News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

throwaway90446

Re:How Sustainable Is Stored Sunlight? on Monday May 04, 2015 @10:40AM (#9486384)
I'm still trying to figure out why everyone, including Deutsche Bank, seems to think the Tesla Battery is such a great deal at $3500 for 7kwh.

I can buy 18 35Ah 12v AGM batteries, plus 0 AGW conductors, for about $1350. That's 7.5kwh for $1350.

What exactly defines the "good deal" argument I keep seeing?

Re:Where Is Germany's Gold? on Thursday February 05, 2015 @06:12PM (#9006797)
Agreed that deflation is terrible. I hate paying lower prices for goods and services. Thankfully we have central banks to fight the scourge of lower prices.
Re:SNB Unexpectedly Gives Up Cap on Franc, Lowers Deposit Rate on Thursday January 15, 2015 @09:10AM (#8892518)
Could someone explain the market reaction here?

When rates are lowered, it puts both competitve pressure and supply pressure on the currency. This can be seen in all historical interest rate cuts. You cut rates to weaken, and raise rates to strengthen.

And yet, this CUT in rates is leading to a BID for CHF.

As they say in Geneva, WTF?

You are probably being downvoted because every single Abrahamic religion advocates violence and killing as a response to blasphemy in the basic holy texts. It's an issue of facts, not offense.
Re:ThorCon Power on Friday January 09, 2015 @02:21PM (#8863876)
So basically, they are better on every possible front, and the technology has existed for a while?

Yet, LWR is still the dominant design. So, what's the catch? There's clearly something preferable about Uranium LWR that causes their dominance, no?

Re:Japan's fertility rate is rising on Thursday January 08, 2015 @04:50PM (#8859250)
Yes. A debt crisis that the US is walking into almost exactly alike, but a decade behind. And nobody cares.
Re:Whitehouse response to Aaron Swartz petition on Thursday January 08, 2015 @10:12AM (#8856680)
How adorable.
Re:What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @02:01PM (#8846247)
This isn't music, or anything like it. The article touches on the Millenials' refusal to learn anything below their chosen layer of abstraction to be a systemic risk to anything they build.

It's more akin to every bridge engineer not bothering with materials science or integral calculus because they know how to throw a bunch of trusses together than it is akin to every hipster on the planet learning to play Stairway to Heaven.

Re:Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades (2012) on Monday January 05, 2015 @04:31PM (#8841327)
Maybe I have a lack of imagination, but what on earth could possibly be the failure modes of floor tile?
Because the brainwashing of Western education is that the values of the Enlightenment are the only acceptable values.
Re:Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In on Friday December 26, 2014 @03:52PM (#8800320)
Excellent programmers are only paid well if they have a good internal idea of their value and are able to negotiate.

I've known countless great developers with terrible self-esteem and/or total inability to effectively negotiate. Far more, in fact, than the reverse.

Re:Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In on Friday December 26, 2014 @03:48PM (#8800304)
Addendum to #3: Motivation is necessary but not sufficient in software development; it is one of the professions that really does have minimum cognitive capability and working memory requirements, which current research shows to be highly nonplastic via education or training. Genes matter.
Re:Silent Circle's warrant canary is out of date on Thursday December 25, 2014 @02:40PM (#8796982)
I may be persuaded that the individual tasked with signing and updating the canary got drunk over the Holidays and forgot.

Nobody is going to convince me that same individual went on a twenty day bender and sobered up on Christmas morning.

Re:Uber Driver Accused of Raping Passenger in Boston on Thursday December 18, 2014 @01:58PM (#8768990)
Not without cause. The recent UVA scandal, the semi-recent duke lacrosse scandal, and the unconscionable number of rape convicts being exonerated and released on account of dna evidence being tested with modern methods all point to the need for defense of the accused.

It's almost as if accused rapists, like other accused criminals, should be innocent until proven guilty.

Re:PostgreSQL 9.4 Released on Thursday December 18, 2014 @11:28AM (#8768033)
Just do vnode-based consistent hashing on the client side.
Re:Putin Blames Outside Forces for Economic Woes on Thursday December 18, 2014 @10:19AM (#8767593)
was perceived widely in the West

Because of our propaganda. We heard all kinds of things about Russian military mobilization, conspiracy theories about who shot down the airliner, how much Putin hates gays, how horrible living conditions were at the Sochi olympic village, how "rigged" the Crimean referendum was, etc.

