skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IIRC Space X is going with small rockets to slow decent instead of parachutes. Or in addition to parachutes?
I wonder if that would be applicable for the required dV. Or if that is even safer.
Weapons (in general) are mostly used to kill and rarely to defend. Should they be totally prohibited?
What about people joining the army for just this reason?
Don't underestimate the value of a place to sleep, a roof over your head, and a rudimentary education to a large portion of the least fortunate. Having the certainty of those things could easily beat trying to hold on to a terrible job and keep a place to stay with food on the table.
Breaking the logjam – how to build real-time streams
How long are your panels expected to last, and how much maintenance do they require? Is the 5 year break even point pretty much guaranteed, and considering those things?
The real language problem is that classes are closed -- you can't add your own methods to std::string (other than operators) As a C++ program grows it's more and more tempting to make your own private string class (either by inheriting from std::string, encapsulating it, or reimplementing it) that interacts more naturally with your program's other types. I've done this myself. Of course this works great until you need to link to some other C++ library which has its own different string type.

Honestly, if C++ added just allow classes to be reopened (even if they weren't granted access to private methods) a lot of the pressure to roll your own string would be diminished.
How to Calculate Sales Tax when taking a commission
I have a website that sells products from local retailers. We charge a 5% commission on sales.

Can anyone with experience in this area comment on the proper way to charge sales tax on this kind of transaction.

Assuming a product that costs $10, and let's assume a 10% sales tax, the government is therefore owed $1.

Is the proper way to do this:
Scenario A:
Charge the customer $11
Give $10.45 to the retailer
We take $.55

or...
Scenario B:
Charge the Customer $11
Give $10.50 to the retailer
We take $.50

In Scenario A, presumably we owe the government $.05, which is the portion of the sales tax we have allocated to our cut.
In Scenario B, we give the entire taxable amount to the retailer, and assume they will pay the tax.

I presume that either may be acceptable, however my hunch is that one is preferable over the other from a headache perspective. There may also be some rules regarding commissions and taxes that I'm not aware of. Anyway, if anyone has experience with this, would really appreciate feedback on how to do this properly.
That is very true - I should have been more specific. Solar doesn't generate in the evening hours, when everyone is still consuming their AC, their Lights, their TV and many home appliances.

Pumping workloads (AC, Refrigeration) are fairly static loads on the grid though and don't account for very much (~7%) of the overall energy consumption (http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/).

The trouble with solar only really happens when their are spikes, either in over production, or over consumption.
I would say Scala if you have any background in java. Scala isn't strict so if you're working on a time sensitive project you can still use OO to get the job done in time. Other than that Common Lisp might be a good starting point.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, the bot seems to have been a really bad netizen. On the other hand I hate the idea of there being a precedence that you can be sued for automating get requests.
I'm absolutely shocked at the PG&E pricing. I'm in Chicago buying power from a 3rd party provide delivered via ComEd, and I'm only paying 8-9 cents/KwH, and that's more than from ComEd directly so I can buy wind power exclusively.
Actually, the C++ standard string was designed to be easy to implement as a copy-on-write object. And one of the motivations for the libc++ project ( http://libcxx.llvm.org/ ) is to stop using that design (first bullet point under "Why a new C++ Standard Library for C++11?") because it's no longer the obviously best choice.
> Also, lua is a nicer language, and if you have the choice, you should chose it over js.

Sorry, but I prefer the nasty language with 0-indexed arrays.
Best PM tools for remote teams
Its cheaper to reduce consumption than build additional power plants. The cheapest watt is the one you never needed to generate.
So what are they going to do, stop google from indexing suicide instructions? That's ridiculous.
You guys should take time to understand what law is and why is it good for it to exist, and also, why you should respect the jurisdiction pertaining to other regions or other people (EVEN IF YOU DISAGREE WITH IT). If the majority of citizens in this world understood this really simple civical [sic] principle, most of the current problems with the world would be nonexistant. [sic]

If the majority of rulers in this world subjected themselves to the law, it might become an institution worthy of a citizen's respect.
Seen It All Before: 10 Predictions About Police Body Cameras
What kind of pay could I expect fresh out of college? I'm currently working part time as a developer in our college Software Engineering lab and am active in our local Code for America brigade
You may be speaking of a particular implementation or engine. JS, the language, has no such concept of a "thread". The standard describes execution of a valid program as linear. Libraries may add functions such as event listeners or threading or sockets, but these are not part of the language.

