skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The US Naval Research Laboratory's electrically-powered fuel from seawater research appears vastly more viable than this project. It's been covered previously at HN.

Briefly:

• It creates aviation-quality fuel (long-chain liquid hydrocarbons equivalent to kerosene or diesel fuel, longer than those in gasoline) from electricity, hydrogen electrolyzed from seawater, and CO2 present at 140x atmospheric concentrations in seawater in both dissolved (2-3%) and bound (97-98%) forms as carbonate and biocarbonate.

• It utilizes two very-well established and understood principles: electrolysis
and Fischer-Tropsch process fuel synthesis.

• The novel aspect is also relatively conservative: extraction of CO2 at industrial levels from water via partial vacuum and pH changes induced largely via electrolysis.

• Efficiency looks to be reasonable and largely governed by electrolysis at 60% in terms of net recoverable energy from H2. Even if operational efficiency is only 10% of this it's still 3.5x more efficient than the method described in the article here.

• Scale of operations envisioned is significant at 100,000 gallons/day. Scaling this to national levels of present petroleum consumption strikes me as plausible, though not trivial or inexpensive. Capital costs are not incommensurate with existing and projected petroleum capex spends (trillions of dollars), and may provide greater return in terms of net energy supply.

• Plant requirements are, as fuel synthesis schemes go, profoundly modest. Rather than tens or hundreds of millions of hectares envisioned for biofuel schemes (along with freshwater and ag infrastructure requirements), a volume of roughly 10m x 4.5km x 4.5 km might provide US national liquid fuel needs. At envisioned Navy deployment levels, the plant would occupy a modest industrial site or possibly a shipboard or floating platform (though not fit within existing warship envelopes while preserving combat operations capabilities).

• Power requirements at 100kgal/day are ~240 MW (roughly an aircraft carrier's reactor output). At national scale, about 2 TW, or equivalent to a solar collector surface of roughly 6,700 km^2 (82 km on a side).

• The process should be highly amenable to utilizing surplus generating capacity on an intermittent basis to create fuel. It could be used for both electrical generation storage or for large-scale fuel synthesis.

• The technology isn't inherently large-scale. Smaller modular installations, or large centralized ones should, from an engineering perspective, be roughly equally viable, as contrasted, say, with nuclear technologies which are inherently centralized for engineering, safety, security, and operational reasons.

More: http://redd.it/22k71x
> So yes, there is an economic limit on your pay.

As a mere programmer, sure, but senior developers get well into the six-figure range, and with some luck, those stock options are worth quite a bit.

Sure, not everyone gets to work at Google at an early stage, but their IPO minted a good number of 'mere' programmer millionaires.
They do have quite a few projects in Java and they published some of their Java scientific libraries as open source. See Colt project. Also the software processing data from LHC is at least partially Java based.
Do you think other nations can replicate Norway's success in avoiding the resource curse? If so, how?
I've discovered that pointing out someone who forgot a is a dangerous thing to
Having a baby is not like having an intravenous drip of love pleasantly coursing through your veins all the time, unless that intravenous drip periodically freaks out and harfs all over you before making you take it for a pleasant night in the ER waiting room.

I'm glad to see startup founders confirming that it's possible to run a company with a kid, but a little rueful that this would be surprising enough to be the lede of a story.

The reality is that adults in high-pressure professions --- like partner-track biglaw and medicine --- routinely have kids. They take a couple weeks off, make child care arrangements, and then get right back on the horse.

And, sorry, but I don't believe it's true that starting a tech startup is the highest-pressure career track you can pick. When you break down the day-to-day hour-to-hour of an early stage tech startup, 70 hour week or otherwise, there's a whole lot of flex built in that isn't there for a partner-track Big 4 consultant or a hospital resident. You can often fix that critical bug in prod from home; you can usually miss today's stand-up dev meeting if you need to take the kid to the pediatrician; the evening you expected to spend sipping beer and writing Cucumber tests can get pushed to tomorrow if a family event comes up.

