skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wave energy is one of those ideas that 100's of clever people have had independently over the years and not a single one has been able to make it work reliably and cost effectively.

We've seen a wide variety of prototypes, some even made it to net power out but absolutely nothing came close to winning the prize. (Though that didn't stop the government from pumping large amounts of subsidy into some of these.)

When you compare 'wind' to 'waves' (or tides, for that matter) the environment is even more hostile, the power transportation problem more acute and the engineering challenges incredibly more formidable and the maintenance headaches harder still.

Having mostly stationary waterborne structures is hard enough and commands skills that are rare and very expensive (think oilrigs). Now change that to dynamic structures which drive generators, add in storms, salt water and interference with shipping and you're looking at a very expensive and complex mixture. It will take extremely deep pockets to pull this off successfully, with the inbuilt assumption of a number of false starts and resulting re-engineering.

Elon Musk will likely walk on Mars (or die on impact) before we will see widespread adoption of tidal energy for electricity generation on Earth. Which is a pity, because it seems such a good idea.
Paste the text here: http://www.rot13.com/index.php
Medicare, and dozens of other welfare programs raise the marginal tax rate in some parts of the curve up to 95% for the middle class. Since earning the money is not free, and you keep virtually none of it, working more you end up with less.

Increasing the payouts for earning less, not surprisingly, erodes the middle class. Either you are determined enough to work more to earn less and maybe in a few years come out on the other side of the chasm, or you work less and immediately benefit from it.

Check out Figure 1 (page 6) in this CBO report, and note it's worse now than when this was written;

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/...

It's amazing how little value you actually gain from the first $60k of earnings! If you prefer a more newsy analysis;

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21585010-america...
A witty saying proves nothing.

That dicing of all incomes into three brackets including the ridiculous $75k+ bracket (for families!) just shows how you can hide truth with graphs.
Everything looks amazing, but what is their business model? How will they fund all this development in the long term? I cannot find any commercial offerings on their website.
nope. it is mostly because microsoft been offering those high quality aerial images for a long time on bing maps for free, but since nobody even know there is a bing map, it wasn't a threat. now somehow google feel they are gaining market and decided to counter attack.
I think that this is why the ethics question is ill-formed in video games: it is used as a mean to an end (i.e. what should I do in order to get this). Translated to real life, it results in a quite hypocritical and cynical behaviour (I'm nice in order to get that). Playing with morality implies playing with the players feelings (or rather the player plays with its own feelings), which in turn implies that the game have to build those feelings in the first place.

I can't help but thinking that there should be an AI for this.
I've been following Ansible from the start, Michael has always seemed like an excellent lead for the project - he's had a strong opinion and vision for the project - Ansible has turned out really well as a result.

More recently, Ansible Inc's faceless approach to marketing has me a little frustrated, but this isn't the time for complaining.

Thanks for all your hard work on Ansible Michael! I hope the team you've built can continue to pursue your vision for the project, and best of luck wherever you end up next!
This one is in use in Scotland: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islay_LIMPET
Oh, is Mexico actually a rich country too, then?
is taboola now posting to hackernews?
"The obvious thing to do would charge for parking with the Japanese system, and use the proceeds to help offset the initial costs, just like with a toll highway or bridge"

So, why would I pay for the cost of something that makes money for the parking owner again?

That's ridiculous.
A graph completely debunks the populist theory, yet you continue to push the narrative that the middle class is "falling out" instead of...you know...getting richer?

Thanks for the downvote because statistical facts on income apparently aren't your cup of tea.
This is a similar chart which reads quite differently...

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/hous...

Also, I think you would be better linking here, which has several versions with differnt groupings (per @r00fus' point) as well as the full discussion behind it:

http://www.aei.org/publication/census-data-on-income-distrib...

It's interesing data, but also missing the last 5 years which are crucial as this is a recent phenomenon. The 3rd chart in the series I think best shows what economists are calling the "lost decade" where we stopped making real progress in upward mobility. Add another 5 years onto those series and I think you would see we are going backwards now.

Edit: Shouldn't the top graph in my link be the same as your link? Now I'm doubting these graphs are even 'correct' (methodology aside)
I'm surprised at the vote swings on this one. Do people think there's nothing wrong with getting drunk in front of 5 to 11 year old children multiple weekends a year? Because I have witnessed this in my city each fall and find it troubling.

