skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Living without running water sucked. We had to drive to town (another expense) to shower at the campgrounds for a dollar, three times per week. We also had to drive to a rest stop south of our town to fill our 50 gallon barrel full of water for the week.

Obtaining running water was the first thing we did but it consisted of hiring a well witcher, drilling for water, putting a well in, putting in a pressure tank and piping to the house. It was a major expense. We had gray water for a few years, but eventually had to put in a septic system when we ditched the outhouse and installed a toilet.
The price of 6TB is more in the range of 1/2 million. 64GB LRDIMM Octal rank is running $4.5K.
techdevman, unfortunately your posts are dead and you probably aren't aware of it. I would welcome you to the site, but the site has evidently decided it doesn't want you here. :-(
The rhetorical dodge is to say of Facebook (or whoever, doesn't matter), A) pretend that the data they collect is necessary to provide their user facing features and B) a private company that blah blah blah you know where this goes and all sides of the arguments for / against.

I largely agree with where you're coming from. Any cultrual shift to bring back to data privacy will have to apply to government and indivudials/companies. You can't really have "but it's different when I do it" in a moral standard.
The very fact that they claim that makes me uncomfortable with their knowledge of security.
Doesn't CAES require gas or other fuel for reheat on expansion?
Wouldn't it be much easier to buy some of the leaky/crapy but popular apps, and then infect the target phones? Or, perhaps develop few apps providing free backup/storage/VPN/proxy services? There are so many small companies provide phone backup services who technically ask for all critical permissions in the phones. There are many flash light apps who ask for so many unnecessary permissions, yet their downloads are in millions.

Certainly, Apple app screening would be pain in the a$$, but Google play store is still very flexible.
Elfu – hosti lammen, program like elves do
In-memory database on a ramdisk, replicating to an on-disk database. All reads answered from the RAM master, while the replica only has to answer writes.

But I suspect that it's all already in the disk cache. Is the bottleneck reads or writes?
I have a Nexus 5 I've had for, well, going on a year and half now, and with the exception of the battery (which for me lasts most of the day), it has been an exceptional phone. For only $400ish (bought full retail through Google), it has met or surpasses my ROI. It is still as fast today as when I bought it. I am always up to date with the latest version of Android. It rarely crashes or even hiccups. I am very satisfied with it. I am a little sad that the Nexus 6 cost so much more, but even if it was the same price as the Nexus 5, I currently have no need to upgrade my phone. I plan on using this as long as it will go, which I'm guessing might be another year or two, maybe even longer.
I upvoted this purely because of the title!
This is the second article I've seen from Bloomberg that ignores two-thirds of what Tesla actually said and thus massively misses the point. I'm starting to think it's intentional.

No kidding this isn't (currently) attractive for North American homes. If I recall correctly, they basically said that in the press conference, though I can't find the link now. They were expecting it to be more useful in places with lots of solar and dodgy electric grids, such as Australia.

Bloomberg also goes on and on about utility scale storage. They apparently didn't read the press kit, where Tesla talked about how they're doing just that.

Press Kit - http://www.teslamotors.com/presskit
The Logjam Attack
Don't forget line losses [1,2] -- closer the point of generation and the point of consumption, the lesser they are.

[1] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/1.2-Trillion-Met...

[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS
Elfu is experimental programming language on top of Javascript, that uses dozens of UNICODE symbols and makes code extremely compact.
Thanks for the reply. Ofcourse, I disabled all the privacy settings that I can through settings in Chromium. But still, I could not avoid connections on startup on Chromium. It generally is not a problem, but I do not want Google to know whenever I open the browser :)
It should be noted that hairworks crushes the entire game no matter what GPU you have (Nvidia or otherwise) except for one, the Titan X, which retails just north of a thousand dollars.

Everyone else is pretty much forced to turn down some setting or another to hit 60+ fps. And that's just at 1080p! I thought my GTX970 would handle it no problem, but there are still tweaks to be made.
Can you point me to cheap 64GB LRDIMM Octal rank memory? Dell's prices for this seem to be the market rate, but maybe I don't know where to shop.
Because renowned economists were so good at predicting the last crash, they are the only ones listening to?
Agreed. It's hard to look at this S6 and NOT shake your head. 8 cores. 3GB of memory. And it does a fraction (in terms of use cases covered) of a laptop with a full blown desktop OS.

