skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 2W/m^2 for wind and ... 22W/m^2 for photovoltaic.

This is a misleading number for my point that wind is denser than solar. For solar, the 22W/m^2 is spread out evenly an area, and you must put something (either photovoltaic or a mirror) to collect it. For wind, you only need a single turbine to effectively cover a relatively large area. The density number comes from the fact that, by virtue of how winds are generated and blow, you can't just stick a second turbine right next to the first one. From a cost per kWh perspective, the important number is more like the number of watts generated by single turbine with a 1 meter x 1 meter footprint.
Security should not be a feature.
I think you're, rather cynical, reasoning falls flat. This would not be a good policy for a company to adopt. If I was evaluating software and saw such a policy, it would bring a lot of uneasy feelings, even regarding the supposed security of the paid version. This side steps the bad publicity and general ill-feelings the community at large would have about your service. I don't think it is strategically a good choice to make such a compromise on security. At best, I could see giving separate authentication mechanisms such as two-factor for paid users, but that's as far as I'd go.
Ah, thanks, I'd skipped over some of the more procedural parts of his statement. I'm surprised it was so easy for him to access and copy such material without detection. I guess if it appeared like it was in the course of his duties it wouldn't raise any alarms.
No, the hash is always the same length, a single character and a 4GB movie will generate a hash of the same length (using the same hash algorithm (md5, sha512, etc). I've casually read about it, I think that is the point of the hash, to take an input of any size or length and represent it as a fixed size.

The problem with this is hash collisions, weaknesses found in hash algorithms can make it so attackers could generate files to match another files hash (or password or w/e). I think the idea is that they create a harmful file, then add null characters or w/e so the hash algorithm will generate/assign the two different files the same hash.
> the fundamentals of Groupon matter, but growth in the abstract (not just YOY revenue growth) is difficult to evaluate

Yes, forecasting growth is tough BUT if you have a price to start from, you can very easily back-solve the growth rate of a companies revenues, cash flow, etc. You don't have to be a genius to extrapolate that at a +$13bn equity valuation Groupon needed to achieve spectacular growth and cashflow generation over that next 5-7 years. Once you observe the implied growth rates, margins and cash-flow needed to be achieved one can genuinely analyse and criticise a valuation.

> That is a terrible idea. How do you define "fairness?" Again, given that the inherent definition of "value" is essentially (in a market economy)...

I don't think you understood my point. I'm not talking about something being fair (like you refer "fairness") or not, I'm talking about a Fairness Opinion or FO. An FO is an exercise that investment banks, auditors, consultants and other qualified parties, do on a daily basis. In the corporate world, specially with public companies, when a tender offer is received or presented an "independent" party provides a FO to inform investors and other stakeholders (primarily the board), that the offer is priced as expected or it is too high or too low. Issuing an FO is one of the most market friendly, pro free-market, instruments/exercises out there, instead of just dumping shares at a dubious valuation while deep-throating "unqualified" investors.

>But I remember at the time that even though I saw that the fundamentals were weak, I personally could not be sure of myself because I saw my mother and many of her female friends (also mothers) buy tons and tons of Groupons. Hindsight is 20/20.

I'm not saying that Groupon is not a viable business. I believe the contrary, I think there is a good business somewhere. But a good businesses can be under- and over-valued. The fact that people use Groupon doesn't make a ridiculous valuation justifiable.

> Again, given that the inherent definition of "value" is essentially (in a market economy) the highest price someone is willing to pay...

What you refer to here is the Price you are willing to pay; Value is a different thing. Any serious valuation exercise uses a discounted cash flow model driven by a solid operational model. Any other methodologies are simply hocus pocus. I suggest you read "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham. It was published over 60 years ago, but it is as useful today as it was back then. This book distills value investing from speculation. Let me just finish by saying that the recent financial crisis, specially that of the US housing was due to the decoupling of prices and value; understanding both will be of value (no pun intended).
Notice the 2.0 there?
Just that side of torture, imo.
You sound really bitter.
This isn't streaming, its the last 50cm from your computer to your display. The 200 times more of data are already handled without a sweat by today's interfaces. Dual link DVI, from 1999, can already do more than 1080p.
People always buy that looking backwards, but almost never going forward. In fact, most people are outright dismissive of new ideas yet unproven. If you do a search on HN about the viability of the currently unproven techs, like google glasses, 3D printers, you'll see plenty of evidence of that.

