skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On my Asus Transformer Book t100, that I use for all my personal stuff, I never have any issue with lag. In some rare case it can lag but it's temporary and then it's fast again.

If your history is pretty big and it's all stored on a slow HDD, I can see how your IO could be the bottleneck.
I'm making a lot of assumptions here, as I'm not an expert on solar panels (took a class that touched on them once, but I'm mostly just Googling here):

* Typical efficiency of a consumer solar panel to day is about 12%

* Average of 6 hours of sunlight a day over a year, sunlight providing 120 W/m^2 [1]

* Rooftop of about 80 m^2

Total energy over a year comes out to about 2500 kWh.[2] Apparently the average household energy usage in the US is about 10000 kWh[3], which would imply that you could get about a quarter of your energy from solar.

A few caveats:

* Apparently some places get up to 2200 kWh/m^2 per year of sunlight[4], which would bring your solar panel total to about 21000 kWh a year.

* Not entirely sure how big your average rooftop is.

* Solar panels have been created with efficiency in the 40s of percent[5]

Hopefully I'm not completely off with some of these, but it seems reasonable that a rooftop system can provide most or all of your power in the near future, depending on how sunny it is where you live. If it's not sunny, you might have a lot more problems, though.

[1] According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight, the World Meteorological Organization defines sunshine as a state of receiving at least 120 W/m^2

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=365+days%2Fyear+*+6+hou...

[3] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3

[4] http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_national_lo-res.jpg

[5] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130923204214.ht...
> The C++ string library cannot bind the string to the stack frame since it doesn't know how long it's going to live.

Huh? If course it could, unless I'm not understanding you correctly.

A class like:

class smallstr {
char stack_str[128];
char* heap_ptr;
}

can easily (with enough logic in the public methods) store small strings in `stack_str` and once it grows larger, allocate some space on the heap, make `heap_ptr` point to it, and copy it over.

"since it doesn't know how long it's going to live" doesn't make any sense to me. A caller would just say:

{
smallstr s("foo");
// do stuff
} // stack_str[] is wiped clean with the stack, and a destructor would be implemented to `delete` heap_ptr if it was used.

I'm not sure what you're even driving at.
What's this about Github banning Brendan Eich?
This is probably a very naive question, but could somebody explain how education is becoming so expensive in the United States and yet there seem to be so few tenure-track positions available? I understand that the number of Ph.D.s has grown quite significantly in the last few decades, but so has the cost of attendance of almost all colleges. The number of tenure-track positions, meanwhile, hasn't caught up at all.

I'm still amazed to consider that the college I attended, had I not received scholarships, would have cost me $50,000/year to attend in total. Yet I can't actually think of a single faculty member in the department I majored in who attained tenure while I was there. I do remember somebody joining with a Ph.D. from Harvard, having studied under a renowned mentor, for a non-tenure-track and low-paying "lecturer" post. This greatly talented person, naturally, is now gone, presumably at some other transient and low-paying post elsewhere. I just looked up one of my professors, who was a brilliant topologist and knot theorist doing a postdoc, and was surprised to find she's abandoned academia and is working as an analyst in oil & gas now.
Zero to One book club – this month's guest Jack Smith cofounder of Vungle + Shyp
Except that we know from observation that's not what happens. China blocks facebook entirely. People who want to use it use VPNs. Instead of complaining, normal people use local alternatives like weibo that are just as good and comply with local laws.

Russia already uses Yandex instead of google and pikabu instead of reddit. Why not репо or whatever instead of github? Buy local.
Have you been paying attention to what Hollywood puts out lately?
> And no, I'm not /that/ old.

I remember dial up. I'm 18. I had it for several years before we switched to satellite, then verizon hotspot, then (pending).
I'm sorry, but remembering dialup is not any indication of age.
Sounds like a waste of money. If you are making lots of money then it may seem like no big deal. Rovio, can no longer afford it of course. I'd rather hire 5 more developers to work on a new game.
I think that without a mechanism to transfer that QE into wages, price inflation cannot occur. If Joe Consumer as a whole has less dollars available (such as through unemployment, lack of raises, lower wages due to increased supply of workers, etc.), that decreases demand and thus acts a check against price inflation.
This doesn't answer your question about residential solar, but it's a useful primer on economic analysis for utility-scale operations.

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

The interesting bit here is how wind is already cheaper than any other option save combined cycle natural gas, and wind is on track to surpass natural gas.
Developer tools in IE11 are much better than Chromes. Chromes have always been confusing and tedious, inherited from Safari. Apple has never really known how to build good developer tools.

