skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zigurd, I doubt the "direct" 'gas to electricity' claim in this press release.

Near the bottom the press release admits the conversion /isn't/ actually "direct", stating:

If the fuel cell heater is connected to the gas network,
a reformer initially converts the natural gas into a
hydrogen-rich gas.

Ah-ha: A "reformer": That would be a 'steam reformer[1]'. Quoting [1], here's what a 'steam reformer' does:

At high temperatures (700 – 1100 °C) and in the presence
of a metal-based catalyst (nickel), steam reacts with
methane to yield carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These two
reactions are reversible in nature.

CH4 + H2O ⇌ CO + 3 H2

So there it is, the 'hydrogen-rich gas' is syngas [3], one mole carbon monoxide plus 3 moles hydrogen.

The syngas can either be burned directly (producing CO2 and heat of course), or continuing per [1], separated from the H2, then combined with more water:

Additional hydrogen can be recovered by a lower-
temperature gas-shift reaction with the carbon monoxide
produced. The reaction is summarized by:

CO + H2O ⇌ CO2 + H2

But the article uses just one word, 'afterburner' which tells me they're burning away the carbon monoxide:

The researchers were particularly responsible for the
construction of the prototype, the design of the overall
system, the design of the ceramic components and the
development of the reformer and the afterburner.

Not clear is whether the CO goes /through/ the ceramic SOFC or is separated so it can /bypass/ the SOFC then get remixed with some H2 at the 'afterburner'. No mention of a 'separator', so perhaps the CO does go straight through the SOFC along with the H2 without ruining the SOFC.

In any case, we see this CHP plant with its SOFC requires water in, makes carbon monoxide in the process, which it 'afterburn[s]', certainly putting out CO2 [the Carbon from the methane can't just disappear, would you have that as carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide?], and needs some heat to run the steam reformer. There goes some of your thermal efficiency!

[2] has a bit more on home CHP.

So long story short, there's no free lunch here:

* It can't hit 100% thermal efficiency

* It releases CO2

* Its intermediate stage passes H2 through, and CO either through or around the SOFC, then burns off the CO to CO2

* It needs water as well as natural gas to work

Presuming the Bloom Boxes also use SOFCs and methane, the operating chemistry would be the similar at the inputs and outputs: Natural Gas and Water in; Heat, CO2 and Electricity out.

There may be an advance in materials science if the SOFC accepts syngas ( CO + 3 H2 ) directly without bypass of the CO and without cell degradation from the CO, but the press release says nothing specific about, or suggestive of that.

edits for dialog form, clarity, corrections, 'afterburner' clean up the CO in the syngas to CO2, no water out, oh it says press release right at the top, no wonder it reads like one

========

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_fuel_cell

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas
He may have used a lot of caps, but his points ring true: after two decades of deflation and low growth, I find it utterly surprising that people keep arguing for a certain, continued pain in the present, to stave off some potential future pain.

Pretty much what Europe has been doing since 2009, by the way - maybe I don't see the full picture with my limited understanding of economics, but it kinda sounds crazy to me.
Yeah, this is one of the reasons why Swift exists. The base Obj-C that we started with was pretty simple and reasonably elegant, but over the years we've been grafted pieces onto it in decidedly inelegant ways.

Block syntax, a ludicrous proliferation of __keywords and @keywords, the verbosity of GCD calls, all of it makes modern, complex Obj-C apps harder and harder to write.

In a lot of ways Swift is a reset. It offers a lot of the things we want from Obj-C/Cocoa (e.g., more block-based everything) in a clean syntax that was designed from the get-go to support it.

