skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's simply not efficient, even with auto-closing dampers, to zone and duct a multi-zone system with single condensing units.

You are absolutely correct. You end-up running a huge compressor for a small zone.

I've always like the idea of chiller systems and the general concept of storing what you need during times of high efficiency to bend the curve in your direction.

I haven't done any math on this at all but I've wondered what it might be like to cool the massive foundation slab most homes have as well as the ground directly underneath them during the night. Again, I haven't thought this through at all. Just thinking now that you would want to treat the soil in order to have a stab at improving heat capacity, etc. You could then use that during the day in a very careful way to compensate for heat flow. I almost envision radiator panels embedded into the walls with sensors to pump heat into the cold ground only as needed. Anyhow, there's probably a million things wrong with that idea. Air conditioning is one of these things that could be so much better.
Nope.

NSA has a program of intercepting shipments to targets and silently replacing the gear with identical (but backdoored) equipment. There's even a catalog of the equipment they have ready-made replacements for and a price sheet (presumably for internal cost accounting) that leaked a few months ago.

Like many private-sector security consulting companies, they also do security research - looking for vulnerabilities accidentally left behind by naive programmers. They leaked a catalog of exploits written for vulnerabilities discovered (or bought) but not disclosed. Failure to disclose these is a violation of its mission to protect the security of US infrastructure, but I can't say I'm surprised that an intelligence agency that pays hackers has some exploits to show for it.

Aside from doubt cast onto the validity of NSA's advice on cryptography standards, there is not evidence that NSA actually introduces backdoors into the design of mass-produced products.

If you're not interesting enough for the NSA to physically intercept your package from, say, Cisco, (or, for the more cynical, ask Cisco to put the "special" version of IOS on your router) your inspection of the gear says nothing about what's running on an apparently identical unit headed for a foreign government.

Granted, "only" targeting a handful communications companies may well give them access to most of the world's communications, but this "NSA is deliberately backdooring everything" business is vastly exaggerated from the evidence.
if your needs are simple, why reach for a higher layer of abstraction, rather than just rewrite the simple layer in the first place? You will quickly find that your abstraction library doesn't handle everything you were thinking of post-migration anyway.
... not to mention the bit about C1 being a couple years behind spec:

$ glxinfo | egrep 'OpenGL.*version'
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 10.1.0
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 3.30
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 10.1.0
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30
This is the third comment I read from you on this page, and you really are useless to this community. Go back to your school books.
the dod, nsa, etc. probably.
This doesn't do anything. NSA is intercepting specific shipments. Unless you happen to be a target of the same program, what you're auditing is not the same as what the target received.
You can install Nvidia drivers on your own for OS X, look up "Nvidia Web Driver". Here's an example: http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/73628/en-u...
Its a good question that got me thinking. so thank you.

I'm not sure if either one would be necessary traits, though. Fallability and infallibility in this case are most likely just functions of our knowledge. And humans do not, by necessity, have to have imperfect knowledge; it just so happens that no normal human being has imperfect knowledge.
Being idealistic doesn't at all detract from the real practical progress that he and the FSF have made in the past 20+ years.

He knows exactly what he's doing when he takes a hard line. Being weak-spirited and compromising isn't a very good way to get noticed.
One thing I've never gotten about these "syncing" apps...

Lets say I install this software on my phone, my desktop, and my work computer. I have 100+ GB free on my work computer and my home desktop, but I only have 16GB on my phone. If I add 20GB worth of movies to my sync folder, its going to fill up my phone.
My recollection was that Xlib is an unfortunately synchronous library written for the the wonderfully asynchronous X protocol.
When is a BIG Rewrite the answer?
Show HN: Original Rap about Databases
Yo it's friday night, I'm hanging out with the Oracle/

the database servers, man it's not metaphorical/

optimizing queries and creating new lables/

girl you know I like the way you drop those tables

Yo, I'm making it rain with that amazon power/

my databse uptime is four cents and hour/

SELECT me FROM here, cause you know what I need/

girl you know it's all about those physical reads

Girl are you into drugs? cause I make a mean hash/

but if the po' comes calling, better flush that cache/

If you're into organic, let's make a B+ tree/

Girl you are unique just like my primary key

Relational databases, declaring varchars

The skys the limit when you COUNT with the * s

running all the queries, finding WHEN things are equal

you and me and php it's motha f*ing sql

~ created by my anonymous friend.
I like Rob Heaton's variation on the phrase, which is also true:

"When you have a nail in your eye, everything looks like a nail."
Exactly.

