skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I'm in an area of good service (i.e. not my cement and steel coffin of workplace), my Z3c lasts 48-60 hours -- 3 "days" of use -- with ~5 hours of screen on time. I don't do much gaming on it, which probably helps.

When I'm at work though, poor reception brings me down to 30-36 hours, still pretty close to 2 days of usage though
The distinction is that you are working the land directly for your own benefit as opposed to working for someone else. If you're good at repairing thing, can grow and manage your own food stores, and live in a small enough house, you don't need to spend 40+ hours at the office working for someone else. You can accumulate enough money to pay for various things through odd tasks. It's an appealing lifestyle, but definitely not something I'd recommend for everyone.
First of all, thanks for all the great feedback. We’ve just launched in beta and we are striving to make UNLOQ the simplest authentication system. We know that we have a long way ahead of us so we appreciate all the feedback. Here’re a few answers to the comments I’ve seen above:
1. We believe it is a two factor: something you have = your phone; something you are = you’re fingerprint (for the phones that comes with this option and it is enabled); something you know = you’re PIN (you can set additional PIN’s on your profile).
2. Regular two factor provides you with a code to insert in the browser after you authenticated with username and password. We make use of two channels in order to authenticate a user: the browser used to provide the identity and the service’s server - UNLOQ server - device to provide proof of identity. We believe that this makes the system harder to break through man-in-the-middle type of attacks.
3. We know we still have to work on user experience, but entering just your email and then approving on the phone the request seems easier than entering the full set of credentials followed by another security code (as 2fa proposes)
Some things take 1 second on 1 machine beefy machine or 6 hours on a cluster due to latency issues. And yes I do mean 20,000 times slower, though 2,000 is far more common due to latency inside a datacenter being around ~500,000 ns vs ~100 ns for main memory vs 0.5 nm from L1 cache.

PS: Not that most systems are built around these kinds of edge cases, but 'just use a cluster' is often not a good option unless each node is sufficiently beefy.
Isn't that a bit like saying, "Innovation and productivity in the tech sector are at all-time highs, why would you risk that by fiddling with patent reform?" The environment is flourishing in spite of, not because of, these issues.
I hope that someone will create some crazy loud alarm that goes off once someone stretches their meeting too long and people who booked the follow-up time slot are waiting outside.
I wish there were more diagrams (like the one in this article) that explains how specific HTTPS ciphersuites work and how all keys are derived and agreed upon, and not just the initial TLS handshake. I would like to learn why I need to generate an RSA key for my server when it's just using AES in the end. I want to know the steps in the black magic involved in going from an asymmetric cipher to a symmetric one.
One consistent counterpoint and life motto that I like to strive for is: don't spend valuable time doing work you don't like. There's plenty of happiness to be had working, and that passion can bring great joy. One doesn't have to lounge around or act on a whim to find comfort.

In particular, my wife works a "normal" 45+ hour work week at a job she loves. Every evening is filled with stories of her day, and she exudes happiness when she tells them. She also gets to challenge herself with real-world problem solving. She's always moving and thinking.

Now, do our jobs take us away from our other passions? Of course! We'd both rather be climbing mountains that sitting indoors. But, there are comforts of life that we've chosen to give ourselves. Those comforts come at a cost, either in time, location or money.

I'd argue that it's better to find what makes you happy and determine what the cost of that happiness is.
Supposedly they're working on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVL54l-VWY#t=25m11
I see the value in your point, and I generally agree with it. However, in this hypothetical situation, I think you'd largely be ignoring the hypothetical product manager, any marketing involve, servers involved, code written before the software engineer that payed enough for the development (R&D?) time, etc. Also, the company probably wouldn't want to pay that person unless the value that person produces is higher than their wage. That being said, as a software developer I wouldn't argue with a more "reasonable" wage. :o)
This definition of multi-factor is a bit of a myth. All of those 3 things are something you 'know' in the sense that they all boil down to secret keys. Your dongle or phone stores a key. Your fingerprint and iris can be copied (scanned and stored digitally)
It depends on the location.

Here's a different point of view: Carlos Slim has so far been relatively unable to compete in the US. Some people argue that he does well in countries like Mexico because in those places, he can run a monopoly (like his telecom company) or oligopoly with price fixing power, generating large margin at the expense of his customers (who don't have much of a choice in the matter). Thus, his business has plenty of reserves for things like 3 day workweeks - at the expense of the population, in exactly the zero sum game you describe.

But when you look at modern American billionaires like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, they made their fortune by working intensely hard and smart in very competitive markets, and inventing or making available to the mass-market products that created billions of dollars in value. It can definitely be argued that a single individual can create billions of dollars of new wealth, and not on the "back" of others - there's a lot of very wealthy early Microsoft and Apple employees out there, and billions of dollars of value created for its customers over the last couple decades.
The article omit use as alternative to UPS + diesel engine. In that use case it is competitive.

