skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
failure to follow up is most likely not intended to communicate "We are pursuing other options" but rather "Oh, crikey, I forgot about that among the 100 things I had to do this week."

This is absolutely worth repeating, or even printing and sticking on the wall.

Developing a nose for these sorts of good-but-busy clients takes time, but they can often turn out to be the best clients as they're the least likely to meddle and the most likely to schedule tight, productive calls with you.

You don't need this advice, but for anyone struggling to deal with busy leads, you need to ratchet down the complexity of your communications each time you get in touch. There are absolutely busy clients who won't/can't respond to complex e-mails that are wisely trying to assess a situation, ask questions, etc... but who will instantly approve a $10k order on the back of a very simple "Would you like us to do X? It'll cost Y" style of question. It's happened to me! :-)
It's probably akin to Facebook Zero. Facebook isn't giving everyone free reign to access the internet; they're probably paying providers to deliver certain information that is pertinent and important. Health and weather information, for instance, is unbelievably liberating to a population without information.
Also interested in how this works. Maybe the author can give some details how he set up the service.
Same with me, I use Twitter login whenever possible, Google if no other option, Facebook login never or if absolutely forced to.

Twitter has been great, they focused on doing one thing really well.
Lucibel’s brilliant vision of the future of LED, Smart Lighting and Li-Fi
I'm currently living in a passive house (in Belgium, Europe). We've only moved in two months ago so we haven't experienced a winter yet but even in the current summer climate it has already been an order of magnitude more comfortable than any of the other places I've lived in. When the temperature hit 30 degrees Celsius for a couple of days last week the house was at a comfortable 23 degrees. Everywhere.

Key design points:

- Insulation, insulation, insulation. We have 30cm cellulose in the walls and 36cm in the roof plus some 5cm fiberglass in the space between the walls and drywall.

- Airtightness, in combination with a ventilation system (with heat recovery).

- Large windows (triple glazing) on east, south and west sides to get free heat from the sun in the winter but have some screens to keep the sun out in the summer.

- We use a geothermal heat pump to prepare hot water and to be able to heat the house a little bit in the winter when needed, using underfloor heating pipes. Extra bonus that has turned out to be essential: we can use this system to passively cool the house by simply pumping the water through the pipes and into the ground. This can lower the temperature in the house by several degrees in an energy efficient way.

Based on our energy consumption for the two months we've lived here we'll end up at around 3500-4000kWh per year. And that includes everything: heat pump, ventilation, all electrical appliances, ...

Building such a house isn't rocket science. The materials and techniques are well known and readily available (at least here); it's mostly a matter of good planning upfront and paying attention to the details when executing. Not all construction companies are up to speed but they're slowly getting there (or they'll disappear).

As a matter of fact: the EU has mandated that by 2020 every newly built house must be more or less equivalent to a passive house.
Show HN: Introducing Pilo, the battery you never have to recharge
Ideally Facebook would engineer itself out of existence, but I'm not holding my breath.
The other thing I find with reading technical books on a computer is that it's a different experience - I'm constantly flipping over to an editor/REPL to try things out, so it's not like I'm staring at a wall of text for hours on end.
They're giving people something for free. It's hard to complain about that.
It's not legit to error-out for eval, since PHP has all kinds of eval-like things.

For example, PHP has two namespaces for functions: anonymous functions live in the regular variable namespace, so they can be passed around directly. Named (AKA global) functions are completely separate, so we can't pass them around as values. For example:

$my_anon = function() {};

function my_named() {}

// Valid
array_map($my_anon, []);

// Invalid
array_map(my_named, []);

As a workaround, whenever PHP sees a string when it's expecting a function, it will try to find a global function with a name matching the contents of the string. In other words, we can do:

// Valid
array_map('my_named', []);