What.. for? What use case on a phone requires so much silicone? I am fine with ~beefy~ handsets to - I don't know - support multi tasking between a couple of applications. But this? I feel I miss the entire target market (again). It seems I don't understand how you're expected to use your phone to actually require all these resources.
Hobbyst programmer – please help me to choose the right, time-proof tools
Dear HN,

I am just a hobbyst programmer (recently worked as a senior BPMS analyst for one of the "big four" consulting companies), still learning to code, but software engineering will rather not be something I do professionally for a living. I'm 29.

There are a couple of things I would like to build (scholar notes manager, complex Hebrew typesetting software with an extensive critical apparatus support, a space flight simulator education game for teaching math) but I cannot decide what tools should I use for that purpose. Again - I am not doing this for money, nor as a business, and my main focus right now is academic and completely outside of IT.

I have a strong self-thaught foundation in JAVA, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a little bit of C++ and Python (I have not build anything useful yet, just bits and pieces for fun, at most 200 lines of code). I know nothing about algorithms except for a couple of cooking recepies and nothing about design patterns except that they exist.

It's high time to start these 3 projects I mentioned above. But when I did the first version of the scholar notes manager in PHP, I was ridiculed by my brother and some other friends when I shared this idea, because PHP, as they argued, is an embarrasingly outdated technology of the previous decade. So I swiched to JAVA, hoping that it will be a more universal, portable, enerprise backed (and therefore long lasting?) tool, that would also be a better ornament to my CV than just PHP and HTML. So I've spent the last 5 months going through an old Head First book, learning SWING, which also appeared to be obsolete.

Please help me decide - should I abandon these languages and swich to Python+Qt? I don't mind that (I love to learn), but it again means postponing the actual production by at least 6 months. I am also afraid that other languages would not have enough extensive, well written and freely available documentation and tutorials.

continued in the first comment
The more informative original release from the University of Utah:
http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/silicon-photonics/
Termflix
What I don't understand, is the comment about relocating like it's like taking a walk in the park.

Have you taken a look at how expensive simply moving is? There's the rental truck or pod, there's first, last and security deposit for the new place. Sometimes there's a doubling up of rent. If you're moving to different cities, there's the price of gas or diesel for your moving truck. Not to mention the time and energy it takes to pack up and move.

Relocating isn't as easy as some people make it out to be....
The diff is literaly linked in the article.
Using "big data" technology is more than just an factor of input size. If your operations making the data bigger, you might well need a bigger tool. You can start with a data set on the middle-to-high-end of memory-sized, but if you have an operation in there which combinatorially explodes the input data, Spark is going to start looking pretty good.
> if you buy a cluster with X amount of RAM

That's not the only option. You can rent a cluster for a lot cheaper.
I find wrk is well optimized and it uses C. So it's hard to beat that :)
Thanks! this is exactly what I was looking for. I may be missing something but I found it odd that the CERN website didn't have any more detailed breakdowns of the experiments and setups like the article you linked.
continued

I know that this issue has been discussed here on HN in extenso, but again: my situation is different, because I am not a professional counting on the bigs bucks to come.
The reason I am so much concerned is that I want to share my work as an open source, free project, not only for my private satisfaction, but primarily so that others would be able to use them or possibly continue to build them if I come across some hard problems I can't technically overcome - without needing to completely refacture/re-write the code.

Any suggestions?

Would anyone take me under his mentorship (maybe a skype once every two-months?) to help me make the right architectural decisions?

And finally - I am a bit scepticall about using GitHub. Isn't it a bit of an overkill for a one man project? Is it really the only right way to get noticed these days?

Best regards,
Would love to know your thoughts on how you are using containers. Plus, 1 in 50 wins a $50 Amazon giftcard. Thanks!
Wrong notes and syntax errors: The joy of improv in music and code
NASA new CubeSat concept for planetary exploration
I was wondering what motion sensors had to do with scheduling. When I think scheduling, I think of putting in advance that you will be using the room at such and such time for this long.

This isn't really scheduling, it's just an occupancy indicator. It marks the room as occupied when it detects motion inside, I guess so that somebody else can check for a currently free room without having to walk to it and peek in.

Looks like they combine it with a beacon system. The beacon picks up people who work there who have the app, and the motion detector tries to catch visitors who do not have the app.

Sounds like you could do the same thing with a turnstile. Or better yet, a light switch to indicate occupancy.
Strange that this let me resubmit the same link. Usually HN will detect duplicates.
This is my thinking as well. As you advance up the ladder of business, you get some unexpected benefits. The higher I go, I feel the less "tough" I have to be, as those under me are being tough for me. I find the less overtime and "skill work" I have to do, because those under me are doing that. Compared to my younger self I'm much less stressed and just overall nicer to staff, clients, etc.