One of the complex bits of Swift right now is that the APIs haven't been ported. UIButton still expects targets and selectors (ugh), and an innumerable number of API calls still rely on the only C-style way of passing error pointers into calls to see if they get filled (and necessitating the idiotic NSErrorPointer class). A lot of the complexity of building in Swift right now is shoehorning Obj-C style APIs into Swift code.
Is it not so you can get updates on new product ranges and coupon codes, if I ever like a Facebook page its so I can get coupon codes. Nothing else.
I wonder if this has any impact on the Fermi Paradox? Could it be that any sufficiently advanced civilization finds itself beyond the "red out" horizon before having a chance to say hello to anyone else? (Pure speculation of course, but so is the question in the first place.)
Starbucks is using ASU's famously developed online course infrastructure and its own massive headcount to educate all of its employees in a way that will add little marginal cost for either entity. Thought the normal ASU cost per credit is ~$500, I would be amazed if Starbucks ended up spending even a third of that.

ASU president Michael Crow is profiled positively as one of the more progressive thinkers in higher ed the 2013 book College Unbound: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544027078/ref=as_li_tf_tl?... I wouldn't be surprised if ASU went on to work out a deal with other big retailers that employ a lot of people who haven't finished college yet. ASU's marginal costs will continue to fall as they get more students into the pipes. Walmart, McDonalds and other large employers could be next to partner with them.
JFK and LBJ both had tax cuts as major economic policy decisions, Jimmy Carter deregulated every industry he could get his hands on, and Bill Clinton created the largest and most important Free Trade agreement in our country's history. It is almost as if good economic policy requires a bit of ignorance about party lines.
Journalism is publishing the truth that someone does not want told; all else is stenography and marketing.

We, the people formerly known as the audience recognize this. We can tell when we are being lied to. We can tell when the truth is being shaded to benefit the beneficiaries of the status quo.

If you hand us shit and call it ice cream we still aren't going to like it, on facebook or anywhere else. We know that our vaunted 'free press' is a bought and paid for lie. We know that much of what passes for journalism is a ham-handed attempt to manufacture social proof for the acceptance of the current order of things.

Burn it down. All the way down. We're going back to word of mouth, moderated by cryptographically attested pseudonymous identities because that will work so much better...
I really hope Android 5.0 is coming out at I/O. It's a bit overdue. Google usually pushes major .0 revisions every 2 years. 2.0 in 2009. 4.0 in 2011, and 5.0 in 2013...NOT.

It's 2014 and no 5.0 in sight, except for a very weak rumor about the date on a Nexus phone being 5:00. If they wait until fall this year, it would be 3 years for the 5.0 release, just as much as for a typical Windows release, which I find pretty ridiculous considering Android isn't even trying to work on all devices out there before it's released.

Hopefully Google will release it soon, otherwise I'll be very disappointed.
Ask HN: Leasing vs. buying a car 
Does anyone know of any technical analysis, comparison calculator or have advice on leasing vs buying a car?

I've seen some analyses of buying vs renting a house, but not for a car. I know one major difference is that a car is generally an asset that depreciates in value. I've purchased a few realtively cheap (~$2k) used cars, but am considering going for a new car this time around and am researching leasing over buying.
So Starbucks is basically doing the government's job.
the cost of solar array as a function of desired temperature rises

In a heliostat-based configuration, I'd assume that it's just the cost of the target of the array of mirrors that increases, right?
I think the author is mentioning sites like Viddy.com that completely fell off the map when FB began to devalue someone posting a link from viddy
I've been using this to transform the output of ElasticBeanstalk environment queries into things I can feed into environment updates since moving between versions is a PITA. Should post that code sometime...
The entertaining thing is ddt was not outlawed for the purposes of mosquito control. it was only outlawed from agricultural use.
That doesn't really help unless the panels are in the same location as the solar field.

Anecdotally this isn't really true either. The peak for air conditioning is usually later in the afternoon since it takes a while for the sun to heat up the area from the cool of the night.
Great. Now recruiters will be calling me offering ping-pong, beer fridays, and college tuition.
Top 11 tech books for summer reading
I was paraphrasing. I'll quote you directly:

"How many more decades of zero inflation / deflation are needed"

That's pretty much what you said.