I'm not sure why this is, exactly. Perhaps it's just more fun to be cynical and shoot down the weird things that other people are doing. Or maybe people don't actually like change. Or maybe people don't like being wrong, and if you poo poo most everything, it's likely you'll be right, since most things aren't mainstream game changers. Or perhaps people don't like hyperbole. I know I have my bullshit flag raised when someone's raving about something.
Manning has not been held the conditions you're referring to since April of 2011. If you care about the case, please learn more about it.
Most rails apps use nothing like that amount of memory, the norm is more like 80-150MB. There are various factors which affect how much memory you use and of course if your processes are leaking memory they could easily grow over time and hit any limit. Rails itself is taking up around 30MB, so this is all about the specific app code. Another common problem is loading lots of records into memory (say fetching all your user records at once), this will allocate but then not free lots of memory. Personally I find passenger handles this perfectly well out of the box without having to worry too much about memory usage, routing or other issues, but it does require keeping an eye on the app code as the app grows and fixing any issues that come up with memory usage or response time. Those are not problems specific to rails.

Without knowing the specifics it's hard to say for sure, but I really think RG should try a comparison with running their own real VM (not a web worker on heroku) and see how well it runs. If they'd done that they'd probably find and fix the reasons that their processes are taking so long to respond and taking up such a huge amount of memory, because they'd feel more ownership of those problems, instead of playing a blame game with heroku.

This is not rocket science but it is a series of trade offs and heroku seem to have optimised for short running processes which don't take up lots of memory - many web apps run that way and would be happiest with random routing. Yes heroku could do better but at some point you have to take responsibility for your own ops instead of expecting some service to abstract away all the hard stuff, particularly if you're seeing performance issues and have a busy site. The amount they're paying heroku would easily pay for far more vps than they need.

So in summary, Heroku is not for everyone, and rails isn't really the problem here, so there are no enormous penalties for using it, just the sort of problems you see running any web app.
I 100% agree that the Prospectus is "The Document" and that retail investors do not read it (and sadly may "professional" asset managers too).

Unfortunately the prospectus is a one-sided story, and it will never say if the valuation is stretched or not... even the price and issue number is inserted at the last minute! Yes, I know the company is book building, but if a company out there is going to go public, a public institution should be calling BS from a valuation stand point, and amend the "Risk Factors" of the company accordingly.

My point 3 was an in-extremis case. Nevertheless FO's are a very common and inexpensive instrument, and it is a shame that the public investor doesn't have access to this BS detector.
The idea of constant social feedback on just about everything brought this classic short story by the late John McCarthy to mind:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/robotandbaby...
What I don't get is, is MHL can stream 1080p over a regular microUSB port, why can't Apple do the same? Is it that expensive?
> suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs.

Your splitting hairs. Pretty much all HDMI transmitter ICs have a microcontroller on board, they need a processor to deal with the protocol configuration, DDC and HDCP. Probably most are using some 8051 design plunked into the chip. They are SoCs by any reasonable definition.
But why would anyone do steganography with such a well-known image?
I meant womens studies.

I don't even care if they take it, I just don't want them to complain that they then can't get a job using that degree.
Sorry but are you talking about the right connector here ? Lightning is for the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Of course dual link DVI et al can do more than 1080p. They are all huge. Apple's needs to support not just today's thin devices but those for the next decade (iWatch ?).
From an evolutionary perspective, all these side projects represent mutations in technology. Environmental pressures are acting on these mutations to select the project that is a best fit for the masses and reward that best fit by reproducing it or as the author puts it, make it into our daily lives in ten years.

So it may be impossible to build a model of what projects will turn out like the Apple 1 and which ones will never be heard of because if technology works like evolution then it doesn't have to be a linear progression forward. It's just whatever tool solves the problem today.

From a personal perspective, I work on projects because I can't help myself. I see something that I would love to use and I need to build it. It's addictive. I'm not sure if there is much more to it than that.
College was more like a 10AM to 11PM job for me. The library was a place to sleep, the best place to work was the eating areas.

Now, I prefer coffee shops for out of office working. Home is too comfortable, while I can hit Starbucks early and grab a taxi when the roads aren't so crowded after rush hour.
A VPN provides privacy not anonymity.
smart

/smärt/

Adjective

Having or showing a quick-witted intelligence.

Verb

(of a wound or part of the body) Cause a sharp, stinging pain: "the wound was smarting".

Noun

Intelligence; acumen.
We have focus rooms in our semi-open plan. They suck, they aren't fairly utilized and usually monopolized, or they are quickly turned into the service of other purposes (like store rooms or guest offices).
I think the main takeaway is, why pay for a $50 widget when a $5 cable will do the job?

For the consumer who just wants to connect their device to a HDTV, it's crazy they have to pay 10x more just because they're in the Apple ecosystem and not Android.

As for being future-proof, by the time some cool new A/V interface hits the market, and we've all updated our TVs, the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum.
> I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important point nonetheless.

