skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This would depend on your specific goals.

Electrifying rail is certainly possible and it's the mode under which much European freight rail operates. The challenge for other regions: the US, Canada, Russia, China, and Australia in particular, is that distances are far greater, meaning far more km to energize. There's also existing traction (railroad engines) which would have to be replaced. The costs are not insignificant, though I'd really like to see long-term plans.

Electrifying drayage (that is, non-fixed-track overland cargo) is a significantly different prospect. The advantages of trucking over rail are both spatial and temporal flexibility: trucks can go anywhere there are paved roads (and some places there aren't), and don't generally need to wait for tracks to clear or switching points to move. This is at a cost of much, much higher costs expressed as dollars per ton-mile.

If you're going to fully electrify trucking, you've either got to fully electrify every mile on which trucks travel, and there's vastly more road mileage than track, or you've got to provide for some level of local energy storage on the truck. That storage has to be able to re-charge quickly, provide sufficient energy to meet transport demands, not impose excessive weight and space demands, and offer high price/performance characteristics.

The usual suspects all have some pretty significant issues: batteries, flywheels, capacitors, etc. Not that it's impossible, but being able to dump a few hundred gallons of long-chain hydrocarbons in a tank and use them as needed has major benefits.

Then there are other off-the-grid uses, though most of these tend to be a relatively small fraction of current petroleum use: small equipment (from chainsaws and leaf blowers to mowers and tractors), construction equipment, ag use, remote power (generators, etc.), shipping (electrifying the oceans would be a significant engineering challenge), aircraft (ditto skies), etc. Even where many of the specific instances might be substituted otherwise, there are current edge cases (and in the case of general aviation, pretty much the whole case) which are really predicated on liquid hydrocarbons. Not to mention industrial processes reliant on petroleum/fossil inputs (chemicals, plastics, steel)

In noting that it's plausible for all existing petroleum utilization to be substituted by synthesis, I'm not saying that it's either necessary or desirable. I do see much present petroleum use being substituted, likely by direct electric power + storage (batteries do work for many instances).

But if you can swap out all of it, then the prospect of substituting smaller portions of utilization, say at the order of 5-25%, is also feasible. And that gets you a long way.
YAY as opposed to nay
VUH as in vagina
SCRIPT pronounced normally
For project work? Yes. Dear god, yes. Always get something up front.
Depends on where you live. I was in NY and that wouldn't have gone very far. Try out a few projects, and you can change it later as you feel more comfortable charging more. Figuring out what you're worth is pretty hard when you're starting out because it's easy to approach pricing based on what you would pay for the service your offering, than what the reasonable market price is, or even what $ value your client is getting out of what you're building them.

Also charging more for successive jobs wasn't a joke. You're being pretty transparent about your pricing; you could keep going and post how much each project cost and what the thing was that you built for that. Might make a more lasting marketing ploy.
attribution bias is close.
this game is the most successful at hooking it's players, but not the most successful at reaching large numbers of players

Rather than "hooking" its players, you could read it as, this game has a devoted cult/niche following. One of those things certain people love & cannot do without, yet has narrow appeal.

Kind of like snake antivenin.
Your phrasing and writing style are a little erratic, so perhaps that's why you're not getting a good response elsewhere. You might do more editing before you post if you'd like to get taken more seriously. But I think the questions are reasonable ones.

Neither of your questions can be fully answered. Until we've seen a bunch of kinds of life, it will be hard to generalize. It's like trying to theorize about languages in general if you've only ever heard one. It's a lot easier to think about if you have a bunch of examples.

Regarding the first bit, I understand that's a topic of quite a bit of disagreement. Early AI pursued a brain-in-a-jar approach, implying that physicality was irrelevant. Others differ. If you dig up the great documentary "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control" you can see robot scientist Rodney Brooks talking about how intelligence and embodiment are very much related. (Since he went on to found iRobot, he's clearly no slouch.) I haven't kept up, but I'm sure there's a lot of interesting work that's still being done in this area.

