timdierks

Google has a bunch of non-profits, and you are suggested one each day, and can choose to donate to it (or any other). It doesn't pool all One Today users into a single donation recipient per day, and there's no pre-commitment.

Dollar a Day looks great, but it basically boils down to you donating to a non-profit that grants to other non-profits and sends you a daily report: they direct the funds and curate the recipients.

One Today also has a nice challenge-match feature.

It will be interesting to see if Intel & Microsoft can compete with Chromebooks on price if they try: how much of the pricing is due to technical cost (weight of x86 & Windows) and how much of it is business overhead (licensing fees & IP profits)?

This is disclosed in https://www.uber.com/cities/new-york: "$20 surcharge on all trips between NYC and New Jersey." It doesn't have anything to do with where the driver is from. It also appears to be included in the fare calculator there. (I can't be 100% sure because it doesn't break down the bill.)

The fee shouldn't be dependent on where the driver happens to be from, or you'd be rolling the dice on which driver you happened to get: it's fairer to have a consistent price.

Under "net metering" rules, which were enacted broadly to support distributed solar, that's not how it works: the generating consumer can offset billing for power use from the grid with excess power generation pushed back into the grid on a 1:1 basis, which amounts to paying them both for generation and for transmission.

People who have solar, who sell solar, who install solar, want to install solar, or who think distributed solar are a public good worthy of subsidy want to keep this rule.

Even in a non-zero sum model, each investment needs to justify itself vs. alternatives at the time. I may have a wealth of investments that can have guaranteed positive returns, but I must choose which to invest in at any time with limited resources.

Even if I can expand available resources because of the promise of these alternatives, or through reinvestment of gains, I still must choose what to do at any time, until I have enough resources to pursue all promising avenues simultaneously.

By this calculus, a line-following robot [1] is self-aware, with a more limited "environment".

[1]: http://www.instructables.com/id/Line-following-Robot-with-Ar...

There's a lot of different "big science" investments humanity could make. In space alone, there's space stations, moon missions, Mars missions, cheaper Earth-NEO transport, etc., etc.; then there's particle accelerators, telescopes, and every other big science project under the sun (or beyond it).

Two questions: first, in a zero-sum model, why is human exploration of the moon more worthy than other similar unfunded projects? In an non zero-sum model, why is it worthy enough to justify growing the funding pie for science projects?

How many billions of dollars are there in "a little more effort", in your estimation?

Another good reason for sites who don't think of themselves as needing security to go HTTPS-only. MITMs who you wouldn't normally think of as attackers (e.g. Comcast) will screw up your site for your users.

NFC has 'must have' next year for the last 5+ years.

A friend who runs a NYC restaurant, and who hates DOH inspections, nonetheless tells me that the A/B/C regime and stricter rules have made his restaurant cleaner. He's just not sure it's a good tradeoff.

And it's true: health departments have the ability to create a huge number of regulations without any concern for whether they make the public better off. I am told that in NYC, restaurants cannot allow dogs into outdoor cafe spaces. I don't have any idea what the food safety rationale for that regulation is, but I'm deeply skeptical that it makes people better off rather than allowing restaurant owners to manage it themselves.

It seems to me that the high levels of trust necessary for this to work also imply a high level of social cohesion (possibly homogeneity). In a society with less internal agreement, I don't see how you could get this much alignment over what is the right management strategy, let alone trust that it's being followed.

Offer the building's super the barometer, if in exchange he'll tell you how tall the building is. [1]

Did the author of the article not bother to investigate the actual answer?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question

That's not a police reaction, that's a press reaction.

Back up everything for $10/month? That's appealing.

Inventing new engineering solutions to existing problems (e.g. winglets) is totally different from not understanding the situation at all.

Beamforming would be cool and might actually allow this to work, although I don't know with what efficiency.

That said, the tech just to locate the phones in space to allow the beamforming would be a significant accomplishment itself. But forming the beam or multiple beams to charge multiple devices is probably quite feasible.

I don't know a lot about specific engineering details, but a jet engine (turbofan) produces about 1 kw of sound energy [1]. A cell phone has about 75 sq. cm of area on one side. Thus, with perfect efficiency and spherical propagation, the available power to the phone for a user about 3m away would be about 0.2 watt.

However, I'm skeptical that they can actually create a kilowatt of sound energy, and while you can focus the power (certainly you could do something more efficient than fully-spherical propagation), you're also going to have significant losses.