If I had some narcissistic level of tunnel vision I'd say I'm like this because I'm a good person - see how amazing I am? In reality, I'm only like this because others are suffering for me and the lack of suffering allows me to act a certain way. Slim doesn't seem to realize this, or like most public figures, makes public statements for his own political ends not out of belief (remaining likeable, etc). This was recently addressed by this great Atlantic article, "Why It Pays to be a Jerk"

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/why-it-p...

Personally, I'm a little surprised we havent moved to a 6 hour work day. I feel between 3-5 no one is productive and leaving at 3 ties in nicely when school ends and gets you a couple hours of much needed sunlight and freetime/chores time/family time/exercise time. Funny how pro-family politicians never fight for more hours to spend with your family. I told myself long ago that if any of my little side-projects takes off, I'd make a real effort to implement the 6 hour workday. So far, no luck, but I feel its feasible. Most places I've worked at have a unwritten rule of no meetings and no "real" work after 3:30 or so. 9-1 seems to be when everything gets done.
Is anyone else struck by the "banality of evil" aspect to all these internal powerpoint style presentations? These documents are interchangeable with some plumbing and heating supply chain company marketing presentation, except they are spying on the planet.
>Look at the link you posted. The recommended battery pack for that system is 62kWh (1284Ah * 48VDC)

Oh look. It's $8k. So the total price is $28k.

62 kwh is over two full day's worth of electricity usage for the average US home. I actually think that's probably quite a bit more than you need. Two of Elon's batteries is 20kwh, which is about 2/3 of an average day's usage - enough to last most people the night, right?

>Now, on to the panels. The sizing of the system you posted indicates it assumes 5 Sun hours per day. Most of the US gets less than that

$98k was in California right? According to this, Los Angeles gets 5.62. Manhattan gets 4.57.

http://www.bigfrogmountain.com/SunHoursPerDay.html

>it looks like 4.3 is a good average for the US

Why not pick 3.9 and assume that everybody gets as much as Fairbanks, Alaska?
> personality trait that is reasonably unusual in the general population

I'm not sure this part is true. "submission to a fairly arbitrary set of rules" sounds like every job.

> that's not normally what people think of when they think of "working for the NSA".

Most people working for the NSA aren't working as a "Jason Bourne"-type (which is what we think of as "working for the NSA).

I would claim the NSA's very much like a standard employer... but with a (significantly) more heavily enforced NDA.
That's like passing up a great car because you don't like the color of the steering wheel.
What is equity?
OCaml 4.03 will, “if all goes well”, support multicore
Can we also repeal the law that gives carriers and ISPs immunity when sharing customer data with law enforcement agencies? Why in the world would they need immunity if they simply obey the law? (that says they need to give that data when properly requested)

Oh, that's right - because they often violate even those laws to help the NSA or FBI or the police, and they don't want to be on the hook for it.

Giving immunity like this to companies creates such terrible incentives. Hopefully after the USA Freedom Act (whether it passes or not) the civil liberties organizations will fight to roll-back that immunity as well - especially if the USA Freedom Act passes and allows carriers to keep the data for NSA.
Yes this is the real story. We expect our spy agencies to spy on enemies, or violent and malicious individuals or organizations out to do us harm.

It turns out they're spying on us. That's a big difference. And it's a problem.
> everyone was arguing for the cloud because who wants to maintain their own hardware?

Well, I keep arguing against that, because you still get 90%+ of the maintenance work, plus some new maintenance work you didn't have before, to avoid some some relatively minor hardware maintenance. And you can get most of the benefits of non-cloud deployment with managed hosting where you never have to touch the hardware yourself.

I work both on "cloud only" setups and on physical hardware sitting in racks I manage, and you know what? The operational effort for the cloud setup is far higher even considering it costs me 1.5 hours in just travel time (combined both ways) every time I need to visit the data centre.

For starters, while servers fail and require manual maintenance, those failures are rare compared to the litany of issues I have to protect against in cloud setups because they happen often enough to be a problem. (The majority of the servers I deal with have uptimes in the multi-year range; average server failure rate is low enough that maintenance cost per server is in the single digit percentage of server and hosting costs). Secondly I have to fight against all kind of design issues with the specific cloud providers that are often sub-optimal and require extra effort (e.g. I lose flexibility to pick the best hardware configurations).

Cloud services have their place, but far too many people just assumes they're going to be cheaper, and proceed to spend three times as much what it'd cost them to just buy or lease some hardware, or rent managed hosting services.

