skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tesla doesn't depend on the whole solar economy to be successful. It mostly depends on its own solar-based superchargers, and those have nothing to do with the health of the solar economy. Whether solar energy will be 50% of US energy production, or just stay at 5%, it will be irrelevant for Tesla cars, as they will still get free charging from its own solar superchargers.
Groupon having a sound business model is completely debatable, though.

When your business model requires that your suppliers provide you with goods and services at a nearly ~75% off their typical retail value, so that you may sell it at ~50% of the typical retail value, and you must amass ~10,000 employees to perpetually hunt down supply inventory, the soundness and sustainability can be easily questioned.
This is already true for most people in the modern world.
Great article, and it's nice to know there are more choices for package management on the Mac.

But, sadly:

Install Xcode from the Mac App Store...

This is the main reason why I've stopped using OS X and am installing Linux on the Macs I use personally. I know it's free and I have an Apple ID, but it really bothers me that Xcode is no longer included with the OS and is unavailable as an anonymous download.
I read his usage of "fuck/ing" as a literary style considering the context and name of the repo. If the amount of swearing here was from commit messages in an unrelated project, then yes, that would be excessive and the author should invest in a thesaurus.

An aside: why do you use "f-bomb" instead of "fuck" when talking about "fuck"? It's not like we don't automatically fill it in when we hear it. See Louis CK's rant about this (nsfw language): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
>Not on sale: computer generated t shirt advocating rape.

Assuming this is a computer generated t-shirt as you and OP suggest, how can anyone be certain that the shirt refers to rape as in forced intercourse?

More often than not when I hear someone use the word rape, they are not talking about forced intercourse. Rather they are using the word rape as a synonym for "debellatio", having nothing to do with a sex.

Examples:

1. I just took my final exam and I raped it.

2. Did you see the superbowl? SF was getting raped until the second half, then they made it a good game.

If the rape t-shirt was not made by a human, but an algorithm, can anyone say for certain that the algorithm intended to mean rape as in forced intercourse or rape as in debellatio or any other definition whether it comes from urbandictionary or Websters?
"since the history of AI" <-- lol. This could be said about any recent technology with a short history.... electronics in your pocket, for example
Google glasses to find things in the real world
The primary strength of google has been search. How about using google glasses for finding physical things in the real world. "Tell me where I kept my red shirt?", "Where is the my Algorithms book?", "Where did I keep my phone charger", "Let me look for a pen to note down ... ah i can't find it", "Ah its raining can't find my umbrella. Google do you remember where you saw it last?" ... sounds familiar.

Google could potentially index my room and help me find some things. Sounds futuristic but doable nevertheless. Automatic face recognition is an obvious thing to come. But I can save hours of my time if my physical world was also indexed. This idea did not strike me when the #ifihadglass competition was still running. May be someone already posted something similar. May be google is secretly working this idea. They could also be patenting it.
Thoughts?
The Mac OS X.4 PBE would display the estimated boot time on startup; I thought it was using sophisticated logic, but was later told that it just averaged the last, say, 10 boot times (which is probably at least as reliable). I seem to remember that you could even execute `/usr/bin/loginwindow` (or some such path) from the command line and watch it pretend to boot at any time. I forget when this 'feature' went—maybe as early as Leopard?—but it's not in Mountain Lion.
I understand the point your making, and I don't disagree with you, but let's say I'm skeptical of Google's ability to do anything other than help my find my porn more easily. AI has just been such a miserable failure for decades. Indeed, Google's big advancement came from incorporating human intelligence (encoding in the graph of links between pages) into the search process! I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but rather that it's like manned missions to mars. Always just 20 years away...

As an aside, being a rural doctor is amazing. They're in very short supply, and therefore the salaries are correspondingly quite high.
In France using VLC to watch a DVD is illegal too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DADVSI
http://www.videolan.org/press/eucd.html
> The most effective attacks are ones that exploit human patterns such as leet replacements...

I think you missed my first paragraph, where I made that point:

"Normals" are using their name with a 3 instead of an E, or some word with a 1 on the end. This tends to put them in rainbow tables _or_easy_attacks_.

Also, my example passphrase that I was annoyed Evernote wouldn't let me us isn't log2(2048^4), but ~ log2(5000^8) even assuming you know it is words.

This thread is getting of on the tangent of debating XKCD's particular formula. XKCD is not the point.

My original post asked Evernote Team to please grok the idea of that cartoon, which it's obvious they had not given their clearly wrong tips and rejection of a very strong password and acceptance of one of the weakest.
"“I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention.”

Or maybe they were paying attention to the WRONG people.. such as.. oh say, HR and corporate spokespeople in Groupon who want you to believe Groupon is on the rise and will be a great company to work for!

