skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did they maybe use it in a remix or something? The album version does not seem to contain it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr94K5VX0Q4

Although the drum beat is somewhat similar.
> If there is no way in our universe to ever know exactly what BB(111) is, can it really be considered a well-defined number?

There's a branch of Maths called constructivism which requires values/proofs/etc. to be "constructable" in principle. For example, the law of the excluded middle ('for all X, either X is true or (not X) is true') is not constructive, since it doesn't give us a value: we don't know whether we're dealing with X or (not X).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(mathematics)

Constructive mathematics turns out to be very closely related to computation, and is one reason why functional programming gets so much research attention.

Constructivists don't have a problem with infinite objects, like the set of all Natural numbers, if they can be represented in a finite way (eg. as a function). There's another branch of Mathematics knows as finitism, which regards infinities as not existing. What you're describing is ultrafinitism, which regards really big things as not existing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrafinitism
But still the question is, why would I want that? I'm all for distributed power generation, but it can still be optimized better when it's connected to a grid.
Thanks - really glad it found a match for you. I'll note down your comment - we do need to improve the UX in this area.
Show HN: Gohort – A URL shortner written in Go
I'm mostly complaining about their new Android app, which was rolled out alongside with the new backend site.

As a pretty typical London commuter, I expected this thing to be usable offline, just like the old app. But no, it's broken now, useless for me. Not reading any news any more.
My kids got a big box of Lego Technic (the kind you make robots with) in their very early years - 2/3. The box has been an absolute joy for them, and now the eldest (7) is using it to build robots. Finally.

Plus the joy of watching them figure out that you can use old Lego with new Lego is fantastic. Principles to live by!
The inspection can include proofs that the loopers loop, with the full mathematical power of the word "proof" behind it, so I'm willing to trust the known numbers. But the proofs can not be general (or at least not past a certain point which probably comes up pretty quickly), and will get ever more difficult to perform as we dig ever further down the sequence.
Sure, Musk makes it sound sexy, but do we really need to use Lithium in a stationary application? I'd probably be happier with a battery that weighs twice as much but costs half as much. Those might not be the exact tradeoffs, but that's the general idea.

However, I don't know much about the details of battery technology, so I could be completely wrong. If traditional technologies such as lead-acid were up to the task, then someone would have already made a big business out of using them. Does that make sense?
When Pigs Fly, Crayfish Whistle, and It Snows Red Snowflakes
> And of course the next IE12/"Spartan" will be tied to Windows 10...so this won't change anytime soon apparently.

Well, Windows 10 being a free upgrade to 7/8 users should help.
This is a great idea. That's why we built it already.

RandomRun for iOS generates random routes for running (or walking / cycling).

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id938354170
Sounds like a win for everyone?

Those who always want the latest and greatest can see easier when their kernel gets "too old".

And the rest of us who run behind the curve benefits from the increased test coverage.
affordable

Because so far batteries have been improving in cost/Ah only very gradually? And generated grid power from fossil fuels has been historically cheap?
It's 2015. Just get a life jacket with integrated EPIRB.
I would argue that 9^9 mentioned in the article for example _is not a number_. It is a method for calculating a number. So most of the article is invalid
I tend to disagree slightly. I have a math/cs degree, but work with a lot of physicists turned programmers. They are all smart and have plenty of experience at doing what they are doing, but have no idea what is out there CS wise. They reinvent the wheel quite often when building large systems. By not having the time taken out to read real cs text and instead focusing on just getting things done they missed a lot of sound computer science. They are all very bright, but just doing the relevant work only helps you on that type of work. Being exposed to a ton of different areas (as might happen in a cs degree, but there are other ways of course), lets you know what is out there in terms of different approaches.
So instead of the ambiguous text 'Software Engineer' we now have 10 ambiguous texts ranging from 'Analysis' to 'Data Science'. I don't really see how that solves a problem, since these underlying concepts are also quite hard to define consistently.
If I recall correctly, battery production is currently a bottleneck for Tesla production and one of the major reasons why there is a waiting period of a few months after ordering. So I'm not sure to what extent he depends on home batteries to find a use for excess capacity, even if Model 3 isn't available yet.
It's a historical problem, it's already been solved in developing countries. Nothing drastic, just dropping the birth rate below 2.1.
So it's a good thing they're spying on that poster child of terrorist anarchy; Angela Merkel?
I don't have water or sewage at my house. I have a well and septic system. I also have a propane generator but it's only for power outages, that happen more frequently when you live in the country. I do have a private company collect my garbage.

I live in the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, so we get some of the lowest amount of direct sunlight in the US. I'm not sure if solar is viable in my area yet.
Citizenfour Echos Citizen Kane
Like many others, I've lived on solar power (no grid, no generator) for two decades now. No problems, no fuss.