It's also a weird double standard when a lot of college campuses don't allow booze except for football tailgating.
I need 20000 USD to pay my education bond
My education (Bachelor's degree) was sponsored by an agency with a term that I would have to serve them for a period of five years or break the bond by paying a sum of 20000 USD. Right now, I earn about 800 USD a month and the job is mind numbing. I have been serving them for about 15 months and would have to go on for 45 more months. How do save / earn USD 20000 in the shortest time possible ?
Looks cool except that I know using a mechanical keyboard will result in me getting murdered by my colleagues in our open floor plan office.
Google search for the title and click through.
I've taken a liking to James Altucher's post on LinkedIn where he also explained why the middle class is dying:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140407131300-5858595-10-rea...
glad i just paid the $400 like a month ago.
There's a false choice at play here. It's entirely possible not to have a favorite team in any sport, not to be part of the sport consumption culture and yet to immensely enjoy active participation in sports.
How does that graph read differently and the captions are from what sources exactly?
A lot of wave and tidal motors were built along the California coast in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It's an interesting history. Cheap fossil power made them uneconomical, though.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/wave-motors-of-californ...

http://www.outsidelands.org/wave-tidal.php
Observations about -XStaticPointers
Remote exploits work surprisingly well on unpatched systems, stupid users, malconfigured hardware/software and if that doesn't work, maybe it's time for a bit of oldfashioned humint.
Thanks. You can see it at https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go#screenshot, but it's less than 10% finished at this point. Everything you see is rendered in OpenGL. The text editing component has syntax and diff highlighting support.

It's written in Go, but I'm planning to have it running in the browser by compiling Go to JS and using OpenGL bindings with two backends: WebGL and OpenGL.

In terms of usability, it's nothing more than a complicated tech demo atm; I need to figure out its future direction.
500 KW (now derated to 250KW), it's neat but that's piddly little bits of power for an installation that size. A single present day wind turbine will produce up to 3 MW continuously rather than pulsed.

Pity I didn't know about it when I toured Scotland a couple of years ago looking at their renewable energy installations.

This one was by far the most impressive:

http://pics.camarades.com/v/jacques/trips/scotland08/dscf158...
The tech has had many projects, but none of them made it in the longer term.
Yeah, too bad Bing Maps search is a bad joke. Really

You have to specify if it's a Address or a Place (if your initial search doesn't work, which is pretty much always)
Maybe they hope that one of the biggest NoSQL players, who raised a lot of money, acquires them?

From the website also I cannot understand the advantages compared to a relational database.
File for unemployment. There is a waiting period. The money always helps.
> Like, why do we still use plain text in flat files for source code

Text transports with full fidelity between print and screen, and between pretty much any system.

Anything beyond text becomes a) harder to communicate (e.g. consider how many people would struggle with even reading out loud maths formulas with symbols they are unfamiliar with; now extend that to trying to talk about representations that have extra spatial information), b) requires extra tooling for far more varied environments than you ever thought people actually code in (e.g. I have an idea; I want to write down code in my phones note-taking app)

Serializing it for IO is trivial. Representing it in a way that allows us to handle the two problems above in a way that makes it seem superior to text in enough cases is a very, very hard problem.

It's definitively intersting, though.
It generates pulses of AC power, but that can be overcome by feeding those pulses into a flywheel or superconductor based short-term storage system.
Well, bad news, good news, and curious news:

Bad news: Sandstorm packages do not have any particular separation between "base system" and "app"; your app package is simply one big archive of the entire userspace filesystem needed. This is something we might conceivably do in the future, but for now we like the simplicity.

Good news: Once the app maintainer publishes an updated package, it is trivial to update your local app instances in-place. Much like installing apps on Android, the system just swaps out the old package for the new one without touching the user data. We are confident enough in the robustness of this that we plan to implement auto-updating of apps, again like Android (though you'll be able to turn it off if you prefer).

Curious news: With Sandstorm, it often (not always, but often) doesn't matter if an app has vulnerabilities. Each app instance is initially only accessible by its owner, and only accessible to others if the owner explicitly shares with them. Often, the people you are collaborating with aren't threats -- they're your friends.

Apps that public a public web site -- like Ghost (the blog platform, not the glibc vulnerability :) ) -- actually do so strictly as static content. Sandstorm serves the content for them, without executing any of the app's code.

Admittedly, this starts to break down if you want to have a public web site in which users can make persistent changes -- say, post comments.

Of course, if someone does compromise one of your app instances, it's only that instance. The rest of your server remains safe, since each app is in an isolated container.

None of this is to say that patching exploits doesn't matter, but security is not about absolutes, it's about risk management. It's significantly less likely that a bug in a Sandstorm app will lead to real damage.
Hi Y'all, Thomas here (guy in article). Just want to start by saying (1) this is a very intelligent thread, and (2) I didn't write the article, was just interviewed for it. You never know what's going to be written, no matter what you say.

Here's how the models really play out.
We compare our accuracy against the 10 year survivorship benchmark of 25% (not the 5 year). When you look at small businesses, VC-backed, and corporate ventures (ex. new products coming out of companies), the 10 year survival rate is around 25%, plus or minus 10% depending on the industry.

