skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heat gain/loss through the roof and other opaque parts of the building shouldn't be an issue because insulation is cheap and about 200mm of modern insulation is all you need before air tightness and AC efficiency become the major factors for energy loss. Also, cubicle farm style office buildings are typically in cooling mode, i.e. they are rejecting excess heat for at least 3/4 of the year even in a temperate climate because of the heat generated by people, IT, lighting etc. Therefore reducing solar gain through windows is pretty critical to improving energy efficiency by reducing the load on the cooling systems. So using solar panels as part of a brise soleil to provide shading to windows would be the optimum solution but this is a more expensive facade structure to build and more expensive and less safe to maintain, so it's typically only done on high spec buildings which need some eco bling.

Residential buildings have different factors in play. Residential efficiency is all about retaining as much heat as possible in winter through air tightness, winter solar gain through windows and insulation. With good insulation and solar shading, summer heat gains are not so much of an issue for residential in temperate climates; for example most people in Northern Europe don't have AC because there are only a few weeks of the year when you would have it switched on.
And Burgas and AIMA and etc, etc.... Just because Iran do it through proxies doesn't mean it's not Iran.
No filter: the meanest thing Paul Graham said to a startup
So, can we expect the funding to fail? Do we have similar charts for other like fundings?

Personally, even the $600 watermark is too high. Perhaps I and my colleagues are not the right market, but either

* we've been fooled by prices on Google's Nexus devices

* the extra power doesn't justify the cost or isn't necessary for our needs

* we might as well get Lenovos -- half our guys have a history of dropping their phones or otherwise damaging their phone

At the end of the day, I connect to numerous remote hosts to get work done, which negates the purpose if I just need a shell and terminal multiplex and browser to run on my localhost. I'm not going to want to run my RDB, search DB, KV store, cache store, messaging bus, etc from that phone. The specs are nice, for a phone, but it's not a workstation.
I'm from the UK, so if I'm in the US looking to get home, I see the dates the opposite way around? A better way would be to look at the user's locale.
As you might expect, it produces code that is somewhere in between C and Python, where custom containers are also somewhat out of idiom.
Facebook Fishhook: dynamically rebind symbols in iOS binaries
Semi offtopic, have you ever noticed on Chrome's new tab page.. the "most visited" section uses the dominant color of each page as a highlight?
A hearty +1 to anything that lets us legitimately run a different scripting language in a <script> tag
Map-based travel diary service?
I'd really like a map-based travel diary service. Does anyone know of a service, or open source projects that could easily be modified to:

- Show a (google?) map
- Include routes of driven or gps routes
- Contain location-aggregated icons on map for photos based on photo metadata. Maybe photos are on the service, or maybe they're on flickr etc.
- Has Icons on map for blog or 'diary' entries.

You'd be able to see your route between cities, click on a city "photo" icon to zoom into the city and see all of the icons for photos taken at different spots, or click on the 'blog' icons on the map to see what you talked about.

An interactive view of a trip.
Web, mobile dev and occasionally computation intensive stuff(read ML algorithms/large csv files/matrix computations)
If your core business isn't profitable, SaaS won't get you there, but it is a great model if you can get big. If done right, the value from not having to re-implement at each customer site is huge.
Actually that's true. I just used the terms they are described with in their local political scene.

Compared to our parties, both are on the right.

And it's a shame that the democratic party, from what I've read, has gotten even more on the right as times move along, even being bullish against the sixties spirit etc.

From this book (which is half light pop culture references and half decent period analysis) I've come to the conclusion that this happened in the eighties:

http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/pro...
Exclusive First Look: ImmuniWeb Hyrid WebApp Penetration Testing
Pale Blue Dot: Interplanetary Photobomb
Serious question. Aren't there more proles now?
I am almost positive it was the MH60. If my memory is correct: Congress did not defund it, they just did not authorize the funds to go forward with the plans to build a stealth MH60 SOF. Upon hearing the news the CIA said fuck it we have some black budget money we will pay for it. The next time congress heard about the program was news reports about a tail rotor from a stealth chopper in some guys yard in Abbottabad.
> Well you can't call 'var' type inference

'var' is not the type inference, ':=' is the type inference.
I totally agree with you on the "e" icon.

