skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There will be engineering challenges no doubt, but they're technically quite easy to overcome. Expensive and a bit impractical, but very doable.

A few thoughts:

1. Make the total capacity up of multiple superconducting strands. That prevents a single failure from totally blowing everything up.

2. Create variable loads at the power generation equipment as well as distributed throughout the grid. They could be giant resistors or single-use loads that are designed to burn up, or probably some combination of both. If/when something goes wrong they can be brought online to absorb the energy currently in the grid and prevent really nasty failures.

3. Any kind of really long distance transmission is likely going to be HVDC and that means capacitance isn't a huge problem. Which means you can bury the cables underground (perhaps 500 or more feet) where the ground temperature is relatively constant in the 50-90f range (depends on latitude). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump

4. There probably won't be too many of them and that means you can go to some pretty serious lengths to ensure that they're highly reliable.

I would envision a single cable from Australia to China to Russia to Europe. A dogleg down through Africa and head onwards to cross North America horizontally with another dogleg down to South America. If we've got crazy money, maybe even connect back up over the Pacific and have the South American and African doglegs connect over the Atlantic.

The whole thing would easily cost hundreds of billions but the benefits would be really big. New power generation could be done where it's easiest rather than near/in population centers.
That's like saying "pot is bad because it's illegal" or "pot is bad because you can go to jail".

Your bitcoin experiences are bad because exchanges can't get processors to process payments. And then people like Dwolla flake out (repeatedly). Sounds like a USD problem, not a BTC problem.
> They've rather disliked Erlang (and not for lack of trying, and not for lack of good reasons, for that matter)

may you please elaborate on reasons for not using Erlang ?
Thanks for trying it out and the feedback! When the stars align Heyday can be really magic.
Sounds like Chefler: http://chefler.com

It's $10/meal if you commit to 4 meals per week.
Has anything changed with Fresh recently? Looks about the same to me.

Incidentally, my review of the LA service from a few months ago: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/amazon-fresh

TLDR: It's a welcome and long-anticipated return of home grocery delivery but there is a lot of room for improvement.
Why did you build this? I'm curious about your motivation.
And I've found your kind of post deluded and utterly ridiculous for the last 3 years.
Just use coinbase. IMO it's the only exchange that actually does fiat currency to BTC correctly - all the rest have horror stories posted all over bitcointalk and reddit.
I saw ads for stop & shop's "peapod" service on the T: http://www.peapod.com/ .

Haven't used them myself though.

(and the ad said that you can use T2013 as a coupon code and get ?15$? off your first order)
Charming Python: SimPy simplifies complex models
Thanks, would love to hear more as you use it, there's lots to be improved!
Thanks, but I just got the invitation anyways. Excited to try it out!
I agree with this premise about pricing.

I'm also a target customer and in fact I tried out Amazon Fresh.

I am mid 20's, upper-middle-class, living in Santa Monica(Fresh delivers here) and I chose to not keep the membership at $220 because it was too steep.

The service itself is awesome and I thought maybe the best part is that when they delivered refrigerated food they used frozen water bottles and encouraged us to keep those waters even though we had not ordered them because it was less trouble for them to collect them every time.

Overall I was pleased with the service itself, however at $220/year its a bit more than I can justify for strictly a convenience fee.

I've been a prime member since 2010 and order almost everything off of Amazon, but I'm all to happy to walk/drive to the grocery store to pay the same prices or slightly less than Amazon Fresh.

Also even though I now live in Santa Monica I still have two cars which is probably abnormal, that said even if I did not have a vehicle (I RARELY drive here) I could not see myself finding the $220 per year "worth" it to me
Any place we can get notified when this drops for Android?
House votes 325-91 to pass Innovation Act, first anti-patent-troll bill
We actually implemented the other way first, where we showed you the journal and then let you log in. The user experience ended up being more complicated then we liked in user testing.