Our models have made thousands of predictions for around nine years now - all the predictions were live, real-time and forward looking (no back-testing included here). From those predictions, around 3,400 have matured to date. That is, only around 3,400 of the results have happened - the businesses have either become big successes (ex. Uber) or failed. In our research, we have to actually wait for businesses to live or die to test our accuracy.

From the roughly 3,400 predictions that have matured, we were right 66% of the time when predicting survivors, and 88% of the time when predicting failures. When we scratched beneath the surface, we were really around 66% accurate in both cases (just most businesses fail, which is why gloomy predictions were 22% more accurate - just a function of dumb luck since most things die).

So we consider our algorithms to be 66% accurate, which is much more accurate than anything we're aware of in human history (remember, the baseline we're compared against is 25%).

If you do a statistical analysis (to make sure our predictions weren't just luck), the models maintained a statistically significant correlation with 99% confidence. There was less than 1 chance in over 500,000 that the results were a function of luck (definitely not a coin toss).

We've used these models in venture, and our performance puts us in the top 5% of all VC funds for our vintage years, so we've monetized these models effectively with real dollars and made considerable gains.

I hope this gives folks a better sense for how it works. There's been a very emotional backlash to the Wired article today (not accusing this thread, just thinking of some others) and it's weird because it's just basic scientific research. Pretty drab stuff on most days, but apparently offensive to some people. Not sure why. We're using statistics to improve venture and startup odds, just like stats have been used to improve just about every other field humans have ever taken seriously. Seems obvious that stats are similarly useful in the startup world, and my dream has always been to help more businesses use stats to succeed.

Anyway, definitely a lot more controversy and emotion than I would have expected. Otherwise pretty basic science, not claiming perfection, just striving for improvement, using data as best we can, etc. I hope at least some folks see this for what it is - nothing out of the ordinary in any other domain of science. Why should entrepreneurship be any different?
> Back when compilers cost money, I had no problem as a $40K/year programmer paying >$200 for the latest edition annually.

But a compiler generally received improvements from each of those updates.

A certificate does not; in fact it's quite the opposite, paying an annual fee merely prevents the certificate from being disabled.
In terms of your bootstrapped business, if you haven't already found some of these resources, have a look:

* http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ - great weekly podcast with a transcript.

* Nice, focused, friendly forum: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

* Book by the guys who did the podcast above that I would highly recommend to pretty much anyone: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/...

Those should be enough to lead you to other resources.
JCTools
The camel transport is surely by far the most powerful since the camel it is loading is only found deep in land locked central Asia.

Pictured camel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactrian_camel
I loved playing basketball, too. But then in high school I could choose between taking advanced math classes or basketball PE, which was required to play on the basketball team. That kind of choice shouldn't be the kind of choice a high school student should have to make.

There were many more example of trade offs like this, almost all of which undermined any ostensible focus on education.

These kinds of things have nothing to do with whether playing sports (on a team or not) can be a positive experience or is good for people.
I ignored the captions. The data show the bottom 80% experiencing significant wage deflation the last decade in real dollar terms. Hence, falling out of the middle class.
I agree but I'd also like to add that most of the time the complexity for me using some frameworks, libraries, or tools has nothing to do with code but instead in the prerequisites for using them. The authors of some tools make certain assumptions about your knowledge of the whole ecosystem around the tool or supporting tools. Here's a few examples that have caused me pain:

Some time ago, an upgrade to Foundation framework required NodeJS and Ruby 1.9+, a version not preinstalled on my Mac. OK, at the time I knew nothing about NodeJS and have never used Ruby, how hard could it be? 5-10 minutes max?

- NodeJS installed fine, but I had to use "sudo" to install modules or I'd see errors
- Googled... many people used "nvm". I installed nvm, had some issues, but in the end all worked fine
- Next, Ruby. "rvm" is popular, I'll try that.
- rvm installation failed with a cryptic error message, Googled message...
- I need to install "command line tools" which come with Xcode
- I don't have Xcode and apparently it's several GB, after an hour or more I finished downloading it.
- I had to open Xcode, find some random preferences panel and click some button to install "command line tools"
- rvm installation still did not work, Googled.... many people use Homebrew
- installed Homebrew, ruby 2.x installed (with strange warnings) but showed 2.x in the console
- Foundation tools did not work
- Googled how to uninstall Homebrew, found some random "gist" script some guy made which does scary things on my system
- Tried installing rvm again, and for a reason unknown to me, it was successful!
- Foundation tools still did not work
- Didn't notice, last two line of rvm installation required me to copy/paste two lines into the shell.