Even if you don't want to maintain your own hardware, AWS is almost never cost effective if you keep instances alive more than 6-8 hours of the day in general. Your mileage may wary, of course.
the rate limit can be per username/per ip address/per time period (you receive one notification once every 10 minutes), or a combination.
Yes, when you have a botnet of a few thousands computers you could DoS someone. But with that in hand you can also DoS every web service on the internet (with a few exceptions)
For the one WP site I have to maintain, I keep things as simple as possible. I avoid plugins as much as possible and push as much functionality as possible to the frontend using Javascript.

For stuff that requires collecting data I will send the form data to a separate Clojure server where I can store and process the data in a sane way and then redirect back to Wordpress as needed.

It is probably over complicating things just for the sake of avoiding having to learn PHP and deal with stuff I don't (want to) understand - but on the whole it works quite well.
Once again, Scientific Linux delivers :P
Bitbar Raises a New Funding Round to Expand Its Offerings
I lurk (mostly) on the Postgres general mailing list (not the hacker list), and I recognize a lot of the names in that article. I've got to say that the helpfulness and civility of the folks there is amazing. I'm sorry to hear there are tensions around the release process. I'm glad the article expressed that in spite of those tensions, there is basically good will. That fits my impression of the community. I don't write much C, but I've got a few features I'd love to find time to contribute. I'd be honored to be a part of that project.
Despite the negative replies you've gotten, I would actually agree that PostgreSQL admin tools are, by and large, not as good as MySQL ones. But that is changing - and I was happy to drop $10 on Navicat Essentials for PostgreSQL a while back.
it's a start. Rome wasn't built in a day
Clean way to limit the execution of a java code block by a timeout
Congrats, that's $1.277 Trillion in batteries to match the $5 billion Bath County Pumped Storage station.

Its not about whether or not someone can produce the batteries. Its about whether or not its cheaper to build centralized storage. Frankly, Pumped Hydro is extremely cheap in contrast to batteries.

Do you want to spend $5 Billion on a pumped hydro station? Or do you want to spend $1,200+ Billion mining a volatile metal out of the ground and building chemical batteries?

I think it is clear which solution is better for America in the long run.
? Quoting the article:

> Respecting agreements not to spy on each others' citizens, the spying partners focused their attention on servers in non-Five Eyes countries,
That's why fuel efficient driving techniques are so great. Save you cash and stop the stupidity http://eartheasy.com/move_fuel_efficient_driving.html
No, the profit of co-generation from 100W of computation has to be greater than (the productivity loss from the geographic dispersion of the computational resources minus the cost of actively cooling the computers).

The electricity is free because it would already have been spent on computation (plus some more on cooling that computation, which is no longer necessary).
We already provide analytics about the searches performed on your indices.
However, we focus on user-facing search use-cases. We don't recommend using Algolia for processing your logs for example. See this quora answer for an Elasticsearch / Algolia comparison:
http://www.quora.com/How-does-Elasticsearch-relate-and-or-co...
Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?
Hey all,

The recent HN post on the "$10 super computer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9575683) was actually very timely, as I am working at a client in the financial space who is evaluating various IaaS providers (up until now they have been using a small on-site data center). There is plenty information out there about which services are available, but less about why one should choose any particular provider over another. I'm curious to hear about the experiences of the HN community on this, and especially from those who have used several different services. What sealed the deal for you? Was it the price? Ecosystem of services? Ease of use? Was it the only thing available at the time? etc. Would also love to hear about any other factors one should take into account when making this kind of decision.
> So, let's say my system is currently backed by MySQL or PostgreSQL, and that is not fungible. How would one move that data into RAM,

MySQL and PostgreSQL will totally take advantage of all of the RAM you give them.

> including writes?

This is harder, and you might not want it? It's worth noting that this argument is almost certainly directed against things like Hadoop, which claim to trade off performance for low management and easy scalability.

There's also a bunch of databases aimed at this use case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_in-memory_databases), but I don't have any experience with them.

> I don't really care if I lose X amount of time worth of data (say, five minutes),

MySQL has generally got your back in the 'less safety for more performance' arena:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-parameters.htm...
Stress Paradox. Why It’s Not Always a Bad Thing
Most people who think they have "big data" problems actually don't have "big" data at all.
I guess I didn't mention it, but obviously (or at least, obvious to me knowing my system), it is writes that are slow. Reading pages can all come from memory, as the whole database is cached in RAM (I've given MySQL plenty of space to store the whole site in memory). But, writing a new post or page can take up to 30 seconds or so, which is simply absurd.

There is something pathological about our disk subsystem on that particular system, which is another issue, but it has often struck me as annoying that I can't just tell MySQL or MariaDB, "I don't care if you lose a few minutes of data. Just be consistent after a crash."