skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know how people's desires can be "wasteful". I find that "summer inside the house" during winter is absolutely wonderful from the comfort standpoint and certainly wouldn't trade it for the saving that I would get on electric bill.

Of course, I realize that many people don't care for that. More power (and smaller bills) to them.
oh yes. So much possibilities.
My bias also leads me to credit Woz more than Jobs, but I admit that I do not know enough about either to have much confidence in that opinion. One thing is clear though. Many very smart people who know far more than I do about Woz, Jobs, and Silicon Valley give the highest praise to Jobs.

What is so interesting to me is that Paul said something I'd always thought, but hadn't expressed nor heard before. Imagine how many Steve Jobs are out there who aren't able to thrive like they could have if they were born into a different situation. That doesn't devalue the brilliance of Jobs. It simply demonstrates optimism in a civilization with fewer unnecessary limitations.

The entire talk was great. Thank you for sharing it.
It is regulated by the FCC and some frequencies can be used by anybody in the US (but they might not be suitable for a cellphone company) http://transition.fcc.gov/oet/spectrum/table/fcctable.pdf ...
It's a key problem many people have with understanding (and in some cases, believing) evolution. The classic example is the complex human eye.
For me to have the right to be forgotten would mean for you to not have the right to remember me. I think that pretty clearly illustrates the problem.
Umm...

Assuming you are not producing any EM radiation at frequencies that go through the skin of your house (radio, X-ray, visible light through the window, etc), any resistive heater will produce the same amount of heat.

Because guess what happens when EM radiation is adsorbed? It turns into heat. Any EM radiation.
http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/
Wrong. Does plenty to save energy. Reasons:

- for half the year, you don't heat but you still light, so you automatically gain savings for that whole period. (also if you have air conditioning, in summer you heat the house with lights then have to cool the air again)
- Lights are on the ceiling. Hot air rises. Therefore heat coming from lights does almost nothing to improve your thermal comfort.
- If you are heating using gas rather than electricity, it is far more efficient to heat air with energy from the gas boiler than from the electric lighting
Of course it does. Heating up a hole in your ceiling does not efficiently warm the occupant. You want to introduce heat low and near occupants.

Also, changing out multiple incandescents means more manufacturing, more truck deliveries to the store, more manufacturing, etc. vs. using a single LED bulb for two decades.

If you live in coal country, then you definitely want to reduce your electrical load and instead rely on a less-bad option of natural gas for warmth.
If you know you can't protect privacy, what makes you think you can abolish it for all?
Ultimate SaaS Metric: Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio
We shy away from corporate press releases.

There are probably other substantive articles on this story out there. If any of you finds one, we'd be happy to change it. No one is attached to the WSJ article; it's just better than the one that preceded it, which was obviously (at least for this site) sub-par. I'm surprised this is controversial.
People pick bare walls because they're imitating each other, and the bare-wall look is easy to recreate. For example, Hannah Hart can make videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzYk2iOZqss#t=242 but when she built a studio, it looked like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjK2xgolAws The first one is more engaging, but people have this idea of what a youtube video looks like, and they just keep doing that because it's what they're used to.
For some reason, it seems taboo to say "I don't know how to do that". Even if I add "but I'm really good at figuring things out quickly", it doesn't seem to have much of an impact. All the person heard was "don't know how".

I would MUCH rather hire someone who is a quick learner and can adapt and figure things out (which in my opinion, is the sign of true intelligence -- "problem solving") rather than someone who is knowledgable in a niche area. Granted, there are exceptions, and if someone is designing a nuclear reactor, you can bet you want someone who is an expert at that one thing. But generally speaking, I think polymath abilities are much more useful.
When I was a kid, we were rather poor. My parents scrounged together to buy a computer for the family, and I started to get interested in programming. But my parents were fearful I'd break their computer (not in a "don't be programmin'" way, but definitely in a "please be careful" way). And then a friend donated a computer to me. And I set it up in my bedroom. And I had my first comfortable winter in that house that year.