Seriously, that statement is such an insult. Sounds like someone who can't admit he's wrong, by saying "Well duh! Didn't you knew this was gonna happen" to save face, rather than "Ok, I made a mistake by doing X, Y, Z"
This isn't about "oversensitivity", it's about normalizing rape. There is evidence that actual rapists very often believe that most men either commit rape or want to commit rape: that they aren't all that different than the other guys they know (except that they had the guts to actually do it and/or that they got caught).

In other words, yeah, 95% of guys who hear you joking about rape know that you're obviously just joking. But it turns out that there's one guy who doesn't: he thinks you and the guys who laugh are giving him a quiet nod of support. And you don't know which one he is.
We have a Python course ready to go for the kids that graduate from the Scratch class. We just need a couple more teachers.
The alternate, hand-wavy argument that comes to the opposite conclusion is this: The Earth gets 10^17 Watts from the sun. This power is at it's most diffuse when it initially strikes the Earth as sunlight. After initially striking the Earth, this power transferred into the air, ocean, and land in complicated ways that result in very strong concentrations in some areas (e.g. high winds). Intuitively, it should be easiest and cheapest to go to those places and harvest the energy where it is dense, rather than where it is diffuse. After all, we are not anywhere near tapping into the total energy flux from the sun. It's not a matter of efficiency (sun's ray/usable power) as much as cost. Much better to go and harvest at a place where the energy is 10 times denser than sunlight, even if there were all sorts of losses along the way.
When I ordered my Tesla S I also needed to get a 240V charger installed in my garage. Tesla sends you over to SolarCity for that and they can install it for you. This also gives them the perfect opportunity to offer you solar panels as well since they can show you, based on your electricity bill and the number of miles you are going to drive, how much it is going to save you.

Long story short, bought a Tesla S from Tesla, a outlet installation from SolarCity and now have also signed up for 8.8Kw solar panel system for my house.

The vertical integration of his investments is awesome. I just hope he somehow integrates in SpaceX ... maybe solar microwave power from orbit?
We have, indeed.

I never expected them to completely rebuild their service because of some customers (very small minority, I assume) aren't totally happy and satisfied with their product. That clearly sucks for the affected people.

It's reason for them to leave the product and platform and go somewhere else, where the problem is not an integral part of the produt. But it's not a reason to be a dick.
AI peaked and declined when most people here were small children.
Multi-Device C++ is used everywhere on planet Earth and beyond
Using the html 5 video player sucks pretty bad in my experience (coursera).
> And 5 is a non-solution given that simply adding more lines of execution does not address the root problem.

Actually more threads of execution does solve the problem. The difference with just doubling the number of dynos is that on a single dyno requests can be routed intelligently. The reason why random routing sucks is that request processing times have a fat tailed distribution: there is a small but still significant chance that a request takes really long. If you have that request routed to a random single threaded dyno, then all further requests routed to that dyno have to wait very long before they can be processed. If however you had multiple threads of execution on the dyno, the other requests would simply go to the other thread of execution. So now there would only be blocking if a single dyno gets N really long requests at roughly the same time, where N is the number of concurrent threads the dyno is running. The probability of getting N expensive requests to the same dyno at approximately the same time decreases very fast with increasing N.

Hand waving ahead! Lets say the probability of an expensive request blocking a dyno is p = 2%. Then if you double the number of dynos the probability of blocking a dyno is now p/2 = 1%. If however you have two execution threads on each dyno, the probability of blocking a dyno is now p^2 = 0.01%. If you have 10 execution threads it is p^10 which is very small indeed.

Here is a paper about it which makes that intuition precise and shows that even N=2 is a massive improvement over N=1: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook20...

The problem is that this only works if each concurrent process of your application doesn't use too much memory, since the available memory on one dyno is quite low. For many applications you can't easily have multiple threads of execution on one dyno. The real solution is to have some form of intelligent routing. As the hand waving and the paper above shows, you can make groups of dynos, and then the main router routes to a random group, and within each group requests are routed intelligently. You can take the size of a group to be a small constant, say 10 dynos. So there shouldn't be any scalability problems with this routing approach. If you take the group size small enough, you could even run each group of dynos on a single physical machine, which would make intelligent routing among them even simpler.
I believe I remember him pointing out, of all the things that need energy on earth, most of them use the sun as their source either directly or indirectly. Plants are obvious, and animals rely on plants. While products of evolution aren't perfect, they can often be a useful guide.
Having just spent an evening trying to sort a strange video issue which turned out to be an intermittent issue with a component cable, the thought of this isn't nice.
Yeah from my understanding everyone was on rations in Europe and the civillians got the short end as far as quantity and quality goes. That is a good point though, I wonder if the lack of food was due to long supplie lines and a decrease in production in the US or if it just wasn't prioritized high enough.
I guess I'm naive then to assume PayPal is being hurt by Stripe and bad press.