It's not just professionals either. Throughout the middle and lower economic classes, it's the norm to have families with two working parents. When you're living paycheck to paycheck and barely covering food, rent, and health care, there's even more pressure not to miss an hour of work, and people get by doing this.

I started a company the same year my son was born, and my daughter was born right at the end of the company. It was stressful (though, more stressful for my wife), but manageable.
Ohh that's a nice find. It's actually per month. I'll have that modified right away.
Typo on your front page:

"Import your existing documentation, create new ones or choose from our exsiting library!"

Edit: tone
Thanks for your concern. I will look into Gittip. Nicaragua is not likely to make my agenda. I sometimes wish I could do something like that, but my health challenges are complicated enough as is in a country where I know the language and culture and so forth. For that and other reasons, I am stuck in the U.S. for the foreseeable future.
On 2.: you decide who you share with. People can follow you but they won't see anything you don't share with them.
As is the rest of the internet.
It's only unethical if a) Uber has a monopoly and b) they charge a surplus (i.e. price-fixing) due to said monopoly.

Uber doesn't have a monopoly in ride-sharing, and Twitter doesn't have a monopoly in microblogging.
One of the things worth pointing out is that biological effects are hilariously noisy. Even many of our best genetic correlates aren't that clear cut. A lot of what we know still relies on large sample sizes to help cut through real confounding factors. And if that's what it takes to detect causal genetic effects, then we'll have to understand whatever we do to 'fix' these (whatever approach we take) will have to deal with the same type of issues.

In other words, personalized medicine isn't going to be this amazing thing that will let us conquer all our illnesses. It will be a tool that will bring significant improvements, possibly even order of magnitude improvements to those with the right genes or illnesses, but it's not magic.
They absolutely do not want anyone asking about user info, or their "store everything here forever so we can index and show ads next to it" is in trouble.

On the other hand, Google doesn't want to piss off the Feds or the Military Industrial Complex. They spend a lot of money and have friends in high places.
A Chinese copy of GitHub.com
> walking to their jobs

See nothing wrong with that. Unless we're talking much more than 5 kilometers and/or the job is physically strenuous.
What do you use it for? The social aspect, photos?
I like the conjecture, but believe that that alone shouldn't be enough. SpaceShipOne, after all, flew to 100 kilometers from Mojave, which is part of the airspace managed by the L.A. Air Route Traffic Control Center.

Oh! This is nice. SSO was in 2004, and the ERAM system they mention is newer than that, so my observation doesn't actually mean anything. Even better, the prime contractor for ERAM? Lockheed Martin. Manufacturer of the U-2? Lockheed Martin.
Interesting, my one quibble is that I don't see anything about the temperature. Flash memory is very sensitive to it.
Excuse my slight condescending tone, but I don't think he really understands what twitter is for, and who benefits from its service. The model explained, which was tried by app.net, doesn't coincide with the real idea behind twitter in the first place.

A neighbor once said to me, we should pay to use the sidewalks in our city; I don't think she understood the ramifications of such a move, but it made sense in her mind because she /could/ pay for the sidewalk and the model worked for her. -yet she didn't understand that the sidewalk wasn't even necessarily meant for her. The same sides she paces, kids use to travel to school everyday, homeless persons use to panhandle, families use to travel to work everyday, and every once in a while some lune is up there with a sign expressing their view.

Twitter is no different. Sure we use twitter to post about our latest projects and greatest food pictures, however somewhere someone is using twitter to alert his friends that government and police are encroaching the neighborhood, quick alerting those near about a wildfire, or trying to start

Just because you could pay for want, doesn't mean someone else has the means to pay for necessity. I don't mind sharing a common good/service even though I know someone else might not be paying the same amount as I.
tptacek is right. It's even worse, if you consider two-tiered pricing (ad supported, and paid), since advertisers want the expensive types who would pay for access, so they would pay less for the ad supported user group than you would think.
Ok after writing this, I realized that a block and tackle pulley system might work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pulley3a.svg