Regarding the different bases for life, again, we can't say. There's been a lot of speculation of other ways life could be, but we've only got one kind to look at so far, and it's pretty hard to just go and check out a few thousand other planets to see what has cropped up.
5 days before the Supreme Court arguments? Who is left to influence at this point? Or is this preparation for a bad outcome?
As a programmer and a poetry/book lover, it is sad news, plrease have a 5min break from whatever code you are writing(on your free time of course) to check this author out!
Alright, this is a great point. It would be trivial for me to add addPossibilities. I think I'll do that! Thanks. This will really help for using PourOver to power tagging selection fields where you can ... add possibilities!
Working on multiple projects at once on tight deadlines is a great way erode the quality of the development you produce for your clients. I would think with such short deadlines you'd want to give your clients the courtesy of focusing on them individually and then stagger development of your future projects accordingly.
Fastly acquires CDN Sumo, releases EngineYard add-on and fastly-rails gem
I agree with the others. My initial assumption at this amount is that it wasn't 120 hours of work. It could be only 30-40 hours of work to get some basic python program going. He can control the features during the negotiation phase.
We should at least change the title
That is a fact.
All right, thanks to everyone for the advice. 1/4 upfront it is. It does make my life easier.
So standard negotiation tactics then.
Funniest tech video I've seen! Actually maybe even minus the "tech".
Yes, it's too little. Remember patio11's advice: you are not charging what the work or time is worth it TO YOU, you are charging what your output is worth it TO YOUR CUSTOMER :)

Also, having a starting price in the 10k+ range will help weed out bad apple customers. Trust us when we say that you want fewer high quality customers than a lot of pain-in-the-neck customers. Finally, charge 1/4th upfront like another poster said so you don't get screwed.
I see your, “Many years later [...]" and raise you, “It was the day my grandmother exploded." Iain Banks, The Crow Road.
AFAIK, they use the embryos left after a successful IVF (if the parents agree).

The sucess rate of an IVF is relatively low, and the procedure to extract the ova is complex, inconvenient and not risk-free.

Ovaries are overstimulated to produce more than one egg. They are all collected and fertilized, but, usually, only two or three are implanted at a time, to balance the low success rate and the non-null chance of multiple pregnancy (that's how octuplets are made :\).

If a successfull pregnancy occurs before running out of embryos, the mother/couple may donate the remaining embryos for research (that's how it works in Belgium, at least).
Another good source is: http://www.damninteresting.com/a-potentially-disastrous-desi...

Apparently it costed $8 million to repair.
Hey, I remember you from robot game.

Wish you the best with this new venture.
Are you using automatic indentation, parenthesis matching, and highlighting the current s-expression? Lisp environments have, or can be given, a lot of tools to make the syntax easier to follow at first.

You may already have heard about those things - but I just thought I'd mention them on the off-chance you haven't.

Personally I find the syntax a lot easier to read - less giving up syntax than eliminating what's always looked like a bit of a mess to me ^^ Though, horses for course maybe, as you say.
What’s Driving Google’s Wild Moonshots? Desperation
> But I have an equally hard time believing that the internet or pharmaceuticals wouldn’t have come to market if government had nothing to do with them.

The argument is that the private sector invests for shorter time frames. VCs look for commercial viability within 3-5 years. They're unlikely to fund biotech and green energy, which have 10-20 year time frames, or the internet, which took 30 years to reach commercial viability.
On that note, I have ten clients I routinely monitor their web site logs (I run a web dev company). I have never seen a Windows phone visit any of those sites and they're pretty popular, especially among the under 30 crowd.
Well, then I'll hope for a Servo equivalent of Luakit before too long.
But if your business is developing web sites, your own web site is a strong signal to your potential customers about the quality of work that you do.
Well they had/have a huge opportunity to start an entire series of cottage industries like this but have completely failed to grab onto the idea. It seems like a pretty obvious extension of the "put a bunch of files in the cloud and sync" notion to me. After all, what's an app server but a bunch of program files stuck on a server drive?
Was just going to post the same thing.

I've never had anyone walk away from a project after asking for 50% upfront at projects this scale.
Go on so. I'll bite. First favourite author? (If we can even rate and rank so crudely.)
3 weeks is just to buy me some runway. I was hoping to work on multiple projects in parallel.
It does none of those things. It does, however, mean that this bit of text has not earned the lavish attention it will surely receive today for being wrongly attributed to someone whose body of work is poorly represented by it. Isn't proper attribution the least bit of respect we can pay to an eminent author on the occasion of his passing? Can we not do him the courtesy of remembering him by his own words instead of those of an impostor?
Consul is a totally different thing to Cassandra. Consul could be built on top of Cassandra, but it would not provide any advantages. Why would you want to maintain a separate datastore?

Consul is a single static binary that uses around 11MB of RAM. Cassandra is a complex distributed datastore that requires the JVM and uses many gigabytes of RAM.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like a mistake to nail these terms down precisely. If we try to, then whenever a comment doesn't match the definition, people will argue that it must be ok because it doesn't technically break the guidelines. That's not what we want to encourage. We want HN to be motivated by the spirit of the law more more than its letter.