And yes, to be pedantic, by JS I'm refering to ECMAScript, or ECMA-262. If by JS you mean JavaScript the implementation by Mozilla, then Node doesn't use that anyway :p
Did it come as a surprise to your clients that your rates would increase every 90 days, or did they know before hiring you?
These tests are only meaningless if you completely misinterpret what they're testing. It's not a test of the overall reliability of the drives. They're just testing the write endurance (and occasionally the data retention). The wear leveling and garbage collection algorithms will have zero variance between different drives of the same model, so there's no need for a large sample of controllers. And each drive itself constitutes a large sample of flash memory so any random variation in the lifespan of individual NAND cells is already averaged out.
Does Plan 9 meet your requirements for a "true multi-tenant OS"? If not, I'd be interested in hearing your ideas about how such a system might be implemented and how it would look to end users.
The EPA and various utility commissions mandate efficiency programs, and efficiency improvements are often tied to promises of allowed rate hikes, but utilities also want to shave demand where possible.

An ideal world for a utility would be one where everyone used a moderate amount of energy at all times. The reality though, is that peak consumption is typically 100% higher than the night-time lows. An example from a utility;

http://i.imgur.com/gPR7DNk.png

Most of the efficiency programs are targeted at lowering that daytime peak. You would need less overall generation (saving money on building new power plants) and have a much more stable system if you could flatten that whole curve.
Current spending is at 2.4% and it pays basically to not have dirt roads 7% is slightly is slightly less than China' current spend.

opening the border will provide a cheaper work force that can extend the infrastructure spending further.

the key is we need build goals and more people that are hungry to achieve them.

US has the natural resource to build out what it needed.

500,000,000 correct US population it far to low relative to the size
Community Packs for AWS: Out of the Box Dashboards, Alerts, and Queries
The US used to have better mental health care but ended up going in the opposite direction to that of the UK, sadly. These two articles provide a decent overview, although they omit some important legal cases.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/timeline-mental-...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/12/w...
It's also selection bias. We tend to remember companies more if their names are still in use.

Borland was founded in 1983. By 2008, the only value left in it was its trademarks. So those were purchased, and now that company "still exists", in the sense that a few of its old names are being used to conduct business in the same industry. It was killed by gross mismanagement at the executive level.

Eastman Kodak was founded in 1888 and practically invented consumer-grade photography with the Brownie. But by 2012, the only thing left of value was its patents and trademarks. It even built a digital camera as early as 1975, which makes it look a lot like it was killed by being run over by its own car. But the trademark is still in use.

Beatrice Foods, founded in 1894, died in 1984. RCA was founded in 1919, and died in 1986. Compaq: 1982-2002. TWA: 1930-2001. General Foods: 1895-1990. MCI: 1983-2006. Pan Am: 1927-1991. Montgomery Ward: 1872-2001. American Motors: 1954-1983. Woolworth's: 1879-1997. Tower Records. Polaroid. Zenith. Circuit City. Borders. Blockbuster Video.

A business will tend to operate under the name of the oldest trademark that it can pass off with a straight face. That doesn't make it the same company. It may be that the new business entity picked up the lovely old facade out of the bargain bin and just slipped it on like a mask.

Make no mistake. Rapidly changing technology has made the international business environment brutal for companies of any age. Protected niches are being pried open and picked clean by the suits who happened to bankroll the lucky garage full of nerds. The fraction of workers that can count on stable, decades-long employment is dropping like a parachute in a vacuum chamber (or like a stone, if you prefer). And those are the people that cause their companies to retain their essential culture and character.

Companies aren't just dying faster. The ones that survive are forced to change so rapidly that actual death might be a less shocking development. It isn't really surprising that Roxio blazed out after its one-hit wonder. What is surprising is that it took so long for them to settle back down to the baseline.
If you're interested in this topic then you should read the whole discussion in the link. There is a lot of talk about what optimizations are in play.
Thats pretty good - You also have the benefit of getting alternative return on that 11K upfront, which helps.

Depending on whether you sell your house or not, I assume that the solar system will also generate a reasonably high ROI as an improvement to the home? It would be interesting to see what the real payback time period would be if you were to try to sell the house before its usage ROI were realized.

i.e. could you buy a house, add solar, get the rebate, sell the house after 2 years and still get a return on the solar investment money because you'd improved the value of the house?
> Why not bill on a daily/weekly/monthly rate?

Does anyone have experience with all three options? Which worked out best for you?
If only they all implemented something like java.lang.CharSequence...

"A CharSequence is a readable sequence of char values. This interface provides uniform, read-only access to many different kinds of char sequences. "
I see, I apologize for not providing you with what you were looking for initially. I struggle with over analyzing problems. This leads to paralysis in some cases, including when coming up with ideas for products/services like you're experiencing.