A 200 m (600 ft) diameter, 4 million m3 float, generating 1 MW, would have a tension of 4 billion kg. That would need 533000 pulleys with 1 cm2 steel cable at 7500 kg tensile strength. So 266000 pulleys on each end, which is a 2D array of about 512 pulleys on a side. This doesn't actually seem that difficult to build on an industrial scale. The cable would travel about 2100 km a day, at 25 m/sec (about 55 mph). The cable would have a total volume of 2100000/10000 = 210 m3, or 6 m on side (20 ft), with the ends connected to the opposite sides of the pulley system. So that's quite a spool at the generator. It should be slightly mobile, either on wheels or a spring so that it can adjust to rogue waves. Also it should probably be made from a polymer that's resistant to seawater instead of steel.

Unfortunately we'd need 1000 of these plants to make 1 GW. Just goes to show how mindbogglingly much power humanity uses. Maybe we could at least try to conserve haha.
The market mostly sets the wages. Pay too low, and you'll be unable to hire anyone. There's also an upper bounds on what one person is worth. It can be a lot, and the difference in productivity between average and superstar programmers is well noted. But even a highly productive programmer has a limited value as an individual member of a team.

Executives get promoted because they've proven to be able to get groups of people to work together to achieve something. Most programmers don't want to or can't do that. Our trade is mostly one of individual contributions, often as part of a team but generally we're not responsible for more than our own tasks, and we're generally not blamed when one of our peers can't keep up.
It's in rust.
How polite one finds it depends entirely on how much one sympathizes with the request.
That is exactly what I thought. For the uninitiated 2^16=65,536, so 16-bit storage limit for the elevation variable or a function of the elevation somewhere in the code. It will be interesting to see what they find.
Ouch. So ashamed of this!
But I fixed it. I'm verifying all the text again. Thanks for he heads up.
I'd also recommend reading the comments on each CFH post. They're surprisingly not terrible.
Wouldn't using a database of subtitles remove most of the bias?
Google Releases Development Kit for Project ARA, a Modular Smartphone Platform
Isn't there a paid Twitter clone that nobody uses that allows you to do exactly that, pay for it?
Marc Andreessen: Why I’m Bullish on the News
Maybe all the other places to host code should just do their job better. Ever think of that?

There are a plethora of choices, and you can always use Google to find projects. However, it happens to be that GitHub is the best choice, it's a free choice, and there's really no reason NOT to use it other than some stupid prejudice that putting all your code in one place is a bad idea.

Keep backups, and of course make sure GitHub isn't the only place your code exists (since you're using Git, that's not the case). and I don't really see a problem here.
I suppose that would depend on how the recruiters operate. I'd imagine that at Google's size, they probably have recruiters just feeding people into the pipeline. I tend to assume people aren't just doing a shitty job, in this case throwing people at a wall and seeing what sticks, despite how much it clashes with my "imposter syndrome" mentality.
I would pay for twitter.
In case anyone else is, like myself, a foreigner confused as to why this article is on the front page of HN at this particular moment, two facts are germane.

Firstly, the Kentucky Derby is this weekend.

Secondly, Hunter S. Thompson was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame last week:

http://jat.uky.edu/ky-journalism-hall-of-fame.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/hun...
Pretty entertaining. Works well on Firefox 28 on Mac.
Narrow and very misleading way of looking at engineering and careers for sure because it assumes a false binary choice.

A choice between doing what you love and making a big payout by doing something else. This assumption is wrong.

On one level, there is truth to what is stated--- but it correlates more to big company paths, people who have a conservative view on their ability to leave an impact on the world, and people who are narrowly focused on programming for programming's sake.

It's not about "switching" to management (this thinking is big company), it's about taking your technical skills and making things happen. If that means you have to be a startup founder or a leader (CTO, CEO, VP engineering, whatever) who ends up not coding much anymore to make that happen, so be it. The point is if you love programming, do it, get amazing at it, solve real problems... and you'll have limitless potential in the future.

