skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some are now about two years old...

Those Cree/Home Depot bulbs were brand new this spring (2013). If you've got LED bulbs that have been going for two years, they're probably something else.

http://www.cree.com/News-and-Events/Cree-News/Press-Releases...
> A regular light bulb converts about 2% of its energy input into light, and 98% into heat.

This isn't relevant to your argument, but that actually isn't true, that figure is about 6~8 percent.

* The "luminous efficiency" as commonly reported is just the lumen/W luminous efficacy divided by the peak value of 683lm/W. The value of 683lm/W is the peak of human eye sensitivity curve and occurs at 555nm. The only light source that can achieve 100% "efficiency" by that measure is a 100%-efficient radiator that emits monochromatic 555nm (bright green) light, the best a perfect white light source can do is about 37%. (see [1])

* That "perfect white light source" would be a 100%-efficient radiator emulating the Sun spectrum bandlimited to visible light (zero infrared, uv and no other losses).

* It's possible to make a light source that appears white to human eye and is more efficient than that by emitting mostly at wavelengths the human eye is more sensitive to, and emitting less at wavelengths it's less sensitive to. That's part of the reason why manufacturers often offer CFLs with high efficiency but poor color rendering and lower efficiency but higher color rendering. (And don't get me started on the color rendering index.)

* That definition of "efficiency" is obviously not what most people think it is when they hear that word (useful work / total work spent), some prefer to call it "luminous coefficient". But it's not all lies, it was defined that way because it's easy to compute and understand and because this is the value of interest if e.g. you're making a LCD backlight or if you're designing an interior lighting setup.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy
love this idea- it is a hard one to execute. i like the direction that you took with this though- giving each of the cities a way to be distinct from each other. are you planning to expand past these cities? going abroad for like london or toyko? going through (a great great design)it sticks out from others in the local space because of the focus on the individual store and how it fits in wit he the larger community. i think these are key to being able to create a marketplace in the local. will there be a way to directly message or keep up to date with the shops that i like?
Do you have a high risk/ low risk breakdown?

ie, "I'm willing to play with 10k of it, but I'd like to be pretty conservative with 20k."
Sadly, that might lead to the entire development team getting executed.
Well, when people talk about ObjC development on Mac and iOS platforms, they generally mean ObjC plus Cocoa or Cocoa Touch.

It's true that ObjC itself isn't what's proprietary, but Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are.
Primary source on commodity fetishism: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#...

Wikipedia is pretty okay too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

Basically, commodity fetishism is the notion that economics is about relationships between commodities, not about relationships between people. It's called 'fetishism' as an allusion to religions in which dolls come to life. Marx asserts that economics is about relationships between people, but since we focus so much on things, the things come to life, like a fetish, and become just as much a part of our notions of economics as people are.

It relates to OSS because of 'the fetishizing of the F/OSS community itself': the dozens of articles about how OSS is the best way to make software, the only good way to make software, that those who do OSS are better than those who don't. We animate this social relation and put it on the same footing as actual people. They're expressed through objects.

Does that start to make some sense?

Stallman is an example in the article, not the controller of the hegemony. The hegemony is of the fetish of Open Source. Stallman is just one person (I am very much another) who stands to benefit from the hegemony.

I understood 'bug, not a feature' in a different way than you. What I got out of it was that it's a structural, not accidental aspect of the system. She was attempting to bridge the culture gap by referencing hacker pop culture. This kind of commentary is very common in Marxism.

I'm going to go eat lunch now, I'll check back in on this discussion later. Thanks!
As long as they have a ten-year replacement guarantee, I guess it doesn't matter as long as it's not a fire hazard.
No bulb will last very long when hot. This isn't something new.
Always commit on day one!
Are there any studies on how effective each method is? It seems fairly complex, depending on how good the methods being dictated are, how price-sensitive consumers are (and how well-informed about what costs/saves money), costs of switching, in some cases economies of scale, etc.

The conventional wisdom here (Denmark) has been that a mixture of the two achieves best results: a high tax on energy to provide an across-the-board untargeted price incentive, plus specific targeted regulations aiming at cutting out the largest sources of inefficiency and encouraging economies of scale in more efficient technologies. So for example district heating is now mandatory if you're in an area where it's available (no furnaces in new construction), and this seems to have been quite effective in increasing its adoption, which in turn makes it easier to build efficient district-heating networks and cogenerating power plants, since there is a dense customer base.
[Ask HN] Mobile Dev technologies current state of the art
Hello HN,

I guess it's the place to talk about that. Sorry if there is a recent thread about that, I couldn't find it.

HTML5? Hybrid? Native?

I was wondering what kind of choices did you mobile engineers made concerning your apps. I know it always depends on the context, but still, just knowing what are the global % is interesting.