Moreover, any modern invention could be dismissed as toy/limited use for rich. E.g. Computers, mobile phones, cars... Next generation should be even more competitive.
I'm not arguing against homesteading and it's actually been a dream of mine. However, marriage and children has altered my reality in ways that affect my ability to create a homestead.

Here in the states, you still, at a minimum, have property taxes, utilities, car/gas, etc to pay for even if you want to live a homesteading life. I lived this way for a decent portion of my childhood. We had no running water and a 12 volt electrical system in the middle of nowhere in Northern California.
Urthecast – Earth Observation as a Service
Architectural robots: The shape of the robots that will shape your home
You haven't really considered the alternatives available to you.

A non-exhaustive list of possible solutions include: Do you have a yard or patio space? Start growing your own produce. Seeds are cheap and with a bit of time and love will pay you back forever more. Tomatoes, peppers and herbs will all grow well on a window sill. Potatoes, onions and garlic will all grow in a bag in the back of the pantry if you let them. You can multiply potatoes, onions and garlic quite easily.

A big bag of flour can be found cheap (Costco for instance), make your own bread/pasta. That way you can supplement your Ramen with nutritious meals without breaking the bank.

If you're in California (or somewhere else with a high amount of sunlight, which many HN readers appear to be) perhaps think about the option of solar panels on your roof to reduce your power bill (flyers and auctions are great places to find these cheap, Google will help you with installation and then you just need to find an inspector).

Actually look at everything you spend money on in a month and ask yourself if there's a cheaper way to get those things without costing you so much money... and really look for solutions, you'd be surprised what you can find with a bit of ingenuity/creativity.
See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_comput...
I really don't understand the AMD driver complaints. I've been running AMD cards off and on for years (Last 2 cards were AMD, previous one was Nvidia) and I have zero problems with AMD drivers.

And Nvidia? There are a large number of reports that the latest drivers cause crashes and there have been problems in the past too.

I don't think the difference between AMD and nvidia is nearly as wide as nvidia fans want you to believe.
Why can't gas generators become more competitive?

Flywheel Disel Engines for example will automatically turn on when the power goes out... using a Flywheel to regulate the power the moment energy goes out... while simultaneously being the automatic-startup mechanism for the generator.

It's not like a flywheel + generator is very expensive. There's still a lot of innovation possible in the generator space.
Exactly. You can always create a demo session with a long-lasting cookie, and then associate it with a new users account when they eventually do register.
Capitalism didn't do so much on its own to create the conditions for the ultra wealthy - it's globalization that permits capital to expand and grow like cancers would metastasize. Great in theory, but there's some consequences like anything.
To be fair, Cloudflare has no concept of how much reputation you have on HN.
Thank you. My question was intended seriously, but probably came across sarcastically. FWIW, it still feels like 'not enough', but if he is pushing things in that direction, that's definitely a good sign. I didn't see the linked article before.
>For the average U.S. home to rely solely on solar panels and Tesla's new batteries, the complete system would cost roughly $98,000, according to analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Even that glum assessment assumes a house in a sunny region such as Southern California.

927 kwh / month off grid solar system : http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solarpowersystems/large-home-7...

Cost : $20,172

Two of Elon's batteries: $7k

Total cost = $27,172

How the hell did they get $98k?

I think they intentionally tried to make that number look ridiculous. I wonder if this is more of ALEC's anti-solar bullshit.
Most of what you mention, while probably true is not the issue I was replying to.

>Finally, even when results may be found, they will be attacked as being untrustable because the author must've been biased to even go looking for such results.

Sure, and that may be the problem of looking for a predetermined outcome that haberman was referring to. If your testing methods are poor enough that spurious results are likely, then the fact that all your hypothesis are somehow biased is a problem. Though I'd say the problem is more with the testing methods than with the hypothesis.

Using the LHC example again no one could attack Higgs for being biased as an argument for the boson not existing after the LHC results were in. The provenance of the hypothesis should be irrelevant if the testing methods are good enough to provide strong evidence for it.
Something this article doesn't address is the potential impact batteries everywhere could have. This quote in particular tells me the author, and the speaker, don't see it this way:

“The battery-in-every-home idea—not only do I think it doesn’t make economic sense, I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Brian Warshay, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Having a centralized grid is incredibly useful and incredibly efficient.”

