skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I clicked your link, and clicked "How it works?" and was taken to a registration page. Is that intentional? Why would I sign up for something that I have no clue what it is?
Great to hear! Able to mention any names? I haven't heard of any YC-backed solar companies beyond Bright, nor seen any at Intersolar or any of the bay area solar industry events. It would be great to see some new faces in the bay area solar startup community.
That list was a paraphrased version of what I've picked up reading HN and talking to a few entrepreneurs near where I go to college.

As a whole if you're trying to start a company I'd say you must be able to answer two questions:
1. What is the need I am satisfying
2. Can this be profitable

For the kind of list you're talking about, the business model canvas is a great resource
http://businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas/bmc?_ga=1.20278319...

and then if you have more time on your hands, Peter Thiel (Founder of Paypal) led a really good class at Stanford on how to start a company, which is entirely transcribed in a blog by Blake Masters
http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup
<-This was the series that first got me really interested in startups, and is also indirectly how I discovered Hacker News. Definitely worth the read

Additionally, Sam Altman taught the class a few years later and recorded the whole thing on video. It's equally excellent http://startupclass.samaltman.com/
Help need a utility to undervolt and disable turbo boost on Mac OS X
Long standing heating issue on Macbook (MB,MBP,MBPr) has been a major problem for media author, developers and power users. If anyone interested to develop a reliable power management utility to undervolt CPU and disable turbo boost in MBP r2015?
Spam has fallen to a 10-year low and is unlikely to make a comeback
There's likely otherwise stuff to it, e.g. Does all the boring housekeeping commits, patches security vulnerabilities etc, leaving others to work on the 'sexy' stuff like new features.
Yeah somehow "the start button is back" and "I remember using alt-f4" don't seem like great reasons to switch honestly.
Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook
40 Years in Prison
1) Government help seems to be a factor, but not a guarantee of success. Solyndra, A123 and Fisker Automotive all were recipient of government loans or grants, yet for various reasons are not around today.

2) This comes up in libertarian circles frequently, and is usually meant as deriding comment, but it's important to keep in mind that all energy business has government involvement in some ways. Nuclear and hydro are frequently government-owned, coal was subsidized back in the days when it got its start, there are natural monopolies involved in grid and energy distribution. Solar, however, enables such a great level of autonomy, that it might just be the last sector where government and private interests are intertwined.
their sample looks very cool: http://dpaste.com/0533J4M

they will release the code after their BlackHat USA talk.
I retired at 30. The best part isn't leisure – it's freedom.
size_t is also unsigned (no idea why). The signed equivalent is ssize_t.

Edit: Sorry, missed the "i-- > 0" at first. The code works, but not because of changing "unsigned" to "size_t".
Dang. I'll pay to watch the movie...
I confused him with Ryū Murakami, another novelist but very different style.
That's funny that would say that since what you are saying is completely wrong. Different techniques would have different probabilities, but none would have what you are describing.
I've spent over a decade in finance and barely feel justified in an investment strategy beyond "target fund". Everything in that article is true, but immaterial. The vast majority of retirement investment strategies are beaten by target funds. Unless you are sure you are the exception you can do much worse than a low fee target fund.
10 Most Popular New Tech Products (July 2015)
The book The Path Between The Seas is an incredible history of the Panama Canal. http://www.amazon.com/The-Path-Between-Seas-1870-1914-ebook/...

Short version: the French tried to build it as an investment, but the vision they could sell (sea level canal) couldn't be built. USA took over and muscled through because it was strategically important to the govt and it was a huge jobs program and stimulus to American companies selling food, transportation, steel, construction equipment, medicine, etc to the 30k+ workers. Also gave electrical projects to a young GE!
From Wikipedia:
In 2008, SolarCity introduced a new solar lease option for homeowners that significantly reduces or eliminates the upfront cost of installing solar power.

Several companies were offering Solar lease in 2007.