Of course, it made summers unbearable. But for the most part, I was used to heat.
Average Internet of Things device has 25 security flaws
its done that way in Russia as well, at least in the city. the downside is they have to turn off the hot water occasionally to do cleaning, which means no hot water for 1-3 days.

in village homes they use pechkas [1]. a giant radiant heater that uses firewood and sits in the middle of the home. most are adapted so that you can use them to cook too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oven
If you don't heat, you don't have a heated house. Hence my comment does not apply.
Yeah, that's along the lines of what I was hoping for too. Maybe something I could take to my boss to convince him to let us use functional languages like Clojure at work? Nope. Instead, I got hit with an offensive, sweeping generalization, backed up by nothing. The author didn't demonstrate that "developers don't understand databases" - he only demonstrated that he can write (intentionally) bad code.
Alaskan here. Getting out of the shower in a cold bathroom is no fun. A towel heater can help a lot with that, though.
There are two different issues that should be considered separately (but aren't in the article):

1. Using client-side loops of single-statement inserts vs. building a single-statement multi-row inserts

2. Using (SQL standard) inserts using (db-specific) bulk copy commands

This article compares client side loop executing single-statement inserts against a bulk copy, but that's not always a good comparison. As well as the standard-vs-db-specific issue, bulk copy commands often have significant semantic differences from inserts that go beyond single-row per statement vs. multiple-row per statement (the latter of which INSERT can do.)

There are very good reasons to avoid client-side looping issuing single-row inserts when you want to do a mass insert. But jumping to bulk copy has other warts (that, like the facilities themselves, vary from database to database) -- for instance, its a general loose-coupling rule (critically to allowing DB refactoring) that applications should be blind to whether the relations it uses are implemented as base tables or views, but Postgres's COPY only works to update base tables, not updatable views. (It also doesn't interact with other Postgres-specific features the way that INSERTs do -- e.g., while triggers and constraints are applied on COPY, rules are not.)

I'd be interested in seeing a looped-single-row-insert vs. single-command-multi-row insert performance comparison, but INSERT (of any kind) vs. COPY comes with considerations besides performance that aren't addressed in the article. I'm not saying that developers (as opposed to DBAs) should never use bulk copy commands in applications -- but doing so isn't the generally-appropriate approach to avoiding loops with single-row inserts from the application side.
You can have an efficiently persistent data structure that isn't immutable.

For example, a rope that reorganizes internal nodes to maximize structure sharing.
I'm glad you liked it :D
Some variables was in German because I took some scripts from internet, credits are in the source
I don't live in Chicago.
Portable air conditioners have small window-installed vents to exhaust hot air.
Amazon Prime members get a $1 video credit for choosing slower shipping
Sometimes "forcing" people is the best thing to do. That's how you solve social dilemmas: situation when allowing every agent involved to run free cause terrible outcomes even if it's temporary profitable for most/all involved (or sum of utilities is the highest for some time).

You ignoring this principle and claiming moral high ground makes you appear as a troll hence all the downvotes you are collecting.
What? If the law is unenforceable, you are de-facto protected.

Watch:

Kim Jong Un and Bhumibol Adulyadej are both complete tossers.

I just committed a crime in two nations. What will the effect to HN and myself be? Absolutely nothing.
> I once asked him if there were any wooden houses in Scotland, he replied "Yes, we keep our lawnmowers in them".

Austro-hungarian empire outlawed wooden houses in the early 19th century. Hence we still don't have any, and if you live in a wooden house[1], you are considered to not have been able to afford a proper house and thus looked down upon.

[1] becoming common with drywall construction methods. Particularly because it's cheap and fast.
People should check out WattVision. It's a little device that attaches to your electrical meter so you can monitor your electrical usage.

What I've found is that almost all of our home's electrical usage comes from heating (heaters, clothes dryers, and hot water).