The difficulty with our current power infrastructure is that there is no buffering at the consumption side. Because there is no buffering at the consumption side, the overall grid must be able to handle peak demand. That is, we must over-provision. With batteries everywhere, this isn't necessarily the case. In theory, we could all have generators, but we don't because they're noisy, smelly, and a maintenance hassle. But sticking a giant battery on the wall? I can see everyone having one, and big institutions having large arrays of them. I think that has the potential to fundamentally change our power grid.
what is "affordable" to you?

what range, wavelength (or: visible/invisible), opening angle, moving/stationary, indoor/outdoor, sunlight resistant, what target materials etc.

provide some context if you want a good answer
> The primary technique is to embed the type that is iterated over in a larger struct which contains the links. This way I can give out references to the inner type without fear of invalidating the iterator.

I see. I was too fixated in embedding a small struct with the links within the larger struct (in the style of the Linux kernel "struct list_head"), and didn't think of doing the opposite.

It probably makes being in several intrusive structs at the same time much more complicated, but I think it's possible to do without breaking anything.
Sign me in. Just purchased Lenovo A5000 instead of moving from iPhone 4 to iPhone 6. Why?

1) Because I feel Apple has screwed me. The iOS 8 update has turned my iPhone 4 into a brick. My phone now does everything iOS 6 did, but now it is slow as hell. In return, I get nothing new worth of mentioning besides animations (what a giant leap forward, Apple) and eye-bleeding colors. And turtle speed and constant hang-ups.

2) Apple isn't innovating anymore. They are busy adding "features." Sometimes the way iOS 8 works makes me think the whole iOS division lacks ideas about what else they want to add, so they are simply throwing stuff on the wall. It's hard to believe how dysfunctional iOS has started to be when Jobs left.

3) I still get eyebleeding idiotic colors on this Android device, but A5000 is four times cheaper than iPhone 6, and it delivers the same functionality, plus dual SIM capability for travel, and a 4000 mAh battery. (I am not associated with Lenovo, that was an impulse purchase.)

So after 6 years of having everything-Apple at home and at work, I think I am starting to leave Apple. Sad and happy at the same time.
There are multiple strategies that are usually handled by the database that you use. For some databases a hard power off will lose the uncommitted data, for more durable ones it waits until the write is confirmed.

Generally though, these posts are geared towards machine learning people that don't really have "live" data as frequently.
No, the problem is the other way around. Keeping them as integers and just using '/' is what's causnig the problem. You can either force them to be floats (not the result, the parameters in the calculation), or you can explicitly look for divisions that have remainders.
Erm... or centralized storage mechanisms could be built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

Do you have any idea how many Li-Ion batteries would be needed to match the 30 GIGAWATT-hours of storage potential in the Bath County pumped storage plant?

The problem is that California didn't build enough of these 20 years ago. California has a couple of pumped-storage plants coming in... and as soon as they're built then net-metering will be even better for consumers.

In general, centralized storage at the utility-level will benefit from scale. Redox batteries will probably be cheaper and more efficient than Li-Ion batteries that Tesla is putting out.

And Pumped-Hydro is already much much cheaper, and has existed since the 60s.
Problem with Net Metering (at least for the people I know int he northeast who have solar) is that when the lights go out they are in the same boat as everyone else... where I live we have had multiple week+ outages. They, like everyone else, have to have a generator to keep things going (despite solar up on the roof). A battery would replace the generator and UPS in that case.

Of course, the week+ outage is usually due to ungodly amounts of snow... sooooo solar may not be your friend then...
I've a low-end Xperia which I use almost entirely for calling and texting - no apps, no browsing, disabled WiFi and data transfer. The battery lasts a week :) and I don't get any annoying notifications or waste time on pointless apps. I'm planning to get a "dumbphone" with small screen and physical keyboard, but I can't find one with an incoming calls blacklist which is a must for me. Other than that, I'll happily throw my smartphone away and never use one again.
Misfit Shine and the Pros and Cons of Wearable Fitness Trackers
Very pleased with my shine not always easy to Sync, but deal able. Have worn mine many types of ways. Discovered the lost of mine when I went to remove my shoes. Had it in the lase as described however it somehow slipped from the loop and magnet and is gone and I can't find it yet. So this flaw is what I am upset about. relying on a rubber and magnet is not enough on a shoe I think now. brgordon98@yahoo.com
The people who own the machines that do the work do have more time for themselves.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 mini that fits 2 out of the three requirements, and battery life absolutely sucks. Especially the standby battery life.

New flagships have much better battery with big screens and faster SoC's.
That's how accidents are made. If you can't spend a small fraction of the budget for the solution to experimentally verify that it is in fact the optimum solution you may very well be leading the company down a road that will cost them significantly more. It's not up to the writer of the article to provide you with the tools to run your least-cost-analysis, that's up to you and your bosses! (After all, you're the beneficiaries.)
The drift speed of the electrons is actually not that important at all. If we communicated over the atlantic ocean by gently pushing on very long sticks, the atoms in the stick might not move faster than a few mm/s, but the signal could be transmitted at the speed of sound for the material composing the stick.