This is basically a weak form of eval: taking a string of PHP code ('my_named') and getting back the value it evaluates to (the my_named function). If you error-out for eval, you have to error-out for this, since the content of strings is runtime information and there's no way you can infer it well enough. For example:

function smart_replace() {
$args = func_get_args();
$func = array_shift($args)? 'str' : 'preg';
return call_user_func_array("{$func}_replace", $args);
}

Other eval-like things in PHP include variable property lookups, variable method calls and "variable variables":

$foo = "hello";

$object1->$foo = $object2->$foo; // Sets $object1's "hello" property to $object2's

$object3->$foo(); // Calls $object3's "hello" method

$bar = "foo";
echo $$bar; // Outputs hello

One interesting fact about these features is that, since they're not as powerful as a real eval, it can often be perfectly safe to supply them with unvalidated user input:

array_map('str_' . $_GET['string_function'], $my_array);

There's no way we can swap out things like this reliably, and remember that these are not just "crazy uses of eval", they're officially sanctioned ways of working, which in some cases (eg. function names in strings) have no alternatives (short of redefining your own standard library).
Moxie is a fellow of the Foundation:

https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellowship/fellows/cu...

But it appears he personally only "helps" Open Whisper Systems:

http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-somethin...

"I help work on Open Source security and privacy apps at Open Whisper Systems"

On more accurate side, see also 2013 report of Open Technology Fund which granted 445K USD directly to the Open Whisper Systems in 2013.
They would get the wrong idea. Access to information should not be free, the internet as it happened to develop was a mistake. We must make sure we don't let the third-world make the same.
Direct Methods for Sparse Linear Systems
You'll quickly get the coolest functions if you do the problems on 4clojure.com. Checking solutions of the best users after my own was enlightening. The typical compression ratio is a 7 lines nested monster with loops to a one line snippet :)

By the way, after 4clojure 'apply' would be within my top 10. It might not look like much (man, I can call my fns directly!) but the fact it can prepend individual arguments to the sequence makes it a very useful tool: (apply mapv vector m) transposes m (assuming vector of vectors). Cool, huh? My own transpose would not be that terse :)
Well done.

I used Oracle APEX to make a couple of user administration consoles for in-house Windows apps as an alternative to the service desk staff needing to run the app itself to manage user accounts. It was quite convenient for them to use. That was a few years ago.

I like the idea of being able to make a database centric web app using just a web browser, yet I find it hard to get past the clunkiness of it. I've been thinking about writing the thinnest possible HTTP gateway for other database systems, such as PostgreSQL, and then gradually building something like APEX on top of that. But unlike APEX, it should be easy to create sexy consumer facing web apps, not just corporate bags of forms, tables and charts. If someone released such a product today, they could become very rich very fast.
Won't happen, I've been waiting for them to become like MySpace but it just hasn't happened.

Facebook is the best at social media, there's no denying that. I would support them if they would have stayed small, simple, and private, but they kept adding, tracking, Sharing, Liking, Poking, etc.
Their development roadmap has some details, not all of which seem viable. They want to make 2-3 apps:

1. Detect hidden SMS and (SIM card?) app installations through public APIs. I don't think this will work.

2. Send AT commands to the baseband processor and use the results to detect anomalies. My guess is that the baseband doesn't expose enough information for this to work.

3. Connect to an OsmocomBB phone running CatcherCatcher [0] via USB. This should work, since CatcherCatcher seems to work.

[0] https://opensource.srlabs.de/projects/mobile-network-assessm...
Probably because of their habit of wearing outside shoes inside the house, making the floor too dirty to sit on.
I don't know. I think its closer to the good ol' East India Company pushing Opium around the world. No one needs Facebook. It's addictive and warps a persons perspective of the world around them and their friends and family.
> inevitably includes "It's been an incredible journey"

it is "thank you for your support" of this times and this generation
Thanks for the update - bytebeat sounds like something thats a lot more searchable than 'c one-liners that generate sound' .. ;)

