jurjenh

Just my luck to switch to this and see the top comment:

  elonmusk Woohoo, rocket hold down firing completed and all looks good!!
  41 seconds ago · reply · retweet · favorite

bugger, I always seem to just miss the boat. Oh well, I guess it wasn't too spectacular from the comments here.

I believe from the article that it already neutralises HIV...

My apologies, that must've been some confusion in my mind... it was a 600MW HVDC link... although it is higher now, and works are underway to bring it up to somewhere near 1.4GW.

I'm pretty sure that has been shut down in one of the last few culling rounds. I agree that it was very useful, it also had a good sidebar that seemed to learn which rss feeds were likely to be interesting among other things, but I stopped using it quite a while ago...

New Zealand has had a 600V HVDC link from the South Island to the North Island for quite some years - most of the power is generated by the hydro lakes in the south, then delivered via a 610km link to a substation in the north, where it is fed into the normal high-voltage transmission grid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Inter-Island

So it is a proven technology to have this as a long distance link (been in operation since 1965) and it is capable of bi-directional power transfer as well.

Well, the ease of implementing A/B testing should keep patio11 happy... I've noticed he seems almost religiously fanatical about it, and probably for good reason! Looking back at a quick search, it seems he's been doing it for several years...

Hopefully it will go further than what he's anticipating: And yet when we check back on who A/B tests here in February 2013, do you know what we're going to see? A few articles about it, with wise comments like "A/B testing can only get you to a local maxima" and "Didn't we read an article just like this on Smashing Magazine in 2006?", and fairly few companies who actually have someone do it every week, even among the savvier folks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3639365

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646669

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1404083

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764508

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484668

I like that. I may use it next time someone hassles me for reading week(s)-old newspapers.

I've always maintained that it gives the news a chance to mature, so it becomes a lot easier to separate the filling from the meat, but the flip side means missing out on the leading edge (forecasts of storms / shortages) that may prove to be very important.

I believe they have quite some involvement with Toyota with regard to transmissions / battery packs or something along those lines. Commercially it seemed a successful deal for them.

I think the biggest statement in the article is The bottom line? Commonly used studies have listed dollars-per-watt of electricity as high as $7.61. According to Dr. Pearce, the real cost in 2011 is under $1 per watt.

That used to be the figure at which it would become feasible to convert to mass generation through solar... Maybe the timing is off, it came quicker than a lot of people expected, or else there are other factors still to be solved (availability?)

Should be an interesting space to watch over the next 2-5 years, now that we've reached the $1/watt mark...

To expand on your point, if one was to sustainably grow all vegetables required for a healthy, sustainable diet, then currently this can be achieved on around 100-200m2 per person (on earth, requiring no extra fertilisers / soil etc) based on research by John Jeavons. This hasn't taken into account external rainfall or air movement, but the basic premise is fairly well established. Throw in water treatment / recycling and humanure composting to close the circle completely, then all you need is a light source (assuming a closed atmospheric situation....)

Assuming that we can compress that down into 50m2 per person, the spatial requirements for a sustainable colony blow out quickly to large proportions, and we don't have information over the long term of just how well such a closed environment can nourish a small population - there's literature and research suggesting that we must have animal products in our diet for long term health, so that quickly adds up.

Given all these factors, supply runs from a known good source (earth / the mother country / home) are a sensible choice - but once you start roaming much further, it isn't an option any more. This is the stage we'll find ourselves at in 10-20 years time, as space travel will be economical to the point of sending out pioneer crews to space.

Then there's always colinux - where you can have both, at the same time, without virtualization.

They keep some sort of record on your emails though - a while ago they mentioned that they were "Bringing better ads to gmail" - what they think are relevant ads based on other emails you've received when they can't find relevant content for the one you're currently viewing.

Not sure what kind of profile this ends up being, but it can be quite entertaining when I get ads about sumo wrestling (because of previous emails from appsumo)...

However, autocomplete will fill out the rest of the query for the user to see, so they should get a fair idea if they are paying attention... which they should be when the contents suddenly spins.

However, on most highways the guardrails are only on the dangerous sections.

So sticking with this analogy, we should only need to use testing in the more intricate / complex parts of our code. However, current testing best practice seems to be to test everything possible, thus potentially wasting a lot of time and effort into aspects with a low ROI.

There could be some lesson in this...

Funny that you complain about page turning... for hundreds of years, it has required an extended physical movement to turn the page.

Amazing the times we live in, that page turning has become an effort that becomes annoying. Combined with our tendency to be less physical active, we are heading to a (physically) stationary future...

I was going to suggest that google should insert a short "your search [A +B 'C D E'] returned x results" and then follow up with "Searching for [A B C D E] returned y results" to separate the results.

