skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember seeing the windmills for the first time in person when I was in my teens, on a flight from Boston to Copanhagen. I saw another "field" of them as my boat left port in Denmark.

They were incredible to look at, just mesmerizing. They were beautiful, gorgeous in more than just their form. That something so bold and elegant could create meaningful amounts of power blew my mind. I remembered reading about lakes and ponds in New Hampshire that had no persistent human contact but tested positive for mercury from coal plants. Looking at these windmills was like staring into a vision of the future. Looking at them, I had never felt so optimistic about technology before.

When I got home I went on the internet to read about wind power and see if there were any initiatives in my home state or Massachusetts. The negativity I found in the papers was its own mind-boggle.

Do you know what they complained about? The view.
The challenge with the US is that all talk of immigration focusses on illegal immigrants, rather than highly skilled and educated immigrants.

It's unfortunate that the Obama administration won't separate these two kinds of immigrants since they fear in doing so, they won't be able to get comprehensive immigration reform passed.

Other countries recognize the value of highly educated immigrants who want to create companies. Canada, for example, just announced it's startup visa specifically targeting immigrants who want to move to the country to start a company.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/1/4170022/canada-startup-visa...
But how does that work when the generation of new coins tails off, but the generation of new blocks does not?
If you could convince the large number of 'newly rich' industrialists to start investing in startups, you could make much more progress. As I see it, most of their money currently goes into Real estate: which is driving up property prices like crazy, but the money is not really doing any 'work'. Also, many of these gentlemen are located in small towns (Rajkot, Pune, Nagpur) rather than in the megapolis'
If they were smart enough to stay anonymous this long, they are smart enough to not suddenly park a bentley in their parking spot at the office.
There are plenty of examples of more recent vintage.

Not really. All of the ones I'm aware of involve DMCA pissing matches, which aren't relevant here.
Does a GPU use less power while mining Litecoin? It seems like the cores would be 99% idle.
Immigration and America’s high-tech industry
> ...throttle back their hydro plants and store more water behind dams for later use.

I find the idea of using a dam as a battery quite interesting.
How would they do this for client-side applications? I made a desktop application that essentially streams & rips (to mp3) Youtube videos but doesn't show any of the video data at all-- never had any issue with blocking or limits.

To do so would mean blocking regular browser access too (since the app behaves like a browser, even to the level of requesting other page resources). I imagine it would be difficult to tell the difference using heuristics.
Yeah, Kendall Square has definitely filled that nitch for a while. There have been enough successful exits, particularly in biotech, that I don't think it's really any contest as far as the local area goes.

It seemed like the startup scene was going to expand to more of Boston and Cambridge for a while with YC doing one batch of startups there each year but they gave up on that. I was running a startup in Boston for a while and talked with the mayor about his vision to make the old port area a revitalized live-work space for startups but it seems to be happening very slowly if at all. Meanwhile, tons of promising startups keep pouring out of the area and NYC is becoming the #2 US startup hub.
[citation needed]

I've never had problems with sleep/wakeup (except bugs in the firmware). Battery life is equal if not better than under windows. Developers rarely need 3D acceleration, and for most webgl demos and games the intel open source driver does just fine.
Eric Schmidt worried about privacy risk posed by civilian drones
Don’t be a dick with the community
My biggest peeve with Ubuntu was that I always had to download a billion software updates every few days.
I agree, but some brand new laptops are fully supported out of the box.

I have a brand new Lenovo ThinkPad T530 and it's running Fedora 18 flawlessly. Wi-Fi, headphone plugged-in sensor, OSD, media keys, dual-monitor support, webcam, 3D acceleration, sleep/wakeup, all working since day 1 out of box.

I think the more business oriented laptops are safe to run Linux and the new XPS 13 doesn't look bad at all except for the pricing.

EDIT: My biggest issue with Linux is font rendering, which, out of the box, sucks. The day I discovered http://www.infinality.net/blog/ I was the happiest man at the office.
Programmer Creates An AI To (Not Quite) Beat NES Games
> "who are smart enough to pay attention to the accomplishments of this small island on the North Sea."