The article seem to imply that SolarCity invented Solar Leasing which is inaccurate.
Victoria Taylor Reflects on Her Time at Reddit
It comes down to prior restraint.

With most laws, there is the possibility of breaking them and maybe you have to face the consequences.

With this stuff, you won't be able to use the stuff for what it wasn't designed for. Stronger guarantees. It's like a car that slows down in a construction zone, and is unable to go any faster, instead of cops giving tickets. Like the 90 year old engineer guy behind the Venus project says in his interviews.

That can be useful. Not for everything, but for a whole lot. The current DRM stuff works like this.
This is really cool! It'd be interesting to use in conjunction with Duktape [1] or a similar embeddable scripting engine to let people write small plugins and mods for a game/app easily.

[1]: http://duktape.org/
Na man you need to go on more walks.

Coding doesn't happen at a kiosk.
This is what Silicon Valley actually believes
addendum: yerba maté
I enjoyed that little essay about the origins of his writing career so much

Have you read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_I_Talk_About_When_I_Talk_... ?

That wiki article doesn't really do the contents of the book justice.
We had one before but the types of products varied so wildly the ultimate cost was different. Currently we capture all that data and give our final price which uses our calculator.

Though we'll discuss this issue and if it keeps coming up we'll act on it.
I'm not sure how it is in other fields, but in Astronomy we have a monolithic database of publications (called ADS) where you can search by author or title or date or keywords etc. And there are sort options for views, downloads, citations, etc (all with time data, so you can see trending behaviors). IMO that serves the same function as "Like" but better.
And still, www forums lack the most basic filtering and killfile capabilities that a usenet reader had 20 years ago.
Digitarians know how to push big buttons, know nothing of how said buttons work, progress indeed. Depends on your definition of progress.
This project looks great!

Is anybody working full-time on the project? Are there plans to commercialize any aspects of this? How confident are you that the project will get to "1.0".
Good talk. I enjoyed the fact that she put up both a voice recording and a text version with images. I listened and followed along.
17 Tips for Joining a Project with Legacy Code
> "SolarCity quotes a "very high" price if any one asks for a SolarPV to own"

My rooftop solar (I believe it'll be ~6kw; installation is soon) is around $20,000 to own outright, which includes 30 years of maintenance, whether or not I pay it off early. Once it's paid, it's mine.

That's actually not a "very high" price compared to decades of electricity, particularly not once you include the federal tax credit (30% of the system price). So you're right that the federal tax credit is a big deal, but I wouldn't have described the system as a "very high" price (it's around the same amount as the average "minor" kitchen remodel.)

EDIT: the big deal with the federal tax credit is that it can be used as a down payment, which makes the overall system payments begin at a lower price than grid electricity rather than a slightly higher price. This means monetary savings is immediate.
Asian American Writers' Workshop – Our Complicity with Excess
Or rather:

I am so sick of reading about your calendar/planning startup. It is a company with similar people, using similar technology, doing similar things for the same amount of money and cultural mindshare. Sure everyone likes you as you are the new kid on the block, but can you disrupt some other thing you do not enjoy for the sake of your consumer? You are really boring me.

No one ask Van Gogh to paint another Starry Night, man. (It is this quite, oft-repeated by my parents, that makes me thinks Jodie Mitchell is a true genius).

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/489495-that-s-one-thing-tha...
Assume sizeof(int) == sizeof(unsigned int) == 4

g << h Well defined because 2147483648 can be represented in a 32 bit unsigned int

Even under those assumptions, it is implementation defined if unsigned int can hold the value 2^31. It is perfectly valid to have an UINT_MAX value of 2^31-1. In that case the code will cause undefined behavior.

The only guarantee for unsigned int is that it's UINT_MAX value is at least 2^16-1, regardless of its bit size, and that it has at least as much value bits as a signed int.