Great stuff, eh?
Electric heating has near 100% efficiency regardless how you use it[0]. Heating with furnace is less efficient since some of the heat escapes through the chimney directly and efficiency is typically disproportional to the heating power so it's better to heat constantly[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_heating#Environmental...
[1] experience
Site is working here without a problem.
Hmm, perhaps I was a little overzealous in my attribution, I'll amend that, thank you.
As i am seeing Samsung, most of there devices are same in looks, so its losing brand value as far as i see. Also samsung is not reinventing anything new in there devices.
Definitely Micromax, Spice and Karbonn will get some market once AndroidOne come in the mareket, but they are not still brands.
you are correct Indian smartphone is wide market and lot of potential will be there.
Agreed entirely, although it has to be said the f/2.0 will help a little.

(Of course a 4MP image will not be as good as a real cameras, but low-light performance should be reasonable with that aperture - though I've not seen anything mentioned about ISO ranges.)

I will go hug my 70-200 f/2.8 now, it truely is an amazing lens :)
They plan to have capacity of 35-50 GWh at 2020 [0]. IMO they will not be able to produce so many cars, to use all the battery capacity in Tesla cars they would to make ~0.5 Million cars per year. This means that they do plan to sell the excess capacity.

[0]http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachme...
But who would want a human to do those things if a machine can do it better, faster and more efficiently?
I think Japan has something close to guaranteed job, their culture is somewhat different from American culture, it would be very interesting to study.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...
You've hit the nail on the head!
Ok, that sounds like a challenge , I have checked it out and wanna know if you want only the interactive whiteboard thing or the whole setup with students and grading and stuff ?
I have the exact same feeling.. I think coding for a hobby and coding for a job is something really different.
It would at least include a bit of space for expansion without immediately damaging surrounding cells or the enclosure, I guess.
ADTs and pattern matching go together. Having tagged unions is awful without a good way to discriminate upon them.

Switch statements are ok but not typesafe since nothing prevents you from desynchronizing the tag and data
Block The Pirate Bay Within 3 Days, Austrian ISPs Told
I'm guessing that it'd be great if you have a voice controlled website where you just say that type of stuff will show you all connections. What say, would you like that kind of thing or would you prefer to scroll through a huge amount if stuff like google ?
BTW: Union types ("tagged unions") predate OOP by some years and thus were there long before OCaml or Haskell. Algol68 had them and also Pascal for example. The invention of ML was pattern matching on those data structures.
Having used PHP actively for 9 years, having seen it 'evolve', and having started with a number of different languages/platforms (Python and Node.js in particular), I can say without a doubt that PHP is still awful.

Yes, things are being improved. But in terms of language usability and consistency, PHP is still miles behind pretty much everything else, especially given the slow deployment of new versions of PHP. As for "unfounded criticism"... some particular inconsistencies have been fixed, but the original criticisms are still valid - they just apply to different things now.

If you look into the way the PHP interpreter actually works internally, you'd rapidly find that suggestions like "methods one can call on the objects themselves" is more or less an impossibility. As far as I'm aware, rather than treating base types as special kinds of objects, PHP seems to treat them as entirely differerent types, which leads to something like "calling a method on it" being a technical impossibility in the current architecture.

I'm absolutely not an expert on the internals of PHP - but from the design flaws that leak through at times, it becomes obvious that the PHP internals consist of a lot of hard-to-maintain code bloat, and that code reuse/abstraction is not as common as it should be. One particular example I ran across myself was this: http://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/comments/1twal5/really_php_re... (the paste no longer exists, sorry for that).
Nice, thanks for the summary
I think they use standard 18650 batteries (might be wrong) and there have been discussions from Tesla saying that the round batteries also have the benefit of allowing an air gap to insulate and help mitigate overheating problems.

Plus they are mass produced, cheap, and have a relatively high energy density.