We're not an island* :-(

* We do have 1419 islands, though.
My code is a response to neya's comment. It's not about short code or readability. It's about demonstrating that neya's example has completely unreasonable non-jQuery code given the jQuery code it is being compared against.
An Open Letter to TED
Couldn't agree with you more. Cambridge/Boston is experiencing something of a renaissance in tech that started a couple of years ago. It didn't really exist when the first social media tech built in Cambridge was born, but then quickly left to the west coast. Now that tech is building steam again here, we have to make sure that the parts of the ecosystem that haven't worked well (and funding is a big part of it), start to coalesce around that momentum that startups in the area are building. Another big problem is that recent infrastructure development has focused quite literally, on the 4 square block area that is Kendall Square proper, when really there should be plans to extend the great things that Kendall Square has built to a broader Cambridge
All Bitcoin documentation ever. The purpose of mining is actually not to generate BTC; the purpose is to prevent double spending and the block reward is just an incentive.
They used Vertica, which they didn't seem to be too pleased about. I think they would have liked to use Redshift it was available.
Strange, that doesn't match my experience at all.

My ThinkPad X1 Carbon worked perfectly out of the box, including wifi, bluetooth, sleep/wake, media keys, 3d acceleration, external displays, webcam, mic, etc. It also gained an hour over its Windows 7 battery life.
I'm pretty sure this is done at a large scale in both Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. While storing energy have always been a huge problem, I'm surprised this is not more popular.
I don't think you can disprove anecdotal evidence with more anecdotal evidence.
Your point about deflation in electronics sounds to me like a great one. That still doesn't account for what I've heard as the bigger complaint of investor fear (because no, they really don't have to invest in a vehicle that underperforms deflation because it's so shiny, like in iPhone). But there may be other mechanisms/responses out there that I just don't know about.
You say that there's no upside to claiming credit, whereas it seems to me you could comfortably retire to the lecture circuit, or enjoy sinecure directorships on just about any business that was heavily dependent on crypto, or get tenure in the university of one's choice, or...
Arduino Based Kegerator
I don't think the port is a viable location for a thriving community, unless Boston is willing to dedicate more than tax credits to stimulate growth. You have to take a bus! (silver line) And then walk past warehouse after warehouse!
RESTless: a robust, simplified alternative to ember-data
This is backwards. Subtree import all the data from the sub-project. (There is no way to clone without getting the subtrees because they are a native part of the repository.) You interact with subtree as if you had one project, committing without needing to know that the subtree has its own upstream. You can split out the subtree history and send it upstream. Splitting it out changes the SHA1. You can merge from upstream back into the subtree. Subtree makes the most sense when you have a component that is completely dominated by its parent, but which you want to also release stand-alone.

Submodules provide weaker coupling and make the most sense when the submodule has its own healthy upstream and you want to track those versions. It's awkward if all submodule development is happening from within the parent.
If Zuckerberg's is trying to satisfy a labor shortage then he should go to where the labor wants to live, as Google has done which is to establish a major technical presence in Manhattan...

https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/newyork
It's not necessarily waste. My home is heated using an electric furnace. The heat given off by GPU mining offsets the furnace. It's essentially "free" electricity while mining during winter months.
I don't get it. It's easy to guess that "well, the rich of course are going to manipulate the political process to protect their privileged position, even if it means those less well off and society at large will be the worse for it." Which is plausible at first, considering who fossil fuels hurt and whom wind farms "hurt."

But it's not like Europe doesn't have entrenched economic interests, and it's not like those entrenched interests wouldn't have captured the political process. What's so special about the USA that gives ridiculous outcomes?
Because i'm not eloquent or articulate, I'll refer you to my favourite travel writer - Mr. Bill Bryson. He's lived in both countries his whole life and has made a living writing about the (mostly funny) subcultures of each.

