skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PV "breakthroughts" are a dime dozen. Usually things quickly break apart due to these reasons:

1) The solar cell has to stable for 20 years in the field, not the 5 minutes it requires to collect the data for your publication.

2) You have to make 200 million cells per year with a yield >98%. Can you really do that?

3) Manufacturing cost on paper and in reality are two
completely different things. Reducing material consumption is good, but it is not the only cost driver. Again: YIELD.

The first point is something that can be partially answered with a lot of additional research. Doable by a university, but often much more frustrating than the research they'd really want to do.

The only answer to the last two points is to try it on a large scale. And people did that for many technologies, see Nanosolar, Solyndra and many more. The problem is that so many failed, that currently nobody is willing to invest in new PV technologies.

Right now there is only silicon, CIGS thing film and CdTe thin film on the market. I doubt that a new technology is going to become relevant anytime soon as all of these technologies still have some room to breathe.

The article mentions, that 15 years passed without a new efficiency record in Si based solar cells. This is completely meaningless until that number is approached by mass manufactured cells.
Alternately, you can work remotely for a company in a high-cost area while living in a low-cost area. :-)
I'm OK with you calling it spin, but don't say "no content" because that's not accurate.
I'm sure they have hundreds of facebook friends...
Interesting article. I have a few comments/questions:

HLS support on Android is incredibly spotty. Do you mean in-app HLS support? The Android Chrome browser doesn't support it at all, and only a select few versions of the regular Android browser support it. Then again, there's not a great alternative.

Why offer the multiple bitrates on the HLS stream at all? You know what the client's bandwidth is, why perform three separate live transcodes? Is this because you're delivering the stream to an iOS app and Apple requires that? In Safari or a UIWebkitView based app you probably wouldn't have to do that... Or is it to compensate for potential bandwidth fluctuations?

You mentioned the mpeg-ts segmenter in more recent versions of ffmpeg but also mentioned that it has unacceptably high latency. I have not found this to be the case so long as you set the segment times individually and force new keyframes at given times (-force_key_frames and -segment_times flags, otherwise the segmenter ignores your segment time option and just creates TS chunks at whatever frequency it wants to).

Pre-transcoding the first few seconds is a really great approach that I had never considered before. Very cool.
you're right, I'm .. outdated.
"Without a cheap, reliable storage medium, solar is useless or extremely expensive. All the more so at power plant scale."

Really? Why is it more so at power plant scale? When you're connected to the grid you have the benefit of being attached to more users, which seems like it'd increase the probability that someone somewhere could use the power. Lots of power plants - e.g. anything fossil fuel based can simply burn less fuel - can reduce their output fairly simply, so until they all bottom out it seems you wouldn't have a problem getting the energy to someone who wants it.

Where this starts to fall apart is transmission losses; there is benefit to having the consumers and producers be closer together, in terms of resistance. It's possible that high-Tc superconductors may help in this space in the coming decades.
Oh jesus that's a huge mess. So I guess it turns out Docker was designed to do a bunch of wacky things under the hood because they never expected users to use their tool in different ways. It looks like as a fix some people are running full-blown copies of Ubuntu under Docker (because somehow that's better than OpenVZ??)
That's a big if. Why would you not max out your contribution?
>In one respect, Miller is saying that Windows 8 was the price we had to pay to get to a smoother and friendlier Windows 9. If so, is that really the best way to treat your customers? Does Microsoft need to force-feed us a not-so-good version of Windows before we can get something better? Or was Windows 8 an unnecessary slip-up on the road to the future?

What a load of trash. People need to stop judging Microsoft products in terms of unreleased products. I understand that the hackers et al. who use the power features in Windows are upset that MS changed the game on them, but putting Metro as the forefront of the UI was, as the article describes, a necessary step in getting users to actually use it.

