skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not so sure. Unless you have huge guaranteed subsidies like in Germany, making these investment decisions carries substantial risk. Is it really smart to buy solar panels and large batteries that amortize over 10 years when there could be a technological breakthrough right around the corner? Do you really want to be in a position to operate and maintain that technology, buy insurance, deal with repairs, etc? I know I don't.

And if you're talking about disconnecting from the grid entirely (I know you don't but the OP did), you suddenly have a high availability issue on your hands. That's never going to happen.

I think at the end of the day, solar will be operated by utilities. They don't have to buy all equipment on one day, so they can spread the risk. They have professional staff to fix and maintain things when they are broken.
Know Your Logical Fallacyis
It's not ad hominem at all. It's statistical. If someone insults Microsoft every chance they get, they probably have a grudge against Microsoft.
That's one of the issues though. Which patents are the "truly new" ones and which are the "trivial ones"? It seems like many software patents seem obvious in hindsight, a few years down the road, but they were not obvious at the time of invention.
I find it extremely helpful to convert any big US-wide number a per-capita value, which you can easily estimate in your head by multiplying by 3 and dividing by a billion. As a random example, the US spends $55 billion on pets annually, which is just an arbitrary number to me. But convert this to about $165 per capita and now it's much easier to see if this number is reasonable, compare it to other expenditures, etc.

(And then there's the satirical visualization from Saturday Night Live: How big is a $16 trillion dollar debt? Imagine each of these dollar bills represents one trillion dollars. It would take a stack of 16 of them to equal $16 trillion dollars.)
Wordpress Under Attack: How To Avoid The Coming Botnet
Why the Ruby dependency for creating cookbooks?
I don't prefer installing frameworks I'm not using as add-ons for another product - can vagrant do the extras?
Things you say on the web have a habit of being preserved for quite some time.

I can easily imagine certain future employers seeing the author because of this rant / critique as a liability.
I definitely don't see Spotify parading around calling this a groundbreaking "innovation." It's convenient for people like me that use Spotify 24/7 and want the choice between web and desktop.
This piece overlooks the fact that utilities can install solar power cheaper than a residence can. This will always be the chase. Electricity will drop in price accordingly.
I have never, ever come across a scenario where assigning to the object instead of the prototype has made any meaningful impact on performance.

The only scenario I can even think of where it would maybe possibly matter would be a tight loop where you are doing little else except just accessing properties.
FWIW: the alcohol content of those drinks was very low indeed. I find it hard to imagine that there was much inebriation involved.
Sometimes crackers do this to obtain accounts to your service or to reverse engineer some of their already stolen accounts. Not much can be said since you haven't specified the service in question.

You could implement CAPTCHA to your system and see if the bots struggle on it. Next step from it would be to make a CSRF protection, which is not visible in DOM. Something like this is used on Instagram.
Some companies have a culture of patenting. You want to stay hired - you patent everything you can, to reach the targets.

A friend worked for a company that did code maintenance (support/bug fixing) for some embedded IBM systems. They were bought by IBM, and in the first meeting their new IBM boss said to them "I checked the company records and I see no patents. This needs to be changed." What kind of patents can you get while fixing bugs in some C code written by somebody else?
How Wireless Carriers are Monetizing Your Movements
Also of note via that link:

Copyright database:
http://www.ic.gc.ca/app/opic-cipo/cpyrghts/dsplySrch.do?lang...

Patent database:
http://brevets-patents.ic.gc.ca/opic-cipo/cpd/eng/search/adv...

And on another part of the site:

Starting a business:
http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/icgc.nsf/eng/h_07064.html

Importers database:
http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cid-dic.nsf/eng/home
We shouldn't be able to patent any idea just by running it on a "processor and memory".

