to software tools enough for testing and this is great.
> I wonder if torrent seeders have exploited this to spread malware/bots....

Seeders cannot modify the content of the files they're seeding. Torrent client checks hashes for each chunk of data it downloads.

Only the original uploader could do that and there's regular reputation system at play there. There are known uploaders, known scene groups, etc.

Plus, most torrents, with the exception of applications where you can just modify the installer, don't contain compressed archives.
No, it should be something which is written over decades, like the Linux kernal.

But a good open-source core will be a nice starting point.
this leaves the space open for anyone who wants to start a different type of game-hackathon.