And so you know, ActiveX is already in Chrome, but they call it native client. Supposedly it makes a world of difference in the Google Kool-aid camp.
YARN is still in its infancy and doesn't run in production for user-facing applications at any large site. Also, there are big limitations when it comes to scaling YARN. YARN also has a lot of overhead on each machine the worker processes run on.

Twitter runs mesos in a multi 10k node cluster for user facing, production applications.
Does Snowden's legal fund actually have under 9000$?
https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/6mzUd

Seems legitimate, but that's crazy to me. Maybe they don't count everything?
I have a 4.8kW system on my 1700sqft home here in rainy Portland OR and I am net-zero (and that's with everything electric - heating and cooling, water heater, cooking, etc.). But I am also in a certified Passive House, which makes it quite a bit easier...
Yea a $500 per month electricity bill sounds steep to me. When my bill hit $400 in the winter, I realized I had a problem with my water heater.
I have in the past written many large C++ projects. I now try to avoid it as much as possible, but the last time I programmed in C++ was just two weeks ago[1], and it reminded me how bad it was -- terrible error messages, and abysmal performance of the final program. At some point I will have to replace it because the program doesn't meet our performance requirements, and no one can tell me why[2]. (Edit: Apparently [2] has been answered now)

[1] http://git.annexia.org/?p=virt-bmap.git;a=tree

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27152834/how-to-improve-...
And the article talked about upping the number of books a prisoner can keep in their cell, which seems a better solution for all prisoners than the few who have people who will send them books.

I wonder how many prisoners are being sent the poet laureates work anyway?

A far better solution is to fix prison libraries, perhaps if all the heat being generated by literary types was directed at that, rather than "OMG they banned books" types protests, we might be able to get more books.

For instance there are literary trusts that donate sacks of books to all children at various points in their life in parts of the UK. Why not set up a prison literary trust that donates books to all prisoners? Get it signed off by the state as an "approved source" and a real change occurs.
But then protesters wouldn't get to protest.
The Sony Hack (see comments)
To further comment on djrodgers:

His ROI in 5 years but can possibly be less. Depending on the state/market/utility, the owner qualifies for local rebate incentive, homeowner solar water heating rebates, local labor substantability rebates and SRECs. SRECS are energy credits that are similar to forwards contracts that can be traded on an exchange. The federal tax credit (ITC) is 30% of the purchase price but expires in 2017 to 10%. But, forecasted solar cost drop to 2017 would far cover the itc.
Yes, most of the time. My small house routinely exceeds 5 kW though.
The g-load experienced during the re-entry is more a function of the entry trajectory that is flown than the speed of entry.

For example, the crews of several Soyuz missions experienced 8+ G's when the so-called "ballistic" re-entry mode occurred due to various systems problems.

Apollo crews returning from the moon commonly experienced 6 - 7 g loads during re-entry

The US space shuttle's entry profile was designed to limit decelerations to 3 g's (as was the ascent profile).

It isn't the speed, it's how you fly the ascent/descent profile. And yes, the conical Apollo capsule form (largely re-used by Orion) is a lifting body that is actually flown through the atmosphere.

http://www.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/U-S-astronaut...
The curious thing is, I could not replicate the clickjacking issue. Everytime I make a click on original wordpress registration page, I am verified as a human immediately.

If I do the click on your github page, I get a challenge. My clicks were never accepted as human on your github page. My clicks were always accepted as human on wordpress page.
To be sure, mostly none of the popular science ever proposes that pursuing science will make you gainfully employed. When choosing major in College, I had to choose between Physics, which I absolutely loved and had got the highest grades in first year of college, and computer science, which I knew absolutely nothing about. However, I did know 2 things: 1) There were a lot more jobs in CS than Physics and 2) Since I knew absolutely nothing about computers (I never owned a personal computer), studying them in college would be possibly the best way to genuinely understand them. Coming from a lower middle-class family, 1) was extremely important. I chose CS, and have never regretted it.

I hope more kids in College and high school realize that a) working physics professionally is very different from what is portrayed in popular science and b) you really have to spend a lot of time thinking about the future in these kind of things.

That said, I still love popular science: interstellar made me want to study Relativity again :).
"That’s the stuff that drives me crazy—this response of more violence and more war to make us all safer actually creates more violence."

Perhaps that's the goal. I've spent a long time trying to understand the grand chessboard of geopolitics and military strategy, and my general conclusion about the WOT is that it was designed as a destabilization program in the first place. Destabilization helps by allowing the jackals to manipulate the power structure to allow whatever the real objective(s) are. In the case of Iraq, for example, it was largely about two things: control of oil (not about getting oil for ourselves, but about controlling who did get it), because the real intellectual hawks (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Kissinger, etc kind of people who persist in the beltway over decades) feel that Russia and China are the real threat as we move towards resource wars, and by extension Iran is a threat because it doesn't comply with our power structure. We isolated Iran with both Afghanistan and Iraq, and continue to allow both neo-cons and the hawkish left to isolate them even more. I don't think they understand the gravity of such actions though.