In rural areas, wind powered battery storage was commonplace 100 years ago.

Perhaps if you bothered to do a little research....
Honestly, everything is more difficult when you have kids - showering every day, for example - but the flip side is that it's a total procrastination killer. There are no more wasted days, or lost hours. I work harder and more efficiently than I ever have in my life, and while I certainly get frustrated that I don't have as much time as I'd like, I don't resent my daughter in the least. I doubt you will either.
So, where does lithium come from? It comes from the Earth, of course, but it doesn't require strip mining or blowing the tops off mountains like other resources do...most often, lithium is found in briny underground ponds. The liquid is pumped out and left to dry in the sun.

TANSTAAFL

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lithium+pond+photos&iax=1&ia=image...

Mining is mining. There isn't a "green" form. Tearing holes in the earth is not the worst ecological damage or the great health risk. The big problem is the water...and it will run downhill from the Andes and wherever else Lithium is mined and into the Ocean.

The house off the grid is built on industrial infrastructure.
Paulig's smart mug Muki has a coffee-powered e-ink display
> Germany gave up that part of their free speech because of the horrors they inflicted upon the world, they wanted to prevent happening ever again no matter what. I've yet to see the USA make any kind of adjustment for the atrocities, torture, murders, war crimes they pulled.

This comparison really isn't apt or constructive. Not only has none of the top US leadership been indicted for war crimes in the ICC or by the UN, but the German state and quite a number of the German people knowingly participated in the extinction of at least 12 million people. Whether you think that the Iraq War was right or legal or not doesn't matter unless there is an indictment and conviction. In addition, the sum total of the crimes-- whatever they may be-- do not add up to total societal or national culpability.
Those batteries can come in useful even when you're still connected to the grid.

Right now, some locations have laws and/or regulation that force grid companies to buy solar-generated electricity from home owners at fixed rates. This makes a lot of sense right now as a measure to encourage the adoption of solar, as a way to get off fossil fuels. In the long term, it might become a less useful measure, and we might want to allow market mechanisms for time-of-day-based pricing. This is already happening on the big players' market, where you see drops of the spot price of electricity at noon on sunny days. Extending these market mechanisms to individual homes makes sense, as long as home owners are empowered by technology to make use of it.

A large battery is an important piece of such empowering technology (combined with being able to set a smart policy for when to run off the battery, when to run off the grid, and when to feed back into the grid).
A Clean Slate Web
The Silver Ball Planet: Inside a Japanese Pinball Arcade
Great minds and all that -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8248874
Well. Broadband is available wirelessly either via cell, wifi, or satellite, so there's not a requirement for a physical connection. Water and sewer have localized options with wells and septic, but they are also extremely inexpensive to build and maintain and have a relatively small environmental impact.

Electricity, on the other hand, has no viable localized option today. It's also the only one of these that has a significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself and has a significant impact to the environment.

Local power storage means that grid can balance the load between peak and non-peak times. Also, local power storage means that wind/solar now has a solution for time where power output is reduced.

Having a battery that can power a home for a week is huge, if it's affordable. This could significantly reduce power generation costs.
Or Guy Kawasaki, circa 2000

>>> Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.
It's an independence thing. If that isn't important to you, none of this is going to seem terribly useful.
Why we released a better product for free (and maybe you should, too)
I note that people replying to this are saying that you can avoid those things (if you live sufficiently rurally, which is only true of a fraction of the population), but not really saying why you'd want to.

Here in Scotland it's the other way round. Orkney is detached from the grid and trying to get itself connected, so it can better balance local renewable generation with the rest of the UK (and thence ultimately the European grid as a whole). Maybe they'll go to municipal batteries but the cost is still not attractive.
If only there was a way to review the reviewers...
I thought you mean calc.exe
I don't see the big benefit here being living off any grid. To me, the benefit could be to charge battery when electricity is cheap, and also - if the battery is portable - to easily get a power source places where there is none.
> One thing I'm fairly confident of is that just having batteries (without solar panels) to do peak-flattening temporal "arbitrage" can't make economic sense. If it did, power companies would do it themselves and keep the profit.

They're trialling that right now in the UK:
http://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2014-12-15/power-boost-as-big...
http://www.edie.net/news/6/Smarter-Network-Storage-Energy-ba...
Does anyone know if these could be a feasible energy store for people living on the Moon or Mars?
Responsible Social Share Links
And fail hard too - blackout (then brownout) are more and more a concern.
Then there's the question of the power price. I don't think the battery will be cheap when revealed, but after a while, they will and help us with solar/wind created energy.
Even with a grid connection, this would be useful as it would allow the power companies to generate more during off peak hours. A distributed power storage solution combined with a centralized power generation solution would be extremely efficient. It's like turning your home into a hybrid.
So is 387420489. The method goes, first you take 9, then you multiply 8 by 10 and add that to 9, then you multiply 4 by 100 and add that to what you have...
Edison's Revenge: The Rise of DC Power
Is Your Samsung TV Listening to You? Pen Test Partners
It's too bad to see that your comment is getting downvoted. I think it hits on some important issues.