I have a friend who wants me to work with him on a project. The problem he is trying to solve doesn't scratch an itch for me though. I have noticed, for me personally, that I am more motivated to work on something if the solution solves a problem I am currently experiencing.
I sat and watched the countdown (the video cut out at T-00:15) with my 3.5-year-old son this morning. He was extremely excited, to the point that he was able to sit still for a half-hour just listening to the announcements of various system checks. Even without being able to watch the actual launch live (we watched a taped version a few minutes later), he still seemed to be catching quite a bit of excitement, and asked a myriad of questions ("How does the rocket return to earth?" "What's that flame?").

When I was in grade-school in the early-mid 90's, I brought a news clipping of a Shuttle launch in for a "current events" classroom segment. Many of my classmates responded with disinterest: "Why do you care? There are Shuttle launches all the time." We were young enough not to remember Challenger, so space-flight seemed routine and boring. As tragic and disappointing as the Columbia disaster and end of the Shuttle program were, I think they actually reminded us not to take manned spaceflight for granted.

I work with an astronomer and physicist with a PhD from MIT. She was actually less excited about today's launch than I expected, mainly because she's more interested in the science being done by robotic missions. I'm sure she's right that they're much more cost-effective and able to deliver almost as many results, but I'd place a small wager that manned spaceflight was at least partially responsible for her interests and career path.

Also, I realized this morning (while looking at diagrams comparing the sizes of various launch configurations) that just seeing a picture of a Space Shuttle with its rockets still makes me a bit emotional. I can't say for sure what effect it had on me growing up, but I'm sure that it played a part in my development as a civic- and tech-minded individual.
Say you wanna make an HTTP request.

What node will do is kick off the process (dns, grab a socket, connect tcp, write the header, wait for response etc.)... but it won't wait for any of this to finish, it just starts it on another thread. That thread doesn't need any JS-level synchronization because it has nothing to do with JS. Furthermore, you can kick off multiple requests like this in parallel.

When a request is done and has data to pass back, the external thread will queue up a V8 event. When V8 is free and is ready for the next event, it will see the finished request and trigger your callback with the data. When you're done handling that data (in Javascipt), V8 will wait for the next event and so on.

So you see, it's parallel but doesn't need any JS synchronizatioon.
No, it's bigger than just copy parameters. std::string, even as a const reference, only works well in these cases:

1. your users already have a std::string

2. you want to support string literals

3. you'll be converting to string in the implementation anyway

What if I have a vector<const char>? What if I have a type called SanitizedString or OracleString? What about character arrays retrieved from C ABI calls?

And even if 3. is true, you are encoding implementation details in your interface. If you need to optimize your type later to use a trie, you'll have to do extra allocations and copies after all.

My point is that interfaces should require what they need: a character sequence if they need a character sequence and a character buffer if they need a character buffer. Hence my comment about std::string being more appropriately named std::string_buffer.

Even string_ref isn't perfect because it assumes your sequence is in contiguous memory. I'm hoping developments in the C++ language and standard library comes up with a good answer to that problem, perhaps one that leverages the concepts proposals. But even a concepts-based solution will have drawbacks, such as requiring even more code to go in your header file.
UK government to force banks to use standard APIs
Twitter NLP Example: How to Scale Part-of-Speech Tagging with MPP (Part 2)
The language is designed to handle events/messages because it runs on single thread in the browser. As far as I know, you cannot spawn threads.

The runtime/library does it under the hood.
And really really expensive. If the point is a safe society without high costs of maintenance it seems foolish to overlook rehabilitation.
Github Uses Issues and Pull-requests for Communication
Is there any region of the world that uses more energy during non-daylight hours? Everywhere I've lived, peak demand is daytime.
It's like dollar shave club - the story is worth so much more than the product.
> Of these and other causes of action typically alleged in these situations, the breach of contract claim is often the clearest source of a remedy.

That's a strange claim given that we're talking about a "contract" which QVC has no proof that the other party read or agreed to, and which there has been no explicit exchange ("offer" and "acceptance").

Are web-site contracts/terms even enforceable at all? According to this article[0]/case law likely not. Strange thing for a lawyer to say, but this article makes a lot of strange claims that seem inconsistent with US case law.

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverherzfeld/2013/01/22/are-we...
I knew more than a few people like that myself. Now, I'm about to stray into the realm of anecdote, so take this with a grain of salt, but I knew these people well (I was one of them) and, honestly, if they didn't have weed to smoke they would have found something else to waste their time with. I'm not trying to say that this is true across the board, but i do find it hard to believe that people who are inherently driven and intelligent can be radically changed by something like pot.