For example C allows these ranges:

int: -2^31 , 2^31-1

unsigned int: 0 , 2^31-1
You know, I am pretty impressed I got down-voted. Every time I see someone mock Java or PHP around here, people are quick to point out no language is perfect and personal biases are not great for reasoned discussioned. I thought there was no perfect language?

C is also boring, but I assumed mocking it here would be asking for free kicks to the face. Apparently, I was wrong.
Little bloopers like this always confuse me. The people who can create a "new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol" can't configure basic DNS?
Sorry. That is bug. Will fix it.
This was in a game engine, written by a guy who is adored here, if I said his name, I'd probably been downvoted to negative :)
I don't think it's necessarily bad to jam on some themes which you've found to work, looking for the perfect permutation of those ideas.

One of my favorite authors Hermann Hesse has very similar themes in almost every book, with just very different remixes on the same concepts. But I love it that he kept searching for the perfect way to present those themes.

Jumping into a different world, if you look at some stand-up comedians like Louis C.K., they have a certain set that they repeat and perfect over time.

A short ebook I recently read (Hooked On You) put it nicely: "Think of yourself as a DJ building a set. The stories are the records in your record box. All you have to do is choose the right ones, and play them in the right order."
For ISPs there simply wasn't enough customer usage of NNTP servers to justify their continued existance. 5 years ago when I was working at a mid-sized ISP only about 2% of our customers used our NNTP servers. We carried binary groups and offered pretty good retention/completion but by then even the pirates had mostly ditched NNTP for torrents. At the time we estimated that we had maybe about a dozen customers accessing the server for non-binary / piracy use.

Going back further to why NNTP became irrelevant for discussion I'd say it was a combination of difficult setup for the average user and the lack of good free NNTP clients. Early web forums could offer discussion for free without the difficulty / expense of a NNTP client. As NNTP groups became more insular the miserable trolls were able to take over and ruin it for everyone. Almost every group I was active in during the late 90s deteriorated in this way. Just one mentally ill and/or very lonely person posting 50+ times per day could very effectively destroy a group.
Don't jinx it!
Also, I wonder where any of this (solar city, spacex and tesla) would be without government help

Has any world-changing industry gotten anywhere without government help?
Harbors generally are freshwater, and boundaries between fresh and sea water are innumerable, if you stop and think about it for a few seconds. If this was a real problem it would have contaminated Lake Michigan and the Hudson Valley by the same means.

The reason it hasn't is that water generally doesn't flow uphill.
In my team, we are currently developing native Android app with Kotlin. At first, I wasn't sure it was going to be successful but when I looked back it was the best decision ever made to my team. Kotlin is short, concise yet powerful. Lambda, and extension are the best features. You can design your API interface in the most expressive way. It help makes communication between objects much much easier.

For Android development, it is even sweeter, who likes keep using `findViewById()`. Kotlin-Android-Extension does that automagically.

I even write my own HTTP lib for Android entirely in Kotlin. If you like to check it out, here it is (https://github.com/kittinunf/Fuel)
It looks like that was added in 2008[1] by an anonymous editor likely affiliated with SolarCity[2]. This is par for the course for a Wikipedia article about an operating business.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SolarCity&type=re...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/UVHaight
Didn't they almost go out of business completely due to a cash shortage, I thought the govt loan was instrumental in keeping that from happening. That seems quite different than a "cash buffer".
I clicked your link. Then tried a few variations of it. Didn't work. It's online now. That means they can't do HA and rolling updates on the cheap despite all the software/hardware to do so. Can't rely on that but they'll pull off:

"This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other."

Wouldn't rely on it for production. I'll go back later and check it out for curiosity, though.
If your domain is 0..99 for example, using unsigned and <100 is nicer than using signed and two conditionals. Detecting overflows is easier, not harder.

In c, unsigned behavior is also less UB.

And while the enforcement isn't there, it is still better to communicate your intent with the more precise type.
Holy hell is this a puff piece. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of SolarCity, but this story is written as if they invented the solar boom that's happening now.

