SamuelKillin

The lack of command + F frustrates me roughly 15 times a day.

This is super gangster

Surprised no one has mentioned App Engine. Their free tier will take you a long way.

Yikes you're right. Looks like 2 powers of 10.

Wait, my back of the envelope says you'll need to pull down around 650mb a second to stream 4K. That's uncompressed, sure, but anything in that power of ten isn't feasible.

I can't wait until code is no longer seen as this mechanical and mysterious thing. Stuff like this will no longer need to be explicitly be "Art with Code", instead it can just be "Art made by describing it"

Has the repo been moved from here? https://github.com/popcorn-team/popcorn-app

It's not really an either/or situation

I'm pretty sure they even take a walk around his factory with him in the movie

That's very naive of you.

I'm in Australia. We have unlimited land and enough sun to power the solar system.

Good on them. In reality, however, fuel from the sun is free and we have unlimited land. Getting the cost down and economies of scale are what everyone is really focussed on.

There is a PHENOMENAL amount of money out in Perth. It may be small, but some of the wealthiest in the world (and the world's wealthiest woman) live there.

Largely due to mining, Australia's average wage is around $70k but our median wage is around $45k. Pretty crazy.

It's a similar atmosphere to Texas oil culture (I hear, anyway). Lots of secessionists saying Western Australia is keeping the country afloat. This is somewhat true (but not entirely), and they tend to forget 20 years ago WA was a shitheap with nothing going for it.

Writes one blog post - front page of HN

A* all the things

There's some (small) wisdom in there. History shows there is less and less correlation between technology and jobs lost the more an industry relies on creativity.

It won't happen here in Australia. QANTAS, our national airline, has just deployed iPads to every seat as the new iteration of their in flight entertainment

here here!

Pretty ironic that something to test a variety of platforms and browsers is only supported on windows and "recommends" use with IE 9.

how long do you have? :)

So, them being 'black' isn't really the point. The point is the potential to get steam from water at lower temperatures, in less time.

If you are dealing with A LOT of water (if you were to scale this to power-plant scale), you are dealing with large 'thermal mass'. This means you need a lot of heat over time to raise all the water to a high enough temperature to create electricity.

If you run a power plant, you want flexibility. You want to switch on your power plant fast, and then shut it down when you want, without cost. This lets you speculate on the electricity market, and be more available if there is a sudden spike in electricity demand. If you're dealing with large thermal mass, you don't have this flexibility.

Also lots of advantages of lower cost - not needing heat exchangers etc but I'll leave it there.

This is exactly how large scale solar thermal power stations work.

The most common ones use thousands of mirrors around a central tower. The sun bounces off the mirrors and focuses at the top of the tower where there is a tank of water. The water is heated, boils, turns to steam, which turns a steam turbine.

Look up BrightSource Ivanpah

Cooling it isn't hard, when the steam hits the turbine it loses a lot of its energy and will inevitably cool down and condense. Then you just pump it around back into the chamber and re-steam it.

I work in the solar thermal industry - my company (http://www.sunapse.co) builds software for solar thermal power plants. I can say with some authority that this is legit and VERY promising tech.

Man, they've been pushing this hard and it looks like it will pay off. They'll make the 750.

Raising 750k in 30 days is no small feat and is awesome market validation. This should really help them raise more investment and keep growing.

I pitched in. There are a tonne of problems that are highly parallel in nature, but need a general purpose processor such as this. You can't just "run everything on a GPU instead" like everyone else is suggesting. Things like if statements are horrendous on GPUs. This gives you the power to scale across, without being limited to GPU architectures. It's also significantly cheaper in the long term than cloud hosting and uses significantly less power than clustering desktop PCs (which is also more expensive, and takes up more space).

OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!

1. "it's laggy running ubuntu - what's the big deal". It's running Ubuntu with the dual-core ARM CPU on board, not the Epiphany chips. The guy is demonstrating that the boards they are shipping allow for a user friendly environment for which you can jump onto and use Eclipse to write code for the multicore chips. This has NOTHING to do with the multi-core chips themselves, and has no intent of demonstrating the power of the "supercomputer" part of the board.

2. "Why would you use this if you could just use a GPU - they're really parallel right??" - GPUs are very very different beasts to CPUs. They are great at what they do, but they are tailored for very specific problems. Look up SIMD. A tonne of general purpose programs which need, for example, a simple 'if statement' quickly break down under SIMD.

3. "This will be great for mining bitcoins" - yeah. but you can do it on a GPU so stick to that. As far I can see (and why I backed the project), this board will be great for those problems which are not immediately or easily implementable as a wavefrontable algorithm for the GPU. I'm hoping you can just write a c program utilising pthreads which will be run on the Epiphanies cores

Not much for a micro-controller company.

I'd say they're looking for exposure/excitement in the hobbiest/startup datamining space. Partly marketing play, partly validation.

I backed $99. I'm very excited.