skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree - and given the locality (i.e. there is someone using heat/hotwater right there), it would make sense to use it as soon as possible.

If you didn't have locality, the water heater approach probably make more sense -- i.e. Your washing machine, dishwasher, which tend to hold on to hot water and then dump it at the end of the cycle.
there is a similar idea for high insulation homes where you heat exchange the outgoing air (recirculated for freshness) with the incoming air to avoid having to cool/heat the incoming air as much

imo, heat exchangers are a good way to reduce consumption because they're usually passive and don't require much maintenance
Still, the writing is horrible.
You know the sum of the weights.
Sample a random number between 0 and sum.
Then, use this value to guide your search in the tree.
For example, if the left branch has weight 30 and the right branch has weight 50, the total weight is 80.
If I pick 40, then I am going down the right branch.

At the next child, if the left branch has weight 12 and the right branch has weight 38, the left branch spans 30-42 and the right branch spans 42-80. So you follow the left branch, because you want 40.
The one that's always confused me is having a Fridge in a cold climate.

Always wondered if there was a technology that could simply couple the fridge to the outside temperature.
Nginx resources
Cool :)

Forgot to also mention CPU usage is negligable. Memory can be a challenge with Java, but often solved by reducing object churn, tidying up better etc. The java.nio package really is pretty awesome.
I agree. And this course probably is a lot better than the course I got (C++, ugh). That may be the reason I'm biased...
See pg's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528924

"The root of the problem is that people think seed funding is regional. They think they're starting the YC of St. Louis, or wherever. Then after they get started they realize that in fact the seed firms are all drawing on the same national applicant pool, and that the default fate of the nth seed firm is not to be the YC of St. Louis, as they'd expected, but to be the YC of the nth quality bucket."

Not that I know anything about this venture yet, but the regional-centric commentary immediately made me think of this comment.

Edit: Seems Michael Arrington concurs:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/atlanta-gets-its-own-y-...
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43793
Basically, yes - branches are chosen with probabilities proportional to their weights, but you can achieve that with just one random float.

Just pick a random x from [0, sum of weights in the tree], then find a node n, such that sum of weights S to the left of n is no more than x and S+weight(n)>=x.
Load Balancing for Developers - The Gotchas
It's time for seat-based software licensing to end
I think Shotput is happy to draw entrepreneurs from all over the US, and this is good for our region.

In general, Shotput is important because there is almost 'no such thing' as seed funding in the southeast. A typical comment at an entrepreneur's round table here would be, "get to $1 million revenue, then someone will fund you." So this is important for the growing startup ecosystem in our region.
I like the last line "For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."

"If in doubt, run." is good advice in most any situation.
I agree with jz about how to choose _what_ to learn, and I agree that actually implementing some useful tool keeps motivation high. The next step that I do is learn the basics and start accumulating questions that aren't solved readily in the books or by reviewing the documentation. Then I find an expert and buy that person a beer to discuss the problems that I have on a semi-regular basis. Finally, I attempt to teach and share what I have learned to others. This final step really cements the understanding of the new skill. Expertise comes from repeating the steps above over and over for ten years or so (according to many scientists). Sometimes I hire a teacher depending on the amount of background knowledge I have in the new skill. For example, when learning a new programming language I would skip a teacher, but learning to golf would require a teacher for my personal skillsets.
Social networking sites: do not pry, says online community
I wouldn't venture to disagree - comment was mostly based on the spin of the article.
Does Shotput Ventures use the "exploding term sheet" we were warned about?
Still O(n).
I'm a bit puzzled by these attempts at simulating the brain. I work in neuroscience, but very far from this field so I'm most probably at the worse point of the (estimated knowledge / actual knowledge) graph on this topic. The people working on these projects are incredibly smart, and are certainly aware of the following caveats, since they've been thinking about it for years. I'm actually posting this comment hoping that someone will jump in to prove me wrong.

This looks like a cargo cult to me.

Not "cargo-cult science" as denounced by Feynman where some nutjobs tried to make telepathy or astrology look scientific. This is real, serious work, with a sound methodological grounding.

I'm afraid that they are actually building a "cargo-cult" brain, because they actually are at the wrong spot of the aforementioned graph too. Think of AI in the 70's. AFAIK, we know far too little and the field is still too fragmented to build a reasonable model of the meso- and macroscopic structure-function of the brain (I'm actually unable to tell where one start and the other ends, assuming the distinction between both concepts isn't a false dichotomy).

You cannot emulate a brain out of the box. You have to simluate the whole embryologic developmental process (which is half directed (mostly at the population scale), half random (at the microscale), but it's actually more complicated) before you can start to educate it, assuming you built something functional. Once again, we know, at the same time, a lot and close to nothing about these development.