Edit: a simple illustration of the problem.

http://jsfiddle.net/7hK7A/2/
My comment contains numerous easily verified facts. I note the utter absence of any attempt on your part to provide evidence that contradicts anything I said.
Yeah, they said they didn't understand the distinction, so I was clarifying. Poker leans a lot more towards the Rock Paper Scissors style of AI, where determining the best move becomes much more dependent on understanding your opponent's strategy.
Even those are compromised. Key tap patterns can be recorded and calculated. You need to have a zero electronics, faraday cage room in order to start to trust things.
That asm.js demo of Angry Bots [1] is damn slick. In Chrome (2013 macbook air) it's a bit choppy, but on Firefox 30 beta it's very smooth.

[1] http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/
SLN files are also horrible, I agree. Fortunately you don't have to frequently edit SLN files, unlike CSPROJ files (which are currently edited anytime you add/remove a file from the project). Both should be changed, but CSPROJ is what kept me from developing in vim during my day job back when I was making the shift. Me circa 2007 really wishes I had a JSON format without individual file entires...

(Also CSProj files aren't super fun to merge using git and change very frequently. See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13479294/why-are-my-cspro...)
Young British Singer, Dymond sings "Colorblind" 
20 Year old Dymond from London sings "Colorblind" the original song by Glee's Amber Riley. Already being Dubbed "Britain's Answer To Beyonce."
If your only metaphor is the hammer/nail metaphor, then every situation looks like an opportunity to use the hammer/nail metaphor.
I believe Bazil[0] is aiming to solve this problem, among others.

[0] http://bazil.org/
There is no "header" to set when you're downloading a data URL from a Javascript application.
Why Apple Is Buying Beats
Competition is GOOD [1]. This is a brilliant branding extension, it's clear on the value and the audience it's targeting. UberX - UberXL.

1 - http://blog.lyft.com/posts/2014/5/7/introducing-lyft-plus-th...
So its basically pirating, but its saves across all platforms?
Dropbox, at least, lets you select which directories get synced per device, i.e. so your desktop and HTPC can share movies but your phone never sees any of them.
I'd be furious that I was getting lapped by people who do a much poorer job

You'd only be getting lapped if you think life is a race to make money.

I'm doing Tarsnap because I wanted to build a good product, and by that metric I think I'm far ahead of the "competition".
Bitcasa (https://www.bitcasa.com/) also solves that problems by streaming your files on demand.
It would be interesting to know if it is possible to keep sea level low by moving water to artificial inland lakes in currently dry places. There are many places in Sahara, Persia, China where creating big inland lakes will be possible, and desalinating and pumping water there might be cheaper than building dams or leaving big cities.
You are putting increasing amounts of code in your Razor views?
Distributed API's are a big part of Ethereum. I think the Merkle tree of the bitcoin blockchain (and the Patricia tree of the Ethereum blockchain) might even qualify as a semilattice.

In fact, its by the physics of information theory that a cryptographic blockchain solves the consensus problem. Specifically, information theory emerges from the laws of thermodynamics: Maxwell's demon is essentially what secures one's private keys from brute-force cracking attempts.

I'd like to see a comparison of how the blockchain solves the CAP problem, alongside CRDT's. Are they not both solutions to the same problem?
SSHFS + Linux = SFTP powered cloud storage
Yeah it's unfortunate they didn't mention the demoscene but if we're talking "OG", there's a history of media artists creating "dev art" that goes back to the same time if not further.