So what if predictions 20 years ago have turned out to be incorrect? That's really not relevant. Japan's government has never said they will do anything to achieve 2% inflation before.

It's going to be a lot messier than you think.
The mistake is associating one party or another with spending. While American conservatives speak of cutting spending rarely does this happen in practice. Think of the Iraq war under Bush, or my favorite, in 2003 Republicans extending Medicare's prescription drug coverage to essentially pander to elderly voters [1]. Not to mention most voters are poorly informed. Most elections are won by charismatic candidates and campaigns that can weave a coherent narrative rather than by the population's calculations on what spending policy is best for the country. I worked in politics for years, including for Obama for America in 2008 and wow undecided voters are scary. And those are the people who decide elections, people who are largely poorly informed & making gut decisions about who has the power to start wars for the next four years.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Prescription_Drug,_Imp...
Android has a web browser and if you dont like native apps just dont install any. WebOS only cant be successfull when the competition have all their features + native apps.
Almost certainly not. You don't need to leave our galaxy to make the case for Fermi's paradox. Something more like a Great Filter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter) is more likely in play.
You'll find several other Manga Guides to math and science here: http://www.nostarch.com/manga
The doubled ' is just a bug in the documentation generator (fixed by https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/14900, which is unfortunately (and strangely) failing tests at the moment).

Its true form is

pub struct Request<'a> {
pub origin: &'a Request,
pub params: HashMap<String, String>
}

where the 'a is representing the lifetime of the origin reference (that is, it is asserting that a Request struct is only usable for as long as the reference in the `origin` field is valid). Lifetimes/references are one of the core features of Rust guaranteeing both memory safety and performance.

See also: http://doc.rust-lang.org/master/guide-lifetimes.html
ever seen the movie 'Office Space'?

'fun' dress code is only fun when the person wants to dress in that manner.
This is completely unrelated to the point of the article, but this struck me:

> To fight malaria, the lab has invented a “photonic fence” device that identifies, tracks and zaps female mosquitoes (only females bite humans).

Can anyone explain why it's important enough to only kill the females that we might want to add (presumably expensive) sex-identification technology to mosquito zappers that are aimed at eliminating malaria in poor countries?
Looks like it's supposed to be a lifetime name, but it got munged in the docs:

https://github.com/cburgdorf/Floor/blob/master/src/request.r...

If you're unfamiliar, Rust has some fairly strict rules about lifetimes. Basically this syntax means that the thing referenced by `origin` needs to live for as long as the Request that contains it.
This Week in Rust 52
From the perspective of a home owner, if I rented my flat out, I'd definitely include a no subletting clause. I'd also love to have a way to temporarily blacklist my property on AirBnB and other such sites.
I believe the Haskell way of doing numerical things would be thinking in terms of what you're trying to do rather than "Step x is get the value from [i,j] of the matrice". I could be very wrong, but for general programming I had to stop thinking in terms of accessing specific elements of an array to write idiomatic Haskell.
Do you believe that a pedantic answer to an obviously loaded question will help to make the author of the question ponder his silly ways?
What is the meaning of `struct X typedef` vs. `typedef struct X`?
And the point of the article, besides being marketing for Apple, is...?
I'm really glad that this article has been put together just to at least have some idea of the way things were.

If they are planning to keep this updated as android evolves I really hope they go back to each of these previous versions and give a bit more context around the industry at the time.

There are certain comments in there generalizing around 'people weren't ready for xxx' but they obviously were as other OSs had the functionality at the time.
Beamer – Stream any movie file from your Mac to Apple TV
Well, Steam sells software now. Not exactly the answer you were looking for, but they began selling regular software packages awhile back.

I don't know how multi-platform their software offerings are, though.
Not trying to turn this thread into a political discussion but this announcement couldn't come at a better time for the Greens (for non-Aussies they are an environmentally focussed political party with influence via their holding balance of power to the major 2 parties). The Greens are looking to block cuts to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. It's not the CSIRO but this showcases what some scientific investment can achieve and hopefully stops the planned cuts across our research facilities being too deep.

