skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2011, we mined 0.2% of known lithium reserves.. This would provide over 350 years worth of lithium at current rates. Obviously usage is dramatically increasing but so will our known reserves as the overall level of demand increases. This is also without developing a method to pull the relatively abundant lithium from sea water and without recycling any lithium we're currently disposing of.

Ambri is interesting from a lifecycle and cost perspective but I don't think a lithium shortage is going to have any real impact on prices.
Hey, thanks for the response. Years ago I was doing network and Windows system administration for a few years. Went back to school to get a degree in the humanities.

To be clear, I am planning on going the portfolio route. Part of the problem is that I have a few exciting ideas, and one is a full stack project, while two others would work best as iOS apps. Thanks again.
He's not suggesting that we use lithium battery packs. He's suggesting the idea is just plain ludicrous.
Maybe RocketSkates?

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/feet-on-with-rocketsk...
The floating basket homes of Iraq: A paradise almost lost to Saddam
This is what is currently done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Well known as "pumped storage". They're competing with it, but dry and upside down. Is it more economical? Maybe. Is it safer? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_S...

At least if this contraption breaks, there's nothing important below it.
I loved TechStars but the WSJ analysis seems flawed. Primarily because I think that data is stale (there are definitely zombie/dead companies counted as "active") and a category like "acquired" it too vague. The way it reads it seems like that was a good outcome (and for companies like Gradcad it was!) but many others it is basically acquihire.

There was a good conversation between Dave McClure and Sam Altman about value of the grand slams vs singles/doubles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=489JA4ERzUY
Does anyone have a link to this particular phone on the Digital Mall site? I've been looking for a low-cost, 'disposable' MP3 player for a while now.
I used to use the Silicon Valley bus system back in the 80's. On rainy days when you most needed the bus system to work all the Grumman buses they had then had a feature that when it rained, the electrical system would short out and the buses would stop running. Hopefully they have fixed that.
I didn't sign one.

I escalated it through management, HR, executives, all the way to the parent company's chief legal officer. Every person told me the same things "It isn't enforceable" or "It's only for executives not for regular engineers". My usual response was, if it isn't enforceable or applicable to me then I won't sign it.

The end result was that I ended up on a temporary contract until it got sorted (~6 months), and now the standard employment contract no longer includes a non-compete clause.

If the company wants to hire you, they will negotiate. If it is a nonsense clause and everyone knows it is nonsense they have no reason to not change it.
Even if it was 1000 tons, it would still only be about $300 worth of power.
Although I think the idea isn't workable (energy density is too low, cost of boring the hole is tremendous), most of the other commenters here seem to think they'd just have one weight, whether it is 1000 KG or 50,000 KG.

Any sane plan would be to have more than one weight. When the first weight hits the bottom, it would release from the cable and another weight up top would grab the cable and start dropping. To store energy, the top weight would get winched up, and when it hit the top it would lock into place somehow and the next weight at the bottom of the shaft would engage the lifting cable, etc. The cable would have to follow a circular track, rather than having 1KM of cable for each weight.
Bug still exists, but only shows up in fewer cases now.
Are all Schemes expected to implement SRFI-1 fully? Should they all implement all the commands listed?
I was Wikipedia's co-founder and first and so far only community manager/chief instigator. I did contribute a bunch of articles, don't know how many, while in that position. I wasn't paid per article.

If you don't pay people, you have to compensate them in other ways--especially in terms of community recognition and other evidence of the value of their work to the community/readership as a whole.
It is somewhat fascinating how much the tech community seems to strive to try to solve non-problems. In this case, poaching or hard boiling an egg is so utterly simple, done in mere minutes, that it is simply impossible that this device could make it easier. And the grotesque proposed waste of energy borders on the absurd.

And then, after you've had your perfectly cooked eggs that you presumably had to hop out of bed and rush to retrieve before they overcooked, in your busy morning you're going to vacuum pack a steak? Seriously?

Or you can turn your oven to 200F. Toss a cast iron pan on your grilltop and sear at high heat, then move the whole thing to the oven. You'll quickly have a perfect steak without blowtorches or extended water bath time.