My personal choice has always been native, though I did a lot of web based technology products and already used phonegap. I'm not necessarily looking for multiple platforms, and I always felt the native apps I made were slightly more responsive than my web based ones (the problem might be between the keyboard and the chair though). Still, this time, I'm thinking about webapp or phonegap, because I want to reach Android, too.

What is yours?

Cheers,
Recent articles have asserted that there's no material gain for those who work for free. You and the author both agree that that's not true.
I really dislike this article. It took me a little bit to figure out why. Most of the annoyance comes from fatigue of reading this kind of thing. "Humvees are more carbon neutral than a Prius" kind of thing.

Besides my personal annoyance though, this kind of unbalanced and unrigorous article is just flat out dangerous to public discourse on a pretty important issue. LED bulbs have strengths and weakness, to be sure. I didn't think the heat issue was a "secret" that "nobody will tell me". It was the first thing mentioned in nearly every single article or story I've seen about LED bulbs. I've been using LED bulbs for about 4 years now (in regular fixtures, closed fixtures, outdoor fixtures in summer and winter, closed bathroom fixtures) and have not had a single issue. As others mention, even if I did there's good warranty coverage.

I'm probably more radical than most on energy issues, but I find this kind of FUD downright irresponsible.

It also is part of this annoying trend of people that really enjoy trying to poke holes in new technology. Like electrocuting elephants with evil electric distribution technology.
I'm wondering whether I should have asked the question "Why are people not using AWS spot instances?". It seems like the price savings alone should be enough for people to consider using them. Is the architecture too different where it makes deployment prohibitively difficult?
Oldest Large Body of Ancient Seawater
That quote is only relevant when you look at it in the context of never, never, never, never give up on your entrepreneurial dream.

Trying something and seeing that their is no market for it or its just not working and continuing to work on it, is not the intent of that quote.

It's hard to know when you should quit and try another idea. But, quitting opens the runaway for the next better venture.

Also, each "failure" is a stepping stone to gaining the skills to make the next attempt easier.

If you look at any major founder they have had a history of starting small companies or failing a couple of times until they found the right business. They had the good sense to move on from their failures but they didn't quit.

At the end of the day its about maximizing your bandwidth. For someone with limited time due to family and kids, the bandwidth is just not there. So writing a book, maybe focusing on iOS apps, etc. might be the better approach or finding a niche that can accommodate a slow ramp up time would be the best.

I would love to know about others who have gone the iOS route. I'm thinking about focusing the next while on gaining iOS skills to develop Apps. The strategy would be to develop some niche apps and see where it goes. Even if it turns into passive income and I've gained new skillset, it might still be win/win.
Obviously there are no 100% guaranteed ways to double your money in a year, otherwise everybody would just do that instead of working for a living. I wouldn't recommend putting all your eggs in one basket, so you should invest in several areas to spread out the risk. I'd also recommend looking at investment as a long-term commitment (e.g. 3-5 years or more). I invest in the stock market, specifically dividend stocks. The most reliable stocks (e.g. Dogs of the Dow) pay 3-5%, and some of the more risky ones pay 5-12%, and up to 15-20% for REITs. For the last 2 years I have been leaning toward the REITs, since the real estate market is in recovery and should continue to improve over the next 3-5 years. With a good mix of dividend stocks you can spread out your risk and still get a healthy return of 8% or more.
Great advice, especially regarding updating documentation. Living documentation is essential to any growing company and is by far the easiest and most effective way for a new employee to have an impact immediately.
Markdown to PDF Creator
> It's pretty dumb to actually spend bitcoins if you could just hold onto them

A similar question can be asked about USD: why would you ever save it instead of spending it immediately, since it's only going to lose value over time due to inflation?

Of course, the difference right now is that the deflation rate in bitcoin is much higher than the inflation rate in USD. But clearly, if bitcoin ever becomes a major currency and the deflation levels off, there will be plenty of motivation to spend bitcoins, the same way there is currently plenty of motivation to save USD.
I often switched to embed. (youtube.com/watch?v=x89eyhj => youtube.com/embed/x89eyhj)

I do it because I might want to watch a video full screen in one monitor and continue to work on another. Embed automatically takes up the full window. An added side effect is that the pre-roll ads disappear. The banner ads are still there.
Diplomacy is a very good group game that even works by (e)mail. Colonial Diplomacy was also pretty good, but it felt like a sprint compared to Diplomacy.
Surprising Ways Music Affects and Benefits our Brains
The same thing happens to incandescent bulbs. If you put a regular light bulb in an enclosed housing it's going to burn out fast due to the excess heat, too. This really is a baseless attack.
While it is very fun to write Clojure, it must be said that it is relatively difficult to read, which hinders collaboration.
Some "distance-metric porn" here : http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/proxy/vignettes/overv...

proxy::dist() in R in case you want to quickly try some of them.

