skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was not talking about the completely off grid case at all. Maybe I misunderstood the article. I was talking in terms of grid-connected solar installs, which I feel just make more sense. What happens if you get a cloudy week? You have no power until the sun shines again... or have to fire up your inefficient generator (the existence of which may in fact negate any savings anyway... because price and inefficiency at small scale of generation). It could be my bias showing too... I'll admit that.

However, there are interesting regulatory consequences here. Various levels of government have regulations in place that are designed to protect the consumer, but also put a strain on utilities. In a very large number of places, the power company is only allowed to charge a certain rate or less. This rate is partly based on building out the infrastructure for all houses, businesses, etc in the region, and assuming certain usage values. They are also required to make power available to anyone in those areas. They are also required to provide power under certain conditions, regardless of the customer paying (e.g. they can't shut off power in the winter in many places, because that could kill someone). The utility being constrained by the rules in these places must figure out how to operate profitably (being a publicly traded company in many cases) with these constraints. So, if suddenly everyone starts going off-grid, they are still required to sell at a certain rate or lower, still required to be able to provide power to everyone, and being told that they can't necessarily charge enough for that service, because a lot of people will just go off-grid.

It is a sticky situation, and until operating models and regulations can be worked out to account for wide-spread off grid people, it is kind of a catch-22 for everyone. I don't want my power to go out because the utility can't afford maintenance because they can't charge me what they need to for reliable service, because half of my neighbors are off-grid now.

Basically, the question is: if you were under regulation to act a certain way, and those regulations were based on assumptions, wouldn't you be against allowing behavior that breaks those assumptions without a change in your regulatory responsibility?
"Design it & Code it" is back with new freebies
That is hilarious and bad and wrong. All at the same time.
In a country where the majority of people live in under $200/month - owning an SUV does make you elite. Part of the problem is that the privileged in India don't recognize how truly privileged they are.
Strange. When I have money, I feel generous about it, and want to use that money to help others. I thought most people felt that way. It's one of the reasons that a progressive tax system makes good sense to me.

There are many ways that people get to be rich. Some are born into it, and stay rich because of systemic biases. Others "value spending their time getting money over helping others" and get rich that way. Still others get there by luck - winning the lottery - or by semi-luck - getting paid in pre-IPO shares of a wildly start-up.

Based on the various stories I've heard, those who win by luck tend to be the most generous with their money.

This essay is about those in the first category; those who are rich because of systemic biases, where society "is so deeply hierarchized along both class and caste lines" and "wealth is so completely tied in with political power, and often to crime without punishment." It's not really the one you're possibly thinking of, where someone starts average and ends up rich.

My income does tend to fluctuate. Some years I make really good money as a consultant. Other times I don't. I don't have much control over it. That would fit with the semi-luck category, since I don't get the feel that my income level is a good reflection of how much effort I put into things; income isn't a good measure of my self.
No. read what I wrote -- "cheaper talent" is worse.
To not break existing apps, denied request could just success, but return sensible but completely bogus data (no contacts, no apps running, connected to "default" WiFi network with BSSID 02:00:00:00:00:00, etc.)
Are we saying that there is no way to prevent power from going backwards back to the utility?

I figured what you generated went directly to your storage system, you drew from your storage system OR the grid, or some third part intelligently drew from the grid or your system as necessary.

Is it functionally impossible to have solar panels that don't "run the meter backwards?" Because I can see how that would threaten the infrastructure that wasn't designed for it.

I mean, I see places like Apple generating all their electricity on location for their new planned office and using the grid as backup. Is Apple sending their excess power back to the utility? Totally different scale, I'm well aware, but just curious.
How not terribly expensive are forklift batteries? I imagine they're similar to lead acid golf cart batteries, which if I recall cost roughly $250/kwh. They're still too expensive compared to natural gas backup.

-A former utility employee
There's a saying that people quit managers, not jobs.
It's on the first page for me too. What's the story? I live and work here in the area.
Ask HN: Itchy Feet - Problem Worth Solving?
Hi, all -

I have had 4 jobs in different fields and tech stacks (enterprise - J2EE, web startup - RoR, health care - Java and web scrapers, and technology - Groovy with Swing), all of them lasting about 2 years before I get itchy feet and decide to move on. At first, I figured it was just a matter of outgrowing the positions I was hired for, and as I kept getting increasing levels of responsibility at each new position, that seemed to make sense. However, I'm starting to see a pattern where I take a new job, dig in and learn everything I can about a new tech stack and problem set, get bored and then move on, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

I started my current job 15 months ago, and yet again, I'm starting to get itchy feet. What started out as a challenging job has become routine - it's just a matter of banging out features as quickly as I can. There's always the option of overcomplicating features to steal a chance to do more challenging work, but that's a temptation I do my best to resist. I've mentioned this to my boss and asked for a chance to do something new for a few months (mobile development, devops, even some design work), and she's been less than receptive. Hence, I'm starting to look around, and I'm wondering if I'm going to wind up in the same cycle. I'd like to find a place I can stick for a while, if possible, without winding up in the same rut.

