skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. No. I don't.

I need a Terry Pratchett philosopher to help here, but they're all in the bath.

First, the inelasticity means that a tax is a great way to raise taxes, but a terrible way to reduce use. Oil has gotten more expensive lots of times, when has it ever made people take the bus? We've seen oil price fluctuations. A tax will work just like a natural price hike. A nasty painful tax (with street protests just short of revolution) might get you a 10% reduction in emissions, maybe 30% over a really long time if your tolerance for civil unrest is above average. Probably less. Also, flat taxes hit poor people hard.

Second, a carbon tax is an almost hopeless mission. We're having enough trouble with money taxes. I mean we might be able to make carbon tax or cap-and-trade or something in that family of thing work in a country. We might even be able to get it partially functional in the EU, NAFTA or some group level. We are absolutely not ready to pull off this level of cooperation at international scale yet.

We will have cheating and defecting. Carbon tax evasion and carbon tax loopholes and carbon tax havens, or whatever the gasey equivalents of monetary tax mess are.

A great book (though slightly dated now) on climate change is "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer. He's a shining beacon journalist and an ex soldier-scholar tip. He made the argument (I'm paraphrasing) that we're lucky we hit this problem now, when we have a chance of cooperating at this scale. Imagine if you had to get China, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Canada and everyone else to cooperate in the 1700s. I like the thinking, but I think he's overestimating our chances. It's straddling the border region between optimisms and lunacy.

We have spent the last 20 years trying to come up with a light weight agreement for minimal reductions in rates of expansion. The idea was, put in a framework, make it easy and painless at first. Then turn the crank. We failed! We failed at ground level, well before the point where it even starts to sting. Even though the targets were way under what we need to be targeting in order to avert disaster based on the median models (or the most lenient ones), we failed to agree on them. And, when we did agree them, we failed to meet them.

Technology is the only way out of this.
Layer API Changelog
That blanket message appears to be another way of wording "it has access to what you type into a browser" (plus an Internet connection).

Who would have thought that the browser has access to what you type into it???? Surely keyboards should come with massive warning stickers to highlight the danger.
Is this very much different from how arguments work in Scheme or Lisp? Seems like this might just be a feature of interpreted languages.
The first review about a wife buy Echo for her husband with Parkinson's warms my heart. Its so inspiring to see how technology has such a great impact on people's lives! Definitely would recommend reading as a pick-me-up for the day.
Why we’re not in a tech bubble
One quick clarifying note: the reason he said in the video that bottles have an edge is because he was treating it as a planar manifold.

Topology is an interesting area of study.
If you already have a dam, why would a day or two's worth of water be troublesome?
> You call it Alexa, not Echo.

I thought the idea was you could call it whatever you want in the official version, but the beta just had it set to Alexa?
What a vapid and pointless post... As if using some magic words will somehow get you noticed... Oh wait, it's focused on marketers. It all makes sense now.
I also use it in a console when needs must. Using dillo over SSH/X forwarding is painful sometimes (particularly as dillo wouldn't compile due to bust FLTK source).
Do you deploy the same docker image to each environment, and somehow retrieve the configuration files on startup? Or do you rebuild your images as you promote from dev to staging to prod?
CCloud TV BETA – Popcorntime for Live TV
Yes, that python patch is only halfway to a proper indirect threaded dispatch, it still got a lookup table. See the OCaml bytecode VM for a really high performance example of this approach.

> a more complex VM possibly operating on an abstract syntax tree

Don't do it.
Electricity was crazy in SoCal last night, almost brownout. I wonder if some long distance lines were shut down preemptively to avoid an incident like the Northeast.
- http://orgmode.org/ (or Evernote, this-pad, that-pad...)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmark_%28World_Wide_Web%29

- Direct link to parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764039
If that's how you feel, give examples why. Personally I don't think what is in that post is too far off from reality; "renewable" energy is a net loss still. Nuclear is the cleanest source per measure of energy produced option we have.
Easy J (2002) [pdf]
Yev from Backblaze here -> Nice work!
Why can't such agreements be made mandatory public? All these backroom discussions of far reaching proposals like Internet censorship are simply disgusting.
Re: 1-I support balanced development (yes, including nuclear, but I get why some don't like it), but solar is AWESOME to pair with central electric production. It actually HELPS out with this issue. Very hot, sunny days is when there is peak power consumption. It's also the peak of solar production and can help avoid utilities having to spin up the (very expensive) temporary peaker plants.

Re: 2-Again, depending on how you look at it, solar helps with this, at least for homeowner rooftop production. If I'm producing my own electricity on-site, the utility company electricity never has to step-down voltages and move that last mile. I'm not using it (or I'm using less of it) so the energy coming from a central power plant never has to come down the "last mile" to me! Feeding back in is where you've got a bit of a point, but it's not really worse than with central production. In general distributed generation is going to be vastly more efficient (from the perspective of line losses) than central generation. Also, why bring up batteries? You don't need batteries to produce solar. If you have extra power, most people are feeding it into the grid, not batteries.