Now I think about it, Google is most likely doing this intentionally, to get more data for "natural language search" ie, to infer what people might mean by combining the results, then seeing what people click on to validate the technique.

This does mean that intentional input won't work anymore, unless there is a means to turn this semi-semantic search off.

Hmmmm... maybe DuckDuckGo would be a suitable alternative?

You need to enter the following in the test file

  X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

ie ignore the "EICAR Test code" bit.

Anyone familiar with disassembly want to give a quick breakdown of what the code does? Never mind, wikipedia has a handy link to exactly that:

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/eicar/eicarcom.html http://archive.cert.uni-stuttgart.de/bugtraq/2003/06/msg0025...

That scenario always makes me think back to simcity (2000?) where as you'd advance, you could build these microwave beam powerplants, and occasionally they'd lose tracking and start burning down your city...

I do wonder how RF power transmission is progressing, and what issues will come with it, as I imagine that's the most feasible way to transport energy from space to earth, although wikipedia also mentions laser transmission - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer

I was thinking more along the lines of a local store, but then you'd need a little script embedded into every page to handle the storage.

Essentially, instead of FB like widget -> request to facebook I would think FB like widget -> add to local datastore.

Then FB could do an optimised/aggragated query on the local database. The only thing would be that it would introduce large latency in the resulting data if its sent back only on FB login.

I wonder if that involves something like collecting the data and storing it locally on your computer, then only sending the data once you log into facebook...

Then you start running into failure. Modern electronics isn't really built to last, so having a laptop that will last you more than 10 years is extremely unlikely.

Until market demand changes to quality, long-lived electronics, you will still be rolling over your computing device every couple of years. And then there's always the trends and cycles of fashion...

Maybe I'm missing something, but for me google.com redirects to google.co.nz (normally happens anyway) but doesn't draw the big blue arrow. Hovering over the logo triggers the alt-text "You're invited to join Google+" and the link will take you to the sign-up page, but that's it.

Maybe they're A/B testing?

One thing that I didn't read in the article, and haven't heard about is whether the placebo effect continues on after the testing phase.

One thing that I could see affecting results is that people are selected for a trial, which may well influence their mindset ("OOh, I'm taking this incredible new drug in a special trial. It is soo much more effective than anything else on the market!") In other words, being part of the experimental group is more important than the placebo or actual drug being tested.

If these drugs are then available via normal channels, I imagine the placebo drug is not distributed, and the results may also not be monitored anymore.

Is there any indication whether this happens? In that packet of anti-depressants, half are placebo and there is no way to tell which is which? Could be cheaper to manufacture and unlikely to be detected. Not too sure of the legalities either...

Or even better, compare it to a butterfly flapping its wings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect) as this kind of comparison is sensitive to so many different factors you can't take any conclusions too seriously.

Still, not a bad yardstick to see how far we've come with respect to computing power per watt - maybe this is why the rate of change is increasing more than exponentially - you have multiple exponential rates converging in a positive feedback system...

Funny thing is, I just transferred 1TB of data from work to home (offsite backup) in just 5 minutes today... via bicycle even! Didn't even think of that until just now. Guess the saying still holds true then!

Although to be fair, doing the backups took considerably more time - a usb external hard disk doesn't copy 1TB that quickly...

I don't disagree with that, as a language that is actively maintained should (hopefully) get better over time.

The key thing is to develop new techniques for solving problems - think iterative versus recursive, or functional programming versus logic programming.

A given language is most likely targeted (or has least resistance) towards one style of programming, which means that new abstractions are likely to work better in a new language, one that has been developed with these blocks as starting points rather than added later.

It might be nice to focus development of specific key languages to avoid too much fragmentation by picking best-of-breed, but everyone's got their own itch... and for some that is developing new languages.

Maybe in much the same way as CoffeeScript differs from JS. It doesn't need to be that much different to be better. Of course this depends on how you define "better" and "different."

Go seems to be doing alright. And that came from Google. And you can't get better languages without developing more...

I think that realistically if you are looking for something like that, you already have your sights set firmly higher than a $25 device... for starters you'd need a decent screen and you'd probably like a nice set of speakers as well. I don't think you'd then go out and get a $25 device to enable the whole setup, but then again, I am not you...

Still, in future versions I'd imagine the SoC would get upgraded appropriately and you'd quite likely get that. And run it off batteries with your roll-out OLED screen that you just stick to any old surface, whack in a nice set of headphones and you're set! Great for camping (hah!)

Is there a transcript of it anywhere? Never mind, just found it: http://www.alacrastore.com/research/thomson-streetevents-Yah...

It's at the end, I believe he was the last speaker...