skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've long wanted to run DC in my house, but there's no standard. Do I run 120v, 240v, 5v, 12v? Which interface do I use? Barrel connectors, USB, cigarette lighter? If we have a large-scale movement to household DC, we'd have these things hammered out without me rewiring every appliance.

If these obstacles were overcome, almost everything in my house could run on DC. Most stuff either converts to DC internally, or doesn't care.
I'm not a fan of the WorkShape matching algorithm. The form isn't in regards to proficiencies but rather what your ideal job function would be spanning all proficiencies.

Realistically, one's experience isn't likely to match up with their ideal working environment.

Trying to pair an employer's requirements to an applicants ideal job would require an order of magnitude more users on both sides before you see realistic matches.
Gaza Hackers Successfully Target Israel with ‘Porn Star Video’ Malware
In my experience, there are two schools of thought in this area:
1) You want developers in-house because they're creating your product. This generates your revenue, so you want to be intimately involved (not outsourced).
2) You want very, very low overhead and/or aren't in a time crunch to deliver the product or new features. Which gives you more flexibility to handle somewhat lower quality (and more difficult* to manage) outsourced developers.

* Not as easy because they are not in-house.
I thought this was interesting in light of the article about Tesla expanding into home batteries. Large energy storage is going to become ubiquitous in the near future, and it will be interesting to see if the batteries will be as maintainable and hackable as they were in 1922. Already we hear of Prius owners rebuilding their battery packs instead of paying Toyota to replace them. In this case, all that was needed was to clean some corroded bus bars: http://imgur.com/gallery/j8Bcp
My original comment on this whole discussion was that few databases write more than 100GB a day. I am not talking about whether you inserted n integers or updated so many varchar columns -- when you actually monitor its IO, it is extremely unlikely that your database exceeds 100GB a day of writes, and in all likelihood is a magnitude or two below this. Whenever anyone waves their hands and talks about databases as if they somehow imply massive use, they're just fearmongering -- actual empirical stats are your friend, and actual empirical stats show that most real-world databases barely register on the lifespan of most SSDs.

So now that we're in an understanding that we're talking about database writes to IO, the other matter is how it writes it. I've built a lot of systems on a lot of databases, and the write amplification has generally been very low. I've been building and running significant databases on SSDs for about 7 years now, and while everyone else is finally starting to realize that they're wasting their time if they aren't, we still see the sort of extreme niche fearmongering that makes other people clutch onto their magnetic storage (and I heard it the entire time. "OMG but don't databases kill flash???!?!?". No, certain volumes of writes and types of writes do. Only metering will tell you if that applies). Yes, some people do very odd things that can kill storage, but that is extremely rare. It almost certainly doesn't apply to the overwhelming percentage of HN readers.
OK, let's take 0 to mean does not write tests on principle and 1 to mean writes minimal tests grudgingly if required by policy.
Show HN: Humanism.sh - subjective but sensible defaults for shell use
> 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.

That's not a problem, that's how the markets work. When electricity is abundant (i.e. sun is shining, wind is blowing), it's cheap; when it's in demand (in the evening, after the sun and wind stop but people want to cook and watch TV), it's expensive.

The problem with energy storage isn't just a home-problem, it's a network-wide issue. AFAIK, current batteries aren't really able to solve this issue, in the long-term (i.e. considering the lifetime and replacement of the battery).
Given the recent press of how civil forfeiture laws have been / are being abused by police departments in this country [1], the idea that the Obama Admninistration would try to float such an idea, much less try to get it passed into legislation is mind boggling. Just shows just how out of touch they really are.

1. http://www.cato.org/events/policing-profit-abuse-civil-asset...
Arguably with money cheap at the moment, it's a good investment.
To be honest people have pointed out problems with that as well.
I have home back-up power based on an inverter charging a lead-acid battery (located in a sheltered area outside the home), which costs about $100/kWh. Usage is about 1-2 hours discharge per day. No matter how well serviced, I've found these batteries don't last beyond four years. Hence I'd pay even $400/kWh for a well-engineered deep-cycle battery that is safe, maintenance-free, and will last at least 10 years. Excluding balance of system, even.
Absurdism [1] is one of three philosophical doctrines (along with existentialism [2] and nihilism [3]) that try to reconcile the fact that we live in a meaningless universe when our human tendency is to seek value and meaning in life.

Existentialism argues that we create our own meaning by living life and exercising our free will. Nihilism counters that there is no meaning and so nothing matters. Absurdism is the acceptance that life is ridiculous and by defiantly laughing at it we can live authentically.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
Not a battery engineer (but my dad was)...