The new factory might work on creating some new battery technologies though, not sure. Ideally yes, you want the battery as compact as possible and lots of round batteries aren't the most efficient for that, but when you factor in cost and the natural heat insulation, it might have been the best option at the time. If it works, roll with it and work on one of the numerous other problems they have to solve.
I want summer inside the house.

It may be wasteful, but that's what I want. I don't ever want to step out of the shower in the morning and shiver again, I find this deeply unpleasant. I also don't want to have to wear thick woollen clothes around the house. In pursuit of this I actually moved to Australia for a while, but it turns out I missed the temperate climate and UK culture (also my family, I guess...)

So when I own my own home in a few weeks it will be getting insulated to hell and back. Eliminating drafts, insulating attic space, replacing some of the old windows with double or triple glazed ones, checking the state of the wall insulation... etc etc.

But when it comes down to it, I'll pay the heating costs and swan around in my t-shirt all year. I like being warm.
Me too. I would like to replace my older business notebook (mate display, good colors) with a MacBook but Apple only ships glossy displays nowadays :(

I hate the eye-strain that the iPad causes when I use it outside in nature. Sometimes I go back to my Kindle, but it is too slow and too small for my complex PDFs.
As Randall Wray said: "There are lots of people who want to work but cannot find paying jobs. And lots of stuff that needs to be done. We’ve got a serendipitous problem here: bring the two together."

He lists a number of ideas for jobs in this article:
http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/07/bop-a-mole-2-j...
These are also all examples of where adding a layer of bureaucracy to get paid ruins it. From what my parents (both GPs) told me, in the Netherlands we used to have a lot of volunteers helping out family members who needed extra support, and who simply got a fixed amount of extra money per month, no hassle. This had the extra benefit that it let nurses and doctors focus on the more difficult problems that they specifically were trained for.

Then the government decided things had to be more fair (we're talking early eighties), so people suddenly had to fill in forms defining exactly how many hours they spent on helping out family to get the amount of money they deserve. Or something like that. The point was that there was this new layer of bureaucratic administration. It was a disaster, and within a few years they rolled it back. By then however, a lot of volunteers had simply given up and stopped helping, and they did not come back. And in the last decade we made the same mistake all over again.

What's especially important to note was that under the new rules, people on average would have been paid more for their help - the old compensation was not nearly enough to cover the time and costs of the volunteers. And yet we ended up with less volunteers.

Almost all of the examples you mentioned are things people do for other reasons than the money; any monetary compensation should be more of a hassle-free symbolic gesture of appreciation, or it ruins the whole intrinsic motivation. People are irrational like that, and we need to respect that if we want to make this work.
So about the same as googles ad business? Not shocking to me.
That's sounds like an awesome add on idea to my present calculator idea, but just a quick question, would you like it to be like Mathematica or totally GUI based ? I think that GUI's rock but as personally, as a student, I've not used such calculators much, I'm not sure if other people would like it better if it's Command line interface ?
"Let the robots do the robotic work, let humans flourish
creatively." - Matthew Taylor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc
Scalable K-Means By Ranked Retrieval (ACM 2014) [pdf]
> Where it really gets annoying is PHP's lack of operator overloading. That means to concatenate I'd need to do

> $str->concat($str2)->concat(new String(" "))->concat($str3)

> instead of

> $str . $str2 . " " . $str3

Erm, no you wouldn't. What's wrong with either of these?

String::implode($str1, $str2, new String(" "), $str3);
String::sprintf("%s%s %s", $str1, $str2, $str3);

Of course, if you want to add operator overloading, you might as well overload '"' as well, so you can use "foo" instead of new String("foo").

Personally, I'd prefer operators to have function equivalents, so your example could be written:

array_reduce([$str1, $str2, " ", $str3], '.', "");

I've raised this at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=66368
Are there any efficient electric heating systems for a household based on a thermodynamic cycle with the environment?

I think the most electric heating systems I have seen are using the rather bruteforce and inefficient (only near 100%) method. The basic principle that they heat a resistor and something quickly transfers the heat away so the resistor doesn't burn out and/or your house doesn't catch on fire.