My parents had received a virus that originated from a web site (seedy in nature) that exploited a vulnerability in IE 6. After having to revisit them twice in a month, I replaced the shortcut with Firefox and Adblock+ (adblock was to prevent explotation of vulnerabilities in Flash Player that were happening with increasing frequency from popular ad networks).

It wasn't until last year that I flipped the icon back to Firefox when I installed their new computer. The first week I received two phone calls from my mom asking "Where's the Internet"? The second one concluded with her asking me to put the other picture back "next time I come over" because she liked it better than the red/orange icon.
"In the land of truth the man with one fact is king"

Linton Barwick
This looks really promising. Can't wait to try it out. This will be just available on Mac?
I'd point to the internet in general as well. It's pretty much ubiquitous at this point. Just stay inside and spend hours on youtube and facebook instead of going outside and getting up to no good.
Backbone conventions: templates and subviews
I live out in the country, but KW is nearby, which is why I find it so interesting that I cannot really name a single startup operating within. I feel like I have a closer connection to Silicon Valley, even though I've never been there. Is there something like HN for local startups?
The podcast to this blog entry http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/15/184208123/were-mak... goes through what the funding graph for their kickstarter project looks like. TLDR; level in the middle, spikes at the end.
An app-indicator script to show how much Ubuntu Edge campaign has raised
https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp

Lisp implementation from one of the julialang devs
Hiring a CEO like this will help you out in many ways. Congrats on the coup!
+1 for awesome use of "decrepitude"
I imagine it's a similar problem to online payments. From 100,000 feet payments looks like shuffling bits around and keeping track of them. And in some sense it is. But in reality that technical problem is maybe only 1% of the business, the rest is things like customer service, fraud protection, auditing, regulatory compliance, relationships and integration with other financial companies, relationships with governments and law enforcement organizations, etc. Each of which is a hugely different problem and vastly more difficult. The funny part is if you translated the problem to the physical realm few people would fool themselves into thinking that a bank could be reduced to little more than a ledger.
It would be interesting to see data on the usage of marijuana vs harder drugs over the past 30-40 years.
I sold my iPhone 4s for $500 last December.
Companies in this space are also in an arms race where there are very finite amounts of scalable channels. (Scalable means, in this instance, any way they can convert money into customers in a predictable fashion.) One would naturally expect that the channels largely go to whomever is interested in investing most in acquiring them. However, since many of the participants in the auction (some channels, like AdWords, are more-or-less literally auctions) have extra-economic reasons to prefer growing, often the auction's clearing price will be non-profitable.

Or, to put it another way: the marketing company which has done best from the investment in marketing companies is Google. (Second best, probably "sales guys." Successful sales reps at enterprise firms are some of the best compensated people in software.)
I know a lot of friends of mine who have C/C++/PHP background struggle with rails at the start, primarily because of the magic of convention over configuration that happens (they aren't used to it). It takes a while to understand it. But once you understand it, it's a breeze.

Disclaimer: I am a Rails developer. My views are therefore biased.
Exceptions I can easily live without; Haskell's monads provide a much better mechanism for error handling (Maybe, Either, IO, etc).
"Many banks, such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo, have recently announced increased commitment to small business."

Hah! Nice one. Yeah, I once walked into a BOA branch myself and asked about start up funding, me being a long time customer, bills all paid on time, and a decent amount of funds in savings accounts there, surely they would consider helping me start a business, right? HA HA HA!!!