But we have heard nothing about NATO breaking its post-wall promise, of the enormous rise of nazism on Russia's borders( actual nazism, not the soft nationalism you see in France ), the outrageous corruption and duplicity of the players responsible for the ouster of Yanukovych, the ethnic and political divisions between the Crimea and Ukraine proper, etc.

I continue to be astounded that HN is so virulently anti-russia, mainly because I thought this group would be the most immune to propaganda and most likely to question the official narrative.

Re:Putin Blames Outside Forces for Economic Woes on Thursday December 18, 2014 @10:09AM (#8767519)
Most wells don't run at full capacity, and absolutely alter draw speeds to maximize the life and economics of a well.

This is correct, but only to a point. Many producers still lease land for limited timeframes (some of them do have "until we are done" clauses, but this is not the norm in Eagle Ford). If your lease has two years left and you don't expect the price to rebound for 18 months, it's still in your interest to produce NOW, since horizontal drilling (far more expensive than the fracking) is a capital cost you've already paid that you need return on.

Re:Proposal to move CoreOS off of btrfs on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @11:25PM (#8765968)
Sabotage? How, exactly? I have heard of no major corruption or performance bugs in ZFS, what am I missing?
Re:Neal Stephenson Joins Magic Leap on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @12:36PM (#8758138)
Unclear from their site what MagicLeap even does.
Re:New York Magazine's Boy Genius Investor Made It All Up on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @09:11AM (#8757160)
In both of the stories you cite, it's a case of journalists beginning with a narrative and then seeking a story to corroborate that narrative. Whether it's feel-bad narratives like "rape culture is rampant in fraternities" or feel-good narratives like "downtrodden teenager wins big with his pluck and smarts", journalism has become driven by narrative. It no longer reports news.
Re:Einstein: The Negro Question (1946) on Saturday December 13, 2014 @03:32PM (#8746303)
Unless and until our recent era of mass global travel results in a highly genetically uniform species, we will continue to have population groups that share allele groupings differently than other population groups which share different allele groupings.
Re:Einstein: The Negro Question (1946) on Saturday December 13, 2014 @02:58PM (#8746154)
Unable to reply to your other flagkilled comment, so I'll reply here.

It's amusing that bringing up facts in a community ostensibly self-selected to prize discovery and reason is sufficient cause to be silenced.

pg and the community he fostered has come a long way since this: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Re:Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer, Project Apollo on Thursday December 11, 2014 @10:56PM (#8738504)
Physical attractiveness is not "completely subjective". There are very well established body proportions, symmetries, and other physical indicators of human attractiveness that are consistent across cultures and throughout time.
Re:Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town on Monday December 08, 2014 @09:22AM (#8716502)
Not sure about idyllic, but iD software started in a lakehouse in the middle of nowhere a distance out from Shreveport, LA.

You don't need ready access to endless city noise, light pollution, or urban gang violence to launch a successful startup or attract talent to it.

Re:The Real Reason Richer People Marry on Monday December 08, 2014 @12:07AM (#8715009)
You're probably not up to speed with the cultural expectations of the ceremony itself in the modern U.S.

In terms of social signaling, an elaborate, extravagant ceremony, preceded by presentation of an outrageously expensive conflict diamond, is REQUIRED. Even if not in real reality, in the "reality" of social mores and expectations.

Re:Freelancing: How to talk yourself into charging more on Friday December 05, 2014 @11:30AM (#8705301)
Little bit of reality for you, HN.

All due respect to patio11, who has made an excellent career for himself, but outside of the usual suspects (NYC, SF, Chicago), the kind of rates he talks about will get you laughed out of almost all client negotiations.

Re:Wire – Modern Communications Network on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @09:25AM (#8693844)
I assume this is a joke? The US doesn't have mandatory data retention laws.
Re:Show HN: Jason – A new JSON Library for Go on Tuesday December 02, 2014 @01:02PM (#8688616)
I was genuinely curious, hence my question. I did not realize HN had the requirement that all posts be run through some sort of psychic expectation filter that magically tells me the exact mental state of other people and how the post will "come across" to them.

But ok, I will delete the post anyway.

Re:DNSimple DDOS Attack on Monday December 01, 2014 @06:07PM (#8684629)
CloudFlare != CloudFront
Re:DNSimple DDOS Attack on Monday December 01, 2014 @05:54PM (#8684551)
Yes, CloudFlare has a full-featured DNS offering, even if you don't use their proxying services.

Older »