From what I can tell, Mozilla's own Firefox feedback stats support what you're saying.

https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/?product=Firefox

It's currently showing 77% of the reports about Firefox as being 'sad', while only 23% are 'happy'. It gets even worse if Firefox OS and Firefox for Android are included, too. In that case, 86% of the reports are 'sad', and only 14% are 'happy'.

I expect disappointed users to be more likely to say something, but that's still an awfully large difference between the proportion of users who are 'happy' and those who are 'sad'. When I used Firefox for Android, I'm pretty sure it sometimes prompted me to give feedback, so it's not like only disappointed users looking to complain are being sampled.

I don't know how things work at Mozilla, but at any other software product company I've ever worked at, feedback results so out of whack would've raised a lot of eyebrows, and gotten a lot of attention. Much effort would have been put toward finding out what's wrong, and what can be done to fix it, especially if the results were consistently bad for weeks or months on end.
Ive often said either an autonomous car or remote controlled car would be amazing for the sport - possibly in formula E one day. The software that drives the car could be as much a part of the competition as the car itself.
Normal division by zero gives you Infinity. To get NaN, you have to do something as numerically confounding as divide zero by zero, which isn't any infinity, because the numerator is zero, and which isn't zero or any finite number, because the denominator is zero.
It would be much better progress if they could use the latest IE on whatever version of windows, rather than being forced develop for the lowest common denominator.

Chrome has it right, it's always the latest version, and firefox is better than it used to be, but even then they didn't say "sorry, you need the latest windows to use this version, here, have this 4 year old version instead"

It's ridiculous, and I can't think of one valid technical reason for it
I have a kid.

Lego Friends sucks. The gendering of Lego sucks. The relentless specialist themed sets sucks. The move towards many small fiddly pieces and some specialist pieces to create a Lego-thing sort of sucks.

Luckily I can ignore all of that and buy Lego Creative or Lego Classic.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/LEGO-10681-Creative-Building-Cube/dp...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/LEGO-Classic-10698-Large-Creative/dp...
EFF Calls on Syrian Government to Release Human Rights Defenders
There are many possible reasons. You might enjoy the feeling of independence or self reliance that supplying your own power brings. You might be a weed grower and not want to be found out because of your energy bills. You may feel that it's more responsible to produce your own electricity and have a clear understanding of its environmental costs. Grid power may be unreliable in your area, or expensive. Maybe you think that power lines give you cancer. Maybe grid power is simply unavailable in your location.
The Automobile Storage Battery – Its Care and Repair (1922)
The van is now in your pocket, living room, and office.
Bingo, and if you think that they're not (trying to?) watch us, you'd be wrong.
significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself

This is usually less than the efficiency drop involved in a round trip through a battery. It's not as big a factor as you think.
Let Section 215 of the Patriot Act Expires in June
>Me thinks you are the shill.

Thank you for illustrating my point so well.
>Unless you live in Germany (where there are laws forcing power companies to buy excess energy back against peak price), a battery should be the way to go.

You can get power companies in the US to buy your excess energy. The co-op that supplies my power will set up a meter if you have your own power source. If your total usage is less than what you created they will buy the power from you (not the best rate).

They will even give you money back for installing solar cells [1].

1. http://energy.gov/savings/cobb-emc-solar-rebate-program
Bycatch – a card game about drones and surveillance
From the research I've done on solar power systems (for powering homes) the market does not have an obvious pre-packaged solution that is made for storage of excess capacity generated by your solar panels.

One commonly suggested (and substantially cheaper) option is to just set things up so you don't have local battery storage and just redirect all excess power back to the utility company.

The problem with that has already been mentioned. You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for.

But beyond that, as power requirements in appliances / computers / electronic gadgets continues to decrease, and efficiency and capacity of alternative energy solutions continues to increase, there will likely come a time (in the not-too-distant-future) when there will [at least in theory] no longer be a need for utility companies.

In fact, from varied sources online I've gotten the impression that many countries (besides US) have substantially reduced power requirements per household where even today it's feasible (for those with sufficient roof space) to move all of their power usage off grid, and rely strictly on power generated by solar.
What would be the advantage of these LiPo batteries over traditional lead-based batteries? In car's, I understand weight (and volume) are really important, but for stationary usage these seem way more expensive / Wh stored?
OpenGenera 2.0 Virtual Machine Environment
No, to be fair, I haven't. It's just tiresome how every single design change by any large website generates comments exactly like this.