As with the soylent thing, it's like basic skills are now lacking so people looking for a lot of menial work to replace trivial undertakings.
"Wikipedia for news" might be a brief statement of the purpose of Wikinews, but it isn't an attempt to solve the problem I'm concerned to solve. Wikipedia made encyclopedias better by making a giant encyclopedia. Wikinews didn't make news better...in any way. What we want to do is actually organize the news, including the "long tail" of citizen journalism, into "small pieces, loosely joined" in the form of one-sentence fact summaries. The result will enable a scalable community to co-author a truly useful, complete, and giant selection of the news, without the noise and confusion that besets the news today. So that's the difference.
Also lifting 500 tons is a lot easier when you don't have to move it horizontally. 1.2MW isn't as much as a wind turbine though which is a pity because they conceivably could be a good pairing.
@compumike impractical... kinda like crapping up the posts comments about a completely different product.

please tell me how the product you're hocking can 'practically' cook a rack of ribs, brisket, or a roast.

or how about cooking/holding more than one serving at once? it cant.

we get it, you want your pantelligent product to take off. but saying it can do everything the sous vide does, just better/faster, is not accurate and comes off extremely biased.

you dont need to reply. you seem to like avoiding response to pertinent points and instead fall back to how great everything is re: pantelligent.
I'd prefer to say that it started with a bang (it really did) but slowed way down due to the unsupportable weight of trying to compete with the 800-pound-gorilla, Wikipedia. :-)
A friend was a carpet layer, who often cut himself with the sharp knives. They always glued the wound with carpet glue. He never had problems or got scars. (Of corse, one person is not a clinical study.)
Holiday Wish List for Browser Makers – Requirements for an Open Web
How Chinese Multiply
TinyJPG – compress JPEG files with a balance between quality and file size
...really? thanks guys gg
It's been possible to get a reasonably good Android tablet for $30 in Shentzen for two years or so. Now those are down to $20 in quantity.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2014-shenzhen-Wintouch...
The news on the front page looks a little weird because a bunch of new people from Hacker News just arrived and ranked the news very quickly and sloppily. So it's OK. In a few days when things have settled down (??), you'll see it's much more plausible. As for being U.S.-heavy, we will of course have a U.K. version, other national versions, other languages...but that'll be post-launch and post-second funding round.

In the long run our platform will make it possible for you to get the news ranked according to your preferences and interests, which will be made possible by the fact that we break the news into facts that people can rank differently. So your friends' (and compatriots') rankings can be up-weighted and what you're shown will be different.

I know this isn't what you see on the site yet...but in 2001 and 2002 you wouldn't see what you'd have liked on the front page of Wikipedia, either. :-)

Sorry, no API yet. We will have one; we're open content. We're not even hard-launched. We've built what you see on a shoestring...
"all while toughing out the same traffic as cars."

The point is, bus shouldn't need to share traffic with cars. A bus system should always flow in a dedicated lane, except for the most capillary streets in low-traffic areas.

Not doing so is inefficient and, of course, will always hinder public transportation.
This doesn't make sense. Gravity doesn't have an energy density. The energy density of this system is going to be directly related to the density of the material being raised/lowered.
So basically clock-type counterweights. PSH seems like it would be far more efficient - there's surely a lot of mechanical losses in the sort of system in the OP?

If the hole could be used for some sort of heatpump too then maybe that would weigh off [no pun intended!] some of the problems.
Your units got messed up there -- it's just mgh. There's no reason to square the distance.

$ units
Currency exchange rates from 2013-07-11
2562 units, 85 prefixes, 66 nonlinear units

You have: 1000 kg gravity 1 km
You want: J
* 9806650
/ 1.0197162e-07
>Is a 500m-1500m shaft is pretty much going to fill with water? //

So you're saying you get a free well as part of the deal?
It's not so much a design flaw as physics. Without adding brakes, what else could they do? They only have two energy sinks on board. The wheels aren't a sink when going downhill and the battery isn't a sink once it is full (unless you enjoy explosions[1]).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ27lAAwGsY
Opening line: "Let’s face it: Elon Musk is probably a time traveller sent back to help us leave earth behind and achieve the next phase of human evolution."

I wonder how much is Musk paying the media to continually publish lines like that one.
No, it's not. I use Google News when trying to figure out how to organize and summarize the news. Google News isn't very good at ranking news, and it doesn't even try to summarize the facts in the news.
> Again, I promise you I understand the physics as well or better than you.

That's certainly possible, but I wouldn't take it as a foregone conclusion. Nonetheless, I apologize if I came across as strident.

> Why would Bob ever look at it if it's always made up?

Why would he not? He doesn't know whether or not the bits are made up. Let's call them "corrupted" because it doesn't have to be intentional duplicity on Alice's part. It could be simple experimental error, or a noisy communications channel, or a MITM attack. None of these are distinguishable by Bob from Alice having not made a measurement. In any event, Bob might look because he wants to determine if the bits are corrupted. Or he might look because he thinks he's participating in the quantum teleportation protocol, notwithstanding that he's actually not because the bits are corrupted. Note that for any given bit pair he has to choose one or the other: teleport, or check for corruption. He can't do both.

