skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see a problem with the article: while launching a dot-com or a program is somewhat cheap, testing a new rocket engine concept frequently involves a couple years of work before you can even build a small prototype.

The fact failing integration tests ruins a million-dollar piece of machinery and not infrequently kills a dozen people also doesn't help much.

What NASA does is the impossible, bordering the very difficult. What we see is the artifacts that fall outside the impossible space.
What I mean by the second part is that comment shouldn't be a supplement of score, but one of the most prominent factors affecting it.
I think I speak for every sci-fi fan when I say, while we're not reckless, if NASA said hey, you may die doing this, but either way humanity will be a little bit closer to becoming a starfaring species, we'd be like, hell yeah.
Your name is incredibly close to a user here in HN who has the website http://www.lingq.com/. Is he working with you on this, or is this just poor creativity on your behalf for a name?

Not coming across in a negative way, at first I thought his site had a revamp. Now im just confused.
I agree with part of what he's saying -- for some reason I've always had a problem with the word "sir." It struck me that people use the word Sir when they are artificially supplicating, or feining respect like "You, sir, are an idiot," or saying Sir to a cop at a traffic stop.

I always thought that was particularly DISrespectful, and my policy to show respect by being forthright with people and speaking respectfully, instead of signally respect where there is none.
It used to be that "momentarily" mean "for a moment" but now it's used to mean "in a moment" as well.

It used to be that "oblige" and "obligate" were treated differently, but now the former is almost completely unknown.

It used to be that the "silly" meant "carefree" or "young and innocent."

It used to be that "nice" meant "exact" or "precise."

It used to be that "literally" meant "really, really truly" but now it's just used for emphasis.

It used to be that people knew the word "pedantry" but now they seem to use "pedanticism."

Given the predominence in written language for confusion between "there," "they're" and "their," will the written distinction eventually vanish?

Call me a pedant, but I think some of these changes genuinely impoverish the language. But languages change, have always changed, and will always change, until they're dead.
Seconded. NY Mag is far more in the know, and current.
Then try TimeOut?
Oh, it's about booze. I'm disappointed. I thought it was going to be an article about pulp mills and alternative energy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liquor
Well, for one, poor students wouldn't have to drop cash on a desktop IDE or a faster computer to develop it. Since my previous laptop broke, I've been working on a netbook for months (and got quite used to it), but have had to resort to campus computer labs if I have to do some Visual Studio, Delphi, or SQL Server work.

When my teachers learn that everything I turn in I do it in class, and not from home, they are genuinely surprised that I am able to do things well and on-time. With this, I can do some work on my netbook, download it at the labs, and keep working from there.
I think it's exactly because smells are so specific that there are few "general" smell words. It's useful to have a word for "red" since lots of different things are red, and particular shades of red rarely trigger very specific memories. But most of the time, when you smell something, your brain immediately tells you: it's the smell of X, for some specific X.

Presumably this has something to do with the underlying biology. Our colour space is more or less three-dimensional because we have three kinds of receptor in the eye (I'm ignoring the rods here since they aren't involved in colour vision); there are thousands of different kinds of receptor in the nose.

On the other hand, there are many many receptors of each kind in the eye; perhaps shape would be a better analogue for smell. And indeed most of our shape words are for quite specific shapes. There are some broader ones -- smooth, spiky, convoluted, etc. -- but likewise there are a few broader terms for describing smells -- pungent, musky, musty, sweet, etc.
Not all AP subjects are created equal, either. I had the privilege of attending a Fancy Private School(tm) which offered the full gamut of AP courses, and took advantage of a handful: English, Biology, Chemistry, French Literature, Calculus.

Of all these subjects, the French Literature (not to be confused with the langauge AP) was an order of magnitude harder. At my school, only students who stayed in the AP track from freshman year onwards were able to take the "AP" class, effectively making the AP requirement 4 years long. It was purely necessary: by 9th grade you know a little French, but the intensive vocabulary building, then reading simple books (The Little Prince), then graduating to proper literature and poetry -- it takes time to build up to that level. The program was hard but well worth it: the entire AP class (9 in total, starting from 30) came away with 4s and 5s. NYU later gave me something like three semester-class' worth of credits for that one AP. I think the monetary value for that is something like $10,000. Not too shabby.

I had some friends who took the Music Theory AP and reported a similarly difficult experience.
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They offer cloud hosting (powered by Amazon). The IDE serves as a bait to get signups, since it makes it very easy to deploy on their service (single-click deployment). It's pretty decent, too. They have a free 15-day trial with 256gb ram and 5gb storage, and that one is only $10/month after the trial is over (down from $25). The others go from $49-$169.