Frechet distance is interesting, too:

"Imagine a dog walking along one curve and the dog's owner walking along the other curve, connected by a leash. Both walk continuously along their respective curve from the prescribed start point to the prescribed end point of the curve. Both may vary their speed, and even stop, at arbitrary positions and for arbitrarily long. However, neither can backtrack. The Fréchet distance between the two curves is the length of the shortest leash (not the shortest leash that is sufficient for all walks, but the shortest leash of all the leashes) that is sufficient for traversing both curves in this manner." (from Wikipedia)

I remember trying it out as a way of quantifying how two related stocks' price movements can diverge (just as an example application).
USD is more stable because gov/banks/etc. are all staring at it all day, as well as their country's population. Not saying I trust them but I'd rather have a bill backed by the US gov than by Satoshi Nakamoto.

He's the single person YOU rely on -- the one who designed the mining system, currency caps, etc. Ridiculous.

USD is more distributed than Bitcoin just because people are always watching theorizing monitoring USD. Bitcoin is at the mercy of market manipulators and there are no legal protections provided against even basic tricks.
Awesome post, living documentation is SO clutch
After spending at least 50+ hours programming in both Julia and Clojure I have to disagree. Julia is more readable, faster, great for both imperative and functional programming and generally I found it easier to get things done.
Why don't metals bond when touched together?
http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html
Try a different adblocker that isn't being paid by Google to whitelist their ads. Try different blocklists, and for the real scummy domains I use a host redirect through my firewall.
Survey: 54% Of Americans Want Airlines To Ban In-Flight Calls
What is a single page app? A website with one page?
I admire his (or his company's) high production values (I bet many would interpret my "slick" comment as a slur though!) but these certainly stand separate to his/their work's scientific merit which I'll sadly never be smart enough to judge ;-)

I suspect much of his/their success comes through his/their Jobsian eye for detail and ability in presentation and while this is at its best when applied to meritorious work, it's certainly a skill/asset in its own right too.
Silk Road mastermind allegedly paid to kill employee
A few months ago, a redditor introduced me to the notion of "the trivium". It was mentioned in the context of reforming the U.S. education system. I think it was a neat idea, and it was the lens through which I interpreted this comment.

The trivium consists of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric [1]. Grammar signifies knowing the language/jargon. E.g. knowing the parts of a car. Dialectic signifies logic and critical thinking. E.g. realizing that adding more oil won't fix the alternator. Rhetoric signifies application and expression. E.g. designing a safe, high-performance, cost-effective, and aesthetically-appealing vehicle.

Regarding your anecdote about not understanding abstraction of shapes. It sounds to me like your friend is comfortable with grammar, but not dialectic.

According to this redditor, a major flaw in the education system is that it teaches "subjects" (grammar) while critical thinking (dialectic) is shafted (mostly limited to math class) [2]. But I repeatedly read stories about people who can program without anything more than a basic understanding. I find this surprising because computer science is mostly math, which falls under dialectic. Why is this? Disclaimer: I'm new to programming.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium

[2] http://www.scribd.com/doc/36325362/The-Lost-Tools-of-Learnin...
In case you're curious about exploitability for code execution... the bug is that this array (Kmax = 16):

static Bigint *freelist[Kmax+1];

which is indexed by the log2 of the size of the bigint, is not checked:

static Bigint *
Balloc(int k)
{
[...]
if ((rv = freelist[k]) != 0) {
freelist[k] = rv->next;
}

If it's 0, then the allocation is done safely.

Where does Balloc get called? First with an estimate of the size required for the whole thing, from two locations, then with steadily increasing values starting from 1, from the mult function. With the first allocation we can theoretically perform a complicated operation (a good thing when ASLR is involved) to any location in ruby's bss section after freelist, but every increase requires doubling the size of the input string, and 16 already requires a 300k string, so going more than a few notches forward is impractical. With the second, I think k=16 is guaranteed to get a hit, because the next variable after freelist in the code is:

static Bigint *p5s;

On my system, and probably on all, this duly shows up immediately afterwards in the binary, and p5s is set before the allocation, so it's not null. The code ends up "allocating" p5s and copying 64k of arbitrary data into p5s->x, which comes from the 'private_mem' static array, also in the bss section. Although this is certainly dangerous, on the 3 systems I tried (OS X, 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Linux), there was much less than 64k of memory in the segment after the array and something read-only immediately followed, so it was guaranteed to crash before anything interesting could happen. It could be possible to exploit anyway if another C thread were accessing the data (not sure if mri ever does this), but the timing would be extremely difficult.

So I suspect that on most systems, this is purely a DOS, even though it involves an overwrite of arbitrary data. However, I could definitely be missing something, as the code is fairly complicated.
Enough not to engage in this conversation with you but not enough to not reply.