Is anyone else familiar with this sort of pattern? Anyone have any tips?
In case anyone would like to compare, here's a similar example using Angular and Firebase:

http://firebase.github.io/angularFire/examples/chat/

Source: https://github.com/firebase/angularFire/tree/gh-pages/exampl...
Yes, so much prejudice and dogma. Its overwhelming just to think about it.
Peaker plants are typically natural gas, not coal. Coal plants are very large, very capital heavy, and cannot be adjusted as finely. (At least in California/USA. I can't comment on other parts of the world.)
You are missing one giant term in the equation: utilities are subject to a shitload (technical term) of regulation. Of course they are opposed to the changes in the assumptions behind those regulations, without a carefully considered change to the regulations such that they can repsond to disruption, and therefore have an actual chance of surviving/pivoting/whatever.
If they are poor, why are Chinese/Indians more likely to get into engineering/compsci than other demographics that are more local, such as poor African Americans / Hispanic Americans?

Both the Indians and Chinese are almost certainly poor. At least 95% of India is poorer than the bottom 5% of America, and about 80-85% of China is.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...

Granted, they might be rich by Indian/Chinese standards, but that's a far cry from actually being lower middle class in the US.

I'm not sure it is more likely for Chinese/Indians to enter STEM fields than your various aforementioned demographic groups. The ones who do enter STEM fields are more likely to immigrate to the US, however...
Rumor: Microsoft To Do 7.2-Inch 4:3 Tablet
It's not dead, it's just resting.
The best use case for oneself would be if missing features are emulated with dummy data using some app-firewall tool. The phone should give any app no chance of finding out, whether e.g. address book access was granted, but instead show fake data.

Of course this would soon be a cat and mouse game if Google really implemented it for everyone: Developers like WhatsApp would check the address book data whether it is statistically sound and if not they would request you to grand access for real, etc.

All the permissions only required for ads (like position, IMEI, full internet access, reading sms, reading address books) would also just have the app terminate if it's not possible, just like today they check for rooted devices based on tools like bash or they check for modified hosts files that block ads.
I think that's an unfair and cynical view of the goals of utility companies. Some utilities may lobby to make distributed PV illegal, but I believe only to protect people and the integrity of the grid.

-A former utility engineer
My Take on Business Development, of the 'full stack' Variety
Radio Observatory in Cambridge: http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=18311
We received the answer from the accelerator 3 days ago, so I'm doing it as fast as I can.

Anyways, thank you for the advice!
Lighthouse - Fogbugz event listener built on bottle
The difference is that you acknowledge that you 'have' money. Also, you possibly acknowledge that you had certain opportunities that other people could ill afford and therefore have this money.

Unfortunately, the difference in opportunity in India is considered (by both rich and poor) to be something that God has handed down and therefore it's fair. By the rich because it's convenient to think that way and by the poor because they feel like they have no escape apart from reincarnation.

I was traveling in Brazil last year and found that the poor in Brazil (also due to drug issues..) actively blame the rich for their poverty and are also to a great extent violent against wealthier people. (at least in the cities that I was in..)

However, the difference in India is that poor people more often than not attribute their poverty to God and therefore do not blame the rich or seek retribution. I honestly believe this is what keeps the poor in India from revolting en masse. If the Indian belief system was like the Brazilian system, over here there would be a civil war.
This really is a no brainer, if you have the best and brightest coming here to work, then its only going to make everybody in the industry better as everybody has to raise their game to compete, as long as these workers don't flood the market (which the h1-b quota does a good job of keeping in check)

The problem is with some of the foibles of the h1-b visa. H1-b workers cannot compete in the job market the way an American worker can, because to get the h1-b the hiring company has to fork over almost $5k to the govt, to transfer to a new job, the hiring company has to pay $3k (I think), every 3 years the hiring company has to pay another $1k to renew the visa, and at the end of 6 years the hiring company has to start a green card application which costs a lot of time, money and resources IN ADDITION to the renewal fee (again).

Because of that, the hiring company wields extra-ordinary power over the h1-b worker which means that h1-b workers can be used to artificially depress wages.

The fix for this isn't all that complex. keep the h1-b as it is (complete with the yearly quota, which should be adjusted according to demand), and give a green card to the worker AUTOMATICALLY after 2 years, so that they're free do as they please in the market and see what happens.