We'll see PayPal is doing in 5 years. ;-)
In my state (Indiana) they are not even licensed. Other places where they do adhere to the law, they are a money transmitter. In Indiana, that only allows money holding up to 10 days, unless law enforcement files paperwork with a judge.

So yeah. I will use them. But if I have any problems with them, I'll take them to small claims over non-compliance with the law.
a) Does it matter what the "intent" was, if the result is very offensive and advocates rape? Edit: Intent matters, but knowing the computer meant something else doesn't change the meaning of this item for a lot of people.

b) Your examples are offensive, and I don't appreciate people who carelessly use the word "rape" like that. You might think it's OK in some twisted way, but it's probably worse than calling random things "gay" even though they have nothing to do with homosexuality.
It's probably not that easy getting through the big tip inbox of such papers. Especially if you are not identifying yourself as a high-level official.
In addition, there is supply and demand at play. If the free handout money suddenly dried up, some schools might cut back on the 50,000 square root gyms and renovating every other building every year, but they would still need to fill their classrooms and empty seats is just wasted opportunity for them.

The prices would drop. Less people would be able to get in college, absolutely, but those people are the ones most likely to graduated with 50k+ in debt they can't fathomably pay off, especially when they get degrees outside STEM.

The only downside I see is that right now, there is a strong sense of scholarly meritocracy going into the college system because, since usually it is just trading loans for grants and scholarships, you get the peak number of people applying - if some people are locked out for financial reasons, and they can't get the scholarships to fund an entire education, they just end up never going, even if they have great potential and discipline.

But in the end, college is a rigged market, just like telecom, oil, banking, etc are right now. There is a billion dollar industry invested in keeping the status quo in check, and any changes to stafford loan policies inherently have to come from the federal level due to their nature, and those are the most easily bought politicians of them all. I don't see the situation changing any time soon for that reason.
Here's the copy on the transcribers blog http://www.alexaobrien.com/secondsight/wikileaks/bradley_man...
I will probably continue to buy laptops with touchpads and mostly use them with a mouse.

I wouldn't want a laptop without a touchpad, that doesn't mean I want to use the touchpad most of the time.

I also hope that a touchscreen is a cheap or universal feature next time I make a purchase, because why not.
Yeah, I've been reading about clojure's performance a bit today -- the slow JVM startup is mentioned a bunch. I've been reading that it's not always trivial to get clojure to perform on par with java itself.

From a web application background, are performance gains seen because of clojure's concurrency?
You just blew my goddamn mind.

He's thinking so long term, he's planning to corner the market on space-based solar after he's converted the world to run on electric power.
The cheapest 2013 Model S is $60K. The price was raised last year. This works out to be 5% inflation per year since 2006--however, at this point I suspect the fatter margin on the pricier models are subsidizing this $60K version.

The price of a Roadster was $109K when introduced in 2008.
> pkgsrc has several advantages over other Mac-specific package managers like MacPorts or Homebrew, especially in regards to security.

I'd love to hear a bit more about what those advantages are. Other than portability (which isn't a concern for me, since 99.9% of the non-OS X flavors of Unix I use have apt), the only argument the author gives for pkgsrc over something like Homebrew is that it has "important security features". Furthermore, its setup and use looks a fair bit more complex than Homebrew, making it seem less appealing without having the context the author clearly does.

I enjoyed the article, and think it's awesome to know that alternatives to MacPorts/Brew exist, but I'm much more interested in the promised follow-up article about the actual security features of pkgsrc and what makes it worth installing.
Well as awesome as this is. . . I think it'd be great if someone can clarify why would you use it instead of Lua?

On a side note: If this is as good as it sounds I think I might be in love with it as much as Lua. :D
Yup. Working on that... also need to update WebGL Globe so you don't have to :)
It doesn't hurt that (at least for me) the ONLY reason I went to college was for the degree saying CS. I had been programming for years, wrote some WoW addons, and was bored out of my mind for 3 years straight taking lectures on things I could have easily read in textbooks or even off wikipedia. But the number of job opportunities when you have BS of CS on your resume are just orders of magnitude larger.

That is colossally stupid. We need a better way to certify people for things than wasting years and tens of thousands of their dollars on this nonsense.
The indexes, though, both benefit (locality) and suffer from (lock contention) such random identifiers.

That having been said, many data sets work with UUID just fine and the fact that such sets are easier to catenate and compare is very convenient.

Unless you actually need some sequential semantics to your records or are redlining a system where the locality of the index really helps, I prefer the non-coordinated assignment of IDs overall, as pvh points out in his slides.