Three major factors contributed to making solar as viable as it is now, none of which Solar City invented (but it is executing on them better).

1. Germany basically subsidizing China (and others) to build the massive solar panel production pipeline it has now that are producing ridiculously cheap panels[1].

2. Financial innovation to allow consumers and installers to pay for panels over time (PPA, leases, loans, etc.). These were originally pioneered by SunEdison[2], and the industry has been innovating on them since (including SolarCity with its MyPower Loan).

3. The California Solar Initiative[3] and Department of Energy's Sunshot Initiative[4]. Both were incredibly well designed to gradually wean solar off of subsidies and foster innovation through strategic grants, and they have worked incredibly well at teaching the solar industry to stand on its own two feet. We are well on our way to $1/watt[5].

SolarCity has executed incredibly well in this industry, so they definitely deserve tons of credit for installing so much solar. But it's a disservice to the rest of the companies, governments, and financiers to say they invented the recent growth. Everyone, including SolarCity, has come together to build a mature and exponentially growing industry that was 1 out of every 78 jobs last year.

[1]: http://qz.com/41166/how-germanys-energy-transformation-has-t...

[2]: http://archive.onearth.org/article/selling-the-sun

[3]: http://www.gosolarcalifornia.ca.gov/csi/index.php

[4]: http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/sunshot-initiative

[5]: http://cleantechnica.com/2015/07/10/price-solar-hits-record-...
Which commands do they use to start? "Ok, tablet"? Soon your next child will wave at the device and wonder about the appendice with plenty of keys attached to the computer.
Every single one of those cases involve integers that necessarily must be signed, in order for the interface to work. They're implementing an interpreted language having signed integers, or in the one other case, with ScaleWindowExtEx, it manipulates values that are signed, and that have meaning when negative. The one place I saw an INT_MIN / -1 bug (in code review, iirc) was also for an interpreted language implementing a modulo operator. These are bugs with signed integer usage, but they're not bugs caused by a decision to use signed integers, because in these cases, there was no choice. They aren't representative of what you see when you do have a choice, say, using signed integers for array indices and sizes.

The question of what bugs you actually see was meant to be a personal one, not one of some dramatic bug you've read about on the internet. The answer of which is the better choice is defined by how much damage is caused by one choice versus the other, and you get that answer by noting how frequently you get bugs in practice as a result of such decisions. (Not that thought experiments and imagination no place, but this is clearly a question for which you can talk yourself into any direction.) For example, I've never had problems with C/C++ undefined behavior of signed integer overflow, while you're spending a lot of time talking about that. I have seen bugs caused by unsigned and signed integer usage that fit into other categories, though.
They probably would not have taken the risks that put them in that situation if they didn't have that buffer.

In other words, the buffer allowed them to be less risk-averse, and accelerated their growth.
Overflow checking all arithmetic is still going to be quite expensive, even with hardware support, because you have to choose between:

A) exception/panic on overflow: this is preferable to overflow but also undesirable behavior.

B) arbitrary precision integers: this is nicer, but even today significantly more expensive than ordinary integers.
Many world-changing industries have not needed $10^8 loans or $5,000 per-unit consumer subsidies to take off.

I'm not arguing (here, at least) that those are bad ideas, just that there's a broad spectrum in what constitutes government "help".
What Would Pac Say? (Message to Drake and Meek Mills)
No that's wrong. You do start tracing paths at the camera. The lens usually is extremely small and the rays that do contribute are highly directional, the probability of hitting the lens is extremely low and the probability of the hitting the lens in a direction that actually contributes to the final image is even lower. On the other hand there usually are many lights in a scene with a total area that's much larger than the area of lens and most lights don't have a directional profile. So you're much more likely to hit a light than you are to hit the lens, hence we start at the camera and not at a light.

