skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One major advantage this would have over chemical batteries (Lithium-Ion or otherwise) is that it should allow for many, many more cycles. You would have to replace cables and motors and such at some point, but the expensive components - the hole and the weight - should last near-indefinitely.

It certainly appears more expensive than pumped storage, but as they say, it doesn't require a convenient mountain and lake. That makes for much more flexibility in placement, and the closer you can place the storage to the demand, the less is wasted in transmission, and the less storage you ultimately need. That said, the pumped heat storage design[1] that hit the homepage yesterday would have all those same advantages, and although the efficiency would be slightly lower, it looks much cheaper to build.

[1]: http://www.windpowerengineering.com/featured/business-news-p...
Maybe it is because I live in a small town on a small hobby farm, but it seems to me that the vision of self-driving cars is very much a city thing.

I can't see self-driving cars being used to drive around my fields, picking up rocks, towing farm equipment, hauling hay, or any of the other things that pickup trucks are used for.

Maybe they will be able to navigate 4WD roads to get up into the mountains or out into the desert, but I'm not sure that would offer as much benefit as it would in city traffic.

The visions people just look to me a lot like the future of public transportation, and not at all the future of motor vehicles in general.
Note: standard out-of-the-box SR-IOV allows VLAN tagging/stripping outside of the guest control, maybe they are simply using this in conjunction with a layer 3 switch to handle the VPC stuff?
Sounds like bullshit. That's all I'm going to say.
Yay! Yet another image format that I can't open in Preview, if I save it to my hard drive.

Webp may be great for displaying in a web page, but it's TFU if I save it to my hard drive and try to view it with default viewing or editing software.

It may not be a proprietary format, but it might as well be.
I got 75% savings on about 15 files. I'm rather impressed.
Yes I was just looking at your implementation and must say it's better in numerous ways :)
TinyCert REST API
It is unclear that the government would own the cars themselves though...just like governments often don't own taxi companies

The government doesn't need to own the cars, since government will own the kill switch so you can't go anywhere.

Oh, and nice downvotes for not going with the anti-car hive mind that infests HN.
wouldn't this last a lot longer than lithium batteries?
Pew just released a study that showed people are starting to feel that they've lost control of their private data (which they have):

http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/11/12/public-privacy-percept...

Your vision of the future assumes that folks will remain complacent about how much they trust their doctors, health insurance companies, medical device companies and hospitals with their minute-to-minute activity.
I think this is right: people living in rural areas will probably be driving on their own for a long time to come. But the world is increasingly urbanizing at high densities, and this is probably the future of personal transport for the majority.

It is not really "public transportation"; taxis are not public transit even though they are pretty ubiquitous in cities (less so in the US, but more so everywhere else).
I understand people running long distances. Not sure why you would run hundreds of miles to inform people about a battle. It would be too slow to be effective, plus the reverse run seems odd again. Consider that Paul Revere took a horse to inform people living a few miles around.
This is great.

Check out http://opendata.cern.ch/ for more info. Pretty neat visualization tool they got there: http://opendata.cern.ch/visualise/events/CMS.
They already own the kill switch. Haven't you ever been subject to a road block before? Beijing was closing down a bunch a ring roads a couple of weeks ago because of visiting dignitaries; and there is always the occasional land slide/avalanche backing up traffic when travelling between cities through mountains.
Drilling into the ground should almost never happen.
Given that the primary lender and customer is the government, "commercially" is a stretch there.
Google News' strength is ranking, not summarizing facts from different sources so you can avoid reading all the top 5 or 20 articles about a story.

And, philosophically, do you HN folks really want to rely on the MSM to tell you what's important? And likes, shares and troll-ridden comments on news stories?

Or do you want a democratized way to decide, collectively, what news stories and facts are important.

Don't forget the NYT, etc. screwed up on no WMD's in Iraq.

I was at a small group dinner with Judith Miller, ex-NYT, who's nice but she messed up.

Who's checking the mainstream media?
Not sure where you live but I'm off the Kennedy and its absolutely true.
Unfortunately, encouraging people to parse the UA header leads to them getting it wrong in a way that would be amusing if it wasn't so irritating.

For example FirefoxOS has a UA string of the from User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 Mobile Gecko/28 Firefox/32.0'. There's an example in bugzilla of a major site that, not only depends on the file details of that format, but will send the mobile version of the site if and only if the number after Firefox is even and in the range 18 < = x <= 34.

Such examples are not one-offs either. In fact it is so common for sites to screw up here that browser vendors often resort to sending specially crafted UA strings to certain sites in order that the content become accessible. The most extreme example of this was pre-blink Opera which had much better compat than it was given credit for, but was often blocked — acidentially or intentionally — from sites that effectively whitelisted certain browsers. As a result it used an auto-updated list of sites for which it had to send an alternate UA string [1] as well as a sophisticated system of javascript injection to work around more complex bugs in these sites [2].