Also, as other posters mention, uuid has sequential forms that can obviate some of this and reduce it to a 128-bit number...but the common form of a good-quality random one is really quite good enough until the indexes really start to get quite big, and this path is most useful if one remains disinterested in partitioning, which may be ill advised. Having to renumber (aka 'renaming', a form of one of the "two hard problems" in computer science...) everything is a big barrier to partitioning, so if one can afford to avoid renumbering, I think avoiding it is a good idea.
A decade ago, I was posting on web forums looking exactly like HN on a 1.9 GHz P4 laptop. My laptop has gotten smaller since then, and my cell phone faster, but the world doesn't look that different.
Auto Transport Davenport, Iowa – Shipanycar
The difference between DSL and API is the difference between language and library. What is that difference? Has it ever been successfully defined?
One issue with my upbringing is that my parents told me to follow my dreams but failed to convey that following my dreams would still require intense dedication and endless hard work. I don't know if this is everyone's experience, but "follow your dreams" can sound a lot like "you can dream and want your way into wonderful things if you want it enough and you dream big enough." When in fact the appropriate lesson is more like "if your dreams are ambitious and in a glamorous profession there's a good chance you will have to work even harder than the med school kids unless you're incredibly lucky and don't count on being incredibly lucky."

I became a professional programmer for mostly pragmatic reasons (though I've always had an interest in programming), but I believe the lessons I learned as a programmer will serve me well when I eventually take another serious shot at arts/entertainment (if you can even call my first attempt serious). A lot of the hard work that goes into arts and entertainment are intentionally kept away from us, in part because it would strip away some of the "magic" and in part because a lot of people don't care how things work. As a younger person I would read books or watch movies and think I could write or direct works like that because I'm clever and entertaining and a good writer. After a few years hacking I know that being clever is worthless without great habits. I believe having that sort of mentality will take you a long way in most fields.
Once you plug an 85kwh battery pack into your house, suddenly solar starts looking a lot more feasible. That's at least a day worth of storage.
Political reform sounds nice. I don't have too much to say about that; I mostly wanted to voice disagreement with your tangent:

De-federalizing destroys a lot of the political and economic clout that the US can hold over other, smaller countries. This is to the advantage of all the states; I don't think any state seriously wants to secede from union and lose the benefits the federal government entails. No one is forcing the states to "hold the union together" against their will.

Other benefits of a federal government: shared currency and unified economic zone makes for more efficient interstate trade (see: Germany); shared federal agencies make for more efficient shared resources vs every state doing its own thing; etc.

And more specifically, re your statement "I am not sure why people in California have to live under the same rules as someone in Georgia:" they really don't. States write their own laws (in addition to federally-imposed laws for all states). Example of the day, some states have laws legalizing marriage between same-sex couples, other states have laws explicitly forbidding marriage between same-sex couples.
>it really bothers me that Xcode is no longer included with the OS and is unavailable as an anonymous download

Like before MAS, it's still available at: https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action

The latest version listed is Xcode 4.6 (1.6GB DMG) with Feb 21, 2013 release date.
What doesn't make sense is why it's ranked beneath a Government site? www.doioig.gov

Plus, the content of the homepage doesn't even contain anything about Stack Overflow.
"Of course, the Soviet economy is not widely held up as a model of success."

I agree with you. The country went from a civil war and foreign invasion (including by the US, something I'm sure 99% of Americans don't even know) and then 25 years later were invaded by an alliance of Germany, Finland, Italy, Hungary and other countries. Followed by a Cold War against a nuclear armed opponent and its western European allies.

Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over 20%, the Soviet economy was booming. Massive steel factories were erected in places such as Magnitogorsk, and factories building tractors to send to industrialize agriculture. The US said Russia stole all technology from the US - until Russia launched Sputnik. You can't blame the adversary for stealing IP when they're doing things you can't do.

China also was a rural backwater, dominated by Europeans and Japanese until the 20th century. Under the leadership of the politburo of the communist party, its economy has been growing 10% a year since the early 1980s. People say that is unsustainable, but they've been saying that since the late 1980s. I'm sure their growth will slow down eventually, but they're already the second largest economy in the world by GDP. Of course, the politburo is not as left wing as it was during the height of the Cultural Revolution.

The USSR economy did stagnate when Stalin died, and people like Molotov were sidelined. Capital spending decreased, policies like detente were enacted, and the economy stagnated. The economy did very well before this change in policy though. American and European workers and firms went to the USSR in the 1920s because there was work and contracts in their growing economy, while the US economy went off the hinges. Kind of like the current US unemployment rate which is higher than anything since the mid-1980s.
> Sort was a design requirement, but not a reason not to use UUIDs, which are trivially sorted by date

Assuming UUID v1 right?