We ask you to make an account so that we can back up your memories, in case you lose your phone, or want to see it on the web. You can turn this off in Settings, and Heyday will live completely on your device and nothing will go to our servers, and it will work fine. Sorry about that.
Your infrastructure deserves tests too
I turn into a zombie whenever I eat carbs during lunch.

Try it and see - the next time you go out to lunch, don't eat pasta, bread, potatoes, corn, tortillas, dessert, coke.

Have a steak and green veggies. I can eat an enormous 24oz prime rib plate and not suffer the zombie state that I would if I ate a hamburger and french fries.
Yes! As soon as we make the product great on iPhone.
"One problem I have is that moving numbers (account balances) around is not very difficult in principle. I don't see how Bitcoin has an especially defensible position in that respect."

Perhaps I lack imagination or ambition. I think it is an incredibly hard problem and I think it is a pretty defensible position. My biggest concern, as someone holding a little bit of Bitcoin, is that a competing cryptocurrency will win out in the end. But there currently is no such competitor. Litecoin is the nearest second fiddle to Bitcoin and it's nowhere near the same league, and provides no benefits over Bitcoin (except to people that want to mine with GPUs rather than ASICs).

"And since the marginal cost of transfers is low so should be the value ascribed. So Bitcoin might kill Western Union and the money transfer oligopoly but not capture much value doing so."

Yes, that's entirely true. But, there has to be enough value in Bitcoin the coin for Bitcoin the protocol to work for money transfers. If there are a billion dollars worth of transfers in the queue, then there needs to be a billion dollars worth of Bitcons in existence to make those transfers work. Maybe they would instantly go to zero in value after those transfers...if everyone cashed back out.

The value doesn't have to be captured for Bitcoin to be a success. Bitcoin isn't a business. It just needs to be better for some classes of problems than what currently solves the problems. And, the more I learn about Bitcoin, the more I realize that it is better for nearly every class of money problem than what the banks, the federal reserve, the credit card vendors, etc. have to offer.

"As to the advantages of centralized entities they have the support of the state, are better organized and can act unilaterally among others."

If a centralized entity can make something that is as good for users as Bitcoin, that'd be a believable scenario. But, short of making Bitcoin illegal (which could still happen in some places), I am beginning to believe we are past the point of anything being able to derail Bitcoin's rise. It's just too good for so many purposes to lose out to something that is so expensive, so inconvenient, so intrusive, and so abusive to users (the traditional banking and finance world).

If Bitcoin were merely an ethically better money (and I do think a decentralized money is more ethical), I wouldn't hold out any hope for it. But, it's an ethically better money that is cheaper and more convenient.

Anyway, it's not that I believe Bitcoin can't fail. It certainly can. It can go wrong in all sorts of ways. But, I can also imagine a scenario where it changes the world, and I'm pulling for that scenario.
"The claim is that it's just the right thing to do, that most people will be better off (economically) than under other systems"

There it is, that is the idealistic part.
Amazon is increasing its seller and transaction fees on February 1, 2014
Wait, what? These numbers seem off..

k = 1 => 45 minutes

k = 2 => 1.5 hours

k = 3 => 3 hours

k = 4 => 6 hours

k = 5 => 12 hours
As a first instance: I will stop using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and switch totally to Pixelmator and Sketch.

Second: relay more on data when meetings. This year I had a successful couple of meetings with destroying data so business men couldn't deny the facts and stopped the opinionated stuff. I will try to do it next year as a standard.
This article illuminates specific instances where NSA mislead the public. The comments here saying stuff like "I don't believe anything any nefarious organization says"--your point is taken, but it's still important to analyze and respond to NSA continually.
I'd be really interested to see this in Boston as well. I can walk to grocery stores easily, but for heavy/bulk items like drinks and chips, I'd much rather pay to have them delivered. I already have iced tea delivered from Amazon, but the selection is just okay.
This app is awesome.

Question for developers: How can I delete stuff that you automatically journal? For example, I take pictures of white boards in meetings. I don't want them in my journal. I'd like my journal to be curated for future viewing.