Pros: Higher energy density, so you don't need much room for the batteries. They don't emit hydrogen when being charged like lead-acid does, so you don't need safety ventilation.

Cons: Not as conveniently recyclable as lead-acid (there's existing infrastructure for this is already in place).

The site isn't coming up for me (neither is google cache) but I'm wondering it they went with LiFePo4 batteries - they have a gentler failure mode than some of the other lithium chemistries.
Samsung Unprotected Production Server Monitoring Dashboard
stumbled upon this while googling about an opsworks problem. Seems to be the real thing...
PersistIQ (YC S14) Is Hiring a Content/Growth Marketer
Blogspam. Original source: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/02/18/researchers-grow-hu...
A combination of reasons:

1) Most companies are not institutionally comfortable with remote working, to say nothing of remote working internationally.

2) There exist pervasive skill gaps between talented engineers available to work at $150k per year and talented engineers available to work for $12k per year. I respect that many people wished this was not the case.

3) Many investors in the Valley, whose opinions are quite relevant given that one cannot self-fund employee salaries, are of the opinion that outsourcing development work suggests a tech company which will never achieve the path to $100 million in revenue followed by a $N billion valuation, which is what their business model counsels them to search for. They would point out "I cannot think of a single company whose product was not produced in-house in history which achieved that" and they would not be far from wrong.

4) Managing outsourced development is a skill, and its a skill that most companies and individuals suck at, and do not particularly wish to become great at.

5) It is the widespread perception in the American tech industry that BPO companies produce software whose quality is abominable and that the process of dealing with them is pathological, as evidenced by the fact that only companies which institutionally hate software and software people are willing to work with BPO companies. Many in the American tech industry do not hate software or software people, and thus would have a very high bar to be convinced to use a BPO company.
If there is no risk, it sounds like a good fit for a bank loan.
It's very hard to beat lead-acid on:

- $/Wh

- number of cycles

- ability to be recycled at eol

- loss of capacity over the lifetime of the battery (or beyond!)

- safety

It is easy to beat on

- power density

- weight

- maintenance

- mechanical stability (especially for fluid based cells)

- installation cost (lead/acid requires a sealed enclosure venting to the outside to get rid of free oxygen and hydrogen)

The same batteries that work well for automotive applications will not do that well when you're building a storage cell for a house.

Lithium-ion does not have a whole lot of edge over lead-acid deep cycle gel cells when it comes to stationary applications.

The biggest issue with Lead-acid is that if you don't water them (if you use fluid based cells rather than gel based cells) that sulfur bridges can grow between the plates causing a cell to be shorted out. Gel based cells don't have that problem and are common in deep discharge setups.
Also many municipalities don't allow battery 'grid-tie' with the option of 'off the grid' living. For example, Connecticut has laws which don't allow houses to have batteries that would allow a house to be self sustaining and have a connection to the grid. This is because if you have batteries which cause a back flow during a power outage to the power station, an electrical worker could get shocked down the road.

The fact that lithium batteries aren't the greenest combined with the fact that you can't even live 'off the grid' in a grid tied system is a big uphill for these batteries.
The NPT doesn't say that. All nuclear weapon states are bound to seek complete disarmament, verified by the international community.
I wish sites would add automatic abbr tags to think like FWIW or, in this case, TANSTAAFL so those no in the know can easily mouse over and see what the hell you are saying.
http://www.instructables.com/answers/Why-DC-current-is-not-u...
Is the app actually available? It is said to be available on the Play Store after "unblinding" (I assume that means something like after publishing, it doesn't seem to be an actual word[1]) but presently I cannot find it.

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unblinding
I like this a lot! If I allow myself explanation, I'd say your findings make a lot of sense, but I will instead heed the title of Duncan Watts' latest, "Everything is Obvious*: Until You Know the Answer" :)

I wonder how much engagement you'd get if you made a browser plugin or even an alternative website that showed users a random selection from the top three pages of reddit/HN, then intercepted and logged their upvotes, to get a direct measure of intrinsic quality, rather than estimating this statistically. I for one would use such an interface.

On a sidenote. Have you seen this work in predicting the growth of ongoing cascades from Facebook [1]? I'm fixing to see if their findings apply to the MusicLab data.

[1] https://research.facebook.com/publications/680551081983090/c...
I checked in UK and was unable to find it. More recently came across this http://bricks.stackexchange.com/questions/939/which-sets-cur...