An other fun method to increase the "efficiency" of electric heating would be heating with bitcoin miners. It wouldn't make the heating more efficient in the sense it would cost the same energy but at least you could get some of your money back spent on heating.
I haven't done that out of concern of being unaware of things coming up behind me, like bicycles and cars.

What I do do is "front load" my head with the context of a problem that's vexing me, and then while running think about it. I'm often able to come up with a solution that way. I also "write" articles while running, and then just tap them out when I get back.
Sage is a collection of math tools for Python nicely packaged. The Sage collection includes Sympy.
You probably shouldn't put the EFF, Guardian Project and Privacy International logos so prominently on your website if you are not affiliated with or supported by those projects.
Sympy is included in Sage. Sage is just a collection of math tools in nice packaging.
The most jarring thing about visiting the United States for me was the car-centric design of the cities.

We lived in an apartment in Palo Alto, and doing the most basic things was impossible without a car - grocery shopping, going to the office, going out for dinner or to a meeting. Even bikes weren't really enough. Eventually we caved and had to pay the extra expense of renting a car through a car sharing site.

San Francisco was really not much better - to get there, the only viable option was either to drive or to take the CalTrain - always extraordinarily crowded in the busiest hours, not to mention slow and with long waits in between trains. Getting around in the city on foot also presented an ordeal, but at least MUNI and BART helped somewhat.

This added a huge expense for our company that would have been completely unnecessary in other cities - including the rental price and fuel, the car ended up burning about $800/mo on its own. Not to mention the amount of time wasted driving around to get basic things done like visiting the bank or the supermarket.

It became clear to me why companies like Uber were making a killing in the U.S - public infrastructure was so badly supported that there is just no way to live without access to a vehicle. I can't imagine what it must be like for the working poor, who must pay for the expense of a vehicle just to subsist.
Life is long and careers are very short nowadays. While it's true that a CS degree from IV league school and a hacker career in google is probably quite difficult for you I assure you that for the more common jobs it is much more appreciated by employers that you have the skills to learn new material alone.
I am now 33. I've been working in the investment industry since I was 17 and only when I was 28 I've changed carrers - to IT. It was very easy for me since (much like yourself) I loved learning alone and was always fascinated by computers. Last year I've changed careers again - this time to tech investments.
If employers won't give you a chance, don't give them the opportunity to decline. Be creative. For example, try getting work as QA in start-ups and then move to junior dev inside the company, or take on web projects for free, bid low on Elance etc.
Couldn't you just as easily reverse that and say, bots have 360 degree vision, superior concentration and reaction times, I hope they're not going to waive that for the humans, even if they do have the ability to recognise potential hazards at a very early point.

Surely the point is to not kill people?

So which is more important, recognising potential hazards early, or unwavering attention and superior concentration? Because although I'm pretty sure it's the humans who're ahead at the moment, but I'm not sure it'll always stay that way. Bots may never match humans at a hazard perception test, but if bot reaction, vision and AI gets good enough, they may not need to.
Unless there's a connection to foreclosures that I'm unaware of, I think you meant: http://www.4clojure.com/

But despite that silly typo, thanks for the link!
Where were you looking at, Milton Keynes? Peterborough? I'm struggling to think of anywhere gridlike in the UK, though I'm sure some of the '60s towns have them.
Actually, Google wants to be held at fault. At least that's their stated position.
`zip-with` and `group-by` just represent the most common uses of `map` and `reduce` respectively. Many data processing frameworks (cascading, spark, storm, etc.) build these abstractions right on top of map-reduce, and sometimes the layer is pretty thin.

Heck, zip-with in clojure is literally just map:

(map + [1 1 2 3] [1 2 3 5]) ; => [2 3 5 8]
"Free" doesn't mean "good" necessarily. Drug dealers often give the first hit free (particularly to kids) to get them hooked.