The deal is you have to be an established business that has already been banking with BOA with for at least two years as a business before they consider granting you any type of business loan. Without that you can have a free lollipop from the bowl and then get the hell out.
NSA Calls Emergency Private Briefing To Lobby Against Justin Amash Amendment
Shedskin - An experimental (restricted-Python)-to-C++ compiler
follow on questions:

Max Resolution

why?

are VMware/parallels, virtualBox images ok for requirements?

also would add requirement for digital monitor port, not VGA.

Like a lot of people, I prefer macbook Pros and Thinkpads, I've had decent experience with cheaper Dells and Toshibas purchased from Costco (90 day return policy) and I would avoid HP and Sony, too many hardware compatibility issues with linux, especially w.r.t. wireless
About the "no generic / you have to cast ,recast / the make issue" , could anyone here with a bit of experience gives an example of what that would look like in real code ?

Sure. Say you have a Set type (which is custom, since Go doesn't provide a `container/set` type.

type Set struct {
set map[interface{}]bool
}

All of the methods (`Add()`, `Contains()`, etc.) are going to be declared with `interface{}` parameters, e.g.,

func (set *Set) Add(x interface{}) bool

You would also want a method to get a slice of all members, e.g.,

func (set *Set) Members() []interface{}

If you want to use this as a set of strings, you would add without a cast:

mySet.Add("foo")

However, when pulling it out you would need to cast it to a string. So if you were converting `[]interface{}` to `[]string`, it would look like this:

values := make([]string, mySet.Len())
for i, member := range mySet.Members() {
values[i] = member.(string)
}
sorry the last sentence seems to be a non-sequitur. Why does the high cost of a hiring mistake justify letting slightly sub-par people stay?
Amazing. I loved the hour/date marks.
Functional languages are not about having no side effects.
The headline is deliberately written to convey the impression that Chevron is dragnetting the American population. I'm not interested in the nerdy argument we could have about whether that's true; I'm confident that it is.
Calling it calculus is disingenuous. This is a computer science master, offered by one of the premier institutions on the subject.

Not all CS masters are equal. Not all CS instruction is equal.

Depending on these outcomes, the cheap masters in CS could be superior to a local, more expensive, in-person community college masters.

Sure, the faculty at an Ivy League can make all the difference. So can the faculty at a top-tier school like GT.

But will the faculty at Ye Old Community College make all the difference and warrant the 2-4X higher cost?
Yes. In many industries, this is called a certification.
It's Time To Destroy Selfish Platforms
Learning interfaces through Go
I drag the Destination Marker to a possible airport; a weather icon pops up and a line with an airplane appears from Stockholm to wherever.

Thats it.

Is there something I'm missing? I don't think this is going to the be future of Airline websites...
Paul can be terse, and sometimes you don't want to hear what he has to say, and he can be wrong; but he's never a bully.
Did you pay taxes lately? Have you ever been disappointed by what government does with your taxes? Why haven't you tried to withhold your participation by not paying taxes? E.g. if you dislike the war in Iraq, what stopped you from not paying a part of your taxes? Also, even if you are hard-core fan of taxation, your neighbour may be not. If he also disagrees with the gov on the same matter as you, but decides to withhold some amount of taxes, would you call the cops to arrest him? Or will you let him do his thing and be disappointed if cops find out? Either way, you will notice there is violence behind taxation.

Anarchy is not some structure imposed on people. When I advocate for non-violent solutions, it's not me who needs to prove anything. It's the advocates of violence need to prove why all of a sudden generally undesirable violence becomes totally valid when done by a man in a special costume.

You yourself live 95% of your life in anarchy. You voluntary interact with people you like and avoid people you dislike. You avoid bad districts, you put locks on your bike, purchase insurance, enjoy security video cameras. Ultimately, with modern technology, people can be ostracized economically without any violence whatsoever. You'd need violent action only in extreme case of personal assault, but that's outside of morality. Morality is needed to avoid such situations in the first place.
Good and evil are such comforting terms, but hardly applicable. Do you honestly see no good in Iran, or evil in the rest of the world?