Awesome to know I can still get it, ordering one for my son via UK if I can find it.
This still doesn't solve the essential problem with these batteries:

They're about $20k each, and they only last about 4 years.
FTK will immediately identify there was another volume mounted regularly, if you are hiding stuff from the law it will be used against you as obstruction of investigation or some other bs
I'd imagine in this case they are looking at the economy of scale they'll be able to gain when producing these out of the gigafactory. I'd be interested to see the $/Wh cost difference once it comes fully online.
"This, of course, raises the question, "Will the unbranded or the Developer builds be sufficiently similar to the Release versions out in the real world that developers can stand by their testing results?""

Yes. It's the same code with different logo.
I was lucky enough to have been around - and relatively well-funded enough - in those days, and quite a user of portables, as we called them (laptop was not yet in the vernacular). As a developer doing support for customer installations across the continent, it was vital for me to have my own computer with me. Writing bug-fixes in the hotel room in the evenings and then having very pleasant customer-paid lunches and so on the following day while the install proceeded - this was a big part of why I insisted my company not chintz out on the "field system" .. which in my case, over a period of the 80's and 90's meant I went through many of the greats: Grid, Atari, Osborne, Compaq, Winbook, Sabre, and then .. that fateful switch to Apple, of all people, when they released the tiBook.

So far, in the last decade and a half, as a laptop devotee it has been very, very hard to kick the Apple habit. There simply isn't anything like the MBP out there. There wasn't anything like the first tiBook, either. Its a class Apple seemingly own.

In hindsight, this article really brings back some memories, and as well gives a bit of a rear-view mirror look back at the way things progressed. I do recall, back in the days of the Grid machine (which I still hold dear as a device), that the only 'luggable'/'portable'/'laptop'-style people that I encountered in the air lounges were also mostly the developer types; i.e. Programmers, Systems Analysts, etc. It has sort of been with mirth and humor that I've been observing the whole laptop market has exploded into dire consumerism..

So this article really resonates, anyway.
You submitted to hackernews. It made the front page. Whether or not you're a meticulous person by nature, not proofreading will suggest you have a lackadaisical attitude towards quality and correctness.
Class in building a computer from “first principles”
Source Bloomberg article
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-12/tesla-plan...
JavaScript Console Recorder + Playback
It won't remove the long tail. And telling your clients "We don't support Windows 7, you should upgrade to Windows 10" won't cut it.
You really can't think of a technical reason?

Now I am not involved with IE at all, but i think it's safe to assume that they are most likely using new APIs which are specific to that platform.

Now that's not an excuse, as they could write in fallbacks for platforms that don't have this, but it's definitely a valid reason.
In '97 they sold 500 Mhz PC (Alpha CPU) with 64 MByte RAM für about 7000 DM (Windows NT had Alpha Support)
Isn't the idea that you keep it topped of and use it when grid power is expensive or missing? That usage pattern would involve multiple charge cycles, perhaps even 365 in a year. I guess it would actually follow the Tesla charging patterns fairly close as well. What is the estimated lifetime of a Tesla's battery?
honest question. do you guys want a piece of crap from me that illustrates a new application type? (the way bittorrent or bitcoin or napster or wikipedia was new?) or should I wait.

I don't have any resources to put into this but can release a piece of crap myself. (I don't personally program professionally.) honest question - discuss.

would you like a piece of crap - or for me to wait. (Nobody more competent is going to just code this for me, at least not until the piece of crap exists and has traction.) I don't really envision other options but am open to them. What should I do? Get it right (not happening) or get it out?
Building smarter, more robust API clients
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" from Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, a highly recommended read.
Then that electrical worker would have to take precations (like disconnect the system), no? Sounds like it's just something that can be held in account. Plus the battery could not flow back to the grid in case of power outage (but instead power the own house first)
A properly wired transfer switch fully cures that risk.
> This is because if you have batteries which cause a back flow during a power outage to the power station, an electrical worker could get shocked down the road.

Surely there is some safe way of preventing this?
Even 'better' is that most of the on-demand generation is coal-fired plants.
A few reasons:

1. Everybody knows J. If you were involved in hardcore or underground metal in the 80s, you knew J. It didn’t hurt that J sweats coolness.

2. Likewise, everybody knows Lou. And most people LOVE Lou. Hell, I hung out with Lou when I was 16 and it was incredible (http://nmh.livejournal.com/3336.html).

3. J’s guitar playing broke punk. While he was a super competent guitarist in era of less than competent guitarists, he still used the shitty Jazzmasters everybody else was using. He was an inspiration from a technical perspective.
You might wanna re-submit this. HN went down shortly after this was posted.
Methods used to increase energy and stop being tired
There is another option: work for a salary, live frugally, and stockpile savings. Then later (maybe 5-10 years later), work on the tech you really want to work on that has no obvious & immediate business need. The upside is that because no one invested or hired you to work on it, you own 100% of that work.
I do love when companies share this stuff. Thanks.