So your real question is "what is the speed of sound for electrons in a conductor?", i.e., how fast do disturbances travel? Wikipedia calls this the "speed of electricity", and it's of order half the speed of light:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity

So the propagation speed of signals for electrons versus photons is not a very good explanation for the potential advantages of photonic computers.
So this seems to use 6.144TiB as the limit that will fit in RAM. That's 1.536TiB x 4 when using the latest Xeon I could find[1]. According to the specs though you should be able to use 8, so the total limit should actually be 1.536 x 8 = 12.288 TiB. 12TiB of RAM, that's quite amazing.

[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/84688/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E7-...
> Well, the above scenario is not science fiction anymore.

Proceeds to describe something that is not the above scenario.

Secondly, this ignores the reality that phones in the hands of real users are not a reliable means of identification. People lose or change their phones all the time.

Next, this creates a massive road block for users in trying to sign up. As it stands now, unloq limits itself to a single email for a single user.

This also ties your authentication to a third party service. What assurances does unloq provide should they go the way of seemingly every other startup these days? What happens when Google buys them?

The "Passwords are obsolete" mantra is built around one assumption:

"Specifically, the ability to send an email or SMS to users reliably and quickly."

And the problem with that assumption is that it's wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. 100% wrong. Relying on a system like this will cause problems for your users, and it will be impossible to fix with software.
Yes. Just yesterday in some other story everyone was arguing for the cloud because who wants to maintain their own hardware? This morning the hue and cry is "slap more RAN in that puppy".

I just speced out a 6TB Dell server. Price? It is already at $600K, and I haven't fully speced it out yet (just processor, memory, drive). Maybe that memory requirement is high (though it is about what I would need); 1TB is somewhat over $200K.

For the right situation that sort of thing maybe makes sense, though I'm SOL if I need high availability (power out, internet flakey, RAM chip goes bad, etc leaves me dead in the water).

So I would need to stand up a million or more in equipment in several places, or just use AWS and suffer the scorn of someone saying 'you could have put that in RAM'. Yes. Yes I could have.
"the owner bitterly congratulates me on striking a bargain he would never had agreed to in less desperate times. I am as crafty as a Bedouin, as wily as a serpent, and his only request is that I not tell anyone how good a deal I struck tonight lest he become the laughingstock of the city. Then he undermines his words by throwing in a couple of pieces for free."

One of the funniest things I've read this month :)
I thought this was going to be about how mountains looked too short in Google Earth, so they amplified the height changes by 3x to make them look right. If you go into the settings and put it back to 1x all the mountains look really flat.
Actually, that particular hypothetical would happen at the speed of sound in marbles (plus some corrective factors due to the interfaces between the individual marbles).

But your intuition about propagation vs drift velocity is correct.
Centralized storage doesn't offer some of the benefits in-home batteries do, though, like the ability to store up power from home solar, or the ability to keep your furnace running in a power outage.
What is "all n cases" when you are quantifying over all "n"?. There are an infinitude of cases. You need induction.
Please give us your feedback or ask us anything!
Clipboard Hijacking with HTML5 in Chrome
Aren't you afraid, given the SuperFish scandal, they also install some bullshit crapware on their consumer phones? Yeah, I know, most vendors do, but the SuperFish was a new level of bullshit and a high security threat.
Database Normalization Primer: How (and how not) to decompose relations
> Of course, the week+ outage is usually due to ungodly amounts of snow... sooooo solar may not be your friend then...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuQhlENQoIE
Getting caught lying will make it even worse.
DopeLearning: A Computational Approach to Rap Lyrics Generation
Sometimes even decent smartphones cut on surprising camera features. The Moto G has a fixed focus, makes me regret the Nexus S...
Interesting to watch how quickly people are dismissing this as something you need to be ultra-rich to pull off. You don't. If you're reading this, chances are you can do it.

That's right. You can do this.

I think my bill rate is pretty realistic for a developer, and I can more than sustain my family working four 8-hour days (so I do). You only need to make 25% more than the average joe to pull that off. And seriously, if you're a developer and you're not making >100% more than the average joe, you really need to go have a talk with your employer about the current state of the market. So yeah, all of us make enough to do this.

No need to scrimp. No need to be the CEO. The math just plain works out.

Incidentally, the author is right. Even taking one extra day off per week has had a huge effect on my quality of life and overall health. I get outside a lot more, play with the kids a lot more, don't seem to get sick at all anymore, and come in to each week completely fresh and actually missing work a bit. It's cool.

I still kick around the idea of dropping down from my current 4 day weeks to 3 or even 2 day weeks.