[1] https://github.com/operasoftware/browserjs/blob/master/deskt...
[2] https://github.com/operasoftware/browserjs/blob/master/deskt...
Probably true, but you'll have very heavily "assisted driving", with the computer controlling a lot of things while you retain overall control. It's a continuum.
Yes. Also, techmeme.
Keyword being rare.
Funny how the article implies Elon designed all this and engineers employed there have nothing to do with it. It's all him.
The majority of humanity's great inventions didn't have basic physics saying "this isn't brilliant" long before a prototype got built. Most of humanity's great inventions were things that were difficult because human beings thought they were difficult, or complicated or intricate or whatever.

On their webpage they say " The biggest single cost is the hole, but it is expected that firstly this will have a very long life and secondly, as the technology rolls out, the costs of drilling will reduce significantly. So the economics will improve in time."

Drilling will not get cheaper without a serious reform of the law, and that's unlikely to happen. There are two primary kinds of drillers; water and energy. Folks involved in water have VERY protective rules in all states. The reasons are 1. good lobbying and 2. if you screw up you destroy the water supply.

Energy drilling is no cheaper. Drilling rigs are huge machines that aren't moved easily and cost at least $50k a day on land and $500k a day for seagoing. That's before you pay another $20k per day in staff and god knows how much for fuel for everything; a rig will produce at least 5MW of power.

Could they custom build a rig just for drilling for their idea and would that work? Sure. But they'd probably spend several million and then you've got to have it running 24/7 for it to pay off.

The regulatory hurdle is going to be non-trivial as well. They're going to case it which helps. But the casing would probably need to be cemented in place which is a non-trivial cost as well. And convincing lawmakers that this doesn't quack like some other kind of well is going to be no easy feat.
Ah, my bad. I didn't sign up because I never sign up to i-don't-know-what and I didn't expect that I will find some "about page" after signing up, which seems to me like very natural thing to [do not] expect. Unfortunately I can't follow your link without signing up either, and service that behaves like that actually makes me inclined to go away and never turn back not matter what. So, no, I didn't read it, and I admit it very much might be the reason I don't understand what it is about.

But, still, what I said in the previous post are pretty general statements which I believe must be true to some degree for every single form of "wikipedia for news".
Are you being paid, or is there a revenue share? If not, I wonder what your motivation is.
I think the coolest thing about this concept (for me) is viewing it as a "whole-system" energy storage procedure.

It is effectively 100% renewable, 100% distributable, using 100% commodities (ie: rocks in a hole).

As a thought experiment: if on average you can meet 110%+ daily power expenditure captured from renewables (solar, wind, whatever), and store it by lifting up these weights, then you've broken into the "free energy" loop.

More specifically, don't look at the power input or storage, look at the power output / usage. If your input + storage capacity is greater than your output rate then energy effectively becomes "free forever".

Simulate it on a small scale. Get a pinwheel to run a small motor that winds something up. Attach a small LED to it that you only run occasionally. Basically, just so long as you have a really small output draw compared to your input rate and storage capacity, this "battery" will give you energy when you want it with minimal maintenance costs and minimal consumables.
They haven't even come close to a build which is safe against popular build orders or adapts. Judging by the difficulty they're having making the AI do what they want, this might be a bit harder than poker.

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~cdavid/pdf/starcraft_survey.p...

Top play uses huge tradeoffs depending on what the progamer thinks they are facing; that would require an AI which can dynamically scout and effectively adjust its build based on what it sees. That isn't even taking tricks into account.

Basically, everything that you are saying is so far beyond what they're doing to program the AI that it's completely irrelevant. Critical things are hard-coded instead of adaptive, so that would all have to be written from scratch.

(None of this proves that it's not possible to program an AI which can beat humans without general AI, of course. I suppose that if you had enough scenarios with adaptive logic built in, the AI's ability to perfectly split marines or zerglings could be used to design a timing attack impossible for humans to stop.)

edit: I did not see your edit of the two sentences of your post when I wrote mine, or I wouldn't have covered the same concept.
I wonder what percentage of garages are used as storage/workshops/playrooms now? In my personal experience it's very, very high.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarahumara_people

> The Tarahumara word for themselves, Rarámuri, means "runners on foot" or "those who run fast" in their native tongue according to some early ethnographers like Norwegian Carl Lumholtz, though this interpretation has not been fully agreed upon. With widely dispersed settlements, these people developed a tradition of long-distance running up to 200 miles (320 km) in one session, over a period of two days through their homeland of rough canyon country, for inter-village communication and transportation and
If the capacity is proportional to the depth of the tunnel and the mass of the weights, and the maximal mass of the weights is proportional to the depth of the tunnel, then wouldn't the capacity grow quadratically with the invested money?