He was busy slapping all nerds everywhere on the back with reflected glory.

You're just reading in what you wanted him to say and judging your desired reading, not the original.

(Edit: and I did the same, fixating on the self-congratulatory fluff and ignoring the selection-biased hypothesis about making predictions.)

> Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.

You're basically imputing to me a motive to impute a motive to Chris that in my estimation neither of us had. I mentioned Naïve Realism a while back in one of the various pitchfork debates (the Tesla test drive, I think). I think it's happening here too.

But really, this post was self-congratulation. I've read similar fluff from marketers and advertisers who see themselves as the lever-pullers of capitalism, from student politicians about their destiny as masters of all creation, from lawyers about the utter indispensibility of their ancient craft, from engineers ditto ... ad infinitum. In all such cases they could have written the same stuff about how they were shaping The Future Of The World years ago.

I'd be more interested in seeing the base rate on all the garage projects that go absolutely nowhere, achieve nothing and have no meaningful impact on the world. That would be most of them.

Which is fine. But let's not pretend that since Woz was a genius, the rest of us are also in the same category.
Out of curiosity, what grounds did they provide to ban your account?

If they had marginalized you, they wouldn't need to ban you.
Are you saying that people don't act according to their own satisfaction (monetary, emotional, romantic etc)? That human activity is basically Gaussian noise?
Probably you should clarify your statement a bit or you'll be downvoted a lot (upvoted you, but that's only one.)

Anyway, what I find disgusting about the whole 'Manning' case is that vetting procedures should have never ever allowed this man to get even close to sensitive material, let alone top-secret. Burning him at the stake is just a way to assign blame when in reality every person that ever evaluated Mannings psychological profile had been asleep at the switch. The guy needs help, not punishment. The fact that we as a society depend on the Bradley Mannings of this world to keep us on the straight and narrow is what is really frightening.
Given that it happens at exactly 12am, it is safe to assume that the machine itself is infected with some kind or rogue software. Kill all unknown processes in the machine. Get an updated virus/malware cleaner. Look at scheduled tasks on the machine. Did you check registry entries? Good luck
yachts, mansions, never working again, fund a company to fly to the moon or revolutionize Electric Cars, Work to End Polio.

30 or 300 perhaps. But I can pretty quickly think of ways to use up $3M.
Wrestling is the oldest sport of the olympic 
Wrestling is the oldest sport of the olympic Olympic without wrestling has no meaning we have some sports that no body comes to watch but they wanna exlude wrestling. its not acceptable.
Again, this is a connector from your mobile device to a display. Nobody has ever done any lossy compression on that pathway; both because you can drive simple circuits at frequencies high enough to have plenty of bandwidth and because it would actively destroy information (hence lossy). This is such a big problem because the video you are playing has already been lossy compressed (H.265) and it will most certainly not get better by a second pass that only has the raw pixel data available.

I could imagine people want to play 4k movies from their mobile device on their TV, but you wouldn't install a 4k screen as the display on the mobile device.

Edit: Yes, computer is inaccurate. I wanted to get the idea across that we are talking about connectors (DVI, HDMI) that you would normally use to hook up a computer or laptop to a TV or LCD. They have only recently appeared on mobile devices, but serve the same purpose here: video (and audio, for HDMI) out.
If the server running on links.example.com, wouldn't the 3rd party web server lose out on doing things like setting cookies in the client's browser or determining their rough location via IP address?

Not that I'm particularly a fan of either practice, but there's probably some use cases there that would have to be accounted for in some way that the 3rd party service could accommodate.
Behind an IP-address shared by many, I'd say you're pretty anonymous unless you give out your personal details. Would you like to explain why you think otherwise?
You might want to look into coworking spaces where people that are not working for the same company, such as freelancers or remote workers, share an office.
I love how all of their machines are clearly covered in various non-traditional colors, especially the blue.
You know you can buy Lightning cables off eBay for $5.

And that the original dock connector first appeared in the iPod 3G nearly a decade ago. So yes today's devices will be in a museum. But the connector could still be in use in 2023 and beyond. Worth keeping in mind.
I trust Amazon's Web Services division because they "eat their own dog food."

I also have to give a shout out to Jeff Barr, AWS's Chief Evangelist. He has always made it clear what AWS could and couldn't do and strives to understand what AWS customers really need.
Something like this video is vastly more effective in advertising any product to me than spending 100x as much on banner ads, sponsoring a sports team, etc. I'm probably not representative, though.
I love Tim O'Reilly's quote on this phenomenon: "The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed"
Quite moronic of Evernote.

HTH is J. Random User supposed to figure out that mkt5371.com is a service hired by evernote.com? A minimally alert user would click the Report Phishing button upon mousing over.