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/06/15/greens-move-bl...
Partition agenda, bias, selective reporting, covering up, exaggeration, one sided stories and outright lies... That is what I think of when I hear the tern journalism today.

I wish that at least one of these organizations would be tackling all of this rather than focusing on digital content.

Is there a single news source that we can actually rely on to tell us the unbiased truth today?

I realize that this is the way that it has always been... to a degree. But today it is ridiculous. The level of trust is almost zero between Journalists and consumers (and rightfully so). I feel that we have been betrayed far too often.
MemShrink's 3rd birthday
I assume an EXTREMELY high number of these 'likes' are due to these companies offering freebies/prizes that you have a 'like' and comment on their page in order to participate.
Is Paper From Facebook To Be Tossed?
Well Unity is not bad for learning ,
What i would do would be somthing like this .

- Learn Unity make a couple of small 3D games.

- Learn some basic OpenGL , learn to write your own shaders and understand how it all works.

- After Unity try working with other engines ( work with something like the CryEngine[1] , it costs like 9.90$ / month royalty free)

- As you make games start making your own game engine as a side project.

ProTip: Open Source it to speed up development.

[1]http://cryengine.com/news/crytek-announces-its-cryengine-as-...
edit:formatting
Debunking the App Myth
> "We do things because they’re just and right," Cook replied. "If you want me to make decisions that have a clear R.O.I., then you should get out of the stock, just to be plain and simple."

While Apple cannot claim clean hands when it comes to ethics, it is fantastic to see the company leader preaching corporate responsibility. Unsustainably evil hypercapitalism is all too often justified as some kind of moral imperative for shareholders.
Ugh... its so depressing. Sooooo many developments have come out of CSIRO... It's a real shame to see funding cuts like this.
I found this part intriguing: "recent estimates of its Android licensing business suggest Microsoft is earning somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion from Android device makers paying royalties. Microsoft said last year more than 50 percent of Android devices are made by companies with licensing deals in place, and the estimates now range as high as 70 percent."

I wonder if that's $1 billion-$2 billion/year? If so, I'm wondering how seriously (if at all) Apple has ever considering pivoting from a "Prevent other companies from copying our core design differentiation" to a "$1 Billion/year is a pretty good licensing revenue stream."
This is blogspam (it's some joint Yahoo/Business Insider bullshit). The New York Times published a profile of Tim Cook which is the real content http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/technology/tim-cook-making...
Does 'supercritical' steam have any storage benefit? Or is it more efficient use of the solar energy? I ask as I read some articles about using a similar focused mirrors to create molten salt which then could keep solar energy running after the sun went down, one of the major drawbacks of solar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Molten_sal...
See also Setun <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun>, a computer from 1958 using the balanced ternary system.
Ahhh, the CEFC. http://www.afr.com/p/national/clean_energy_profits_up_in_smo...

$200 million annually in profit by 2017 for the government through investment in renewables. But making money from renewable energy is, one should remember, 'utterly offensive':

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-02/joe-hockey-wind-turbin...

The CEFC is a commercial investment in actual rollouts of renewable energy with a 7% return on investment. The Abbott government, however, says 'bugger that, we hate evil renewable-tainted money' (or something like that) and is currently looking forward to passing legislation to abolish the CEFC as one of the first things the new Senate will do once the new Senate meets in about two weeks' time.

Note also that, if it weren't for that the $200 million might well grow to $520 million pretty handily - they've got $10 billion in applications:

> The Portfolio Budget Statement does not include the significantly higher positive contribution to the Budget the CEFC would make if it was able to continue to carry out its investment function over the forward estimates period. Were it to do so, the CEFC would deliver a net cash surplus (profit) for the Government of more than $520 million, net of operating costs.

This government is committed to throwing away $500 million and more for taxpayers in money companies are willing to borrow and pay back - with interest - to roll out renewable energy schemes.