Re: 3-Agreed. Creating the panels is in general a very energy intensive process (in ways unrelated to the rare earth components), not to be ignored. It takes time for an "energy payback" if you will, but it's there. And the panels are very long-lasting.
As we recently saw with this feature being forced into Chromium, implementations change, and auto-updates happen.

Even if the current implementation acts as you describe, do you trust that Amazon won't change4 that behaviour in the future? How about when Amazon is handed a national security letter? Do you trust Amazon to pull a LavaBit to avoid having to change the firmware? Do you trust that Amazon actually got the security right and nobody will ever crack the device and change its behavior?

Also, claiming that other devices are also surveillance tools does not excuse this device.
And now a new era of Man begins
Interesting product. Better than my bank.
A problem being, if you open the door, you don't control who comes through. I am totally against an open borders policy.
But will it? The big lesson of 2009 was that ratings agencies aren't trustworthy and investment banks have no problem selling you junk investments.

The Dollar Shave Club looks like a prudent investment in comparison. Perhaps it's overvalued, but it's safe from outright fraud.
The governments of the world will allow decentralization only to the point where it starts to cut into the tax proceeds of centralized energy. In the U.S., solar isn't going to move to rooftops, it's going to move to panel arrays on large swaths of government-owned land out west where it can still be metered and taxed.
It seems to be the norm. "Hey Siri" is three syllables. "OK Google" is four. "Hey Cortana" is also four.

I bet they really can't find a 2-syllable word that doesn't false positive all over the place. At least not with either the quality of speech recognition or the wide range of accents that need to be understood.
You could essentially do the same through Siri - in either event, the separation of the entities still makes sense.

I don't personally understand the need to humanize interactive services and apps, but I guess Siri made that appealing.
Famous Framework is Out
Other than the fact that littering is typically a legal offense (albeit an extremely minor one, as it should be), I think you're saying exactly the same thing.

A safety net is exactly what a welfare or other charity system should be. I'm simply suggesting that ensuring it's no more than a safety net should be backed up by more than just shame.

To be clear, the reason to not do something wrong shouldn't just be "because I'll get in legal trouble if I do"; laws should reflect morality. But that needs to be around as a backup for the sadly large number of people who will only pay attention to that and nothing less. Some people avoid littering because it's wrong and disrepectful to others; others avoid littering because it's illegal and will cost them a fine. Some people avoid drinking and driving because it could hurt or kill people; others only avoid it because it's illegal. Some people turn down charity because they actively want to be self-sufficient and contribute something; others will only do so if it is limited to need.

> There is no welfare system in existence, theoretical or otherwise that could sustain a disproportionally large number of people dependent on it by active choice, where there is more being taken out then being paid into it. There isn't a socialist democracy that can function that way.

Agreed completely. There isn't any governmental or societal system that can function that way.
"People who care will have turned them off" That is not true. I have my cookies on, but when visiting a site claiming that they use cookies I will react differently depending on the site. I will either carry on or leave.

Some people care about privacy, especially when it comes to cookies. You should be upset at the nasty ways companies use them to track people instead of the lawmakers trying to protect citizens' privacy.
A Comparison of Three Proportional Selection Algos in Python
So... a better leap motion?
Seriously! I rolled my eyes at that one. The author even acknowledges he won't prove what he just said, it's just a gut feeling that using text protocols over binary protocols wastes enough energy to be noticeable.
I wasn't aware that airport displays like that are available to the public. Fascinating!
We need AGPL algorithms and training datasets for voice recognition, plus user-programmable open-source firmware for on-device wake word recognition.

If we can end the false privacy-convenience tradeoff, then the technology can be applied for goals defined by users rather than select business interests.

Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a mature proprietary product that runs locally on Windows. It has an SDK for custom integration, http://www.nuance.com/for-developers/dragon/client-sdk/index...
Dang, I should have bought at the $99 price point when I had my chance.
How does wind power match the output of hydraulic power? Hydro generation can be turned on and off pretty much at will. The only limitation is that the level of your reservoir can't drop below a certain level. But the reservoirs are huge and typically operate far away from the minimum level. Hydro plants are a perfect complement to anything because of this. Unless the region suffers a years-long drought, you can operate the hydro plant at will, and turn it on whenever your less reliable stuff isn't operating. Add a pump and you can even operate it as a gigantic battery. The only problem with hydro power is that there isn't enough of it to run everything. If there were, we wouldn't even think about running anything else.