Iran and Israel have been the only major sources of stability in the region in the past twenty years, surely that's certainly good. If they hadn't had to endure sanctions then Iran would be one of the shining examples of prosperity in the middle east, however a bloody Shi'ite vs Sunni showdown would have likely occurred by now.
Looks good, it seems to get the markup right.
It's a good question to ask yourself all the time, not only when you are working on a startup. "Am I failing? How?" The more you ask it, the more evaluate your own progress according to whatever goals you have, the better you get at managing your own progress towards goals -- and the less you need other people to manage you.

That said, kudos to pg and team for being honest and to the point.
Electronic licence plates can be invalidated remotely
Because they might be replaced with someone who is much, much worse. Not awesome vs. complete disaster.
f-i, first and foremost, is an interactive agency, meaning they're all about selling their 'next' project; this leads me to believe that the site is probably a response to an RFP, or a really slick sales tool. As mentioned previously, this is a nice proof-of-concept for cutting-edge web UI work and interaction design (excusing obvious UX issues) that will '[sell] design consulting', but that's about it
Amending 215 isn't much good with FISA 702 collection methods still in place, so yes, this bill is useless.

You need new elected representatives because thus far no representative in any election in any district has ever lost an election over this surveillance. Unless and until that happens, the massive forces arrayed against you will sway the votes every time.

This movement lacks support, funding, vision, and credibility. It is at best a placebo that bleeds public motivation, so in many ways it is in fact worse than useless.
Agreed, I think navel gazing about functional programming for a systems language is ill guided at best.

Go seems to be pegged as a complement/replacement for C/C++/D(maybe no experience)/misc assembly. I don't see how functional languages will help at all for these tasks. You could argue maybe that security would be improved to a degree, but I really am having a hard time at imagining a low level driver being written in purely functional code. I know of only forth being used for some of those tasks in things like boot proms but that is a bit different in that it wasn't really an entire os built on top of things.

I find this somewhat ironic as I'm currently looking to replace a number of ruby/perl/shell scripts at work with go this winter. Not for any reason of maintainability, but the horrible task it is to deal with gems/cpan/"extras". And rather than program in pain with C I was thinking go would be a decent compromise as I can make rpm's rather easily for deployment and a makefile. Go seems to be perfect for these glue level things that escape the basic confines of most scripting.

But I don't know yet, this weekend is my "learn go and find a test framework like rspec in it" task. It looks similar enough to C that I could get up to speed ish in a day.
What about sponsoring murders and bombings in other countries? To highlight just a few: the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (whose only crime was writing a book that Ayatollah Khomeini never read), which resulted in the death of his Japanese translator and numerous injuries and bombings; bombings against Jewish targets in places like Argentina (the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires killed 85); sponsorship of Hezbollah, which has attacked people around the globe; sponsorship of Palestinian terrorist groups, etc. The Iranian regime is a very bad actor and economic sanctions are warranted.
Presumably because of the risk of replacing a known slightly sub-par quantity with an unknown truly bad hire.
"Write it in a Lisp" or "Use a Lisp as an extension language" don't work?

(Last time I tried the latter the more vocal members of the user base complained so much the entire effort died. That was in 2000.)
From reading about VegasTech I thought 'The Ogden' was a building owned by Hsieh and restricted to startup people - but it appears that is just a normal building lots of them have chosen to live in? Anybody have an idea of the cost to rent a 2br?
Looks great - when is it out?
I love Jason's blog but I'm having some trouble understanding this post.

It's okay to spend $X on customer acquisition if $X is less than the lifetime value of a customer (where X ends up being rather high for enterprise customers). But if it takes (pulling this number out of the air) two years to recoup that initial $X, then each customer is unprofitable for the first two years. And if you're a growth-minded SaaS firm, it's going to feel like a lot of customers are in those first two years: but once your initial batch of customers pay off their debts, so to speak, their profit can be invested back into customer acquisition -- it's not like your profits have to be funneled outside of the company, or that your growth has to be rampant and unchecked (with enterprise sales, you're more or less determining your own rate of expansion by the quality and quantity of your sales fleet). Acquisition begets acquisition.