Metro UI is quite good for browsing content and navigating to the things that you're certain to want. It's good looking and it works pretty well. Just because it's your launch screen doesn't mean it's supposed to be the only tool you ever need. If you log on to windows 8 to check facebook, it's awesome. If you log on to manage hard drive partitions, you're going to need to be looking elsewhere.

Microsoft is trying to make products for the consumer market. If you want to blame anybody for Metro, blame Apple. iOS and other simple, clean user experiences showed consumers that there is a better way than the old desktop standards. The applications you want can be at your fingertips, instead of in a button in the corner. Microsoft HAD to make the initial experience of the UI simpler to stay competitive in the modern market for personal computing.
There is going to be a lot of hate in here about how impractical this is, but I just wanted to say nice job on the clean design and presentation. I watched through all of it.

I wish more car touch-screens were capacitive.
I see it (and the whole site) as social commentary on Silicon Valley
I think this is used just for playback, not for storage.
The XP start menu was different in that there were high-profile things "pinned" to the top of the menu and then other things were under the "All Programs".

Also, the icons were much larger than the Windows95/98/ME/2000 start menu.
How do you local unemployment data on developers? Are there any agencies that collect this data?
I was not under the impression that the article author called that trolling. I understood that there would be enormous difficulty in coordinating the inputs among the honest players even in the absence of trolls.
EXCELLENT metaphor!
A new programming language: LW-{
he probably doesn't like his files read at all
The problem is, we don't live in the year 2003. Grandma has a PC.

Sure, she doesn't know how to "use" it in the grand sense that we savvy users might. But, she knows how to do things. She knows how to Facebook, she knows how to send an email. Unlike us, she doesn't think of these things as general concepts. They're very specific, down to the smallest detail. Email for her is hotmail.com

Now, grandma is presented with Metro (or as I like to call it, The Boxes). The small, basic knowledge she gathered over time that gave her freedom of communication is now worth nothing. Perhaps she'll explore, and perhaps over time she might find that the interface is in fact easier to use. The problem is she wants to send an email now, and none (and I really mean NONE) of the anchors, symbols or paradigms she's used to even exist anymore.

On a tablet, this makes sense. She can intuitively poke around and maybe get to the email app. She's not used to touching a screen, and the opportunity gives her a chance to learn something new.

With a mouse and keyboard, she doesn't know what to click on. She's never clicked on text and had it perform an action. "Charms" bar? Corner of the screen? Ha.

Now imagine we're not only talking about grandma, but instead average non-technical office worker. Not only does said office worker need to send the email now, she needs to send a dozen yesterday. She has no time to learn something new. Her company paid good money for a device that's supposed to save time.

I agree that this article gets to the bottom of the issue, though. Microsoft has underestimated its users.
Touchscreens are not only dangerous to drivers, but fairly unusable unless you can make judgements based on touch alone. I've used this[0] system before and it satisfies both of those requirements. Can it be optimized further? Possibly. But I don't beleive touch screen is the future (until we get driverless).

[0]- http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/x/x5/2013/showroom/dri...
Nvidia  GeForce GTX 750 Ti – Maxwell Architecture debuts at
The claim (ascribed to Albert Mehrabian) is much more limited than that. Those are the alleged percentage influences on how much we like a person on the basis of a conversation with them. See, e.g., http://www.kaaj.com/psych/smorder.html (which I think is Mehrabian's own site) which says "Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking" and adds: "Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable".

I'm frankly doubtful even about that much, but Mehrabian certainly never claimed that any such equation holds for more "contentful" communication.
I thought the point of the study was that these sponges live in an oxygen-rich environment, so there is no pressure for them to develop this trait in the modern world. It doesn't prove it's a primitive trait, but it at least makes it unlikely that it's a recent adaptation.
If you don't have a seat in the board room, assume you have a giant target on your back. As soon as the company has a reason, you can be diluted to nothing.

You can get a lawyer, but the proceeds are so uncertain, especially if you successfully sue. What do you get, 1% more of a company that has just lost an expensive lawsuit?