Losses become less important as things move to renewable. Who cares if your storage batteries lose 20% of your solar power to inefficiencies? That's energy that you were going to just radiate back into space otherwise. If solar becomes really cheap, that just means you slap on some more solar panels and call it a day. And don't forget that solar production matches up well with peak electricity consumption, and transmission losses are small in the common case where production and consumption are co-located.
I took the Dan Grossman's PL course, so I appreciate how good Standard ML is.)
If you're looking for the relevant space weather-related graphs I suggest http://spaceweathernews.com/ (the planetary-K index shows our current geomagnetic storm level)
Same goes for if you have a bigger screen but don't maximize your browser.

Windows has terrible virtual desktop support; as a result, I don't usually scale windows to full screen so I can actually keep multiple windows straight. One of my big pet peeves is when websites don't scale well to smaller width or height (height seems to be particularly neglected by web developers).
Not quite - tidal power is purely gravitational, and doesn't rely on nuclear forces at all.
Who's the "we" here? It's already possible to write your own smartphone apps that basically do what supercomputers do. If you work in the field that supercomputers were designed to help (scientists, basically), I'd imagine that they could be very handy, since you could plug your cell phone into a workbench and get results immediately rather than needing to do laborious data entry.

The problem with information is that it's only valuable in context. Scientific computing has given us wonderful breakthroughs, but it needs lab equipment, it needs data collection, it needs trained scientists, it needs theories and hypotheses to test. Computing was developed to break Nazi codes; the Enigma machine may have been the star of the show, but it also depended upon radio intercepts, field operatives, dispatch runners, generals, soldiers in the trenches, people who built fighter planes, etc. - and it obviously wouldn't have been useful had we not been at war. Similarly, most of the consumer data that's vacuumed up is only useful in the context of a task that millions of consumers want to do.

You're right that there's a power imbalance in the distribution of this information. The problem is that this power imbalance doesn't exist because of the information, it exists because of the context in which the information is collected and applied. Find a context where information can let you deliver a better product than competitors, and it's easily worth billions of dollars. But the information on its own - minus the product design, minus everybody else's information, minus the brand name and distribution channel and user adoption - is worth zero. It's already possible to siphon off and redirect all data that is being sent to Facebook & Google's servers on your behalf and save it to use on your own personal behalf. The problem is - it's useless. Without everyone else's data, there's nothing you can do with it.
Fusion is basic science research. In a few decades it may become engineering.

Making solar and storage cheaper is already engineering.

I do expect fusion to out-compete solar and storage eventually, but probably not in the next 50 years unless one of the fringe groups does something amazing.
There should be no SEO value to posting on a site like this.

I can't think of many ways to enforce this that wouldn't be annoying to users, but it should be a wasteland for marketers.
(BrianB from Backblaze here)

Yes, that's right. When a drive is replaced, its contents are rebuilt from the data on the 19 corresponding drives in the other 19 pods in the vault.
This might be one of the most trivial questions, but I always tried to find the answer, failing always.

How is it that Solar energy is 'clean' and 'renewable', (or for that matter, any natural source of energy that plays a significant role on earth ecology), for if we make use of solar energy, will it not break the environmental equilibrium (temperatures, weather patterns etc) thereby making it 'unclean'? I see that using solar energy doesn't create any direct poisonous residue, but what about the unintended indirect effects? Did researchers already prove that there won'e be any effects or that the effects are far less significant than existing energy sources? (I would like to read actual research, apart from opinions/thoughts)
Would it not be mutually beneficial for Apple to relinquish their 30% cut from app sales? More developers would focus on iOS (because of the money), they'd make better quality apps, and Apple would sell more hardware.
A generous plea bargain: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/06/17/imminent-p....
Hasn't it been on the verge of changing forever forever?
The Top 20 CS Schools (Roll on You Bears)
Why does designing a simple A/B test seem so complicated?
Fossil fuels are massively subsidized by being allowed to pollute without paying for the consequences. They are not cheap when you account for the externalities they're allowed to impose.

The decision to allow fossil fuel users to poison us all is a political one and it's pretty much the only reason renewables are even still a question instead of being the obvious answer.
You mean like creating a website using Wix for instance? Well the answer is always the same: They work as long as you do thing exactly as they intended it. As soon as you want something a bit different, you will have to either forget it or start to hack around it. But for instance for a barber shop, it would be nonsense to pay a developer to create a website when they can just use a premade solution and customize it a little bit. Now, if you want to do something a bit more serious, you will definitely need to code.
Spring Guides Move to Java 8
(See the sibling comment with a "10." in it for context.)