It is also worth noting that even the possibility of corruption is enough to debunk the idea that Alice's measurement results in a physical change on Bob's side. Bob can tell (probabilistically) that there is corruption happening, and he can put a probabilistic upper bound on the amount of corruption that is happening, but under no circumstances can he tell which measurements are corrupted and which are not. One in four corrupted measurements will appear to be genuine by pure chance, and there's no way for Bob to know, even probabilistically, which is which.
"In this case, poaching or hard boiling an egg is so utterly simple, done in mere minutes, that it is simply impossible that this device could make it easier. And the grotesque proposed waste of energy borders on the absurd."

said like someone who has never used the sous vide cooking method. this is about precise cooking, which yeilds very specific results; it's very different than your 'toss a bunch of eggs into boiling water for 10 minutes! duhhh' method.

you cant get these results with your 'utterly simple' method(s): http://www.cookingissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/eggc...

and we're just talking eggs here. your steak wont look like this either: https://d3awvtnmmsvyot.cloudfront.net/api/file/clFhHJTkRraOg...
We had typing in middle-school in Mexico in the early 90's, but it was on typewriters (Olivetti's that we had to lug to school)

It has proven invaluable as a software engineer. I still prefer to take handwritten notes, but my handwriting has gotten progressively worse - use it or lose it.
Of particular interest: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is excluded because of breach of human rights and labour rights and Alstom is under observation because of risk of gross corruption.
Is there any take-away from this rant? I guess I could have dodged heartbleed if I'd written my own TLS library and avoided any software that depended on OpenSSL. Considering the effort involved, I think I'll take heartbleed and rotate my keys.

Given the number and quality of libraries today, one should spend very little time re-inventing wheels. I say that as someone who has re-invented multiple wheels. I wrote a clone of Ack[1]. I've built distributed data stores instead of using open source solutions like Cassandra. Even in those cases, building that software was harder than I thought it would be. Existing projects have graduated from the school of hard knocks. Time has forced them to solve issues like cross-platform compatibility, documentation, and API stability. They're certainly not perfect, but unless you're a domain expert with a lot of time to spend, you're not going to do better.

We can only re-invent so many wheels in our limited time. If you do the math, a career consists of approximately 1 million lines of code. Almost always, that time is best spent building on top of existing software.

1. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
Isn't that the math that the GP posted...?
Can I agree with you both?

After a few curses of quantum mechanics (with the Sakurai book) and working in the field I still not sure if the press release is misleading or just wrong.

One of the important details is that Bob can't do any experiment to distinguish the photon before Alice measurement and the state of the photon after Alice measurement. If it's not possible for him to distinguish the states, has it really changed?

On the other hand, if Bobs makes a measurement after Alice measurement, the result should "agree" with the result Alice measurements. So, has something changed?

I think that the press release it's completely misleading and perhaps wrong.
Depends on the spot price of power. Power on the open market (where utilities have to buy it to provide to customers) changes every minute. Its usually cheap at night until the early morning, starts to increase, and then spikes around 3-4pm (+_30-60 minutes, depending on the country).

If you delivered power when it was most expensive (ie high demand) and consumed it in the middle of the night, the arbitrage may work out.
Your research is out of date, then. :) Even the game of Go, thought to be the hardest for computers, now has bots at the 6-dan (stronger than >99% of humans will ever be) level.
You're making the same point that the article, which of course you read before commenting, makes. The quoted text is from the intro, and the next sentence makes the suggested solution clear:

A bus ride just takes longer: walking to the stop,
waiting for the bus, picking up passengers, all while
toughing out the same traffic as cars. But when transit
is done well, the time gap shrinks, and when it's done
really well—with frequent service, all-door boarding, and
exclusive lanes—the gap can disappear entirely.
Do you have a patent on this? Hopefully! I can see a big brand wanting to have a stove top that auto regulates the temperature for you so it stays at the perfect temperature exactly leaving your job only to place and flip
I don't think its flawed as much as limited by the availability of hard data about acquisitions, or the profitability of existing companies, and they addressed those issues to some extent.

So basically I see it as interesting, and better than nothing at all.
More that Facebook's return on the amount of money they've spent on PHP is pretty poor.

Facebook has had the author of jemalloc locked up working on making PHP go faster for a few years now. Surely there's a more productive place to sink that kind of talent.
Nothing. He has the same 'reality distortion field' that Jobs had.
For the maillard reaction, obviously. I assume you were hoping I say something asinine like "sealing in the juices", to which you could tut tut, but sorry, searing has a very important culinary taste purpose.
Your actor-modelled example doesn't touch the idea behind promises, ie the background operations should return a result that is usable by the "main thread". In your example, that would be "result" being passed in some way to "more_random_other_work".

The way to do it would be closer to something like that:

do_random_other_work();
actor = spawn(function() {
bfn_args = some_setup();
result = blocking_fn(bfn_args);
emit(result);
});
result = wait_for_result(actor)
more_random_other_work(result);
> then I invite you to put monster truck tires on your smartcar and tell me how well that works

That's why I prefer "active libraries" [1], i.e., libraries that can configure themselves based on the needs of a consumer application. Generic types can go a long way to keep things both flexible and efficient, but sometimes the best option is to have a library generate its own code.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.40.8...
I don't understand what this means... Can you explain?