Besides, the current laws are not stopping people from doing it. Most know that weed is something which can be enjoyed recreationaly without risking their health or lifestyle. It doesn't hurt anyone around them, so current law is viewed as arcane and unjust. What benefit are these laws providing to society?
A manned Mars mission is within the grasp of existing technology (and has been for 40 years).

Fusion power isn't.

Mind that I'm not arguing for or against a manned mission to Mars. I don't think it would prove any tremendous benefits, though it would be most decidedly cool. I also believe that permanent or long-term Mars settlements are well beyond present technical capabilities.

But the difference here is political will and financing. Not underlying technical viability.
You don't lose that much freedom in the military. At least, most of the things you would be permitted from doing are things that you wouldn't need/want to do anyway.

But I suppose you could say the same about prison, for some people.
You can choose on-demand instances till calibrate your growth.
You can also use load balancing, starting new servers as need.
> The reasoning was: If you force jobs to be filled by people who are not as good at them, we collectively get less work done. Assuming that work tends to be useful, that means we collectively have fewer resources available.

Now you're changing your argument. The people who are the "best fit" for a job aren't necessarily better at it. They may be worse at it but willing to work for less money. Which is where equality enters into it: You're making the assumption that it's better to transfer that money from the workers to producers or customers. But for something that done at scale leads to the destruction of the middle class, that assumption is false.
In their defense, rocket technology has been around for quite a bit longer than IP video streaming.
No problem. It's good to point out the reposts since it helps identify urls that should be investigated to figure out why the deduping algo didn't catch it.

Good article though.
> whether we should be trusting so much of our infrastructure to one company that hasn't yet started to monetize the technology

We trusted free software for a long time before we needed to call it open source to make it sound palatable to less visionary business leaders.

We'll go on trusting the FOSS. The free and open nature of it means that we're never really trusting the company (the corporate entity) just the people they've amassed to work on the FOSS. Those people can continue to work on the FOSS after the company disolves, because the osftware is open/free.
>We have rights too.

Not under the US Constitution which is what governs the NSA. That has been one of the main features of government throughout history. They put their own people's rights above the rights of foreigners. EDIT: And doing the opposite will generally be viewed as treason.

I am honestly not aware of anything that was revealed that would violate any international treaty the US agreed to, but will definitely listen if you have examples. I also have a hard time believing that any other country with the capability to do the type of international spying the US does wouldn't do the exact same thing (or isn't already).
It's a painful learning curve, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth it. I used to do all my apps in jQuery and was pretty adept at cross-component communication using events. Angular made me think about SPAs in a completely different way, and I'd never go back.

It's very popular to deride a framework or a language because it's too hard to learn. My experience is that I grow as a developer if I can think about problems from different perspectives. As an old professor used to remind us, "It's good for the soul."

As for speed, now that I'm fluent in Angular I can do a lot more in less code. Since Angular is opinionated on structure and there's been a strong community effort toward standardizing architecture and style, the tooling (seed projects and generators) has come a long way in the past couple of years.
I believe languages war is not a good problem to spend energy.
Cashing out when funded or not?
I don't. I recently witnessed someone writing a 10 line function to test for a particular condition in our codebase. I could have done it in less than one-line, by re-using pre-existing code.

What took them 10 minutes would have taken me 1. My solution is also more in-line with how it's done over the rest of the codebase, if you applied my approach 100 times you would have a consistent and easy to maintain codebase, apply their approach 100 times and it would be inconsistent and harder (more time consuming, more expensive, more risky) to change.

That's where the 10x comes from.

Edit: Just in case they're reading this... I don't think this is because I'm a better engineer or you're a worse one, I blame our lack of documentation and training for this feature!
It will likely come down to that but since utilities are typically government-granted monopolies, it will take legislative action to allow changes. It will be a tough political sell since it would actively discourage new investment in distributed renewables and socialize the costs so that the people who used the most energy (and therefore drive most of the demand for T&D) will pay the smallest proportion of their upkeep.
Having been on both sides of the coin, once you hit 600 reqs/s without a prior arrangement, that almost qualifies as a DoS attack. If they'd maintained 200-300 req/min would have been pretty acceptable.
Free Lyft rides to work
Actually, I really enjoy using Groovy as a Java REPL, when having to use Java. Your code is run in a Script class

Most java code is valid Groovy code and it has some nice dynamic features, syntax sugar and has closures. I am currently using it to hack together a small DSL to easily configure a transformation from XML -> CSV

Here's an example of a Groovy session (From my instance of IntelliJ IDEA through Tools -> Groovy Console)

> P = "Hello world!"
Hello world!
> sub = P.substring(5)
world!
> sub ==~ / wo.+/ ? println("World") : {}()
World