Brain simulation could be, oh the irony, a good target for genetic programming/engineering :-).
I view all these "regional" YC knock offs as just early stage angels.
The most surprising thing about this is that it wasn't already banned.
"Smallest, lowest-power" ARM core debuts
This does exist. For industrial applications, there's http://www.freeaire.com/. There are also small fans designed for use with RV fridges that could do the same thing.

Unfortunately, in a cold climate, you need to heat your house anyway. Electric heat is more expensive than natural gas or oil heat, so you might save some money, but from a greenhouse gas perspective, the savings are small at best.
Oh.

People who know NOTHING about Science fall squarely in the "warmists" camp. The "nutcases", "tribal", or "primitives", eh?

Certainly your own biases, politics, and ideology aren't apparent from your prose, right?

Plenty of good scientists besides Freeman Dyson (one of my own personal heroes) have looked at the good science on the issue, and have concluded man's activities are causing harm.
AT&T first to test RIAA antipiracy plan
Last.fm puts pay wall around streams; except in US, UK, Germany
I did a cursory visual check on:
http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

And didn't see it here:
http://searchyc.com/submissions/aig?sort=by_date

Is there a better way to check if something has already been submitted?
Silicon Valley's bright young things [video]
It's a personal style issue. I read a lot of introductory/survey articles to keep up with what's out there, and HN is a good starting place. Sometimes I do a literature search to see what the academics are doing. I even buy a book every few weeks to did in deeper. But that's not really Learning (big L) it's more like cramming or recreational reading.

To really Learn, you need to build something, not just do the tutorials. Scratch your own itch, Eat your own dog food. Build a web site for your SO. (That gets you an instant critic that you have to prove your creds to. HN will forget you in a day. S/he wont.)
They accept applications till April 10 [1], so the answer is no.

[1] http://www.shotputventures.com/program-timeline-2
My Leaning Bookshelf - 18 Books That Are Influencing My Lean Learning Path
I attended their open house, and I didn't get the impression they are just early stage angels, although if thats all they are that would still be great, because there are very few of those here. Many in the investment community in the southeast have been openly hostile towards the need for more early stage capital, let alone willing to fund seed stage companies.

Anyway, my impression from talking with the Shotput guys was that there was a lot of value add they were providing. I would suggest actually contacting them if you are interested, as I think you'll be surprised and impressed. Most of these guys are active advocates for our region's startups and do everything they can to mentor and open doors.
I've had success with google and site news.ycombinator.com
OK, I attributed the quote to the wrong philosopher ;-)

Science is not perfect. After all, Science is a human activity and humans are not perfect. Ideally, there should be no place for dogma in Science. In practise, there is some. Still, let us put things in perspective: Science is inherently non-dogmatic, while Religion is inherently dogmatic. I am not diminishing one nor the other. I am observing that they have entirely different essences and domains.

The goal of Science is not to attain an "absolute truth". Indeed, one may study Quantum Mechanics for a lifetime and still feel uneasy about it. But the truth is that just as long as we can explain experimental results and observations with our scientific theories, we are making progress. No scientist will ever know everything about his field, but that does not mean he can't contribute to it.

For centuries Newtonian Mechanics dominated. Then Einstein came up with his Theory of Relativity that could explain, for instance, the anomalous orbit of Mercury. In a few years, his theory was accepted. There was dogma, but it was not a big obstacle. By contrast, many religious fanatics in the U.S. in the 1960s still believed the Earth was flat, and when confronted with photos taken from Space they replied "OK, it looks a bit roundish at the edges." That is dogma. That is close-mindedness. It's not Religion's fault, it's a problem with us, humans (like you mentioned).

In Science one should always keep a fresh mind and be willing to accept what goes against the dogma. Otherwise, we will end up in a new dark age where we have advanced technology but no true knowledge.
It is disappointing to see Michael Arrington in the comments dumping on the article and the program.
How to start your own TEDx
"Interesting how so many people who know NOTHING about Science are SO sure that global warming is caused by man. Such dogma reminds me of the times of the 16th century Inquisition: no amount of evidence will ever convince the nutcase warmists that there MIGHT be a possibility that global warming is not caused by humans."

I'm calling your BS. There are very few if any people who believe that it is impossible that global warming is not caused by man. I don't think I've ever heard that view expressed in the media, even once.
I personally feel that it is better to err on the side of caution in regards to global warming. I say "feel" because I'm just not smart enough to navigate fact from fiction on this issue anymore. There's going to be extremes on both sides, but I don't see what we have to gain by not taking better care of our planet.

Even if global warming is only partially manmade, shouldn't we do what we can to minimize the effect? And plain old pollution is a visible problem regardless of warming effects; it's now in our food and water supply.