E.g. Videoplace (~early 1970s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo
Did you post something like "TL;DR"? I didn't see your post but I suspect I'm not alone in having a rather repulsed reaction to that meme; its tone seems to celebrate being too dim to be bothered to read something, or being dismissive about the possibility that length may contain content. It is certainly often flung as a cheap, content-free, at times even outright anti-intellectual criticism of a piece of writing.

On the other hand, a polite request for a summary, and/or a well-written summary not prefixed with a borderline-snarky "TL;DR" is often well-received.

I recognize that some people seem to use it more neutrally. YMMV. But I have a hard time not expanding the acronym fully in my head, and it never sounds very nice.
You inserted "mass spying," "foreign civilians," and "pre-emptive." They are nowhere in the evidence around this program. For all you know, NSA is only rerouting shipments bound for legitimate threats.

I wouldn't be surprised if this tool is used inappropriately as well, but there's nothing inherently mass, pre-emptive, or civilian-targeting about it.
Nice to know that we picked what will be a fairly uncommon, but not unheard-of, name for some time.

I named my son Emmet (inspired by the Sublime plugin, stuck with it because my fiancé liked it). His full name is Emmet Smith, and the only two burdens it looks like we stuck him with were 1) the name of a famous football player (he's apparently not bad, and won Dancing With The Stars, so we don't feel too guilty), and 2) easily misspelt. We didn't know about #1 until after he was born (probably should have Googled it first), and I didn't really consider #2 until just now.

We were mostly concerned with the ability to make fun of the name (Emmet doesn't lend itself to any crude nicknames we could think of), that it sounded nice, and that it would be fairly unlikely to encounter another one in school. I met another Duncan once in high school; we had a short chat after class, and he went by his middle name (Robert) the rest of the year.

If we have another child, we'll have to pick a name that synergizes well with Emmet (though hopefully that won't be for some time)!
Like I said below, you can improve a situation without outright fixing it.

I'm well aware of the program you're refering to. Have you seen some of the unit costs? That doesn't even include operating costs. The US is already near-bankrupt! Intercepting shipments with look-alike models doesn't really scale to mass surveillance, which is kind of a key point.
I would love to see human adult stem cells used to repair some organ coupled with a transfusion of "young blood" as well to see the effect on the growth, overall.
Wouldn't people be complaining if "the unicode problem" hadn't been solved in Python rather than leaving it an undefined mess? Now it is a solved problem even if the solution is seen as a problem by some.
Over the years my opinion on this sways between never, and whenever you feel like it.

Never: its far too risky, usually ends up not fixing half of the issues in the first place. Better off taking scorched earth refactor approach at the class / file level than system level.

Whenever: the more often you do something, the better at it you should get, the faster you will get, and the better your designs will get.

I think there really is likely some middle ground in there.

The one thing I caution against is not to refactor while doing bug fixes unless it is part of fixing the bug. Overcomplicates the situation dramatically, make a note to refactor next time you're replacing a feature / have some downtime (lol downtime)
Peterson's Algorithm isn't lock-free, it's a blocking one.
together with all the other work on optimizing
asm.js, allows it to run at around 1.5x slower
than the speed of the same C/C++ when compiled
natively

Running at 67% of native speed, and backwards compatible with all non ASM.js browsers? That's pretty great!
This recent article casts some doubt on the Inmarsat analysis.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/why-th...

I've skimmed both article but haven't had a chance to focus on either and form any kind of opinions on the analysis. More data would certainly be nice to have, finding the aircraft would be even better.

The presentation linked in the siam.org article dives into the math involved.

http://www.utdallas.edu/~zweck/MH370_UNM.pdf
The mobile port Plague Inc is fantastic as well, great time killer.
No, they do have an obligation to protect the public in general. That's the point of police.

What they don't have is financial liability for the death of every specific person they aren't smart/fast/legally empowered/well-funded enough to save, because that would be unreasonable.
"No the problem is some people are simply detached from reality."