I gave Wartard some pointers on this article that is worth a read if you are interested in this sort of subject matter.

http://wartard.blogspot.com/2012/01/phase-ii-why-us-wants-to...

Anyway, I digress, the point is that we need to acknowledge and accept that actual national security from terrorism has never been the primary goal, and instead is the cover for the perceived national security situation that is soon to be here, namely, a neo-cold war era of global resource and economic wars. Until this fact is acknowledged, I will continue to be disappointed in journalists who simply stop at "but we are creating more terrorists!" and don't move on the the bigger picture of why this is the current state of the union.
Haha actually even simple "fluoride" eludes me fairly often. The gmail remark reminds me of the "please advice" idiom that MS-Outlook established. Of course the original, grammatically correct request is "Please advise," which one might expect to see at the end of any issue-raising business email. Because Outlook "corrected" this phrase to "please advice" for so many years, many people now actually think "advice" is correct.
Publishing our development standards
Review: Federal Support for Local Law Enforcement Equipment Acquisition [pdf]
To me is strange for anyone to choose a life where he is absolutely not free, just to get a college degree. Degree or not, having jail time in your resume will have a (extremely?) negative impact.
How to fix Node.js build (io.js): logos and website stubs
And shortly before the logos, a website stub: https://github.com/iojs/iojs.github.io

Edit: Just live commenting the fork progress.
I think you're quite wrong about these things.

"Only the very biggest of tech companies like Google, Palintir, Apple, Facebook, are able to tackle the really hard problem."

Wrong and wrong. First, all of those companies made concrete progress on hard problems when their size was less than 10 people. Woz pretty much singlehandedly designed the first PC for normal people. Zuckerberg built a pile of code that would become one of the largest social networks.

Let's talk about the "really hard problem". Let's talk about John Carmack, friend.

Made the first realtime 3D fps games, the networked dialup realtime 3D games, the first networked shooters over the internet, the first true commercial 3D engine, and is basically responsible for the fact we have GPUs in consumer desktops now. Dude only had two (2) semesters of college under his belt, and he runs rings around the academic CS wanks, because he fucking ships code that works. No cutesy benchmarks. No government funding. No papers, barring perhaps some stuff in Graphics Programming Black Book, none of that. All of that stuff running on consumer hardware without graphics accelerators.

There are plenty of hard problems being tackled by small teams, even on shoestring budgets. To say otherwise is magical thinking.

~

If you want to publish a paper, you don't have to actually be in academia. If you want to do research, you don't have to be in grad school. In fact, and hopefully more people will get in on this, you will probably do better work in a healthier environment.

What does academia get you? It seems in the vast majority of times, it gets you...

...an "advisor" who is more concerned with finding funding and keeping lab space than making progress.

...an "advisor" whose last original contribution to the field was, almost by definition, probably a decade ago.

...a chance to talk with world experts in your field--the same chance available to any schmuck with an email account.

...a chance to submit papers whose only circulation will be behind paywalls.

...a chance to be woefully underpaid for the above, because they know you are stupid and naive enough to take it.

Fuck that. The author was smart to get out while they were only slightly behind.
Thanks for mentioning Cockpit CMS, it looks great!
Am I the only person who is worried that AI start-up companies are going to use AI to insert "deep learning" into every pitch deck possible?
Will it be possible to add a feature like the web clipper?
I've come across several cases of people who were not professional criminals committing crimes so they could get access to medical care, although this is obviously not an issue in the UK.

Robbing a bank for $1 is still a crime, though not as severe one as intended: http://volokh.com/2011/06/21/man-commits-1-robbery-to-get-he...

A similar case: http://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/index.ssf/2013/08/...

Career criminals do so as well, of course: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/on-purpose...

According to this local news story, 80% of inmates at one Colorado county jail are either mentally ill or have serious medical issues that are diagnosed on arrival: http://kdvr.com/2014/07/07/expensive-trend-people-committing...

I could go on and on about this :-(
Twisting, Bending Aircraft Wing Begins Flight Tests
A big portion of the existential threat to power companies is the possibility of price-spirals.

The cost of maintaining all of the power infrastructure for a region is relatively fixed, especially if people don't disconnect completely when they add renewables. This cost is generally recouped by a small surcharge to every kWh that's provided to customers. The possibility of a spiral arises when customers start purchasing significantly less power from the utility, which means the per-kWh cost for the remaining customers will have to increase. As this cost increases, the ROI of adding solar panels improves, so more people add solar. As more people add solar, the utility must increase prices to the remaining customers.. etc. etc.