I'm convinced that trademark and copyright gives us all the IP tools we need. Patents can get f'ed.
Sails 0.8.9: A Rails-Inspired Real-Time Node MVC Framework
Got accepted in an accelerator. What kind of visa?
Guys, just got accepted in an acceleration program in Washington D.C. I'm braziliand and now I'm worried regarding what kind os visa should I get.

Do you know if I can establish a new company in US with the B-1 visa? If not what kind of visa should I got for?

Do you give any advice what should I do? I don't have much time, like a month and a few days to get it.
And if you choose to work for one of those companies with a culture of patenting, you deserve the shame. If you run a company and you want to go patent crazy, you should be starved of engineering talent.

You do have a choice of where you work. "i just want to keep my job" is not a valid excuse for anything.
Bionic hand controlled by iPhone app
Robin, the tutorial behind this link will enable it for you if you haven't got it yet: http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57551372-285/enable-spot...
Finally! Web-based browser. It's actually pretty good. I like the interactions
Our relationships with the sun are deeply disturbed and this is likely responsible for many ailments, mental and physical, that we suffer from.

Our circadian rhythms are regulated by sunlight. More specifically, the pineal gland in the brain suppresses melatonin when the retina is exposed to natural sunlight. This allows for a huge melatonin surge at night, putting you to sleep and telling the body to perform its nighttime functions. When you aren't exposed to natural light during the day, your pineal brands produce melatonin when they should not be doing so, leading to all sorts of problems.

To make matters worse, even looking at the sun through a window won't work; enough spectrum is blocked that melatonin production continues.

tl;dr; If you want to optimize health and sleep, work outside (in the shade) as often as possible.
Even if the inventor refuses to sign the declaration, if they have an obligation to assign and are truly an inventor, their name will appear on the face of the patent. There are procedures at the patent office for proceeding with getting a patent even when an inventor refuses to sign.
Your employer will have its internal lawyers call you to explain to you that your employment contract says that you have to assign them the patent, and that they're giving you $1,000 honorarium for this, and if you do not accept this then they will file your name anyway as "assignment by an uncooperative inventor." Not sure if you can blame someone for caving. Who wants to be called an "uncooperative inventor" by their employer?
Strange that they didn't conduct any studies in parts of Asia, what with the cultural differences between East and West.
There is no implicit moral code of technologists.
A Way Out for the US Gov in Bradley Manning Case
More likely that you'd see an informal/distributed 48VDC grid spring up. Less than 50V isn't considered "real" wiring by the NEC and goes largely unregulated. Think low voltage path lighting, doorbell wiring, thermostat wiring, etc.

So if you and your neighbors can share power via 48VDC with no approval then you can run your own inverters to power your household stuff. There are plenty of grid-following micro-inverters that can be purchased fairly inexpensively.

Forklift batteries cost a few grand but give you many kilowatt-hours worth of energy storage. Considering that the average US house seems to use about 1kW of power on average a 40kWh battery pack would allow huge amounts of flexibility to decide when to run a generator, use solar cells, wind turbines, etc. http://www.midwestlifttrucks.com/offgrid.html
I love that it's all on a single page.
If you think getting a Visa card is hard in Rwanda, getting a merchant account so you can accept Visa payments is a whole different story. And again, here Bitcoin shines. Someone in Rwanda that builds a compelling service can instantly start taking payments from the rest of the world, without asking for permission, without filling out any paperwork and with the same fee structure as the biggest retailers.

Brilliant blog post. The best idea around Bitcoin I've heard for a while. There's probably room for a startup to help spread bitcoin in the developing world
Not sure of the quality of it but Wordpress does have automated test suite: http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/automated-testing/ https://unit-tests.svn.wordpress.org/trunk. Do you have any experience with those?
Ha ha, be sure to mention this article to startup founders during the interview, see how far this gets you. This is the world in we live in, no life outside work, let alone sleep.
OG1205
Startup Weekend project for IT-developers - please answer 8 questions
While you may doubt, I am quite confident. Forklift batteries are readily available and not terribly expensive. Heavy, yes, but you weren't going to put the batteries on your roof for a bunch of other reasons anyhow.
Here is my visualization of the 16 Trillion Dollars bailout given by the Federal Reserve to the Banks that cannot fail:

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/have-you-heard-a...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the-...