Everything else is almost a rounding error. For example: I saw almost no change when we switched from incandescents to LED lighting (even in the summer when we're not heating the house) but I saw a large change with efficient shower heads and washing clothes on cold.
Apparently he likes the light and thus the double usage (if you're already going to have a light on you might as well use its heat). I agree that the placement would drive me batty. Reptile heaters were mentioned towards the end and he uses them when having guests over.
Scalability news during the fortnight ending July 30th 2014
And then there is C#. (implication being that I almost never see anyone hating on C#, and yet C# is really used a lot, obviously. Hey, I was probably gonna have to add this part to the post as an edit, anyway; might as well get it out of the way.)
Given that he uses electric heating, it's pretty funny the electric company wanted him to switch to florescent. That buys you nothing in those months where the heater is on.

What I'd really like to know is: why not switch to gas?
Depends on if you can use a heat pump or not. Heat pumps are more efficient than resistive heating.
Ask HN: Who wants to share their startup stories?
Hey everyone, I am trying to start a collection over at Medium that is all about what it's really like working at a startup, called Inside a Startup. If anyone here wants to share some of their stories I would love to add you as a writer. Just need to know your Twitter handle for Medium. Any links to your blog or previous writings would be helpful too. Thanks!
"the court of public opinion"
I don't think that court cares. It usually doesn't.
Thanks a ton for doing this interview :-) This has been on my todo list for a long time.
That is a sobering article. These guys blink at a product, and their user base is instantly more than the entire population of the US. I wonder how much longer the US can afford to fiddle with ridiculous things like debt ceilings, immigration, birth control, needless foreign wars, etc., when a behemoth like Alibabi is poised to overrun the world in a decade. Once China gets over the whole fascism thing, the future appears to be theirs.
Roko's Basilisk as Descartes' evil genius
WHAT the Cloud?
Fair enough. Just the WSJ article is less complete but I can't find a truly neutral one that is as complete as the biased ones.
Most heat from incandescents is infrared radiation, which travels. If you get useful light from the bulb, you also get useful heat. Plenty of rooms are heated with one big, honking radiator, which certainly is no more effective.

That said, it's true that some of the heat ends up not being useful (just like a lot of the light from the bulb doesn't either) -- unless there's a heated story above, of course.

And I never implied that I think it's a bad idea to get rid of incandescents, for all the other reasons you mention.
That is true! In fact, an earlier version of this library was called "persistent-js", and I know this is a pretty subtle distinction - I found it easier to talk to people about when I talked about it via immutability and so I ended up naming the library that way.
In wired world, the carriers were granted monopoly to dig the trenches... In the wireless world, companies rely on exclusive monopoly licenses to spectrum

There are two different scopes of monopoly here. My house is bathed in the waves of at least four different cellular networks; that's not really a monopoly.
Baidu as a search provider did lots of immoral things, that's why these days it's so difficult to use Google because of GFW/censoship, and why Baidu is so dominant in China.
> This is a specific PostgreSQL command.

You could reduce database roundtrips in a somewhat similar manner by doing a single-statement multi-row insert (I don't know if the particular DB library here supports multi-row inserts, but Postgres does and if its an FOSS library the lack of support is fixable) without resorting to the vendor-specific bulk copy command used in the article (which also has semantic differences from INSERT which might surprise people who are lured into thinking it is a semantically-equivalent performance optimization.)
Even if there's no scientific research, e-ink doesn't seem a gimmick to me. I find it a pain to read on a laptop, but find a kindle almost as good as a real book. My eyes simply tire a lot faster with an LCD.
Does Apple throttle older iPhones?
True -- if you live in a suitable climate, this is probably the best option of all, regardless of what your electricity comes from.
> Then you use insulation. This especially is something that feels nobody in the US has heard of. At least in California.

In defense of Californians, most of us rarely, if ever, turn on a heater and most homes here don't have AC. Our heating and cooling costs are a small fraction of those of you who live in places that have seasons.
Depends where you live--a house with no air conditioning generally won't suffer mold, and neither will one with air conditioning. But spotty air conditioning without something like a dehumidifier will breed mold and warp floors.
I live in Florida.