Engineers know what they should be making and if anyone tries to underpay their workers, they'll have to contend with the fact that they'll be gone in 2 years, at which point they have to seriously ponder if it wouldn't be cheaper to actually train/hire an American to do the job. This would stem the problem of bodyshops bringing in immigrants and underpaying them for donkey years while profitting richly off their labor, and companies who'd apply for h1-b workers would actually need them and pay them fairly.
I'll do that ASAP.

Thank you very much!
You don't see this in stable societies with more income/class equality, but it shows up in any place with large social inequality. Russia/ex-USSR after the 'wild capitalism' of 1990'ies is also a great example with similar situations as described in the original article.
Seriously? Spotify and Grooveshark aren't even playing in the same league. Grooveshark's audio quality and music library are a wreck compared to Spotify's clean, consistent and reliable one. This is like people who decried the iPod and foresaw its doom because "Archos had the same thing available for 2 years." Not comparable.
So the web version definitely doesn't do p2p? This would be good for work where there are usage agreements that specifically prohibit p2p
By the time you hit print the bitcoins are only worth $66.5 million. Or was it $135.7 million?
Am I not the only FogBugz user who read his old articels advocating the use of bug trackers, and then read this recent piece which advertises Trello and thinks that he kind of sees or advertises Trello as an alternative to FogBugz? And that the snarky comments against full bug databases are a bit inconsistent?

Also, I'm still disappointed that they discontinued Kiln for self hosted servers. They did that silently.
There is an implied causality in this article. Being rich -> Lose empathy.
I'd be curious to know if there indeed is causality in either direction (Less empathetic people get richer) or is it just correlation masquerading as causality.
You need to be part of a country's economic elite to be able to afford a vehicle that costs 10x the local GDP per capita, even if it is a practical choice for the local roads and considered a low-end model in richer countries. Owning an SUV doesn't, of course necessarily mean you have to drive it like an ass (or insist your driver drive it like an ass)
Cool! Mine is a bit more complex for a few reasons, mainly the usage of Firebase's authentication API, since I wanted to show a very basic example of "real world" usage. Still, thank you for posting for comparison :)
Ttyrec : a terminal recorder
this is one boring job. the guy does weird things from time to time.
A hot-spot is a bad idea because most computers can't connect to two wifi networks at once. That means any time you wanted to configure your thermostat, you'd have to disconnect from the internet.
> ... per American taxpayer

Isn't everyone a taxpayer? Or did you only mean "federal taxpayer"? Even then anyone who has a phone is paying federal taxes on the service. And people pay tax on consumption (sales and service taxes), city, county and state taxes, fuel, and the list goes on. I suspect that the vast majority pay taxes several times a month rather than the 1 in 4 you imply!
This problem is far more complicated than political parties. It's an issue with human nature. Entitlement exists outside of politics.
"Bill Goldman, the great screenwriter, said to me when I was pathetic enough to ask what Robert Redford was "really like" - ‘what would you be like if you hadn't heard the word “no” for 30 years?" - Stephen Fry
See also: Delhi Boys
What kinds of engineers are they hiring that they can't learn a new platform?

Speaking as a web developer, I can tell you that I am perfectly able to transition to making desktop apps, I just have no incentive to. There are fewer and fewer desktop apps out there, so it's not a great use of my time to learn those skills.

Back to the Spotify player, the web client makes far more sense than a desktop one to me. All the music is stored in the cloud, so why do I have to download a desktop client on every machine I use to access it? It seems horribly backward to me.
Patent trolls buy them and keep them to use them eventually, but will wait a long time before doing so so that lots of members of industry will have infringed before starting to sue. In trademark law, you can't do that: if you're lax and let your mark become generic, it's basically impossible to go back and go after infringers after the fact (this happened to "nylon," for example).

There would still certainly be patent trolls, but as a start-up, you wouldn't have to worry as much about them... if you wanted to implement a feature that other companies were also implementing, you could do so with a reasonable amount of safety: either they weren't patented, or they were and there would be noisy lawsuits going on about them, or the patents existed but were no longer valid due to lack of defense.
Identity across Google's services is an absolute mess. They seem to be trying to integrate on one identity per person rather than separate YouTube, GMail, Google Search, Play, etc. accounts. Which makes perfect sense, considering they're all part of the same organization.

"I just want to register for courses, but my university wants me to make a .edu email address!" would be a better analogy. They aren't part of the same functionality, but the organization is moving towards one identity provider across all its services.

Could you imagine the nightmare for IT if email, library, VPN, course registration, brusar, Blackboard, facilities ticketing, software discounts, help desk, file server, 802.11X, workstation login, etc. were all separate usernames/passwords? There is a reason most universities have one central authentication service. My school's network IDs are even even integrated with ID cards so (as of next year) you can reserve space with your network login and then tap/swipe your ID to access it.