Everyone who uses Gmail and/or Google Docs is "detached from reality"?

Okay.
SLOMO
"I wanted to tell you about his private-eye trick, which he learned from a hard-bitten partner.

It wasn’t a blackjack-, brass knuckles-type thing. “It went like this,” Morris explained. “He’d knock on a door, sometimes of someone not even connected to the case they were investigating. He’d flip open his wallet, show his badge and say, ‘I guess we don’t have to tell you why we’re here.’

“And more often than not the guy starts bawling like an infant, ‘How did you find out?’” And then disgorges some shameful criminal secret no one would ever have known about otherwise."
I'm not sure what kind of inconvenience it seems like. If you do extensive logging (which you should), and you set Llongfile or Lshortfile (which you should), you will at least know where the error bubbled up into your own code. And you can always get a stacktrace from runtime/debug.PrintStack(), if you want, though I've only had real cause to use it once or twice. (In the event of a panic, you do automatically get a stack trace, though most of the time when that happens I barely have cause to glance at it.)

Idiomatic Go is not so deeply layered as some Java stacks I've seen. It is more horizontal than vertical. If you call a function in somebody else's library and get an error back, the source of the error is probably not ten layers further down.
I thought you could only sync individual files (mark them as favorites). Can you download a folder to your iPhone with dropbox?
My favourite of the many variations I've seen on this one: "If all you have is an icepick, every comrade looks like Trotsky."
Would you be interested in talking about this? I'm trying to get neuroimaging department to standardize methods for communicating data/models/findings and I'd love to talk to someone who's been through it.
Definitely. For anybody interested, http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/sicp/book/node90.html offers a nice introduction to the amb operator.

One issue that I found when solving problems like this is that, to achieve speed, it can become necessary to use many nested lets. That could hurt readability. Nobody wants to see a line of code nested 20 tabs deep!
You can treat your business as a labor of love, but be aware that you're making it less likely that the broad market will benefit from what you've built. Which is frustrating, because you have perhaps the only trustworthy cloud backup system I'm aware of.
Do I smell a niche for time travel startups? Disrupt the Big Time monopoly!
How Big Cable is organizing against net neutrality
Reminds me of Design Coding[1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0qMe7Z3EYg
I still think it's an interesting question to think about. There's going to be a (long) period of time whereby autonomous vehicles are sharing the road with human controlled vehicles and the elimination of all/most accidents is not likely during that transition.
That doesn't help if I want to support both kinds of installs using the same codebase. I'm pretty confident with this set of abstractions at this point - I've implemented maybe 15 different storage backends or storage wrappers, most of which were super easy, and I've never changed app code based on storage changing out from underneath it.
You're right, thanks. I'm finally home and managed to look at the source, it doesn't use Bootstrap. The author built it all from scratch. Kudos to him.
How do you figure that? That comment that you replied to matches reality very well.

Perl 6 is nearly 15 years old now. There have been many attempts to implement it during this time, and none of them have really been usable like Perl 5's implementation is.

I can recall hearing about Rakudo Star, Pugs, Niecza, v6.pm, Yapsi, and Sprixel. There are probably others that I've forgotten about. And that's ignoring NPQ, Perlesque, Parrot and all of the other intermediate implementations and runtimes that have been dabbled with.

There has been a lot of wheel-spinning when it comes to getting Perl 6 implemented. It's like they've tried everything except the proven approach of just writing a plain interpreter using C, like we've seen work well for earlier versions of Perl, Ruby, Python, and so many other languages.
One way to elegantly describe and solve such a problem would be Answer Set Programming.
Delivering eBay’s CI Solution with Apache Mesos – Part II
I have a really expensive bose headset but I find myself using my phone's cheap in-ear most of the time. If you need mobility, nothing can beat them.

http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/mobile-devices/smartphone...
> My guess is that a cheap programmable thermostat would have done that for you just as well

You're probably right, had I figured out how to use it (that's what I replaced with Nest). Like most things it's probably most efficient when I put the effort in, but that's the magic of Nest -- a huge work:savings ratio. You're right about laziness. Banking on laziness is a great business model -- find something people are lazy about, automate it to be maybe 60% of optimal and charge $$$$ for it.