US Population : About 314 million
Bailout : USD 16 Trillion
= 16000 billion
= 16,000,000 million
Hence loading factor per person: 16,000,000 / 314
= about 50000 dollars.
I.e. The Federal Reserve Loaded every US citizen with an additional burden of USD 50,000
It's a big issue that any successful open source project faces. It's natural for the team to want to promote all the great things the product will do. But the core team doesn't scale as fast as contributors, let alone the userbase, and there is great risk of over-promising.

I think the approach of something like jQuery works best: do one thing well. Add polish, not features. Let other people start their own projects that extend yours.

A way to scale back expectations even more is to provide sample code, not a drop-in library. If you want to use it, copy and modify it so you know how it works and can fix the bugs yourself. This ensures that people don't think of themselves as just users.
Bird's feathers are moving slightly, seems to be alive to me, unless there's a fierce wind or something.
You'd probably set a chron with crack or John the Ripper which would come with a small password list and do some common permutations and then lock accounts. Ars Technica mentioned a RockYou.com password list that is now the go to list for serious cracking. I think it would be hard to enforce this patent for sysadmins who implement their own system.
Thank you so much for this book. Your writing is clear an concise. I am starting out with angular and this is just what I need, not another piece of angular documentation.
To the ember.js team: don't worry, people like this are poison to open source. They demand so much, have such high expectations, and are not willing to contribute anything. They do not realize people have real lives outside of open source, and sometimes they need a break.
This doesn't really speak much to software patents (I'm assuming those are of particular interest to HN). Does anyone know what the status of software patents in Canada is currently? If I were to judge solely based on the articles I read, the problems with patent trolls seems to be an exclusively American problem.

Reading: http://www.jurisdiction.com/spcanada.htm says that in 1993, the Canadian Patent office updated its terms regarding software patents to:

In June 1993, the Canadian Patent Office replaced its August 1, 1978 guidelines and published them for the "information and guidance" of practitioners. They were:

"1. Computer programs per se are not patentable.

2. Processes which are unapplied mathematical calculations, even if expressed in words rather than in mathematical symbols, are not patentable.

3. A process and/or computer program which merely produces information for mental interpretation by a human being is not patentable, nor does the process or program confer novelty upon the apparatus which uses it.

4. Claims drawn up in terms of means plus function which merely produces intellectual data are not patentable.

5. New and useful processes incorporating a programmed computer, are directed to patentable subject matter if the computer related matter has been integrated with another practical system that falls within an area which is traditionally patentable.

6. The presence of a programmed general purpose computer or a program for such computer does not lend patentability to, nor subtract patentability from, an apparatus or process."
Tips on building a Game as a service (the service parts)
Just to make it clear once forever, that in Hollywood movies, when they say "You have 3 hours too arrange $100MM in cash" etc. there is no way this money will feet into a suitcase.
I find it hard to lose motivation with beeminder (https://www.beeminder.com/) kicking my ass.

I used to have a lot of trouble.
Hindsight is 20/20. Everything is obvious, once someone already paves the way to the solution.

This is why, in principle, there is the "prior art" clause. It's just not enforced well enough in the software realm--but the mechanism to prevent patenting something widely known a posteriori does technically exist.
1) What is the percentage of students who get admitted into U.S. schools from foreign countries poor? Are most actually middle/upper class and just prefer to study overseas? I saw the latter as a pretty common scenario in Australia and Canada.