1. Bounded gaps between primes. This one's pretty easy to describe, though the details of how it works are harder.

There seem to be quite a lot of pairs of prime numbers just 2 apart. 3,5; 5,7; 11,13; 17,19; etc. Are there infinitely many? Everyone expects that there are, and there's even a plausible conjecture for how common they are. But no one has been able to prove it. This is yet another of those "additive versus multiplicative structure of the integers" things, like the Goldbach conjecture. And, like the Goldbach conjecture, what everyone believes is that the two structures are kinda independent, almost as if the prime numbers are chosen at random apart from some simple constraints.

Zhang made a big step in the direction of this "twin primes conjecture", though we're still a long way from proving it. He proved that there are infinitely many pairs of primes no more than 70,000,000 apart. (Other people have subsequently reduced that bound to 246. Still a lot bigger than 2.)

I don't know enough analytic number theory to say much about how Zhang's proof works. The first (and deepest) step is to get some bounds on (roughly) how much the density of primes that are k mod m can vary with k. (So, e.g., any prime number >3 must be either 1 mod 6 or 5 mod 6; if you look at prime numbers between x and 2x, how different can the number of them that are 1 mod 6 and the number that are 5 mod 6 be?)

Having done that, he uses a technique called "sieve theory", which has been around for a while, to prove that for a certain (rather large) k the following holds: If you have an "admissible" set of k numbers -- I'll say what that means in a second -- then there are infinitely many n such that when you add n to each of your k numbers, you can find two primes among the results. And "admissible" means that there's no prime for which your k numbers cover all the possible values mod p. So, e.g., {2,4,6} is not admissible because these numbers include every possible value mod 3. But {2,4,8} is admissible.

And then getting from there to the actual theorem turns out to be pretty simple.

What came next after Zhang's work was that, as I mentioned, a bunch of people whittled his bound from 70 million down to 246, and established a connection between this work and something called the Elliott-Halberstam conjecture, and found that if EH is true then the number would go from 246 to 12 -- or even to 6, if a stronger version of EH is true. It doesn't seem possible to go further than that without major new ideas.
Ask HN: How bad is the SSL certificate “spurious” error problem
Browser warnings such as "Servers's certificate is not trusted" occur on websites for a variety of reasons, many of them that can be "fixed" in browser settings by the end user. Are there any statistics for how common this is, or breakdowns of warning types? They are common enough that many users simply ignore these warnings, even though they make it difficult to click through to the site.
I'd really like a summary of this.

Yes I see the irony.
Fusion accidents are much less likely - they need to be constantly supplied with new fuel for the reaction to continue. If they get hit by an earthquake / terrorist attack / other emergency, the natural tendency of the system is to stop moving things, including the fuel, which means that the source of energy is immediately removed, and the danger with it. At worst the reactor itself may get destroyed, but containment techniques should guarantee minimal radiation escaping to the environment.

Fission on the other hand requires a large quantity of fuel just to get the chain reaction started, so if things go wrong, you'd better have a robust cooling system, because nothing is going to stop that fuel from producing lots of waste heat. The fuel melts and escapes containment, radiating surrounding groundwater and the general environment. Even without catastrophes, fission results in lots of irradiated coolants and 'spent' fuel that is still hot enough that it needs to be stored in water for years after it leaves the reactor.
"I doubt I'll try Gillette's shave club as I've heard they just send out their "not as sharp" razors for the reduced price."

I have actually bought OEM hard drives from the Apple store that I can buy cheaper on Amazon on the theory that Apple gets the better drives. I don't know if I am right but that is my theory and is based on past experience with other products (and similar to what you are saying).
already exists. It's called pumped storage hydroelectricity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

Here's one (built in 1977.. uses power from the grid), and can produce 3000MW (stores 24000MWH): http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/27/2524501/hydro-pu...

Many of them were built to make nuclear plants more efficient.. nuclear plants turbines are most efficient at full power.. so they would store the water during the night (when demand is low) and then use it the next day to handle peak demand.

So they were also made to start generating electricity quickly.. the one above takes 5-10minutes.. but there are others that respond within a minute. Much faster than starting a oil-fired generator.

These account for the vast majority (90%+) of stored capacity worldwide.

There's no reason they couldn't be used to store solar/wind energy.
Introduction to Spring Batch
They don't need a lot of Tellurium, and that's only for the "thin film" cadmium-telluride ones. Most are mono- or poly-crystalline.

There's quite a few nasty intermediate chemicals: http://www.solarindustrymag.com/issues/SI1309/FEAT_05_Hazard... - but the responsible manufacturer will recycle them on-site.

"Rare earth" supply concerns usually means neodymium for magnets. In any case, most of them could be extracted from aluminium mine tailings ("red mud") at moderate expense.
It is kind of surprising to learn that those Big Law Firms rolling in huge piles of cash minute by the minute do not want to spend a mere couple of thousands for a member of their team.

Is it because petitioning for a candidate without a STEM degree is that much harder?