By including a link that happens to do the right thing, Evernote is conditioning its users to succumb to phishing in the future.
That blue is the color I've seen for most metal presses and other industrial equipment. It's usually blue like that, gray, or sometimes high-vis for certain parts, or maybe sometimes powder green.
Is dust a problem? It looks like everything is uncovered, even when moving big barrels of it around on a forklift. I would think that getting some dust in there would reduce the quality of the ink.
My current lawyer is a technology entrepreneur on the side.

My law lecturers were variously keen observers of politics, literature, art, human nature and economics. One of the people I most admire as an essayist and thinker has three (three!) law degrees.

However, putting aside the exchange of anecdotes at twenty paces: you're absolutely right. In every profession there are people whose vision never rises above their own blinkered view of the universe.

I guess my point is that being intellectually parochial is ... well, it has drawbacks. Especially if you set out to explain why your profession is amazing and you have nothing whatever to compare it with except ... your profession.

Every time I wander out of my own field I first of all make a total arse of myself. But I always come back clutching something very useful. I never thought Olympic weightlifting would have given me useful life insights, it has. I never thought that learning muscular physiology would help me better understand software architecture, it has. I didn't think systems dynamics or fuzzy logic would upend my view of the world. They have. I didn't think that learning the basics of accounting would change the way I think about how to pick startup ideas, it definitely has.

And studying law, even though I dropped out because it made me unhappy compared to cutting code, gave me training in a model of thought that I still find tremendously useful.
Yep, it's ranked #1 for me too, but this could be linked to regional and/or personal data (I'm not based in US).
Yes, of course. But they have the the actual transfer of the raw data offloaded onto specific circuitry that mostly just passes it through, something the processor part of a SOC would be terrible at. That's not what Apple is doing; they take in a normal lossy compressed video stream (H.264, who knows) and then reconstruct a HDMI signal.
Ask HN: How do you secure your OSX machines?
OSX security is an open question. What do you do to keep your development machines secure?

Recently at a large conference one of our OSX machines (10.7.5) experienced erratic behavior: mouse moving around as if a vnc was engaged. Upon turning off the wifi, the behavior stopped. All seemed normal until a bit later we had strange phone calls, weird ssh requests via mosh, other strange occurrences that made us paranoid to the level of changing all passwords / wiping the machine.

What security precautions do you take with your OSX machines -- and which ones are the best tradeoff in terms of hassle vs security? What tools do you use to check for intrusion/strange behavior on suspicious machines?
DVI is inferior to HDMI in bandwidth, and plenty of mobile devices have been offering that.
Yep, I was Harvard '07, and I've TA'ed at Princeton as a grad student. It was pretty obvious in both places that students were collaborating pretty often; for the classes I taught, in general (though not always) students were cautious enough to hover just below the obvious threshold of phrase-for-phrase copying, so I only challenged students on it infrequently.
I guess I find it more annoying that they're preserved but sensitive.

Typing LS and having it work is... odd.
I think there's mostly a lot of knee-jerk contrarianism, especially in the HN community. You can see the worst of that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3466925 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469453.
So can you say more about that? Specifically

"If I was evaluating software and saw such a policy, it would bring a lot of uneasy feelings, even regarding the supposed security of the paid version."

What if it was explicit? What if Evernote said, "Since it would cause us to lose money if we spent time on both more sophisticated security in the free product. Its basically secure against random threats but dedicated people will be able to break into it. If you want a truly secure product you should sign up for the paid product, part of that fee goes to paying the salaries of the security team we have on staff who are keeping it that way."

We also need to be clear what we mean by "security" here, there is "security" as in we make sure if someone breaks in they cannot easily get your password (they seem to have done that with salted passwords), and their is security as in "Even our operations staff can't get you access to your files if you lose your access token." level of security which takes a lot more work.

I'll admit I was pretty put off by Mark's assertion that Evernote doesn't care about security, his basis for that are three claims, that 2 factor authentication is late, that SSL isn't forced on, and that 64 bit RC2 is used in the free product. What is the purpose of the free product anyway? Is it to prove their security? I don't think it is, I think it is to give you a way to test drive what their product does without risking any money.

Anyway, someone broke in and got access to hashed and salted passwords and Evernote reset those. LinkedIn had the same issue, some Facebook apps grabbed similar data, Google has hosted malware in their App Store which tried to install banking trojans on your phone.

I am not persuaded by the assertion that "Evernote doesn't care about security" any more than "Google doesn't care about security" (and I happen to know they care very deeply and still get compromised now and then).

I defended Evernote because I felt Mark was unfairly maligning them and their CEO. I would be more sympathetic if he was a paying customer, and less sympathetic if he only has a free account.