They do simplify things a bit though. Normally we don't trace one path at a time, but we trace multiple of them. Each time we intersect with an object we do not only create another ray to continue to path, but we also sample a point on a light and we connect the two points by a ray to finish the path. This process is called Next Event Estimation and we can combine both 'accidental' paths and 'connected' paths by using a technique called Multiple Importance Sampling (MIS).
It's just another toy for AWS kids with "private cloud" buzzword.
It's notoriously difficult to calculate effective taxation in the US since it is fragmented across so many jurisdictions (goes hand in hand with the US's incessant attachment to federalism), and because many of the taxes in this cascade can be partly or wholly deducted from superior taxes (e.g. state taxes deducted from federal taxable income).

Nevertheless, you are correct that the aggregate effect is that we pay roughly the same cumulative tax as the average Western European citizen. A little less, to be sure, but we get vanishingly little for it in social benefits, particularly in the catastrophe that is health care. The result is that we have to pay both sides: pay the government, then pay (gargantuan sums!) out of our own pockets for things like tuition and health care.
The Defense of the Personal
They're indistinguishable from work except retirement "activities" are self-directed, instead of decided by some manager. If you really like your job, sure, why replace it with other routine chores -- but I'd bet, once I'm that old, that I won't have a job I like enough to justify giving control of my days over to a company somewhere.
Pixar and Disney are different studios...

The global illumination tech used on monsters university was just standard path tracing with physically-plausible sharers - the first time pixar had used that instead of radiosity caching. Other studios have been using path tracing for years before - pixars lighters are very good however, so the results are very good.
you remind me that Microsoft used to try to ban the name "Windows". pathetic, isnt it??
Sizes can be >2gb on a 32 bit system. Not sure how ssize_t works, is it 64 bits then?

It makes sense to use unsigned for sizes to save a bit (or 32 bits per size). Also less invalid possible inputs to handle.
1u/0u
I work with Go at my day job and that's idiomatic. It's not the most beautiful or readable language for sure. This does force devs to think about error handling. Although it's not that different from code littered with exceptions (like some Java codebases).
I would also add, that over time hyper efficient public transit systems and large fleets of self driving cars doing transportation as a service converge into the same thing.
They are virtually indistinguishable from each other.
Combine that with the progress we are making with electric cars and we've got some REAL progress on multiple fronts that will make a serious difference to the lives of everyday people.
Commercially licensed pilot = legally allowed to fly passengers in exchange for compensation (above cost of flight)

Seeing as AirBnB hosts and Uber drivers have been found in violation of the law in some jurisdictions my question is relevant. Whereas when have you ever vetted a airline pilot before purchasing a commercial flight?
If you underflow an unsigned you get a huge value that's going to be invalid by any range check unless you assume entire unsigned range is available.

But if you use signed, you have to check for values under zero AND the top of the range. So I don't understand how the bugs were caused by unsigned overflow. Wouldn't they still be bugs with negative results in signed numbers?
25 Years of OpenStack–Looking Back from the Future
That's very simple: if we don't end up hitting a light the path won't carry any radiance, so it won't contribute to the final image. If we start on a light and we don't end up hitting the camera the path won't carry any importance and so it won't contribute to the final image either.

Keep in mind that there is a very mathematical foundation to all this, we're not just tracing paths for the fun of it. Basically what we want to solve is a path integral (an integral over all paths), we do this using a technique called Monte Carlo integration (which basically means we use randomness). We first sample a path (using path tracing) and then we calculate the contribution of that path (which basically is the amount of radiance is carries divided by the probability of sampling the path) and then we add that contribution to the right pixel.
Hacker News reader(with thumbnails) for android
I have zero experience with agents, can someone explain how different this language is from Erlang? Aside from syntax, obviously.

The concept of agent capabilities composition reminds me of entity-component-system paradigm, except that there's no data encapsulation in ECS. Perhaps agent-oriented design could be successfully applied to game programming?