It's true that "troll" is particularly ill-defined. Perhaps we can try not to use that word. I like the phrase "toxic comments" because, while imprecise, it conveys what those do to the ecosystem. In practice, I'm not sure this is as big a problem as it seems. As Sam pointed out, the bulk of the community has little trouble recognizing these things.
Thanks :) Is anyone still playing that?
Oh, definitely. When I was freelancing, I wouldn't start a project without a 50% deposit. I also made sure that 50% was enough to cover my expenses and sanity.
I want Rust scripting support in Servo.

<script type="text/x-rust" src="foo.rs">

Since Rust is a safe language this should be possible without compromising security, though I don't think anyone's yet attempted to write a JIT compiler for Rust. Has the Servo team considered this as a possibility?
The corporation is doing what it's supposed to do within the system. It's supposed to look out for its own interests, obey the law, and make money for its shareholders.

The government is fundamentally broken. It's trusted as the law maker and the enforcer of the system, but fails in its main supposed benefit of trustworthiness.

Blaming the corporations for lobbying and planning their taxes is like kicking a kitten for drinking out of a bowl of milk that you left on the floor.
For something like this it's more like "perhaps i can put a down payment on a house after my stocks vest and i pay taxes".
Chris Granger does (did?) offer a similar service[1]. I think his price (5000$) is more sustainable for a developer, but I'm not sure how the market is for this kind of work.

Chris, if you are reading this, please share your experience with us.

[1] http://iwbyp.chris-granger.com/
It is the complexity tradeoff. I built a really simple widget using an LCD which you can send "standard" HTML (as in the base DTD) over a serial line. Built using an Cortex M3, a SPI connected LCD, basically libft2, libpng, and a minimal drawing package. If you look at LED signs, this is one of those, but with a screen instead of LEDs and a more 'standard' layout engine. Three fonts, (serif, sans, fixed), three weights (normal, bold, italic), old skool HTML (no css, no script) and a simplified img tag. The most complex thing in the code is the table rendering code.

Basically if you want to throw up a quick status display, it can do quite a bit.

So I thought I would update it to HTML4, maybe a bit of ECMA script for animations. Did a couple of runs at it and found most existing code had a bunch of stuff in it so that it could render "commonly occurring, but non-standard" HTML pages. In order to fit in a limited memory foot print system I was ripping things out left and right but stuff has more side effects than Cymbalta. So I tabled the project.

Starting from the premise of rendering "just the stuff we promise we can render" allows me to add stuff until I run out of memory and then stop.
maybe the hackpad creators will open-source and/or release upstream patches to etherpad! cough
I don't think it's bullshit (and you can write that word instead of abbreviating it, it's what you mean to say anyway). MITM might be common in absolute numbers, but it's often not practical for attackers that are not some sort of authority, like, a government.
Yes. 1/2 upfront for smaller projects, 1/3 for larger projects is the standard.

For ongoing projects that you bill hourly instead of fixed cost, try to do retainer instead of invoicing and then getting paid a month later model.

Cash flow is THE single most important thing in this business. Try to get paid as early as possible, and delaying paying others as much as possible (while still paying them reasonably soon, of course - just try to negotiate better terms upfront, i.e. get paid Net/15 and pay others Net/30).

Also, never EVER work without a contract. For every project, have client sign MSA and SOW. I bought mine from here: http://msabundle.com/ and modified per my needs.
15 years in prison for a 26 year old who made 40.000 USD by hacking and pleaded guilty? This is nothing more than a morbid joke. The justice system's goal is to rehabilitate, not obliterate one's future.
About a year ago I wrote an extension for finding & replacing whatever spelling/grammar people wanted to change on the WWW: http://www.ityms.com/. It's a poor man's version of the Github PR for typos.
EDIT: By browsing to the Github repo, I found the link to the One Big HTML page: http://www.greghendershott.com/fear-of-macros/all.html

Original post:
I wish there was a single-page version of this that I could Pocket. Or an epub that I could put on my reading devices.

I don't tend to read multi-page things like this at my desk, not in this era of high-resolution lightweight portable screens.
Man I hate you.

What's especially funny is if you search for "SAGE" and "small_roots", you get this:

http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/2424

Please at least tell me small_roots was hard to implement.
My favorite Marquez story is that he never used adverbs ending in -mente, so he called his English language translator (Edith Grossman) and requested that she not use any adverbs ending in -ly.
http://www.literatura.us/garciamarquez/enormes.html
I want to know more about this gravity generator...

"It has weights that spin round and multiply the power of an 1/8 horsepower motor by 1200% - enough energy to power a town of 3,500 at a cost of £1 a month"

If it's not a wacky-looking flywheel, what was this guy's story? Something close to a perpetual motion machine?
Goodbye, Digital Ocean!
If there's one thing that will push people to design better, it's the promise of better Google results.

I know Google isn't exactly saying that here, but take page load time for instance. Once the rumor started that faster pages rank higher in Google, suddenly everyone was trying to make their pages faster.