I recommend starting with "Notes from a small island".
True, +1 for the nativeness. But we are still a short bit away from being able to reliably use CSS3.
Really? The impression I got from Ubuntu users is that in the last few years it has made a lot of steps sideways.
My experience is somewhere in between - I still use OSX often, but have a laptop with Ubuntu on it. There are some things that I miss, but for most purposes Ubuntu is fine. Hardware support is not bad, and this on an ultrabook that shipped with Win8. Ubuntu lacks a little of the polish of OSX (or even Win7), but it is perfectly usable for most of what I need (most of the apps I use are the same anyhow, FF and Chrome, Sublime, VLC, etc.)
Good question. Longer transaction blocks maybe? Would love to hear this answered.
I personally think this is a good thing. The worst thing is when someone (developer, OS manufacturer, etc) takes forever to fix a bug or deliver better performance through a kernel update for example.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/11/hands-on-with-the-dell-sp... (reports 4-5 hours)

http://randomtristan.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-review-of-dell-... (reports around 3 hours)

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400986,00.asp (tested at 6 hours).
He was sending out emails in 2009 announcing his diagnosis:

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2009-August/...

I had it marked "unread" in my inbox.... oops.
Using Git Intelligently
Here are the reasons I switched to OSX:

- Image installers (.dmg files) and complete installers (.pkg files, that bring dependencies with them). I have never seen either of those fail, ever. I have seen installations from .tar.gz -> ./configure && make && make install fail countless times. This is the number one reason for me, and it's so much more important than anything else that I have trouble thinking of other reasons. I absolutely dislike the model that linux package managers use to handle dependencies and I do believe in bringing all libraries/dependencies needed with the installer and compiling them with disable-shared on. To do otherwise is to suffer a whole day trying to install ImageMagick when it should be a one-click task.

- Any other reasons pale in comparison to the first reason. I guess it's nice to have decent trackpad gestures... but I'd forgo everything for easy installers that bring dependencies with them.
Off shore wind power is about 25% of the wind power capacity of Denmark, the rest are 'normal' wind turbines. However, they'll contribute more to the total energy output. Off-shore wind turbines generate about 35-50% of their maximum capacity on average, compared to 20-30% of normal wind turbines.
The memory hierarchy needs to be revised to take into account the different performance characteristics of Flash RAM vs. hard drives. There is no disputing that NAND Flash SSD are very different from Dynamic RAM, static RAM, and HD.
Subtree only needs to be installed by the maintainer that interacts with the submodule's upstream. Everyone else just makes normal commits in the parent repo. They don't even need to know that the subtree has its own upstream (but they likely write better commit messages if they know).
Citation from me - stuff that hasn't worked properly for me in the last 5 years:

Acer Timeline 1810TZ, Acer Timeline 3810TZ, Sony Vaio VPC-J1, Lenovo ThinkPad T61, Dell Precision 390, Dell Precision T3500.

All have irritating bugs, hibernation and sleep problems, random crashes despite being absolutely bog standard Intel hardware across the board supposedly fully supported by Linux. The same kit doesn't exhibit any problems under Windows.

The Timeline series machines under Windows 7 got a whopping 8-10 hours battery life of average load OUT OF THE BOX. Under Ubuntu, even with all the powertop tweaks etc, 3 hours was pushing it.

Current Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian were tried on each machine at the time.

Just can't be bothered any more. Linux (Debian) sits inside a VirtualBox VM on Windows on my T61 where ironically the battery lasts longer when it's in a VM than on bare metal...
+ I think going to a cloud IDE is the future. I've been experimenting with www.action.io - it's pretty awesome to just open that up in a browser on any OS and get coding without local configurations.
Voicing disagreement that a particular submission does not belong on the site is boring. It adds no value, and becomes noise. In this case, we care more about the general discussion than an individual's desire to voice disagreement.
What's the other anglicized version? "Cyprus" is the only correct spelling, as far as I know, and I'm Greek. Or are you referring to the transliteration, "Kypros"? That's pretty much never used (same with "Hellas" for Greece).
I exclusively used Linux on the desktop from 2002-2006. Font rendering sucked back then too.
Recently when there was a windy weather situation, Denmark produced enough power from wind turbines to cover 82%[1] of the entire power usage in denmark.