That is how I see this issue. Hope that is a reasonable approach considering all the FUD out there. I don't see how society is harmed by erring on the side of caution on this one.
You jump to conclusion too fast before reading the article. If you read it, you will know Dyson doesn't deny that human being's activities create the current global warming. But he doubts the consequences are as dire as what activists describe in their propaganda.
CS171 - Data Visualization at Harvard
> From my point in view, encouraging scientists to be socially/politically active is a good thing (what's the alternative?)

Maybe thinking scientifically?
Latency and bandwidth are fundamentally distinct. In particular, if all the players in a game are on the same OnLive server, then there's no synchronization issue between systems as there usually is, only a latency issue from the renderer to your screen.
Eat less. I've also heard it's good for your health to eat less if you can.

One of the common themes I hear from people who come to the US from overseas is that food portions are quite large here.
I don't think we have a disagreement.

My point was about human nature, not about religion.

I really wish Kuhn was taught as much as Newton. I think what he discovered -- the human nature of the people who practice science and how it influences the study of science -- is just as important. Maybe more so.
Seat-based licensing allows enterprise software companies to value-price; they can sell to a 50 person law firm for a low amount, without giving away the store to a 5000 person enterprise. The alternatives are to forgo the smaller companies and market exclusively to BigCo's, or to leave huge amounts of money on the table.

This person's problem isn't with seat-based licensing. It's with license enforcement. No license enforcement scheme is good. They all suck, no matter how simple the pricing model.

A reasonable response to this complaint is, maintain seat-based pricing, but don't do "hard" enforcement; just alert the product admin that they need to update their licensing, and make it extremely easy for them to do that. Have a maintenance and support process that checkpoints licensing compliance, so that customers can run the product indefinitely without complying, but will be forced to confront licensing when they call for support or try to upgrade the software.
"People who know NOTHING about Science fall squarely in the "warmists" camp. The "nutcases", "tribal", or "primitives", eh?"

No. You didn't get the point. Sorry for not making it explicit. The point is: people who are not trained in Science (Climate Modeling in particular, Physics in general) are not qualified to speak on the topic. Their opinions count for nothing because those are based on emotion, misinformation, ideology, or plain dogma. In the old days, people seemed to know the boundaries of their knowledge, now everybody who has internet access believes he / she is an instant expert.
[Heck, go open source and offer a hosted solution.]

I have it from a good friend who sells software built on Open Source to PHB's, that it's really hard to have them look at open source seriously. There is still too much of the "No body got fired for buying IBM" attitude.
I agree that some kind of anxiety is often (don't want to say "always") near to those who are said to be "rabid thinker". But is depression what I should think of a "natural side effect" of being such a man? If so, my would-be future (yeah, I want to be "rabid thinker"!) is going to be full of depressions :/

What I beleive is that any depression has a cause which can be (and should be) eliminated if you are going to be happy. If you really know what the problem is, you probably know what to do with this (it's harder when there are so many problems that it becomes impossible to find out the one-and-only root of all evil).

It may seem as if I'm trying to say that depressions are unusual. Not really, I think that is a stage which should be overstepped (but what if there are some such stages?)
In what may be heresy here on HN I am going to partially disagree with PG. Regional YCs may indeed be of the nth quality bucket, but that does not necessarily doom them to failure anymore then not attending Stanford or MIT dooms a hacker to failure.

The proof as they say is in the pudding. TechStars seems to be doing just fine so far. Let's see what Shotput's births before we call their babies ugly.
Well, since when is the media reliable? They also said Iraq had WMDs. Read some scientific papers. Seriously.
It's pretty politically tone-deaf to call for relaxing SEC rule 501 in the wake of the Madoff and Sandford scandals.
4 hot-swap servers in 2U
There may be truth to this, however, I think the roles of the seed funding companies remains to be seen. The Philly venture for example seems to be different in that it pairs roles to create companies. I don't think this makes sense for our team, but the Philly venture may be right for someone.

It would be hugely beneficial to have a website where people sign up and indicate when and where they've applied (after the fact), maybe even indicate their beta site if it is available. Not only would we be able to see the breadth of applicants but also the history and results.
I personally feel it will be futile to be cautious. Instead, we should always prepare for adapting to changes.
Does making development non-trivial (e.g., iphone apps) result in fewer but better apps?
Also, perhaps this is why people make money on these iphone apps? There's definitely a non-trivial barrier to entry.

If all of this is true, then what incentive does a company have for improving its SDK in a way other than adding new APIs?
Big changes ahead for enterprise software licensing
Ask HN: state of the art in source code visualization
I am interested in:

"Given a large source code (say in C), how can I most efficiently figure out how it works?" The best I have so far is emacs/vim + gdb, which has been around for > 1 decade.