Also, feature request: password protection. I don't anyone with access to my phone to be able to open the app.
Open Letter to Peter Schiff (Bitcoin's Value)
I cannot wait for this to launch in San Francisco.

Depending on your location in the city, grocery shopping without a car can be a pain if you're buying enough food/organic produce/grass-fed meat for 21 meals/week x 2 people.

Add the cost of ~1.0-1.5 hours of a ZipCar on top of the 'organic premium' and a delivery service makes sense.

In NYC, FreshDirect was worth the delivery cost. They charged per delivery rather than a subscription. Their food quality, variety, consistency, time-savings, and organic options always exceeded my expectations and made it worthwhile.

I'll pay the fee on top of my Prime membership for this in San Francisco.
It seems to me that both casca and mathieuh are correct - he was both a symbol of non-peaceful resistance, and a creator of peace amidst a push for war. Furthermore, his post-apartheid actions seem the more historically important, as they were the more novel and their relative success the more surprising.
Somewhat OT, but I find it curious that you would, in the same breath so to speak, put closures and continuations in the same category of "hard things". To me, continuations are still pretty mysterious, but closures are a pretty simple, usable idea.
I knew someone who traced it down to this:
http://www.wikihow.com/Recognize-Gluten-Intolerance

He's fine as long as he eats gluten free wheat.:
http://udisglutenfree.com/products/whole-grain-bread/

He ultimately blames GMOs:
http://maninisglutenfree.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/the-histor...
And, Bitcoin has a superior feature: m-of-n arbitrated transactions.

If you need chargeback capabilities, you can get it.
JS-Interpreter: a sandboxed JavaScript interpreter written in JavaScript
Same question for me. I'd happily pay for this without an "account". I suppose that doesnt give you recurring revenue, but i can imagine things like tying up with photo album printers and dvd memoir makers may work?
Show HN: I made a WP8 app for the Kraken bitcoin exchange
Functional programming C++ template library
Well, an ebook experience is about much, much more than just typesetting. (See eg some comments in this discussion.)
"Economically, the 'progressive' income tax is completely unjustifiable, as the wealthy invest disproportionately in economic (and job) growth, while lower income people spend more on consumption goods."

That's bass-ackwards. All the money in the world can be available to fund companies; if there's no money to realize demand, it'll sit around unused. If there is demand for goods and services, people can borrow money to provide it, to be paid back out of the revenue stream. That's healthy. What we've been doing lately (and more especially pre-crash) is borrowing to consume instead, and as you say, "borrowing to finance regular spending will eventually fail as a policy" - as partly evidenced by the crash.
Working. Thanks, Bitcoin!
I had to create a account to comment here.
I'm not the kind of person who likes this kind of app: Personal Journal, track activities, photo collages and so on.

HOWEVER, my sister is my opposite and SHE LOVED IT. She has a local (brazil) FB group of moms and first time mothers. The group has 3k members I think. She'll probably recommend it.
The problem with exceptions (in certain contexts, of course) is precisely these assumptions.

Changes in low-level routines can change what your function is able to handle. Sometimes "just let it crash" isn't an option, period. Often, the exception hierarchy doesn't expose enough information to handle an exception without outside context (vis Python's OSError).

In many cases, exceptions are superior to returning error codes because of ease of use and debugging. In many other cases, returning error codes (or something like Java's checked exceptions, although those have some rough edges) are superior.

I've yet to see a universally applicable error handling model, and I suspect I never will.

(By the way, I believe the ability to throw arbitrary values in C++ is, somewhat loosely, related to something called 'foreign exceptions'. The Itanium C++ ABI on exception handling is an interesting read here. C++ implementations support throwing things into and out of non-C++ code, and simply don't limit what C++ code can throw under normal circumstances. Though perhaps they should have.)
huehue :^)
Honestly it was when someone (the CEO of 500px, actually) told me that quitting smoking was easy. You feel weird for the first two days and after that its only a 5 min period here or there that gets you tempted.