[1] DANISH http://ing.dk/artikel/vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-gaarsdagens-...
Discussed at greater depth in the paper at http://goo.gl/YDTwu , if anyone's interested.
Finally, an objective opinion.
This is correct. Norway exports power in wet seasons, and imports it in dry seasons. But if there is less rain and dam fill-up than expected, they will throttle down on production to save the water in order to sell it at a higher price later on.
While the view may be a rather weak argument, wind power doesn't make much sense. Nuclear power is just a better way to produce energy. It's cheap, stable and just as environmentally friendly. It's too bad that politics prevent it's usage, adoption and development in so many countries. There's very little research on thorium power, too, which would solve most of the remaing negative points about nuclear power.
The End of Power
A lot of hydroelectric in the US pumps the water back up at night (when demand is low) so that they can use it to generate electricity the next day.

Just south of the Bay Area, you can see such a facility on the road between the 101 and the 5, at Pacheco Pass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Luis_Reservoir

See also : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_storage
Perhaps that rule could be rewritten as
6. Never drop your margins.

Sure, find ways to save costs and pass this on to your customers, but only when it improves your margins a bit.
I guess the real question is if liberal governmental policies encourage innovation better than conservative ones.
It's also a web app.
Easy Video Embeds
While I agree with you, I wouldn't attribute the entire effect to Paul Graham. There's a steady progression: Phase 1 was Larry and Sergey: they tried their hardest to stay in charge, but the powers that be (i.e. the money) forced a CEO on them. The best they could do was limit the damage by making sure the CEO had as much technical chops as possible. In retrospect, Eric Schmidt was great: a real hacker in background who had made the transition into a business guy at Novell/Sun. Pretty good progress to getting hackers more power: at least when they were forced to hire above themselves, they picked one of their own.

But the next one in the line went better - Call this Phase 2: Mark Zuckerberg (the next big company founder) was somehow able to hold his own against the money. I think we can credit this to Peter Thiel: since Thiel had first hand experience at PayPal, he probably has tremendous respect for hackers (I don't know what his personal hacking skills are, but I suspect they are good). Thiel (as the primary money behind FB) gave the Zuck free reign to stay CEO, which moved the needle further.

And now we're in phase 3: Zuck has shown the money guys enough contempt (remember the articles in Businessweek or whatever where bankers were angry that Zuck wore a hoodie and not a suit at the IPO roadshows?), as well as established a ~50B company with hackers firmly at the helm. Now it's common knowledge that you don't really need a "business guy". The next guys are free from this tyranny.

I do think that PG helped though. A lot of the education has come from PGs essays: I'd be surprised if there was anyone in the valley who hasn't read them, or at least organically come to very similar conclusions that he has: notice how they overlap well with Peter Thiel's class notes for CS183 (at least in some of the assumptions they both make about how the world works). And the part of SV that PG doesn't influence (the bigcos, I imagine. I don't know, I'm speculating at this point...) Thiel influences. So take the lead-by-example of Google, then Facebook. The intellectual underpinnings by Thiel and Graham. The evangelizing of Graham and Hacker news, and that's what I would credit for this outcome.
Where are you located? I can relate to how you feel. I was like that for few years until I finally find few close friends (not long ago).. Sometimes, I even think finding a good friends depend on luck.. Are you freshman at your university? When I was in my first year, I was very lonely as well. Anyways, add me on gtalk.
The correlation between standardized test scores, GPA, high school graduation rate and six-year college graduation rate are bound intimately to income and class.

So what? Why do you believe that merit is not correlated with income and class?

Suppose, hypothetically, that some reference classes are simply intrinsically better than others at math and reading. Wouldn't any meritocratic system result in rewards being correlated with membership in the aforementioned reference class?