(Request: court records for a normal middle-class equity-owner in a small company fighting his rapid dilution, successfully or not.)
This is hands down far, far better than what's out there already. A lot of thought went into this and it shows.

Could there be a few options to enter other modes, though? What I mean is that right now there are only 8 adjustments possible. That's better than the 4 I thought it was limited to, but still nowhere near enough for modern cars.

I would estimate that on a modern car you need to be able to adjust something like 100 parameters. Only a few of them frequently, but definitely more than 8 in total.

One of the thoughts I had was that using a (say 90 degree?) twist motion along with a number of fingers could bring up sub-menus. That way if you want to adjust other radio parameters like fade, balance, equalizer, etc you would put two fingers on (for volume) and twist.

Maybe you'd arrange the different controls in a loop so that every twist indexes to the next and there's a ~10 second timeout before you head back to the default. So if you want to adjust all the "volume" parameters you put two fingers and twist right once for balance and adjust, twist right again to get fade, twist right again to get highs, etc. Make a mistake? Twist left to go back and re-adjust.

If you want to get out of one of the sub-menus you're in prior to the ~10 second time-out for default, another gesture? Maybe a double tap? I don't know on that one, really.
It was such an amazing game. Is this just like Looking Glass and Terra Nova?
So I'm typing this on a name brand Windows Machine, certainly "over the hill" in both hardware and software.

Its sound worked when it was new, then stopped working. Booting Linux (Suse of a certain older vintage), and sound just works. I'm sure I could spend more time futzing about about with it and it would work, but I've given up after about a day.

Pleas, please, please I am begging the Windows community as a whole and the HP community in particular; get your act together. Really, this is embarrassing.
Perhaps I'm just not envisioning it correctly but this seems to replace looking at the screen to touch a button with looking at the screen to figure out how far apart my fingers are, or how many fingers have touched the screen after hitting a bump. I'm not yet convinced it's a great improvement, though an interesting idea. I'd like to see a demo in a more realistic environment, i.e. in a car on a non-perfect road rather than on a table.
I agree - the BioShock games are great in theory but have a hugely messy execution.

One of my favorite articles about Infinite is this one where it's argued that it's the worst game of the year: http://tevisthompson.com/on-videogame-reviews/
Can someone please explain to me how they already have HomeDepot as a client? Its been around less than a year and HomeDepot already uses it? Am I missing some angle here?
Show HN should be set to text, not a URL. Then link in a comment (so it's clickable).
14 Days With (Almost) No Internet: Did My Digital Detox Pay Off?
Until touch screen controls have haptic feedback, I'll much prefer physical controls.

Same reason why my phone has a physical keyboard.
I agree. There are many good interface ideas here, but cars interfaces need to reach people of all sorts. ie. people with handicaps, disabilities, etc.

Great ideas though. It's great to see someone working on this! Nice job.
John Tyler's Grandsons Are Still Alive
Something to the effect of that - unfortunately when they extended the offer I was away at a conference and I had to do it over the phone in a loud hall. I was very unhappy with how the entire exchange went, but overall I am glad I did not take the job.
You can also stop engineers from leaving for finance.
I really like the “one big button” idea!

Using different numbers of fingers to control different things is interesting- how would people with missing fingers use this?
I think simple json documents are much simpler and easier to re-use by other clients in interesting ways than simple html pages. I think the API + client (note, not just traditional web browser) rendering is actually a more "pure" interpretation of what the web can be - data sources and data consumers that interpret and present that data on behalf of their users.

This is an interesting point - if you are representing numeric data like chart datapoints, a representation like json might make it cleaner and more reusable by other services or clients. Of course much data is actually formatted documents or snippets of text, in which case json is not such a good fit and html is perhaps better. In many ways html is a worse is better solution, but that is probably part of its strength - it is very easy to get started with and munge to extract or insert data.