2) 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? I've worked in tech in the U.S. for the last five years and have met very few male African Americans / Hispanic Americans despite working in cities with high populations of those demographics.
Microsoft's original campaign for WP7 focused on the idea that it let you check your phone quickly and then get back to real life. This commercial is all about shutting out reality. I have a feeling about which message is going to resonate more with people.
Perfect! This will go well with our River of News RSS reader we launched yesterday: http://rivered.io
The popularity of snooping on other people's lives will never cease to amaze me. Some of the sentiment in this thread is what has powered ww.com for 15 years now, and I still don't get it.

I'm not complaining though :)
I'm not the author, I just though the service might be useful given the impending shutdown of RSS access to Twitter and the continuing demand for it.

Yes, they are violating the Twitter TOS regarding naming/branding, but it should be easy to work around it.

So far it seems the site hasn't had much exposure, and I'm interested in how Twitter will respond to it if it increases. If they really want to prevent the re-packaging of user's tweets into RSS feeds, and depending on how they're obtained (through API access, plain old HTML skimming, etc..) things could get interesting.
A very, very simple cd "hack" I use is (put this in your .bashrc):

function cd()
{
builtin cd "$*" && ls
}

it automatically runs "ls" every time you cd somewhere. I find when I'm using someone elses box or SSH'd in somewhere it's really annoying not to have it.
Amateur Half-Life 2 series by russian fans
just moved his head
One can do wonders for indoor climate with better house design and appropriate handling. The reliance on air conditioning everywhere amazes me.

(But then, Europe is not too humid.. nobody uses private air conditioning.)
It continues to amaze me how Facebook is so popular when they don't seem to have a clue about human communication. First comparing the service to a chair (really?!), now showing their CEO and public face as a boring guy who nobody pays attention to and its developers as having attention deficit disorder.

I know I'm not their target audience, but I wonder if any Facebook user thinks this ad is cool or funny. My inner teen thinks it's lame.
The Libertarian Party is Now Accepting Bitcoin Donations
Ask HN: Pure Lisp / Lisp syntax without parentheses?
I just had a very confusing conversation with a new acquaintance. He's a bit of a Microsoft-head, and works in finance. So far so good.

Then he goes off to say stuff like "I love Pure Lisp... after starting with Common Lisp but hating all the brackets, then Pure Lisp is great", which left my brain so confused I didn't know what to say. I'm pretty much sure he meant 'parentheses', not "brackets". But is there a single 'something' in the Microsoft world that's called Pure Lisp? And does it have a syntax that isn't s-expressions?
Cooling in the summer requires much less energy compared to heating in the winter. It's also a lot more of an optional comfort than a critical survival need.
Reasons not to use a statically typed functional programming language
Very useful service if you want a single RSS feed for multitudes of web services that you want to track. The good thing is that almost every web service out there has an active Twitter account so it works very well.

I have been using it since the early days after another service that offered a similar functionality closed down.

Also love the fact that developer listens to feedback and implement changes. Just hope that Twitter does not break the functionality that is used by this platform.

Feature request? A similar service for Google+!
Well, Angular and Ember actually do have substantial differences - they have surprisingly different architectures and general philosophies driving them.

Unfortunately, that seems to lead to a lot of acrimony between them. I wonder if a big part of it is that each side is convinced there won't be space for both in the future, and that a clear winner has to be declared - which I don't think is true at all. This town is certainly big enough for the both of them :)

As for drama within the Ember community itself, that's a little more complex. I think a big part of it is that Ember seems to have a lower barrier to entry than Angular at first glance, but certainly has its own catches and hang-ups, and running into those when you thought you had found a holy grail can be extremely frustrating.
This accurately describes the current situation, in broad terms. Amazon went through an extended litigation process to extend Canadian protection to their US 1-Click patent.

Here's the Federal Court ruling on the matter:

http://www.patentlyo.com/amazon-dot-com.pdf
IF as an expression is C-like, it's the ternary operator.
Igniting motivation in others
I'm in the UK and it is working for me so its definitely not US only.
I guess this one is playing a joke on us? It's a feed of what looks like some old Japanese movie: http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=27115
I wouldn't want my electric grid engineers (or any other kind of infrastructure) to be anything less than skeptical of change.
Too bad that page isn't dated April 1 ;)
How long before the utilities (likely successfully) lobby to make PV/DER illegal, I wonder.