As somebody that has done a fair amount of usability testing, that much of why people think redesigns are unusable are simply because they were used to the old version and haven't yet spent much time with the new version. But if you show the new design and the old design to somebody that has used neither, they frequently prefer the new design. And over time, everybody kind of likes (or at least gets used to) the new design.

That doesn't mean that all redesigns are necessarily good, or even that redesigns are necessary, but the kneejerk "it's unusable!!!!!" is so cliched.
Leadership is easy: just stop lying
This is probably a hoax: http://www.hoax-slayer.com/fake-eggs-china.shtml
They were big for indie bands. They were obscure compared to actually big bands like U2 or Dire Straits. Their names would be met with blank stares in most milieux. See the comment elsewhere about "organizing a shoegaze party at a local bar, low attendance of course and ending up being kicked out by the manager because "this isn't music!"."
Verdingkinder (Contract Children) of Switzerland
It really was only a matter of time before Hung Lee created something like this. He's one of a very small group of people that truly 'gets' hiring in todays environment and I'm really not surprised to see workshape gaining traction. We're still relatively new users but we have already arranged a handful of interviews via the platform.
I didn't say what was best, I said that comparing "only" MHz is missing part of the picture. Today machines are easier to compare because they have similar functionality, but back in the day it was different.

I had a ZX Spectrum +2A back in the day and I've programmed several games for the speccy, and the attribute clash was a pain :)
OnTheMap
I took a look at those articles and they don't support the position with sufficient authority or evidence.

Consider two charts from those two blogs - chart from blog 2 shows the contribution to global GDP of India and China.

Chart 1 from blog 1 shows how growth spiked by 1820 onwards.

Even if we take the data into consideration without question, 1857 is the year when the revolt of 1857 took place in India, and the British east India gave up control of India - handing it over to the crown. So at this juncture wealth transfer to the west has already begun from India at the very least.

Should that wealth transfer not occurred, I beleove we would have had even better outcomes than what we see today.

Britain and the west was able to take advantage of new technologies and increasingly build monopolies, while abusing government regulation and dictat to pauper competition, and disenfranchise and enslave huge swathes of people.

It was known policy to convert subject colonies into markets for cheap goods, after sucking out resources via slavery on low pay. Competing businesses or crafts were also removed from the picture where possible, and it's obvious that local rulers and governments were sacked or taxed regularly.

Logically we know that a fair market creates more wealth for all who participate. Given that this was a perversion of these ideals, I suggest that the British were at the right place at the right time, and ensured a standard of living for their country men at the cost of almost every country they touched.

If on the other hand, if countries had been able to compete and import technologies - which many business men of the time did try to do - it's certain that this would have driven even more competition and innovation globally.
true but if Malware.exe ships with an addon, it could tweak Firefox user profile to allow the addon install
All those are good reasons to also have your own power. You'll get your independence and might even save some money.

But even then it's still good to be connected to the grid. It will serve as a backup line and if you produce more enery than you can consume, you might be able to sell something back to the grid.
Awesome! and great news for the renewables.

Right now, if there's a storm or what have you you can lose your heat, your power, your water - everything. Its a bit like the mainfraime/terminal days - everything is centralized, and represent single points of failure for the citizens it serves.

But with energy you create yourself, and things like water recycling or indoor farms, we could go fairly far in self-sustaining units. And instead of the grid, there could be local community sharing so if your power/water goes out you can pull from a local grid. It doesn't need to be in every home, but something more distributed means more resiliency in the system overall, and thats handy in a lot of scenarios.

All that's a ways away though - but making the energy storage better / cheaper is an important step.

But I'm curious of the environmental factors in battery production / lifetime / recycling, can anyone comment on the impact these batteries represent?
> If (universe==indifferent) meaning=null;

Why?
Wants an e-mail address before even showing me what's going on. No thanks.
Interesting piece about making of 'Citizenfour'
> Unless you live in Germany

Many populous U.S. states have net metering, New York and California inclusive.
Wonder how this would compare with Bloom Energy Server[1]

I recall Apple made some purchases or investments in these products.

[1]http://www.bloomenergy.com/fuel-cell/energy-server/
Time an Space complexity are moving targets too. The rapid change of the importance of memory locality will soon make a lot of the hard and fast data structure advice useless. At least if you program in something like C. Those n's are a lot bigger then they used to be.
It nice to know what is happening in the BBC and the tech they are using. Additionally, It is appreciated they spend the time writing up what they have done/achieved.

Rock on!