Btw, for someone complaining about losing time, you seem to have a lot of it. ;)
I don't see pricing as significant goal with Bitcoin. Other currencies can be used for pricing. I use bitcoin myself, and never by from stores which price the goods in Bitcoin, because they are most certainly rip-off prices. The good way is to price in fiat, then use something like bitpay exchange rate at checkout.
Probability is based in part on logic using past occurrences as references - and not the present moment or determining conviction.
Fire hazard? They're certainly not as hot as incandescent bulbs!
What bank?
How to design a class
... with a much smaller fee than if they simply accepted USD.
It's not that I am against virtual currency and think there is no interest in it -- I just think the Bitcoin scheme is so f__ked that respected corps don't wanna be involved.

I'm not surprised at all that Google invested in an alternative. In fact, maybe that will catalyze Bitcoin's demise.
If you’re looking specifically for an alternative to Go or chess then be sure to have a look at a list of the so-called abstract board games (Go and chess belong to this category too) on the BoardGameGeek: http://boardgamegeek.com/abstracts/browse/boardgame (sorted by popularity by default)

There are a few gems there that you might be interested in.
There might limitations, definitely. But move to OSX just because the $PATH has limitations seems a bit overboard.

There are other ways around it.
maybe he was being forward looking. version 2 needs some sort of bug fix and feature list.
Agreed. Greed.
>Now every time I see a HN post about a new price milestone I kick myself. Today I could have sold them for ~$1500-2000.

You shouldn't. You only lost $10 by reformatting that pc - your only loss is from not buying the bitcoins at that point, of which most of us are guilty.
"the manufacturer must get an independent lab to measure their operation at 45C and measure the temperature on the die"

In an environment with no airflow?
Yes, that would work.

And better yet, everyone could just switch to a client that works exactly like the clients we use to day except that it allows a new wallet I just created containing 100,000 bitcoins. This one is better because I get rich.

And to make it work the only thing I need to do is convince everyone to use it. It's kind of like that guy who convinced everyone to allow little green slips of paper to be traded for goods and services -- ALL money has value only because society consents to value it, and society could change it's mind. We've done so before -- consider when the Euro was created and how after a transition period the currencies it replaced became worthless (except as collector's items).

The hard part is convincing everyone to use YOUR plan. The deftness with which Bitcoin has navigated that social dilemma is one of the most impressive things about it. Somehow we have all come to agree that certain bit patterns and secret keys are worth valuable goods and services.
Sounds very similar to http://www.cycript.org/
I reached out to my ideal customer and told them I have an idea to solve a problem of theirs. They said they would love to use something like that, and they're helping me build my MVP.

Without reaching out to my customer first, my MVP wouldn't have solved their needs as effectively -- and there would have been too many holes in critical use cases.

After watching all the Steve Blank videos on Youtube, I'm a believer in "get out of the building and talk to customers".
+1 mathattack -- in terms of understanding, I couldn't agree more about just measuring followers. It's like saying you understand a person by the volume of mail they send/receive without looking at what's in the envelope.

Really big fan of @SocialWebMining's work and I hope to see some articles about what's being said in tweets, and I think that we'd both like that a lot...
Maybe they learned from Microsoft that is not good to ship a browser with an OS?
It cannot be a HN clone, as HH appeared in 2006 and HN in 2007.
I'm actually fine with risky investments (which does not translate to stupid investments) - am potentially willing to risk it all for possible better returns.

Was in this situation a few times before and ended up just spending it all on crap that I don't really need anyway.
Agreed. We are tweaking the terms around.
RIght, so it's an easy assumption to accept - and no assumptions being made. And do you really think the government level / agency that is in charge of justice would have any level of 'clearance' towards the agency that would be fabricating evidence? The NSA has been lying to congress for years, as an easy example.
Collision detector uses CSS hover effect. If you don't move your mouse, hover is not triggered.
Thanks:

http://reliablybroken.com/b/2010/12/running-minidlna-on-mac/

minidlna -d -f ~/minidlna.conf

with media_dir=..., this exactly what I was looking for, thanks again.
Bitnami Bi-Weekly Packaging Contest
> Heat does degrade incandescents.

I didn't say heat didn't degrade incandescents, I said LEDs are much more heavily degraded when they're over their heat capacity.
Now that dimmable 60-watt equivalent LED bulbs have dropped into the sub-sawbuck range, I was examining the packaging at my local Home Despot store. I remarked to the salesman who asked to help me how the iconography on the front of the package suggests that the bulb is suitable for use in your standard ceiling-mounted light fixture--which is usually enclosed--but the fine print on the back explicitly states that the bulb is not intended for use in enclosed fixtures. He agreed that the ceiling fixture icon was misleading, and that the fine print is what I must consider most authoritative.

He did note that the Cree brand bulbs are actually rated for use in enclosed fixtures, but alas, they're also more expensive at the moment than these other guys.