Being a programmer/engineer gives you the ability to find and build real solutions to problems in the world. If you're good, being able to build things = creating a startup or partnering with others to take on big things.

Regardless of statistics on the rate of success of startup endeavors, this potential and this opportunity make being a programmer completely worthwhile and rich with potential. You do not need to be a manager to have financial success. What you need is equity, equity that appreciates massively in a successful company. Financial outcome is a nice side effect of starting or joining a startup but not the only metric of success.

IMO, the more "correct" way of looking at a career as an engineer is what other smart people have blogged about. After graduating, join the best mid-level (in terms of size) startup you can (or hell, start your own). The relationships and the higher opportunity for rapid growth will serve you well down the road--- whether that means you're an executive or still an engineer who codes. And it's this perspective that creates a healthier mindset where you aren't thinking "Oh when should I jump ship into management" but rather "if I build X, it could solve Y in Z industry... I can partner with A and together we can make it happen or I'll start a side project and build a solution and see if I get traction": http://hunterwalk.com/2014/03/08/new-grads-midstage-startups...
To explain the flaw in the reasoning, it's easiest to generalize -

y = x ^ (x ^ x ^ x ^ ...)
= x ^ y

and hence

x = y ^ (1/y)
= exp( 1/y * log(y) )

which is defined for y > 0.

Graphing this using Google plot [0] or Wolfram Alpha [1], or just differentiating, reveals that it has a maximum at x = e, and that x takes the value sqrt(2) at both y = 2 and y = 4.

Therefore the inversion, which is the original equation

y = x ^ (x ^ x ^ x ^ ...)

is dual-valued, i.e. it is not a mathematical function. For it to be a function, you need to specify whether you are on the upper branch (so that y = 4) or the lower branch (so that y = 2). Deliberately obfuscating the difference between the two branches leads to the conclusion that 2 = 4.

The square root function can lead to a similar confusion, since there are two solutions to the equation

y = x^2

and hence the "function"

x = sqrt(y)

is not really a function unless we specify whether we are on the upper (x > 0) or lower (x < 0) branch. By convention we interpret sqrt(y) to be the upper branch, and write -sqrt(y) for the lower branch, but there's nothing that forces that choice.

Obfuscating the difference between the two branches could lead one to conclude that 1 = -1, although the fallacy is more obvious in this case, since everyone is familiar with the fact that the square root function is dual-valued.

[0] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=y%5E(1%2Fy)

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=y%5E(1%2Fy)
Make sure to give those immoral fucks not the slightest bit of income.
You're right, that statement was poorly phrased. Apple wants to meet a certain price point for their notebooks, but they also don't want to sacrifice on their margin to reach that price point, so they reduce the cost of manufacture by using less expensive components, like lower-capacity flash storage.
This isn't crazy... checkpoint restart for something like this is viable.. infact, I think people are doing it.
Using larger form factors like 3.5" or 5.25" can possibly help.
Don't you think the visas would go to people from countries with less stupid immigration rules? The UK is hardly the only source of educated labour.

Also, there are a hell of a lot of people from the UK who work round the world doing jobs like dishwashing and wouldn't be able to afford to travel if they didn't.
I read the blog post and my reaction is: they are saying that being a programmer is not a good way to become a manager, or to be successful in terms of what makes a manager successful.

As a developer who has also been a director and a team lead:

- Good programmers get pretty good wages in the current market. I wouldn't call earning 6 figures a "dead end job".

- The number of people you manage is important to a manager, not a programmer

- Becoming a CEO is important to someone that wants to manage a company, not to someone that wants to write code

There are many rewards in writing code, if that's the job you like. You can write code that makes a difference in a company which does something you agree on. You can create a new company or product from scratch. You can spend your career learning new stuff. All of this is exciting to me!