Here's my basic understanding:

MRI is a single process, with multiple threads... They can't run in parallel because of the global interpreter lock (which is used because the code in MRI is not thread safe? Meaning each thread can touch the same memory and may leave it in a broken state for another thread, so we lock access to it first...).

So: there are multiple threads, I am guessing each with their own task (maybe one to run the code, one to do garbage collection, ... I have no idea), but because of the GIL they can't be parallelized. Still multi-threaded anyway.
What about to add control digits?
So is Android not an OS because it uses the Linux kernel? If it is a program that manages other programs and is itself not managed then it is an OS, is what I've heard. Just because you're only making a small part yourself doesn't make the assembled thing not an OS.
This is a completely pointless semantic distinction that nobody cares about.

What makes threads interesting is parallelism; if the goal is merely cooperative or pre-emptive multitasking, where there's no concurrency, then you're "effectively" not multi-threaded as per any modern expectation.
Makes sense from an efficiency point of view. Not exactly keen on the hygiene aspect of shared cars though.
[Google] put serious resources into figuring out how people interact with their software, so if they say, "This is good enough to be our UI standard for the next several years in _every_ product we ship." then the odds are, it really is pretty good.

Not necessarily[1]. Especially in cases like this, where the org is large enough, the cash is endless enough, and the goal is fuzzy enough; that principal-agent problems are inevitably bound to prevail.

Think Pontiac Aztec. Or Lotus Notes. Or, for that matter, the all-new Google Maps(TM).

[1] http://brousseau.info/pdf/cours/grossman_hart_83.pdf
Patent pending. Thanks!
How about http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html ?
s/big brand/consumer ftfy

the technology should be in the stovetop/hotplate burner, not the pan, IMO.
The post-Grasshopper "F9R" testbed has flown with these before. You can see it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgLBIdVg3EM
We (mostly) resolved the issue with things like hotels. A car or bus could essentially become like a tiny, travelling hotel room and return to base for "housekeeping".
You can also use a beer cooler or other thermo-isolated container, filled with hot water at the correct temperature (kitchen thermometer), and a bunch of plastic baggies (plus something clever with tape).

It's not quite as set-and-forget as a real sous-vide machine, you need to readjust the temperature (measure, adding more hot water, and stir a little, measure) about every 20 minutes or so (depending on the volume of water, obviously).

You need to know what you're doing, but I've gotten really great results with this DIY method :)
if you own a self driving car, you could either have it sit in your driveway doing nothing - or you could hook it up to an api provided by uber to put your car to work.

if everyone does that with their self-driving cars, the cost of transportation will go down. it'll change the economics of car ownership; the cost of using a car will go down because the cars that exist will be put to greater use - so why bother buying one?

that whole thing could precipitate a sea-change in how the auto industry works. we'll see far fewer cars, built to be maintanable with easily replaced parts, sold to people who use them as investments that generate returns.

it's even going to change the _retail_ model if you think about it. couple the ability to see anythign you want with an occulus-rift headset, and lower traffic (thanks to fuller cars driving smarter) means it'll take less time to get where you want to go, and the model of 'a target every 1 mile' will just stop making sense.

the FUTURE!
The Opportunity Cost of War
Get used to it
"Google, will you hire me? Pretty please?"
This was my take on it as well.
this is about precise cooking, which yields very specific results

This is exactly what I'm talking about when I mention people intentionally making simple things difficult. Do you think someone, somewhere was sitting eating a hard (or soft, or variations thereof. Apologies if there was confusion on this) boiled egg and thought "Boy, this really is terrible. I sure wish it was..."? Do you think that was what yielded the invention of sous vide cooking? Are hard boiled eggs a current culinary problem?

No, they aren't. The argument borders on comical. Adding a "Duh!" to denigrate the notion that this is ridiculous easy doesn't prove your point. Further the steaks look absolutely vile (they look like texture monotony, which generally isn't a good result).

Sous vide came about in high volume kitchens. It wasn't because it yielded better results, but because it allowed for in-advance preparation, allowing the kitchen to toss little salmon meal baggies in hot water on spikes in orders, versus preparing it from scratch. It was a "traffic smoothing" technique, not an exercise for better results. In the classic "copy the chef" exercise, people emulated something for all the wrong reasons.
I guess if it were designed appropriately inside, you could actually use it as an accomodation and plan to sleep in it during an overnight trip, much as we've had night trains with beds onboard.
I own one of these burner phones for backup use, $9.99 but it was on sale for $4.99 when I bought it.

It's no iPhone, but I also get 8-10 days on a charge:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...
InfoBitt does not create original facts. The site curates and organizes news as it breaks.