Besides the fact that you need a cash reserve (either through your own savings or outside investment) and patience, I don't see what's particularly wrong with this strategy.
> My government has not once engaged in violence to me or my family.

What happens if you don't pay taxes?

The government will get violent.
Let me try to explain Schanuel's conjecture a little bit, if you're lost on words like transcendence degree. This turned out longer than I hoped so I hope it's not just a wall of text.

sqrt(2), π, π/2, π^2, and e are all irrational. Now think about π and π/2: these are very closely related. What I mean is:

π - 2(π/2) = 0

So we can add some combination of the two numbers, and get 0.

Now what about π and e? These feel different. After working with them one gets the feeling that
aπ + be
will never be zero, if a and b are rational[1]. If that's true, then π and e are called "linearly independent over the rationals". We do not know whether π and e are linearly independent over the rationals. (In particular, we don't know whether e+pi is rational.) It turns out that stuff like that is hard.

Now, there's an even stronger thing than being "linearly independent", and that's being "algebraicly independent". When talking about linear indepence we only thought about multiplying by rationals and adding (linear relations). For example, π and π/2 are NOT algebraicly independent. What about π and π^2? Well:
(π)^2 - (π^2) = 0
which is rational. This shows that π and π^2 are also not algebraicly independent. (The equation is obvious, but think about what it means: on the left of the minus, I have π, and I'm raising it to a power of 2. on the right of the minus, I have π^2, and I'm raising it to a power of 1).
We do not know whether π and e are mutually transcendental.

So you should think: linear independence of rationals is a weak way of saying "these numbers aren't that related." Algebraic independence means there even less related. You can think of both as ways of proving huge amounts of numbers are irrational. If we can prove that e and pi are algebraicly independent then for example we would know
e + 5e^3 + e^7 + pi + 4pi^4
is irrational.

Now, you can understand what this conjecture says. Take z_1, z_2, ..., z_n which are complex numbers. If you want, you can just imagine them to be irrational numbers. Suppose they are linearly independent over the rationals. The conjecture is that: at least n of z_1, z_2, ..., z_n, e^(z_1), e^(z_2), ..., e^(z_n) are algebraicly independent.

[1] And not both 0 ;)

Related: If you know some linear algebra, think about this. sqrt(2) is irrational. Think of 1 and sqrt(2) has "vectors" which you can multiply by scalars, but the only scalars you're allowed to multiply by are rational numbers. In this way you get a "vector space over the rationals" which includes things like 3+sqrt(2), 5, and 7sqrt(2). This vector space is also a field: we can multiply things together, and we get another element of the vector space:
(3+sqrt(2))(7sqrt(2)) = 3x7sqrt(2) + 7x2 = 14 + 21sqrt(2).

Because sqrt(2) is algebraic over the rationals, this vector space-field thing is finite. But now do it with pi instead of sqrt(2), and you'll get an infinite dimensional vector space with the vectors 1, pi, pi^2, pi^3.... Elements of this field are things like 4+pi+7pi^3.
Good products have features, Great products have stories.
Building a box-truck attraction always costs more money and takes more time that one would expect. However it's so refreshing to build something that isn't software once in a while.
Surface Printer release
This has been my experience - one unethical employee ran off with our best customer that represented about 40% of the business.

I now value ethics above all else in working relationships. Two ways I perhaps can quickly determine ethics: Watch how they interact with people in low status positions (food servers, gas attendants) versus how they interact with you. Also ask them about how they determine morality - if they give you a blank stare then perhaps take that into consideration.
You mean something like http://halftone.co/projects/temperatures/date/2003/4? Good idea, thanks!
The Definitive Guide to GitHub Pages
Good post until the Linus reference without any context.
Was this recent? If not, how did the advice turn out?
Has your own government called for an author to be murdered as a sacred religious duty because he wrote a literary novel that they didn't like?