Edit: You assumed that they can both fill most of the tunnel up with lead and move that up or down 500 meters. The volume that they can fill with that is thus only half of what you say.
Poker bots made by the same university have been able to defeat human experts in heads-up limit play [1].

[1] http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/man-machine/
Sounds like you haven't read the quick summary on Infobitt just yet.

http://infobitt.com/category/about-infobitt/b/5762
Now that you mentioned a mountain... Why again is a hole needed?

Edit: I mean that an inclined rail could be just as good as a hole, and way cheaper.
Digging subway tunnel through rock costs about $100M per kilometer. On the one hand, these holes would be vertical, which is harder than horizontal

I would have thought that a better comparison would be oil wells, which cost about $500 per ft of depth, or $1.5M per km.

our total volume of mass will be about 25 m^2 1000 m = 25,000 cubic meters. If the weights are made from lead, that's a total mass of ~280,000 tons*

You seem to be assuming that the entire depth of the shaft is filled by weights. My impression was that the weight was much smaller than the shaft it fell down.
Absolutely.

Sadly the rest of the US considers buses to "be working solutions." (For shuffling around poor people)
Every President’s Executive Orders in One Chart
> > regex parsing implementation when optimized sufficiently is very close in implementation to C code

> I used to think that, but it is really not true unless your regex engine contains a JIT compiler.

The P6 Rules engine is written in NQP so it gets JIT'd on the JVM and MoarVM backends.

Of course it'll be many years before the engine is seriously optimized but it's a good start.

It'll be interesting to see if the code gen of this next gen regexen engine gets good enough in 2015 to make its advantages (most notably the grapheme-by-default design) actually pay dividends.
I've been doing isolated, per-service environments that can be shipped around using jails on FreeBSD for a looooong time.
For the gravity-based design, you need to lower a weight directly up and down in a controlled manner (ie without swinging etc.) That basically requires a shaft in the ground. If you have a mountain and a lake handy, pumped storage would be more economical, but the advantage of this design - as I understand it - is it can be deployed in places that don't have those things.
A much higher proportion of news content than Wikipedia content is politicized, and Wikipedia functions worst, IMHO, for politicized issues.

How will you prevent users from politicizing your content? For example, will you exclude more politicized sources such as Fox and the Huffington Post? Separate editorial sources from straight journalism? What about government-controlled media such as Russia Today (RT)?

It seems like the content of politicized stories could be mostly politicized 'bitts' (where often both sides are deceptive and none of the information is valid), and it could merely represent the beliefs of whichever side has more dedicated contributors.
Our writers have added almost 25,000 posts on thousands of topics (a sample here http://newslines.org). So far, at $1 a post, that has cost $25,000. Some of our writers have made thousands of dollars. We just closed more investment are are building a revenue-share model that will give our writers even more money. People who get in early, and do consistent work will be able to make a lot of money.
Maybe? But what if it cost way, way more? You actually have to look at the time value of money for anything that takes more than a year or two to pay off to be sure that there isn't some kind of false economy.

If you assume that the thing lasts forever, well, you divide $x/infinity so it's free. EXCEPT that you've got $x tied up that could be earning interest instead. So it's not $x/infinity, it's the opportunity cost on $x versus anything else out there like batteries, the grid, etc.
I'm sure the US rural demographic is different, but around here (Western European country), the rural population is on average much older than city population. Having (reasonably priced) self-driving cars would be a boon to the millions of elderly folk who can't drive anymore and have to rely on inflexible and often expensive transportation services.
ive done both and the stress depends on where you work a lot.

Note that this include the "tech lead" stuff. That said on average for me and my close colleagues its largely always been easier and less stressful as a manager or director.
Not a phase change heat engine, but a phase change heat reservoir. Yes, they'll lose some efficiency, but if they can exchange heat as well as it's implied (from their efficiency figures), they may lose very little.
That's a fine saying but even at 20% YoY increases in lithium usage, we'd still have 35 years or known reserves -- without any increase in exploration or recycling.

As oil & gas have shown, if there's exponential demand for a naturally occurring element, we'll definitely find ways to pull more of it out of the ground.
Why is the maximal mass of weights proportional to depth? It's more proportional to diameter than anything else. There's a practical limit to how much weight you can hang. Sure if you make a 10km deep hole and a 3km deep weight you could store a lot of energy. But a 3km deep weight might not hold itself together.
Agreed. Driving in Chicago is generally twice as fast as taking public transit within or near the loop. The difference grows when you have to go further.

You can get in a car and be almost anywhere interesting in 20 minutes without traffic, whereas you would need 5-10 minutes just to get to a CTA stop and wait for the bus/train.