All this for a charging rate that's about 1/5 of what you get from a 1 amp USB charger.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_power#Table_of_select...

Read the post; apparently Zend doesn't make deep array copies in some circumstances.

The quote from the spec is "Unlike conforming deferred string copy mechanisms discussed in §§ that must produce the same observable behavior as eager string copying, deferred array copy mechanisms are allowed in some cases to exhibit observably different behavior than eager array copying."

Note the phrasing "observably different behavior".

In my opinion: throw it away.

More constructively, what are you trying to accomplish? There are few goals that a press release will help you with. It may help with some vanity links in Google News if you search for your name, but that's about it. If you want press coverage or user attention, a press release is almost certainly not going to help.

The death of RS, as cheesy as it is, is a tragedy for hackers: for most of the country, it's the only retail outlet that carries electronic components and tools.

I don't know the details of PHP, but it seems to me that all the areas that are referred to as "implementation-dependent" are code-observable: e.g. the deferred array copying decision discussed in the critique: if your code depends on a behavior, you'll get different results on the other platform. So if you want to be portable, you need to sniff the behavior and take a different route on the alternate platform, or you need to avoid the quicksand in the first place.

Where do you work now that you're not at-will? In the US, the vast majority of software/tech jobs are at-will; the exceptions are unionized shops (not common in tech) and people who have personal contracts (also not common except for senior executives). So presumably you're not in the USA?

Here's the questions I think you should ask yourself:

1. How likely am I to lose the new job? Is the employer stable (both financially and also in the sense of making rational decisions)? And related: how much more stable is your current job, really?

2. If I were to lose the new job, how hard will it be to find another one, and how similar/appealing will the new job be? If you're in a hot market and getting constant recruiter outreach, or if your current company would be happy to have you come back, then risk is low.

In addition, of course, you should balance the full package of alternatives; not just salary, but also career direction, personal growth, happiness, etc.

Note also that the URLs themselves are not removed from the search corpus; instead, they are elided from results when they are matches for a search with a particular name in them. The URLs themselves are still eligible to be returned in response to queries that don't include the specific name.

I can see the appeal of allowing behavior variant from Zend in areas where there is a big benefit, and I like the approach of defining these areas as "implementation-dependent" rather than specifying one or the other.

However, it seems to me that some of these are in areas where PHP code would need to know the runtime behavior of the platform they're on; the alternative is just to avoid all such areas ("there be dragons here") or to give up on portability and be implementation-dependent, in which case it seems to me that there's not much value in having a PHP standard (other than as a base document on which to build the Zend or HHVM specifications).

Why not have the specification allow runtimes to expose their choices of behavior into the runtime to allow code to determine what their platform does? Of course, one can probably write tests for these behaviors and build a library, but it seems like it would be better to just delineate the alternative behaviors and put them into the ABI.

How would a reader know that this has to do with speeding radar, and not LIDAR use in ranging / mapping?

And I think it's relevant that the content of the presentation is scientific/analytic, rather than related to using legal strategies to invalidate a speeding ticket, for example.

This presentation was not to a court; see slide 51 for the resolution: his attorney bargained it down to a zero-points violation before trial.

I submitted the link with the title you note for the following three reasons:

1. Josh Bloch is an author of particular interest to this community.

2. When I searched to see if the page had already been submitted, I noted that recent HN posts on LIDAR were on technical laser ranging (e.g. in mapping applications), not on speed enforcement.

3. I thought it was an article that would be of interest to HN readers, so I thought they would be well-served by an appealing link title which conveyed the content and tone of the presentation and invited a click.

My clickbait technique is impeccable.

In the private sector, investors provide capital that companies (and employees thereof) use to pursue projects. When the company fails, the employees are generally still paid (while some companies have employees who participate in profits / share risk with investors, it's rare for it to be a dominant form of compensation). Thus, the situation is more similar than you describe: if the projects fail, the investor/owner has paid out a lot of money to employees and vendors and is left with nothing.

The difference is that smart investors/owners are aware that the possibility of failure is inextricably tied to any attempt to excel, and allows people to try things that might fail in the pursuit of success.

In our current political climate (and probably in other climates as well), governments are dumber, and tend to drive their staff to manage towards over-safety and covering of asses rather than towards best outcomes.

If this were true, presumably some smart news organizations would be blocking Google from extracting this value by excluding themselves from the index via robots.txt, yet I'm not aware of any.