He was totally, 100% right. At least for me. It was a mindset change from something being impossibly hard to something being temporary and really pretty easy. During the first two days I had an inhaler that I used a total of 3 times splitting 1.5 cigarettes worth of nicotine then I just put it down and didn't come back.
Best photos of the year 2013 [NSFW]
Another question: are you properly licensed and permitted to run a catering operation?
Ask HN: I've finished developing an iPhone application. How do I protect myself?
Currently I live in Reno, Nevada.

I got an iOS developer's license under my name in February 2013. Since it is under my name, it will be displayed when I submit it to the App Store. I do not want to release it under my own name in fear of getting sued by a patent troll.

The application itself is a music player, which streams audio from another source that I do not control. As such, I am afraid that it might be possible that I may violate some term, or I might break some DLC rule or something to that effect. Or just plain old bad luck with some random patent troll.

I have done some research and it appears that my best course of action is to start an LLC and get a new Apple Developer license under the LLC's name. I really don't know how I would go about acquiring the LLC, though. I also do not know if there is anything else I should do to protect myself that I may have overlooked. It would be great if someone could clarify this for me!

Thanks.
Try this, someone showhn'd a while ago. http://squaresend.com
> "Moon Express engineers have combined the latest exponential technologies in micro-avionics with advanced propulsion and materials to create an innovative approach to spacecraft design and fabrication, empowered by leading edge Autodesk digital design tools to help make the impossible possible and reach for the Moon."

The web site is filled with vapid copy, but this rather meaningless sentence takes the cake. There are a bunch of interesting XPrize teams working to land rovers on the moon; I wouldn't put any money on these guys.
I am very impressed.
Just saw this reply. Maybe bring me to a screen with two buttons that say "create an account to sync" or "sync using icloud"?
Odd, my brother picks up my packages for me since I have been out of state for a while.
What about comparing Corrections Corporation of America and it's privatized prisons to DPRK labor camps?

Perhaps a bit of a stretch given how clean and sanitary private prisons are known to be. But since American prisoners are forced to labor at wages that are a fraction of the market rate for the same work and are charged for their incarceration at a rate higher than it is possible for them to earn in prison... perhaps it is not so different.
Yes, it would be much more comfortable to continue riding inside the machine that tramples others than to be the others. Perhaps the divide is how you see of our current global actions. Truly sinister, or just the actions of a jumbled congress/governing system.
You may wanna try Good Eggs: http://www.goodeggs.com/welcome
You can swipe right on the title of any moment to delete it. =)

Passcode is coming, it's a pretty frequently requested feature.
Maybe people here are just to young to remember the Reagan 80s and can't make the metaphorical leap?
I think it needs a few Why, oh why's and an In my day, to really make the grade.
Ok I'm in! Your reply is sufficiently reassuring :)
Mandela is hardly a flamewar topic outside the unreconstructed racists who left South Africa for places like Australia and New Zealand once they lost their hegemony at "home", and their fellow-travellers (such as Thatcher).

It says more about denizens of Hacker News that there are so many of apartheid's useful idiots here than it does about Mandela.
You can also get to the QFC on Northgate on the 75.
It really depends on the context you read it in and how you define some of the key words.
I do not believe that mathieuh considers Mandela's "not always nonviolent" stance to be a negative.

I think the idea is more along the lines of "violence had its place in that conflict, it was for a good cause, and it worked."

Injecting my own opinion here: I think that if we forget the usefulness of violence then we may risk failing to repeat Mandela's success, should the need ever arise. Nonviolence is great, but only when it works. When it doesn't, violence should be embraced. We should embrace whatever is necessary to get the job done, nonviolence should be seen as a (typically very effective) means to an end, not an end in itself.
Interesting. Does this have anything to do with the fact that distances are larger in the US and a large percentage of the population rely on their own cars rather than public transport?
You've got to read between the lines with a corporate statement. There are two major issues this one:

1) They're giving no indication that they can't decrypt their customers data. This won't protect customers from the thousands of information requests that they're not allowed to publicly acknowledge, and will only hamper vectors such as MITM fibre splitting. This is concerning given the fact the US intelligence agencies share their data with private companies, and that Microsoft didn't even attempt resist previous requests. They have no incentive to inform customers and fight expensive legal battles, so as soon as the whole privacy thing blows over it will be back to old habits.