> Rather than using PHP or Java (that was the requisite of the Forge platform), we have chosen a non-blocking framework, NodeJS with the Express framework . This allows us to serve more simultaneous requests, increasing the performance of the application.

I don't doubt this is true, but its worth noting you can get good performance out of a "blocking" framework too. Node.js does better than others in some situations, but in this its not a snowflake, and is in some regards worse.

But I will criticize priorities: I think this is too much fad, not enough practical. the experience is notably worse than the old site, and it seems like they just threw buzzwords at their problems instead of really crafting a solid solution.

I think where they're coming from, maybe this makes sense - they needed to overshoot from their previous platform. But I think they'll find it problematic in the long run and change some of their approaches and release a new site, and that will be a good platform and serve their needs for a good while.
>This is because if you have batteries which cause a back flow during a power outage to the power station, an electrical worker could get shocked down the road.

If I were an electrical worked I'd treat a power line like it was live regardless of whether there is a power outage or not.
Did you notice Parse easter egg?
> When they actually get somewhere they'll rewrite it in a better language.

Anecdata for you: Not necessairly. I'm working for a company which has "actually gotten somewhere", and our development team is still writing in Node with Mongo.

Of course, there is a reason for it, the front end development team has spare cycles, and the backend team does not. Ergo, Node!
Why do you think your client would sell you his business for the book value of its assets if it allows him to make "additional" $46k per month?

Also, wouldn't your client also sell his services to this other industry if he had the correct contacts? If you also do not have the correct contacts what makes you think you can create them better or more easily than your client?

If you have developed the whole system anyway, why not build a new one using your earned skills and experience?
We have all lived through the improvements in construction with tools that don't need to be plugged in and phones that are unplugged. The next logical step is homes that are unplugged and self power generating. There is an incredible gap in society in the U.S. created by the tax code whereby if you make $25,000 and are a family of 5, you receive enough tax and food benefits and medical insurance to be equal to the person that makes $65,000 per year. And if your income increases to $45,000, you will be losing money, so there is no motivation to reach that point. The Living Off The Grid topic has gone viral because those stuck in the gap seek a way up without increasing income, because it's hard to increase income without hurting oneself. But the idea of downsizing and saving up has become popular with it. Getting a little plat of land and a trailer or a tiny house for a time while saving up.... growing food, having chickens, all are ways to save up and gain without actual cash income increase. Adding solar power to the mix helps prevent power bills. It is also a terrific way to fire the local monopoly power company, who may or may not in your area have any decency of customer service. Without competition, why would they have to care. But the off grid movement is pulling the carpet out from under these government allowed monopolies and forcing competition. In the same stroke, it removes the tax burden from the homeowner that was included in the electric bill. If you have a solar or wind power system and charge your Tesla car too, then you have a completely tax free energy system. It sounds like it's taking away from the government, but the neat thing is, this can also be used to alleviate financial strain on the government. If you can provide a self powered mobile home with rain-water collection to section 8 housing, then the government is also saving on those utility expenses. And land is cheaper a little further out. I recently bought 10 acres in Creek county Oklahoma. The power company wanted $10,000 to add one pole into the land and connection. I opted that it was better to spend that money on a solar power system. The same was true of water with huge expense, so I opted for rainwater and later to add a well. The up front costs associated with being on the grid for many rural areas, or adding more power poles is really more than costs will continue to be as they come down down down for self power generation. This is all exciting to me. We have to consider total impact. Hydro power is still a hugely terrific producer of energy. Rain that fills the lake.... the lake is a battery.... stored to produce energy. So rain makes our energy. This is still a much better solution than building batteries for large power needs. Yet the infrastructure and labor required to put in poles and wires is too high for homes in light of these modern developements. I look forward to an exciting and bright future. ~David Webster Offgridquest.com and Facebook's Living off the Grid
Cool. This is why lean testing and continually asking for feedback is also a great idea.
I wonder how did they pick that "cops and robbers" game in the first place...
Even though they're stylistically pretty different, there are some similarities to Dinosaur Jr. in Uncle Tupelo's earlier more rock-centric stuff. Obviously they never did the J Mascis-style shredding, but some of the other elements are there. I would have never made this connection without your comment though.

Now I have to check out Slowdive...
Most briliant explanation i've ever read on how to triforce.
Tesla batteries retail for $30K@85KWh, so approximately $350/Wh, Lead-acid deep discharge is about $10000/100KWh, so approximately $100/Wh. That's a pretty large gap.
Oh now this is cool. I tried to do something similar for designers a while back[0] but this is a much nicer system! Would love if you added a designer version!

[0] http://codepen.io/jamesdelaneyie/pen/uIdie