It isn't like Twitter asking you to open a bank account because Twitter doesn't also provide banking.
I wonder when CSP tech is going to be talked about in the mainstream. It seems like when it comes to solar, people just think of PV.
Yes. My site www.sharelatex.com was built on nowjs originally, it taught me a good lesson in not trusting random open source projects. I moved over to socket.io about 4 months ago which has far bigger community so feel a bit safer.
On iOS the onus is on the developer.
Pfft... my wife used to write side scrolling shooters with self learning AI enemies using Clipper on DBase III. You can use anything to write a game if you put your mind to it.
Call me crazy but "taking"? The man scratching the mans car with his cart was Taking. The people in the street who wouldn't get out the way were taking.
That's true, but it requires that you have a side-effect free exported function for each scope. Adding such a debugger function is probably a smart move if you're using that pattern, but it is not standard practice, and as you said, it's still a hassle.
Immigrant engineer here. Do immigrant engineers depress wages? Of course. Trivial supply and demand (and I'm surprised to see a supposed economics blog make unintuitive assertions without providing any evidence). You can already see wages rising rapidly as a result of the already low supply of engineers. Kids coming out of Stanford are getting 6-figure offers at Google. If there were less engineers, lots of companies wouldn't be able to hire at all, leading to no option but to increase their offers to attract talent.

But the thing this article got wrong (which is the same mistake made by anti-H1B articles) is asking the wrong question (though it touched on it at the end). Is it better overall with immigrant engineers? Is the economy better? Are companies able to do better (therefore providing more taxes) as a result, or able to build better things (such as the google car or glasses)?

Finally, I'll note that moving to the Bay Area does not necessarily result in 5x salary, but even when it does, it doesn't result in 5x standard of living. If I had stayed in Dublin, I'd be on a similar salary (maybe 20% lower), but I'd be earning over 3x the average salary and so be able to have a much higher relative standard of living. The downside of living in SF with a good salary is that everybody has a good salary.
This ad was actually pretty scary - Facebook seems to be actively encouraging a culture of active and constant distraction. I don't think that society has really learned to handle being bomabrded with always-on distractions yet and this seems to push the idea aggressively.
Sun Microsystems still representing at UCSD:

http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=34899
Ahmed El.Hussaini | Founder & CEO splinter.me
There are no jobs "Americans won't do." Depressed wages and the de facto Spanish language requirement reduce American interest in agricultural work.
That article is from 2009, the study they link to doesn't actually have what it says its supposed to have in the abstract and the article that claims that

"Most foreign tech workers, particularly those from Asia, are in fact of only average talent. Moreover, they are hired for low-level jobs of limited responsibility, not positions that generate innovation. This is true both overall and in the key tech occupations, and most importantly, in the firms most stridently demanding that Congress admit more foreign workers."

is 404. I'd like to see some better data if you have it though.
The column does not directly mention H1B, but it is clear that H1B is the subtext.

Here are a couple of points not mentioned.

The top 10 H1B employers account for about half of the visas issued in recent years. All 10 are contract houses that specialize in out-sourcing. They bring people in, train them up and then send them back to work on the same programs remotely at local rates. These actions are totally against the stated principles of increasing the number of technically skilled workers in the US.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...

H1B people are supposed to be paid a prevailing wage. There are two big problems with that - there is absolutely no money at all allocated for enforcing that requirement, and due to technicalities (or loopholes) in the legislation, companies are legally able to pay rates for the lowest skilled categories rather than ones commensurate with their skills and jobs.

http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-...

FWIW, I am totally willing to go with the concept of a network effect, that skilled engineering job market is not a zero-sum game. But the H1B program is practically the worst possible implementation to take advantage of any network effect in the labor market. To me, it looks like it is designed to wreck it.

I'd rather H1B be treated like a fast-track immigration visa - if you qualify for an H1B visa you are guaranteed a green card in 2 years or less. I think that would remove much of the ability for H1B employers to use them in ways contrary to the rhetoric that sells H1B to the uninformed.
[insert communism comparison rebuttal here]
Oh, you reject Facebook and don't feel like you need it in your life? Please, tell me more
There are no resources left that you could "steal" for less than you could buy on the open market.
Don't know if those outside India will find it funny, but: http://www.quickmeme.com/Rich-Delhi-Boy/?upcoming.
... or you don't want to read the enlightening reply from an Ember core member :P
I wonder. Here's a relevant one-year-old item from The Red and Black newspaper (more about The Red and Black at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_and_Black): http://www.redandblack.com/news/professor-deals-with-elabora...