If your definition of success is a truckload of money, retiring at 30 and being the boss of 100 people... you shouldn't be a coder, but that's a very narrow (and let me add, totally shallow) definition.
Have you considered using the Circles feature, so that you aren't always receiving posts from "some people and companies"?
Nice cartoon image
A good and nice cartoon pic that will show you how to get your ex back (in a funny way)!
t is written in Ruby, and Ruby doesn't come standard with a non-blocking HTTP client. You'd have to pull in EventMachine which would have a far greater cost than spinning up a thread. Additionally, threads in Ruby are user-level threads, so the overhead is a lot smaller than a kernel thread.

I see what you're saying here, but given that t had little other choice, I don't see how this comment adds any value other than to attempt to point out anything that could possibly be wrong with t.

Instead, I think t is fantastic. The usage of threads is good enough, and I thank Erik for spending so much time on a sweet little utility.
See also: http://bitbet.us/
Feds didn't act on polygraphs indicating child abuse
This honestly needs to be voted back up to at least neutral. I don't think QuantumChaos is trolling or anything like that here, and it's honestly an important point.

I don't know how many of you here have South or South East Asian parents, especially those who are first generation immigrants. I live in Canada (in Toronto!), so I get to talk to fellow immigrants about this all the time. It's pretty much accepted that many of our parents are racist. I have a Tamil friend who will only date other Tamils because of her parents. My Korean friends know that their parents will disapprove of them dating non-Koreans. My Chinese friend caused a stir in her family when she dated an African.

A lot of these parents will not have a problem with other ethnicities or whatever. They're not going to call anyone a nigger, or a gwielo, or a towelhead or whatever. They're not going to avoid talking to someone of a different skin color. They'll happily go out and be real and true friends of whoever. But they'll want their children to 'keep the tradition' or whatever.

This is a real thing. And it is a real racism. Whether or not we think its an acceptable thing is one thing. But if we let the Korean immigrants get away with it, then we can't get too upset at when the 'white people' do it.
>> Unless you do something stupid like personal guarantees on loans

As a director of a limited company in the UK - it's virtually impossible to get a loan without a personal guarantee by the director, unless your company has as much money as you are trying to borrow - in which case getting a loan is slightly pointless.
Well... except that, if by equality you mean mathematical equality as real numbers, and by "0.9…" you mean the limit of the sequence (0.9, 0.99, 0.999, …), then in fact "0.9…" does equal 1. I'd argue that this is almost certainly what you in fact meant when you wrote "0.9", "1", and "equals". In fact, "0.9999… = 1" is true, and an appreciation of mathematics beyond a purely-syntactic level will make this clear. It will also help clear up puzzles like the OP.
My issue with that is how?

I have seen file(s) in the repo. But branching a big makes little sense

I have seen git-notes, which seems good, but nothing survived across rebases.

There is a zombie StackOverflow thread on this but I would love a good solution -
But you could find a way to work around that issue e.g. by offering certain features that are fee based and that are unrelated to advertising.
No, this is bullshit, but 0.99.. does equal one in the standard system of math we use every day. It's not even up for debate.

Don't be belligerently wrong. It's not becoming.
Also the big red flag in the reasoning is:

> "But take the square root of each side".

Sorry, but that's not really something you can do without recognising the fact that there are two square roots.
> You can't force private companies to build out a network on unattractive terms. They'll just exit the business and take their capital elsewhere. See the difficulty municipalities have had trying to get companies to build out fiber on ridiculous tarms.

Why do the terms have to be ridiculous? What's wrong with offering 10Mbps service for one price and 1000Mbps service for a higher price that reasonably takes into account the capital investment that went into being able to deliver it?

> If you want public infrastructure, build it with public money, like we do roads.

OK sure, all we have to do is make the incumbent ISPs stop damaging any attempt to do such a thing through lobbying and litigation. Easier said than done.

> But the problem with that approach is you'll quickly realize ordinary people don't want to spend as much money on all this as the techies do.

If Comcast can turn a large profit then there is no reason a municipal ISP couldn't break even without consuming any tax dollars. Pay for the initial roll out with a bond issue and then repay the bond over time from subscription fees.