This entire discussion is bizarro world for me. It costs nearly $400 a month to keep my house at 74deg in the summer.
Mass Incarceration in America
Spot-heating, especially within a leaky building envelope utilizing expensive heat sources (electric resistance) is one option.

But it's hardly the only one, or the best. For northern climates, taking a whole-system approach to home/structure design gets you a tremendously greater payoff in terms of energy savings.

Among the most powerful demonstrations of this I've seen are Thorsten Chlupp / Reina LLC's experiences designing and building zero net energy homes in Fairbanks, Alaska.

His videos are long (~90 minutes) be exceptionally comprehensive. The TL;DR is:

• Total envelope. He pays exceptional attention to any thermal envelope penetrations. All emissions (air, water, sewage) pass through thermal exchanges.

• Thermal mass. The foundation, flooring, central masonry stove, and a 5,000 gallon stratified thermal storage tank all store and scavange thermal energy both passively and actively.

• Moisture control. Heat barriers introduce thermal issues. Chlupp makes use of multiple glazings, window setbacks, and _exterior_ thermal shutters to minimize moisture buildup on windows. Moisture barriers and ventilation of interstitial spaces is designed to clear moisture.

• Heat pumps. Rather than create thermal energy directly (other than the masonry stove), Chlupp moves heat using ground-loop heat pumps.

• Solar and net metering. Solar panels (yes, in Alaska) and net metering help him arrive at net zero energy. His first-year goal wasn't met due to plug-in hybrid vehicles, an oversight in his energy modeling.

Though conceived as a whole-system ground-up greenfield design, the principles are applicable to a lesser degree as retrofit options.

Oh, and for heating your bed: a 1 liter Nalgene bottle, filled with boiling hot water, and slipped into a wool sock, will heat your bed cozily. Two are almost certainly too hot, but you're welcome to try. And they'll last the night.

http://www.reina-llc.com/

Alaska's First Net Zero Energy Homes Performance Update
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=Xen_VWyDezY

Path to Net Zero Energy Series -- Alaska's first Net Zero Ho...
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=AtHkvpRI6fc

http://fixyt.com/search?q=thorsten+chlupp+zero+net+energy
Forced air heat is a lot more common in the U.S. because we are further along on adopting air conditioning. If you put in ducts for AC, it's cheaper to use those to distribute heat. Upscale construction does seem to be adding radiant floor heat.

Houses are generally pretty under-insulated though.
What is a language, really? It's not really an implementation (necessarily); a language can have multiple implementations, in which you have to ask "which one is the language?" if they have subtly different behaviour.

In order to enforce what a language is, you can introduce a specification. This will say that "given a program X, the language will behave like Y". Now any implementation of the language can be checked for conformance.

The spec itself might be some document, or perhaps just a "blessed" implementation ("the implementation is the spec").
There has been some lively discussion of Artemis pCell technology on HN in the past.
Phoenix, ditto, except $500/80.

Installing solar screens helped a ton. Our power bills are down around 30% this summer since installing them.
Tor Warns Users That Someone Penetrated Its Network to Try to I.D. Its Users
Its also kind of weird seeing a DBA advise application developers to use bulk copy functionality as a general approach to avoid single-statement inserts -- generally, most DBAs I've met want application developers to stay as far away from bulk copy functionality as possible.
I agree. I am 100% for social entreprise, but something about GiveFoward's for-profit model has always rubbed me the wrong way. In fact, I'd say what they are doing gives social enterprise a bad name.

They're simply asking for money from people who are willing to give out of pure kindness, then taking a larger-than-necessary cut (by definition of profit) of that generosity. That means that an outsized proportion of that generosity is going somewhere other than to its intended purpose, and away from sick people in need. More generous donors are then necessary, else goals may not be met and sick people may continue to suffer.