Great, now I can use Foundation in my Grails project that has nothing to do with Ruby or NodeJS. This whole process took ~6 hours, half of the time I spent just googling error messages.

More recently, I couldn't figure out how to properly package/bundle my React app into a single minified JS file with browserify. The docs linked to a nice simple template:

https://github.com/petehunt/react-browserify-template

The package.json has a few useful commands in the "scripts" section:

"scripts": {
"start": ...
"build": ...
}

"npm start" works fine, so why isn't "npm build" working!?!? I posted on stackoverflow and got no answers. Ten days later I figured it out. Knowing very little about npm I had no idea "npm start" was a shortcut for "npm run-script start" and thus I needed to do "npm run-script build".
Why Technical Blogging?
'Social Critic' is a bit mild.
I think you simply value the work environment much more than anyone that "retires" at 30, much similar to people that continue to work after winning a large lottery. And that's ok. For most people that want extremely early retirement, though, it is time to spend with family: Time to learn: time to experience. Not a lot of people acheive this, but that's the dream.
Hoffice Turns Your Apartment into a Free Coworking Space
The only step in Medicare taxes occurs at $200,000 (or $250,000 for a married couple). Given that those numbers are well above the cap for social security (which provides a nice break in marginal rates), I doubt that Medicare taxes are factoring into decisions to work more or not.
What does your title have to do with the actual article? Facebook copying myspace? What?
On x86 and x86_64 you should be fine to use OpenGL via dlopen/dlsym, right?
I have a theory that the classification of working class, middle class and upper class will disappear as we go through the 21 century. They will be replaced with two types of job:

1. Jobs were you design things (code, graphics, marketing campaigns, franchise models, sales scripts, hedged trades, screenplays, new business models, retail store layouts, art, fashion etc)
2. Jobs were you follow basic instructions (flipping burgers, voice-over artists, uber drivers, sales, retail manager, factory line worker, tax accountants etc)

The first category is a subset of the current middle class, but it's much smaller.

Everyone in the second category is in for a rough ride. They will be constantly competing with machines, algorithms and millions of other people who can all follow the same manual that they have. Even jobs like sales where you'd think there has to be a human involved will be gradually eroded. Human intuition will increasingly be replaced by scoring algorithms and CRM reports. Their persistence in following up with people will be replaced by lifecycle emails, tracking algorithms and chatbots. And ever more transactions will be pushed online anyway.

I also believe that we're at the point of saturating our hierarchy of needs. Some people will try to monetise things like love, acceptance and respect of others (I can already buy a Facebook girlfriend on Fiverr). But I think this will be largely un-monetisable. Meaning we're in for mass unemployment. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, so long as we drop the stigma. People can be kept warm, dry, well fed and entertained with games and box sets, with relatively little cost.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Honoring commitments is important, but so is adjusting to new information, even if it's only new information about your own productivity and mental state, or the revealed imbalance in critical-path-tasks and hourly commitments between partners.

OP may need more time away from the project, or may need more teammates with the right tech skills to help on current-bottlenecks.

Maybe knowing that 10 paying customers are lined up would help, as motivation and improved confidence in the partner's ability to equally contribute. (Maybe it's allow recruiting more technical help.) But maybe more people waiting for the completion would only add to the pressure and anxiety; he'll have to think about that.

I strongly suspect a major part of the problem is that OP has no peer technical help on the critical-path – all his partner can do is ask, "is it done yet?" That's a broken team.
> in the future few things that we base our current economy on will still have value

"People" in general is one of those things. We have reached, or are about to reach, the point where it's no longer true that more people = more {wealth, power, progress}.
I sure hope such investments have enough time to make their money back. I expect robotic cars to do away with the need to own personal cars. Shared by many people, a robotic cab will spend a lot less time sitting around and many parking lots will disappear.
Feel free to tell voice-over artists and other actors that their jobs are following basic instructions. Same with sales, managers and tax accountants.
Of course people are getting richer in absolute terms, that's not surprising (if you assume technology advances and produces any increase in value at all), but with that comes inflation. Now, the interesting question is not whether people are getting richer or not, not even whether people are getting richer faster than inflation negates those gains. The question is: are the richest X% (for a sufficiently small X) is getting richer much faster than the remaining (100-X)%, and whether that difference in the rate of growth is sufficient to seriously unbalance a country's society?

Even if it isn't, does that concentration of capital make the whole economic system less efficient than it otherwise could be or happens at the expense of basic living conditions for people in the (100-X)% group?
ShuttleCloud Launches API to Import Address Books and Build “The Email Graph”
I think the panels might block the road visibility of his business (which I don't have a lot of sympathy for, but it's at least a less petty motivation).
Nice click-bait title. Well done!
Pgfuse – store files and their metadata completely in a PostgreSQL database