It's like "Dear government, if you give us x amount of money, this lender over there will give us 2x of money, and I'll pay you back both, with interest. This is for us to change all the lighting across this huge area to use a third of the energy.", and the government saying, instead of "let's have a look at your business case and assure everyone this is a sound investment for us and your claim actually checks out and we'll all make money" a "lol, no".
This is a good point. The pension system, as it stands now, is just basically another tax.
Show HN: A simple way to measure blog performance via RSS feeds
This is not about Facebook or not Facebook,this is about not put all your money into Facebook.Truth is,Facebook is doing fine,but advertisers are getting less and less for their money on Facebook.Facebook is not Google.Social networks eventually die and people go somewhere else.
I can think of several reasons:

1) discounts / promotions / contests and other forms of bribery

2) upcoming products you want to hear about as soon as they're ready

3) products you genuinely love and want your friends to know about

4) companies you support for ideological reasons (they support some charity/cause you like)

5) social signaling / status (mark yourself as an Apple customer, or a Coach bag owner, or whatever.)

6) the brand puts out genuinely entertaining advertising (some people really like the Old Spice "smell like a man" commercials)
Nee help to find one linux
Does anybody know what linux is this guy using?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWt484AC4E8
Skip to like 2 min. Thanks a lot.
what? No. there is absolutely no such thing as an absolute position in the universe.
Good for them! Most folks today still think Capitalism has merit, so if a corporation is working out ways to do things like this, way to go.

Sure, it will help Starbucks recruit college-oriented more ambitious employees, and that's what they want. Fine.

This is no solution for society overall, but it's a good thing for what it is.
I don't know about you but I plan on lasting forever.
A lot of businesses used the consumption tax increase to raise prices. I attended an expo for English language school owners last year and most said they were planning to raise their prices and hope no one would notice.

As I drove by a barber shop on April 1st, they were changing their sign from 2500 yen for a haircut to 2900. A tad more than 3%.

The clinic my wife works at raised one of their monthly services from 7000 yen per month to 12000 yen!
If Starbucks can do a better job educating students I'm not going to complain.
Well, that's some nice news, if mild. Cheers!
Certain brand are worth following for the content they publish.
Gopro's pictures/videos of the day are almost all stunning and one might want to follow them the same way you would subscribe to the RSS feed of The Atlantic's In Focus or Boston.com's The Big picture.

I personally follow a few kiteboarding brands that publish great pictures that I enjoy having in my feed.
What Elon Musk did – and did not – do when he “opened” Tesla’s patents
I came to the comments to say how much I like Wirecutter. It's one of my favorite sites. Exceptional research for behind every recommendation and they always have a small range of choices to fit your exact needs or budget. Absolutely top notch stuff.
We like to believe privacy will be a determining factor but even most of my CS university friends don't give a damn about privacy.

People need to burn their hands before they watch out for fire.
> Lots of work to do between now and then but it seems like its mostly engineering now vs new discoveries.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. There are still lots of issues with just surviving the journey, let alone making a foreign planet habitable and establishing a society. We need lots more discoveries in energy and understanding human physiology before it becomes just an engineering problem.
Quality Journalism = oxymoron
I don't see how his stance can hurt the stock, looks more like clever marketing to me -- but then again I'm not an investor..
There's both the letter and the spirit of the private contracts.

Some HOAs are restrictive on sublets and some newer ones explicitly prohibit short-term rentals or require an owner live-in minimums. The question is why?

The spirit of such regulations is that long-term owners, who typically rule the HOA, don't want their complex/neighborhood to be used for short-term parties, which brings noise concerns, safety concerns, possibilities of vandalism, etc.

If that is going to happen, HOA has the means to nab the offending owner, usually start him off with a warning, and later move that up to penalties or whatever other means they have at their disposal. If that never happens, HOA will stay mum.

Why should AirBnb get in front of the issue that's self-solving?