I'm not sure a separate of concerns between server and client is necessary and helpful to all apps, though I'm sure in some cases it is useful (for example serving the same json or xml to a mobile app, a client-side app and some desktop client, or separate teams working on both), but then a server-based solution can easily output both formatted html for traditional clients (web browsers, which are now and in the future ubiquitous), and a json or xml representation for other clients - this sort of separation of concerns between data and presentation is not really exclusive to client-side solutions.
I like this attempt to rethink the UI for vehicles and I think you are on to something. The absence of any cues I guess is still a problem and the finger-distance based approach could be a problem for some.

How about selecting what you want to control (Temp, Channel, Air etc) on the first pass followed by adjustment of the selected control on the second?
RainforestQA looking for first enterprise-focused sales, BD hire
You are indirectly blaming a WHOLE LOTTA people with this comment. Learn to play nicely with others and maybe someone will listen to your complaints. Chances are, you don't care. <---- that's a blaming statement.
Now I have to change my interview question. :(
It wouldn't make sense to have a network actor and a parsing actor. Because these two tasks (downloading the data and parsing it) are not concurrent, you should instead have a crawler actor that downloads -> parses -> stores.
Is Heroku down?
Scenario: An "idea guy/gal" comes up with an idea upon which a non-idea guy/gal builds.

Scenario: An "idea guy/gal" comes up with an idea and tries with all his/her might to bring it to reality, but fails. Yet, the idea is proven "useful", posthumously. Ever heard of Babbage? Babbage wasn't "useful"?

Useful: What a dreadful word to use for a person. Are you useful?
Everything he shows here is accomplished already by a fairly nice set of buttons on my steering wheel. Each button has a unique shape, so finding them without ever looking down is very easy, and my hands never leave the wheel.

What I find hard about in-car UIs are things like entering and editing navigation directions or selecting music to listen to given a 32GB USB stick full of songs.

There's always some horribly designed onscreen keyboard or "iDrive" type knob controller, both of which are quite horrible experiences. To make matters worse, the UI is laggy and unresponsive, and in an effort to make things "easier" onscreen controls frequently dim & disable when not actionable or when the car is moving vs. stationary.
Sad to see them go. Their latest games weren't as good as their early ones (too much shooting), but still sad. Hope to see Levine involved in a project soon.
Industry vs Academia
Looking over this again, two things strike me:

1) Why was a single touch interaction not demonstrated? Each control requires 2+ fingers. Maybe that can bring up a help menu or other information?

2) There is no demonstration of boolean switches and button controls. Things such as turning on a defroster, or enabling pairing with a bluetooth device. I'd be curious to see how those would play into the ux flow.
Game of Stubs
Thanks. I'll definately be adding these next session.
> I would estimate that on a modern car you need to be able to adjust something like 100 parameters.

Not the author, but the way I see it this is specifically an interface for adjusting things eyes-free when driving. In an actual implementation, there would be some sort of physical switch between the in-drive control (demoed here) and a high-density "at rest" operation for passengers or more specific tasks (e.g. configuring the GPS).

> One of the thoughts I had was that using a (say 90 degree?) twist motion along with a number of fingers could bring up sub-menus.

The problem with this is there'd likely be a rotational component to movement, and a movement component to rotations, discriminating becomes harder and the chances of false positive (and thus frustration) increase. Only using a single axis is actually a smart move as far as I'm concerned.
Maybe having a physical button/dial with these features (like the Nest thermostat) would give people more connection to the 'past interfaces'?
I really like this. My only issue is that the prototype ignores single finger, which to me feels like it should be the most important control. The other issue with number of fingers based gestures is, well, people who are missing fingers. I also think using both the X & Y position could be really useful. Why not tune the radio by dragging up and down and adjust the volume by move right and left, or other combined gestures?
How far will this divide go? There is a desktop version skype and a metro version (ditto with IE). I recently cringed when I had to explain to a casual user that they should be using the desktop version of Skype instead of the metro version. Having to explain that there are two different versions of Skype was jarring and bizarre.
Chances are your attrition rates are affected by lack of agent visibility
Practice a call center culture of transparency, open-communication, & unify expectations throughout your organization. Improve performance, increase engagement, and lower attrition.
Sadly, I tend to agree. It seems anyone starting a new publicly-accessible web site with Rails are aiming for a shot at their own feet. Rails might still be usable for Intranet servers in a trusted network setting or prototyping web site ideas before transitioning to a "serious" framework. The continuing security issues and lack of focus on performance make it terrible choice for any production web site.
Microsoft readies a Lync app for Android tablets
I like Tanya Khovanova’s perspective:

"I started my life wanting to be a mathematician. At some point I had to quit academia in order to feed my children. And so I went to work in industry for ten years. Now that my children have grown, I am trying to get back to academia. So I am the right person to compare the experience of working in the two sectors."

http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=476
64% of residential solar costs are the so-called soft costs of permitting and installation. PV's tech problems are smaller than its social/political problems. http://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/12/nrel-soft-costs-now-larg...
I don't even know how to argue with that...can't do anything against bad faith I guess
> How about selecting what you want to control (Temp, Channel, Air etc) on the first pass

But how would you do this selection, and know unambiguously that you've selected the right control without looking at the display?
I did read the article. The problem is, panels got cheaper, but they are nowhere near cheap enough.

Note that installation costs can be dwarfed by panel costs if you are in a third world country, where wages are lower.

I agree about the rest of the infrastructure required. Batteries, charge controllers and inverters are very expensive still. More appliances need to use DC, so that we can use less inverters.
Yet, these large companies are always desperate to aqcuire, or 'acq-hire' smaller companies.
Actually, the ECU might very well do that if it gets in field updates :)

Mechanical pieces fail over time, but we know a whole lot more about inspecting for, finding and preventing mechanical faults than we know how to create defect free software.
First sentence of article:

Bruhathkayosaurus (/bruːˌhæθkeɪ.ɵˈsɔrəs/; meaning "huge bodied lizard") might have been the largest dinosaur that ever lived. The accuracy of this claim, however, has been mired in controversy and debate. All the estimates are based on Yadagiri and Ayyasami's 1989 paper, which announced the find.[1]
But what you have available to save is not a % of your total salary, it's a % of your total net income (salary - taxes - living expenses). If those jobs in SF pay higher wages purely to keep up with the inflated living expenses, then you don't really have more money to devote to your 401k.
Despite all that, Mountain View is still a dreary wasteland. It's a great place if you want to buy a $1.5MM home and raise kids, but not if you want to enjoy your youth. Even if the big behemoths stay down there and employ the people with the $1.5MM homes, the new exciting startups will probably keep popping up in SF and the East Bay.

-- Former Mountain View resident now living in Berkeley
Similar story here. Now not only these "big" companies as Facebook, Google, Microsoft focus mainly on algorithms and data structure during interview, to my surprise some of the early startups ask heavily for whiteboard coding...

It's no surprise these companies rejects many really good hackers (at least from people I know... yes, I admit the small sample size) and accepts these just optimize for algorithm preparations by doing a set of online coding problems.
Beside very reassuring, yes it is. Secure + good sense.
"Why I Chose Academia"

I make enough money to pay my bills, I have as much free time as I want, I get to learn new things all the time and teach them to others.

However, it can be a little depressing to be a lousy researcher, I feel useless at times.
As far as I know the only absolute requirement is to have at least a single 64K stream. All other bitrates come as general recommendations, but in my experience, offering a few different bitrates amount to far better, smoother playback, overall.

"Warning: These requirements apply to iOS apps submitted for distribution in the App Store for use on Apple products. Non-compliant apps may be rejected or removed, at the discretion of Apple."

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/technotes/tn2224/_in...