There's also pressure on this spiral from solar installers since the 'soft costs' make up the majority of new installations. As more people purchase systems, the per-installation price will decrease due to installers getting bulk discounts for materials, efficiencies (physical and bureaucratic - dealing with permits, etc.) from previous experience, and a bigger base to spread out the costs of their own capital equipment.

Detractors think that utilities are fear-mongering to increase their operating and price flexibility, which would likely result in higher profits in the near-term. I don't think I buy this theory though, looking at my last bill of about $50, $28 was generation and about $25 was transmission & distribution (T&Ds). PG&E bills T&Ds based on system costs / proportional usage, so if I cut my power, my T&Ds would drop to almost 0, increasing the cost on everyone else.

Here's a pretty balanced article about the issue;

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/04...
No, because they chose to exclude those features.
Where do you live? Do you use electricity for heating? I'm in California and for a 1500 sf house, it costs us roughly $600 in electricity and $600 is gas per year. This actually an old house with some insulation. I think it would be more efficient for me to improve the insulation and water heater/furnace before even considering solar panels. I wish they would subsidize these other improvements as much as solar panels.
Orion successfully returns to earth
It boggles the mind how many different ways to represent Strings there are in C++, and String handling in general is the major reason I'll never touch it (or C) with a 10 feet pole. I'm interested to hear though how the String handling in Java is broken. This is everything I have to know:

- String

- CharSequence

- char[] / Character[]

- StringBuilder

Done. Finito. Strings are immutable, the GC will clean up after me. Equality works, Unicode works. Only downside: more memory needed, but nobody except the embedded guys care anymore.
Hack your memory to learn faster
What is the Value of Religion?
I think it's that power companies depend on a very broad customer base to support their substantial capital investments. When you start removing a small portion of customers the cost of power to everyone else starts going up. And if those customers aren't consistently off-grid, i.e. they still need grid power sometimes, that can actually raise power costs.

Increasing generation capacity to meet demand spikes is expensive, and requires having large, expensive power stations waiting at the ready, just costing money.
CocoaPods in 2014
Web, Mobile and IoT distributed database requirements
The NEC doesn't do any regulating nor do they have any authority. They write standards that states may or may not adopt and use for their own enforcement. That's why Romex is illegal in Illinois and New York has it's own code.
"moving your finger" is still legal, that doesn't mean it's legal to pull a gun trigger and shoot someone.
At least for programming, it seems like predictive typing, Intellisense, templates, etc, negate the advantages a given keyboard might provide compared to a regular typist. Emacs or vi bindings contribute a lot to keystrokes type.
Dynamic vs. Static Typing
Android Wear sales figure: Half a million watch units sold
I just started freelancing after doing a few regular SDE "regular" jobs, and just got my first contract through a freelancing agency. It's been pretty nice in my experience, since they helped explain a lot of things about freelancing that I didn't know, and they handle all the taxes for me (so it's a bit like a consulting firm, and I get a W-4).

Ideally I'd like to develop a network so I won't need them for leads, but starting out they've been really helpful.
I usually do the same thing. Both the 32-bit issue (that issue being with JSON libraries, not the spec) but also: IDs are opaque tokens. If down the road it makes sense to use UUIDs or have a sharding hash or something else, you don't want clients tied to expecting an integer datatype.
What appliances/devices are you using when that happens?
As others have mentioned some libraries do use it. It has tradeoffs though. In a "traditional" implementation sizeof(std::string)==sizeof(char * ) -- it keeps a pointer to the first byte of the text with the metadata (minimally: size and capacity) stored before it in memory. c_str() is just a "return p_;" and size() is something like "return reinterpret_cast<const size_t * >(p_)[-1];"

Now to add the short-string optimization you need to do one of two things:

1. Add a small buffer we can point "p_" to inside the std::string itself. However, strings are very common inside of structures so this will bloat objects throughout your program

2. If you're clever you can use the lowest bit of the pointer to indicate that it's an interned string which would let you store 6 byte strings inside the pointer itself on a 64-bit machine (remember you still need the '\0' for c_str()'s benefit) However now c_str(), size(), etc all need an extra branch instruction. These are normally inlined methods, so now you've bloated/slowed the code instead.

Personally I prefer a keep-it-simple string implementation for most things.
There's a very simple middle ground of only restricting access to unlawful materials for the users of the jurisdictions where that material is illegal. That's what github did, and that's what twitter did. The service as a whole isn't the lowest common denominator, it's just customized to your own local laws.
pPP moves the goalposts on to each nation's home turf so they get a home player advantage. International influence and power requires playing against the same goalposts as everyone else.