Intutively, it seems like there should be tools that can help me better visualizae what's going on inside the code.

The closest I can think of is: doxygen that can generate pretty graphs using AT&T's dot for function call graphs; ... but I hope something more can be done.

[Slightly OT: when I first came across Valgrind, it changed the way I debugged memory errors because it can pinpoint to me exactly the line number and the stack state when I wrote to unallocated space or read in an uninitialized value]

I'm hoping to find a similar tool for understanding large source code bases.
Its interesting how the article completely ignores the issue of incentives with respect to coaching. In reality, isnt uncoachability a result of lack of incentives and perception of self benefits? Paradoxically doesnt that just indicate an ineffective coach or coaching methods?
We submitted on Monday with a simple photo booth video made in a cafe. It was just of us talking about the project and ourselves. Took us about 20 minutes from start to finish - may as well do it!
In business, war, governance, love, and the climate, people are forced to make decisions based on sorely incomplete data because time is of the essence, and it is all they're ever going to get. If likely exaggeration is to be called out, so too are those who assert that doubt should necessarily imply inaction.
I wonder if this video will be used to identify founders who would look good in a TV interview... and so enhance their chances of getting funding from VCs, especially early on.
Having gone to the article hoping for details on why Dyson disbelieves global warming, I'm disappointed like you. On reflection, I think the author intended the article to be about Dyson himself, and as such, I kind of like the writing. But, yeah, I'm disappointed about the lack of details.
Well, I think good scientists are always looking for facts that disapprove current theories and models of explanations.

There is no affirmative for theories and models, but our inability to falsify them for the time being.
I remember staying in a Youth Hostel in Scotland in cold weather, and people keeping their cartons of milk on the outside windowsill 'in' the kitchen. (Presumably there was no fridge.)

The point being: if you are in a cold climate, you can just keep food outside (suitably protected, etc., etc.).
I've been gaming a lot lately on my iPod Touch (1st Gen, 8GB) and I give it about one more year before the DS and PSP can't hold a candle to this thing. The hardware is better the GUI is better and the feature set is better. It's just a matter of waiting for the gaming library to catch up and it's gaining ground fast.
"I don't see how society is harmed by erring on the side of caution"

Let me try to help you see then.

Even though it's extremely important that you prevent tooth decay, and even if you have a huge chunk of "Jolly Rancher" stuck between your teeth, it would be a non-optimal use of resources to use your last match as you were shivering on the side of a mountain with a broken leg, to dislodge the offending piece of candy.

I'm sure you'll agree with this, in this extreme case. But what you are missing, is that humans have a limited supply of productivity that we use to feed and house the populations of our respective countries, and hopefully, to build infrastructure for the next generation to feed and house their populations. When you siphon off that productivity to dislodge a piece of candy, you better be damn sure the candy is going to harm you. In the case of the warmists, since you are literally stealing food and medicine from people's mouths with your demands of what is necessary, you better be damn certain you're right.
Check out some of my research on this topic.
Some people investigate stuff like that, and hold on to the answer for a long time.

For this one, I guess you'd start by narrowing it down. The number must have the start-end pair of 1,2; 2,4; 3,6; or 4,8. That narrows it down to 4E16. Then you can narrow it down further by looking at what other digit-pairs are possible. You might assume it has a palindrome in the middle, but that digits near the end are not palindroms (e.g. it could have ...1001..., but couldn't be 101....102).

At some point, you might have enough simple rules like that to just use a computer.

Edit: I'm also interested in exactly how he figured it out, though.
That's a great idea. Modern gas boilers and tankless water heaters often run their exhaust and intake in concentric pipes, so that the outgoing hot air warms the incoming cold air.
There's a number. For example, trying to prevent developing countries from using coal/oil etc That's harming to those countries.

Also it's an absolute ton of money to spend on something that hasn't been proven.

I'm of the opinion that it's unlikely we are to blame, we should obviously as always try to use less energy, and we should spend money on more important causes.
... And if it's anything at all like a brain, it'll be quite bizarre.

I really recommend this book - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks ( http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949 ) to change opinions of brains and people.
So even Dyson says there is man-made warming, but still people who believe in man-made warming are ignorant, stubborn nutcases who have no understanding of science? This is getting a bit confusing...
Discussion: Credit Default Swaps
We did the same thing too. We use photo booth to make a real short video intros.
Object sharing is fun Using stream algos and refcounting to improve Redis memory usage
At times like this I really wish there was no downvote button on HN. I might try to guess what the guy who downmodded you thought (that even non-specialists have the right to express their opinions? that lobbying is a legitimate activity?) but after all I'm left to guessing. Because in a vast majority of cases, people who downmod don't explain why. It's like throwing a rock through the window and running.