2) Allowing companies to review their source code is only useful for their desktop products. Most data is going into the cloud now, plus it's possible to use cross library exploits and obfuscated code. I don't actually think that they'll do this now, hover they've done it in the past with their famous NSAKEY in the 4.0 kernel.

Office 2008 with a firewall will keep your data safe. Office365 is a company risk. I wouldn't put anything more confidential than a CV or short story on it.
Ownership and the Sharing Economy
I love it, its simple, automatic and it does exactly what I want. The initial tutorial is awesome - great idea! But...

I was quite disappointed when I read here, that you're actually downloading(syncing) all data to your cloud automatically. I would expect you to ask me also, in that brilliant tutorial, if I want to save my data to the cloud, since as you have mentioned, you're operating with the most sensitive data. As a result I found photos, which I really rather have in my pocket than somewhere on cloud.
Language is hard... You appear to be using different definitions for "left" and "liberal" than many of us are familiar with. Perhaps because you are from a different country or culture than those of us who are confused (seems like mostly Americans), or perhaps it is because you usually talk to people in a "bubble" where everybody recognizes the same definitions (I'm personally more familiar with the unique word definitions of more right-leaning "bubbles"). Either way, once confusion arises, saying "I meant what I wrote" is not all that helpful in resolving it.
FuckIt.py - The Python Error Steamroller
Life at Thomvest Ventures
I installed TF2 on my work tablet yesterday, it worked just fine. Civ 5 and X-Com are great on it. Is that "real" enough?
I wouldn't say we're "taking on" Amazon...
South Africa's murder rate peaked before the end of apartheid; it has been on the decline since. It's still very high, but the idea that it's a result of the collapse of apartheid is not plausible.
I got to like the fourth screen, then it just whipes everything away.

I... I don't get it.
It definitely seems pretty capital intensive as well with all the delivery vehicles and the actual boxes. As for signing - I don't think the delivery guys are as concerned just as long as someone accepts it. For instance in San Francisco roommates usually accept for each other without really needing to sign. I've also heard issues with amazon lockers being full most of the time so people will need to find a different spot and I'm curious if it will be the same for this. Overall I think there are still a good number of problems these guys will need to straighten out to be able to scale. I'd also be curious how much they are paying the stores with the actual boxes.
mathieuh does not seem to be criticizing Mandela's use of violence. Rather, I believe he is criticizing the failure of others to recognize and appreciate Mandela's use of violence.
My experience with Peapod is a few years back when I had a broken foot and was on crutches. It was great for me in those circumstances. I could order from a (somewhat limited) set of things and they would (mostly) arrive at the scheduled time. Going to the store to pick up the odd item wasn't that big a deal but doing a full grocery shopping was difficult.

Now, if I could reliably do a full grocery shopping with all the ordered items delivered from a good selection I might be tempted. But probably wouldn't pay the necessary fee as the grocery store is 4 miles down the road from my house and I have a car. (Also I imagine I'm too far out of the city to get the service anyway.)
> Erlang on The Game: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t....

The Game is a terrible benchmark for Erlang. Math, computing digits if Pi, string searching, n-body problems. If that is the target domain, don't pick Erlang, or Go, pick Fortran or C.
WikiLeaks, Press Freedom and Free Expression in the Digital Age
Try us out if you're in SF, for free, and let me know what you think :)
I hope you'll think about what kind of replies you got here the next time you post something like this.

You may have had a point, but your phrasing was atrocious, essentially built to generate conflict and suppress any rational thought.

You could have made your point in a much better way such that people would actually reflect on what you said, rather than start political fights.