Soon, I'd wager. As I see it, the purpose of this report is FUD, which is usually the opening move of any protectionist initiative.

Edit: alternately, they'll push to tax it to high hell, or at least argue that they own sunshine (like water utilities do over rainwater collection) and should therefore be paid by PV users.
It's really hard to imagine a trillion dollars, but it's also hard to imagine 7 billion people or 300 million Americans. Usually when we're talking about trillions of dollars we're talking about something at a national or international level, i.e. shared among a large group of people. Dollars per capita is often a better metric because it's normalized to something more tangible.

A trillion dollars is about 3200 dollars per American or 12000 dollars per American taxpayer. It's still a lot of money, but much easier to think about.
A bitcoin private key fits nicely onto a single page of paper. Print it, hand it over to the bad guys, done.
Yup. If I remember correctly the WP7 ad pissed off quite a few people. How DARE they infer people are obsessed with their phones!
The writing on this page is insufferable. A more effective presentation of this information would have been a simple graphic.
When I clicked, there was a dog running all over the place.
Besides the P2P, I think that with the native client they went after iTunes at that time. Their first versions of the client (not sure if current ones), scanned your hard drive to organize your music library, allowed you to purchase individual songs and also to sync your iPod. Now iTunes is not their main competitor, but Rdio and Pandora are, that's why I think the strategy shift.

Having a native client was the feature that caught my attention and made me try Spotify in the first place. I was tired of implementations that used to hang my web browser or consumed lot of memory. But that was back in the time. Their latest Mac OS client is very memory hungry, almost every time on my top 3 of applications consuming the most memory.
My best guess is that Ember is marketed as "omg look awesome!" and Angular is marketed as "hey, this is useful", and this causes the user community compositions to differ just enough for this to be the case (though there are still crazed fanboys on both sides, hence the Ember<->Angular comment thread wars).
It's interesting how sometimes an article seems ridiculous at first but quickly becomes extremely interesting... This was one of those.
The answer is immersion. Live and breath music and music theory. It won't come to you overnight but if you have been playing guitar for 15 years, I feel as if you'll keep going for at least another.
It's an interesting mindset, and I wonder if he'd ever given thought to letting the troops take afternoon naps. I can't imagine that they did, but wonder if it would have been beneficial or not.
Gmail, Facebook, Google+, Twitter
That's because for most people reality sucks. Well played Facebook.
While I was hired under H-1b visa I was definitely underpaid, but the moment I got greencard my options exploded. Now I work at startup for 1.5x of prevailing wage in here. And in a year or so I plan to get next bump in salary or finally do a successful launch of my own project.

So... Do not want to slump domestic engineer wages? Remove stupid restrictions and procedures to do transfers once employee got a job in USA so these foreign employees could pick for whom they want to work as easy as this could do domestic employees.
Their team came from Skype and Joost so they had more P2P/native client engineering talent.
You just responded to a criticism of evidence being anecdotal with more anecdotal evidence.
One man's crusade against America's war on drugs
Very basic economics says that a greater supply of people willing to work at a lower wage (as many H1Bs) will reduce the market wage.

"Somewhere along the line, the H-1B program got side-tracked. The program was never meant to replace qualified American workers, but it was instead intended as a means to fill gaps in highly specialized areas of employment. When times are tough, like they are now, it's especially important that Americans get every consideration before an employer looks to hire from abroad" - Sen. Chuck Grassley
> it's naive to believe that the spike didn't play a major part in getting published in Science, or the media attention the article received.

Yes, you're right, but now we're talking about science media.
Not really, imo. The Ad is more about fun, and having fun. Fun sells.
I can only parse that as being a really lame pun on losing your cash beneath the cushions of a sofa.