Its one of the ways Google can bring even more change to the web.
There are plenty scientists, who are paid from government grants. Government even participated in training them - in state universities or with federal grants. Saying that it's not "government" which does research shouldn't imply that government can't be critically important in the process which led to research results.
"Nah man, you are contributing to the problem. Less training wheels, the world is a better place without them."

Tell that to all the Wordpress based projects out there or Dev Frameworks.

Some users just need an outlet to express fairly static data in engaging ways and don't need the overhead of learning a CRUD/REST stack in their way.

There will always be a need for experts who know who computer science actually works but harder things will continue to be further simplified.
as far as I know, the contractor is based in some other country. Not sure about international laws here.
Beware of super cheap VPS providers. A couple years ago I got burned by a provider called VBOX that was highly recommended on lowendbox.com. At first the service was ok, but a few months later my server and VBOX business were completely unresponsive.

Sure you'll save some money, but you might also waste hours of your time setting up a server that could one day disappear into thin air.
think about it like fiverr

There are a lot of unknowns, the only known is that it costs 5$, that's all some people need to know.
unless I was one of the customers who's out a service I depended on.
Can someone tell me what is the theme of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" as applied to modern society? I read the book awhile ago and appreciated greatly the various character sketches.

Unfortunately, the literary criticism that I sought out back then at liberal arts college, focused mostly on the metaphor of the European colonialism on Latin America (industrialization of the town with the rubber-plant, and the subsequent massacre of the residents after some kind of rubber-plant revolution, consequences of military rule and violent overthrows as embodied by Colonel Buendia and circular nature of the history, Spanish colonialism past long felt after Latin America became independent).

Tbh, I'm not really interested in the whole multiculturalism and ethnic studies rehashing the white guilt trope. However, I find the obsession of the various characters fascinating, the scientific obsession of the original patriach that eventually descended into madness, Colonel Buendia making little gold fishes, the incestuous natures of the whole family, some ethereal nympho character that doesn't speak a word and then one day transcend to haven much to the horror of the venerable matriarch. What is your interpretation of the book?
I'd imagine that a Mozilla project would just focus on compiling to asm.js...
I think a menu of reasons would be a great start.

Not only does it require a bit more overhead on the downvoter's part, but the reasons can be used by the algorithm.

I also think that some sort of feedback for the comment's poster could really help comment quality.

edit to add: It also reduces the possibility for 'accidental' downvotes, which I see on a regular basis.

----------

On a related note, deleted comments should still count toward a user's Karma and avg.

The other day I saw a user making comments that struck me as factually questionable. I'm not an expert in that field, so I asked for an explanation. The user had an avg over 5, so there was reason to believe the user might have known something I didn't. All of a sudden, the user's comments on that topic started getting downvoted. Despite the initial downvotes one of the comments was still at the top of the thread (my understanding is that a user's avg impacts the comment ordering). The user never responded to requests for more information or reputable sources, and then all of a sudden, all of his/her comments on that thread were deleted.

Curious, I went and looked up the user's previous comments. In multiple fields this person put on an air of expertise. Maybe he/she is and then again, maybe not. But the comments were almost all disparaging, with this air of expertise. So, the user makes definitive claims that come across like an expert, if their comments start getting downvoted, they delete the comment and don't get penalized. Otherwise, they reap in the upvotes and have an avg that appears to the world to justify their expertise.
I respect your desire to stick to your word. However, this shouldn't restrict your pricing over the coming weeks and months. Your time is limited, so if demand is strong your price should increase to better fit the market. You could always make an update later on that includes a note that clients may reserve at the current listed price but it could change over time.
Michaels Stores: About 3M customer cards may have been exposed in a data breach
I'm curious to see what happens as our age group gets older. Right now few focus on developing applications, games or social networks for elderly individuals, since there isn't a big audience. As we age, I think we'll see a lot more technology designed to helping the elderly, and hopefully it'll allow them to stay more mentally stimulated, less lonely, and provide ways for them to further contribute so society online.
"I get back to the DOM"
I agree with that line, but it feels like sometimes we are tricked into feeling like we're enjoying something, when we really are not. What matters is if afterwards, if you feel like you wasted that time.
I did not ignore it, I clearly said secular humanism[1] and later said reasoning which is how it works. Rather than asking me more stupid questions I've already answered, go look up how secular humanism arrives at such answers, they are there.

Morality should be reasoned about, not blindly accepted from the demands of ancient savages. You have a brain, try and use it. At the very least, pay attention when your questions are answered so you don't foolishly keep repeating them due to a lack of reading comprehension.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism
Selected readings from OpenBSD's reworking of OpenSSL