It's a little sickening, really, to have these emotional pleas made on their site and promoted by them, all the while knowing that profit is being made. Paying salaries and expenses? OK. But, going beyond that to profit? Seems a bit predatory.

Then, there's this:

https://www.shareasale.com/shareasale.cfm?merchantID=51956
Have you looked at Azure? I know they dropped prices fairly recently, not sure how they match up to GoDaddy though.
> Nice to see some common sense.

Common sense would propose something workable. Instead, this is proposing straw men in order to try to win the PR battle.

The "right to be forgotten" goes hand-in-hand with "paid his debt to society". It also goes hand-in-hand with "innocent until proven guilty".

The powers that caused this privacy apocalypse in order to profit don't get any support from me until they propose a solution that allows people who are accused of a crime but later exonerated to expunge that information without having to pay for armies of lawyers.
My guess is that the FCC will win this one, but as trade, Verizon will win a future (important) one they want. That way Mr. FCC will be seen as fair and balanced...
Which is an excellent reminder that the challenge isn't heating or cooling, it's minimizing energy use as dictated by the requirements of your environment.
Sublevel – A personal network
The making of the Raspberry Pi Model B+
In case of Sprint this might be a very good thing for average society. I will never ever pay $40 for any data plan but I will happily pay $5 for only Google Maps. That way this new innovation will earn sprint and additional $5. Similarly my poor aunt who needs internet only for Facebook might end up saving $35 which can then go for her healthcare.

Sprint is clearly addressing a legitimate need in an innovative way and making money in the process.

I do not thing this comes under net neutrality issue. The difference between Sprint and Comcast is that Comcast has put cables in cities using public land and has got a virtual monopoly over the markets. They can screw us from front and behind and we have to suffer it silently.
The Internet and Hieronymus Bosch (2011) [pdf]
I live in Copenhagen, and it's also bizarro world for me. :) But mainly because electricity is very expensive here, whereas district heating (hot water produced by municipal plants, which you can draw through your radiator if you'd like) is quite cheap. It would be hard to beat the costs of district heating using a space-heater approach, even given better spatial concentration of the heat.
>why shouldn't we make a profit if we can?

I guess it comes down to the definition of "if we can". Because, if they don't, then more people they are presuming to save might be saved.
No. I mean, good on them for making it free. It is great.

And no, of course you can't replace everything they do with 100 lines of code. But you can get a fairly long way. If you don't need all these pretty consoles, things like quickbook integration.

However, the point remains: if you are a developer and you want to accept bitcoins. There are more and more third party APIs (blockchain APIs), reporting tooling (watch only bitcoin consoles). If you know a bit of bitcoin. It really is pretty easy.

Oh and I get it, what about scale? what about customer service?

My point is this: this is a vastly different industry then for example, visa or even stripe. Bitcoin Payment processing will trend towards extremely low fees. While visa provides something that no startup can do in house, what bitpay provides can be done securely in house over a few weekends.

And bitpay gets that. My speculation is that this is part of a greater strategy to abandon paymenet processing as the core and go towards redhat for bitcoin
Thanks! That would have been useful information for them to add to the article. I assume Hyenas still retain their sense of smell though.
Vinegar is also excellent at combating mold (before it gets established), and is gentle on pretty much any surface.

A 50-50 vinegar-water solution can simply be sprayed onto walls, floors, carpets, and other surfaces.

Another is fully airing out a bathroom. I'll set a fan to move air until the walls and other surfaces are dry. Especially useful if you've got an interior bathroom. Otherwise, an openable window is highly useful.
Thank you for your quick responses. However, that's the problem for me that I am lack of connections with CEO/COOs. But I am pretty interested in what you mentioned that there are several great law firms which provide incorporations service for free. Could you list some of them for our reference. I think more people may benefit from such a information. Thank you.
What's the attenuation of the UV from a light bulb in the ceiling?
The Internet’s Next Act