> Wet air has greater heat capacity than dry air and so the system will operate more efficiently.

I grew up in a house with a swamp cooler now that I think about it. It worked pretty well.

We just had an offer accepted on a home, so I'm bookmarking your comments. Maybe I can implement some of them soon!
Things I wish I had done:

1. Thought it would last longer than one month. I assumed (still do) that they would realise I was faking it and take it all away. So I paid extra for temporary access to things (rented a car not bought). A year later I still was. Stupid.
Assume you are now a contractor for five years. You probably will be these don't sound like people to stick with.

2. Think of yourself as a business. Not a contractor - a business who needs to market and build a "sales pipeline". Who are you going to work for in six months time? doing what? How will you find them in the next three months and persuade them to wait?

3. taxes. Oh shit taxes. Get a accountant and do not leave their office on the first day until you have written a spreadsheet and calculated your own basic tax return. know this stuff inside out. You are now running 4 tabs on a spreadsheet and carrying over from one to the other:

Business Income > Business Outgoings > Home Income > Home outgoings. Make a spreadsheet like that today. Fill it in.

4. Blog - it's probably the best middle path for marketing yourself. But choose your story, your unique take on things. Are you techie through and through? A Brogrammer? An outdoorsy hiker, a Beethoven lover? What is your (oh god) tribe? Talk to that tribe - somewhere there is a hiring manager who is also a member of your tribe. Probably quite a few - talk to her through your blog.

5. Never ever ever ever lie for anyone ever.
Politics is a hard game especially in companies that are changing a lot, like startups. As a contractor you can have a professional armour - you have an obligation to give unbiased advice and opinion.

Not the companies problems are not your problems. Do not take on board their views of "if only we can hit this deadline we can make the sales and hit 100M..." - you should give your real views on the state of the codebase, the likelihood of hitting the deadlines and the tech debt.

Go read the clean coder (with an r) by uncle bob martin.

5. be your own project manager - that is track in your own system the tasks needed to achieve the requirements and the likely ship dates. Don't keep this a secret but don't rely on someone else tracking this for you. I recommend fogbugz these days (it's for pay). Don't touch Redmine with a barge pole. Basically know that the two week estimate the sprint just made is bullshit. Be clear on what your estimates are - no need to be shrill, just be clear, polite and consistent.

6. Be calmer than everyone else and realise this all takes time.

7. Don't take career advice off random people in the Internet :-)
What isn't!
There's no other way to put it: In some parts of the world you are simply screwed. I am lucky in that I have 50 to 60 degree air available at night during most of the summer. During the day it's 110+, so you learn to manage heat-flow very quickly if you want to save money. If I could get away with paining my roof white I would.

If I lived in an area where it's still hot at night and owned my own home I'd look into ways to store thermal energy at night when A/C units are more efficient. Here's a stupid example not fully thought out: I'd install a swimming pool as large as I could handle and chill that water at night.

A decent size swimming pool can easily have 25,000 gallons of water. Rough calculation: That's about 200,000 lbs of water. 1 BTU raises 1 gallon of water by 1 degree F. So, if you cool 200,000 lbs of water by just one degree you've stored 200,000 BTU's. A typical mid to large home A/C unit is 3 to 5 tons, which means 36,000 to 60,000 BTU's. As you can see, if you can efficiently cool down a large mass of water at night during high-efficiency and low electricity bills period you might just be able to sink heat from the house back into the pool during the day with a suitable heat exchanger. Again, seat of the pants stuff. I haven't thought it through in any detail because until I build my own house (on my bucket list) I have need to do so. So, call it a crazy idea at this point. Probably a bad one at that.
Totally disagree. I call Hitler "Hitler", but whenever I hear the name "Adolf" I think of Hitler as well. That name is done in America.