You are correct that using "holistic" admissions rather than standardized tests is likely to reduce meritocracy. That's the whole point. Meritocracy gets you too many of those geeky Asians, and it would be really bad if colleges were full of Asians.

[edit: My last sentence is indeed sarcastic. I favor meritocracy, not ethnic corporatism.]
They do complain about views and noise in Europe too. But with a functioning government their concerns are overruled by the majority who doesn't have a view of the coast.

I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day.

As far as power generation I'm amazed the ground windmill approach is as popular as it is. It's not efficient. It has serious limitations. Seems like a craze. But then the incredibly inefficient coal plants were a craze too. Electric lights and vacuum cleaners, how did we live without them! We can make coal plants far more efficient. A 10% efficiency increase would be bigger than the renewable industry in the US. We can also make wind kites which make a lot more sense. Lets see if we bother.
That's fine but for some of us, connectivity is not ubiquitous and it isn't necessarily legal to ship our code or data somewhere else unknown on the Internet...
That's very true. I appreciate your comment because it shows the situation in another light completely. You're quite right, and logically this is also what I should think, however it just, I don't know, feels bad. Irrationally, it feels shitty. We're still humans and I guess that influences us a lot.
nice one!
I am currently working on a similar project with raspberry pi.
From previous experience with beer. I recommend using flow sensors with integrated liquid sensor. Foam can be a big factor for some beers.
whoops, definitely my mistake on exact time frame there (early vs mid-late 1800's), but we'll just say 150 years ago then.
Thanks for the suggestion. The motivation behind writing a blog post every day is to force myself to put something down without worrying so much about what I'm writing. I have this perception that every post had to be an essay and a masterpiece, and I want to break that in favor of more honest, free communication.
Freshly minted coins are as anonymous as the public IP that claimed them. If you mine behind TOR (even if you're part of a pool), your new coins are anonymous.

The same goes for the transaction fees.
Bitcoin is a 21st century Hawala
Agreed.

We've got them on Windows too - .msi files :)

The main advantage of standalone packages is I can choose whatever version of package XYZ I want and push it out rather than being stuck with the package version the repository ships with until either the maintainer updates it or you patch it yourself or argue with some shoddy backport.
Can someone explain why Denmark would have to pay other countries to take excess electricity rather than getting paid for it?
Side projects means that the person in question is investing hens own time learning (more often than not, new) stuff.
They don't want their employes learning stuff. Fair enough.
oh, the irony. one line he says that he's a clever user that understands business, the other line suggests that what apple should do is change the filesytem. can you picture it? tim saying "one more thing to excite you" and announce a new filesytem instead of, say "Siri on your desktop"? I image 95% of the user base thinking "you updated the WHAT?!"
That email is from Hal Finney; I'm confused by your post.
AFAIR it's done in italy too (~1/5 of the national power is hydroelectric) and I am reasonably sure all the big plants work with dams/reservoirs, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entracque_Power_Plant
And the purpose is to help understand how to cultivate innovation in communities.
I'd really like something like this to happen, but I agree that this set of patches isn't likely to get included. Submodules are my biggest gripe with git usage, and what persuades me not to suggest people roll git out more widely. I've seen various strategies to avoid submodules (build scripts that clone sub repos instead is one example alternative) but it'd be much nicer if it there was a One True Way which worked properly.
If Apple needs a better filesystem, they should consider HAMMER from DragonflyBSD. It's BSD-licensed, unencumbered by patents, and way more sophisticated than HFS+.
Is this a joke? I thought he is offline?
Just imagine how many Bitcoins you'd mine with that.
People are actually not super excited about windmills in Denmark either. Noise, vibrations, and view are the problems.
This is the money quote that summarizes the view of ~everyone in clinical care:

“You have to ask, how is it possible that my doctor cannot look at my DNA without being concerned about patent infringement?” Christopher Mason, assistant professor at Weill Medical College, told The Guardian.