Public transit is only ever faster than driving during rush hours in heavily trafficked areas.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/11/an-easier-way-of-using-pol... also had a small bit on UA over feature-detection
You're not anonymous when you drive a car today: it's got a license plate and there are cameras everywhere, never mind that you're probably carrying a phone that acts as a universal locator for you to any government agency that cares.

I can't imagine a general restriction on going where you want when you want, but as others have pointed out there are roadblocks today when the need arises. Assuming some cost for the cars, and of course taxes on their use, no one's going to restrict a source of income for the heck of it.
That is my least favorite stretch of highway.
Bells should be going off in a head somewhere about using Android alongside a desktop Linux home-rolled to become an amalgamated ecosystem of both and "just work" on a PC form factor but with LTE. Developers are demanding it so much that we're building it.
This is only guaranteed with ECC RAM, right?
This was what people said about Windows before Vista, too. "Broken apps should just break! It'll push the developers of broken apps to fix their shit!"

Then Microsoft listened to them and did that with UAC, breaking tons of apps that assumed (stupidly) that they would be running with administrator privileges all the time.

Who did the users blame for the breakage? Not the app developers. They blamed Microsoft. "It worked fine, until I installed Vista!"

The point: "just let things break" is one of those ideas that sounds 100% reasonable, until you try it.
Portability is clearly important to him in the sense that it's brought up as a reason for him not have this or that feature in his software.

And he clearly has a point; at its worst it is a giant ball of YAGNI.

Do you think that Thompson and Ritchie gave a !%^$@ about Multics compatibility? Or OS/360?
Oil wells are also only a foot in diameter. Makes the economics worse, really.
Umm, by 2040?

My plan for 2040 was to step outside and not see a single freaking personal use car, or bus (stop|lane). Surely we'll have figured out a sane solution by then to commuting?
Perhaps the reason pulse and gnome were disliked has something to do with distros that don't support the old versions after a new one comes out and foisted unfinished buggy releases on their users before either was ready for prime time?
A lot of bad ideas happen in between humanity's greatest inventions. When you look at the past, you are only looking to the successful stories. Maybe a lot of people with unrealistic or bad ideas would have benefited from HN.
Sometimes a 747 isn't enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Beluga
I feel this idea would mesh well with the mining industry. Dig straight down, reinforce the walls on the way, separate out the desired minerals, pull up the drill, put in a pendulum and move the rig over and start again. You already need to setup giant motors to move the pendulum, so getting the ore up would be easy. An ideal site would have an abundance of lead, which would cut down on the pendulum cost. Unused rock could be mixed into cement for the walls. The small footprint combined with the benefits of being able to store solar or wind energy for long periods of time could make it the first form of mining that environmentalists approve of.
One of the main problems right now is that Wikipedia is being used for news, but the format is very poor.
What Guy says is his big message for the talk is on the slide seen at 2:34, transcribed below:

> This Talk Is about Performance
>
> The bag of programming tricks that has served us so well for the last 50 years is the wrong way to think going forward and must be thrown out.
That all sounds nice but then you have this:

http://tech.eu/news/spain-government-startup-tax-reform/
Do you not have to park? Or are you assuming Uber?

Parking got quicker in Chicago since the metered fares went through the roof, but it can still easily dominate the total travel time, as leaving and entering large multi-floor parking structures downtown takes a really long time.
The plan for Caltrain is to have more frequent train service.
It would be great if we had a header that tells the screen size.

And it would actually help solve the problem, instead of just placing another layer of band-aids above it.
> I can't see self-driving cars being used to...

Your kids will be saying things like "I can't see self-driving cars driving me all the way to Timbuktu across land and sea."

They'll be wrong too.
Well... with sugar for example we know for a long time that there is only about 50deciliters*80mg/DL=4grams of glucose in blood in average healthy adult.
As people are eating tons of sugar a day (snickers bar has 27g, half a liter of cola has ~50g, half of it fructose but still) it's clear stuff doesn't just go into bloodstream as we would all die before finishing that snickers bar. Somehow though fat magically getting into blood and clogging arteries was something which was accepted as common sense.
I do blame policy makers and scientists as healthy amount skepticism was clearly missing.
JS lint as a service
Some of the real computer pioneers (no, not Bill!) are here! Very interesting for people that want to learn more about the basics and roots of computing ....

A little short, though, I would like to see a more in-depth documentary of similar style.
I actually haven't had a bad experience for the most part with the 522 on El Camino going westward - I'd make it from Sunnyvale/Mountain View to Downtown Palo Alto in ~20 minutes, which compares quite favorably to driving. Then again, I often am leaving for work around 6:30 - 7:30, so I rarely see the traffic issues that are typical around 8 am.