I think they really have something here, if they had Ruby support I'd jump on it: it reminds me of Heroku (garden) when it was a web based Rails IDE, but this seems just a bit better performing, at least from my end.
Why is it when Google enters the picture into anything many geeks turn into tinfoil hat homeless people?

"The googles! It's coming for your body!"
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Why on earth would you recommend Agave syrup as a sweetener when it has an even higher fructose/glucose ratio than the dreaded HFCS? There are sweeteners that are 100% glucose including plain old corn syrup but also other nice alternatives (maple syrup etc...) or even refined dextrose...
As a bad example?

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

That said, I think we may be confusing two things: teaching computer science and teaching about computers. To the compsi approach, you would want something that can express the rich, high-level concepts

OTOH, if you want to teach how a computer works deep inside, BASIC, with GOTOs and one-line IFs, primitive types and so on teaches a lot about how the processor inside the computer thinks, without the fuss other languages bring. Creating your own recursion (building your own stack - or stacks - out of arrays of primitives) is a worthy exercise.

I learned how to program with an Apple II. It didn't kill me.
I'm probably biased because I do what might qualify as systems research for a living. It's hard to do right - much harder than a novice might think, but it's no rocket science. A reasonably intelligent person who has the stomach for rigor can be taught to do it well. However, I cannot easily get into computation theory - I tried my hand in it, and I just don't have the mathematical intuition. I could develop it to some degree with a lot of work, but I could never do first rate complexity research - that stuff requires real talent. I suppose it's common for people to slightly look down on what they do because they've experienced the mess first hand - the magic is always more spectacular on the other side of the fence :)
"It should also be noted that Python also has roots in Lisp."

If that is so, I can hardly distinguish them anymore.
From a very quick scim of the original blog Wikimedia blog post it looks like the total for #18 was higher (with the same number of impressions). What this suggests to me is that the lower amount shown on the banner made people feel there donation would count even if it wasn't very much. If more of these people donated one would expect the average to go down and the total to go up, and that appears to be what happened.
So the story here is ... Techcrunch published a story about an acquisition that turned out to have no basis in fact. TMZ seems like a more reliable source for gossip.
I haven't really found "misleading headlines" to be much of a problem. I don't really see a correlation between adjusting article titles and improving the discourse on HN.
Sounds like an interesting way of harnessing solar power.

Perhaps all future skyscrapers could be self-powering, or even day-to-day energy-positive (I imagine paying back construction energy budget might be tricky).
Why doesn't NASA use Soyuz rockets then?
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Triple J radio in Australia (the government funded "youth" radio station) has a science show with a guy called Dr Karl.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Kruszelnicki

"He holds degrees in mathematics, biomedical engineering, medicine and surgery. He has also studied astrophysics, computer science and philosophy. He has worked as a physicist, labourer, roadie for bands, car mechanic, film-maker, hospital scientific officer, biomedical engineer, TV weatherman, taxi driver and medical doctor."

He also written a ton of books and won an Ig Noble prize for his extensive research in to belly button lint colouring.

He is clearly totally awesome.

Anyway, petrichor is old news to listeners of his radio show, as it's been discussed there numerous times. I highly recommend listening to his podcast, it's full of all sorts of random sciencey stuff presented in an easy to digest way:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/drkarl/scienceontriplej/
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But Avatars shaped like ourselves are still a few decades off, and needlessly complicated to execute. Avatars of our cars have worked out well.
Is it named D Minor to imply it is in harmony with C#?
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He should set up a cron job to read Flickr's home page from his machine and send emails with the reply. If you stop getting emails, he lost. If the emails show that Flickr is out, you lost.
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> ...a healthy individual can obtain 10,000 IU or more of Vitamin D produced by their own skin from being exposed to the sun for 20 to 30 minutes.

It seems like that 10,000IU/.5hr dose would be surface-area dependent. Are the face, hands, and maybe forearms sufficient? Or does that number depend on, erm... _all_ of the skin being exposed?
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And what's funny about trojans?
I'm a web developer and I have legal issues with a client, what do I do?
How would things be different if the UK wasn't part of the EU?
It's the Dunning-Kruger effect: Sure, if this machine's failure rate is below the human average, it'll be safer for average humans. But I'm better off in control, because I'm a far better than average driver--aren't you, and almost everyone you know?
What if not ironing your pants affects your income significantly?
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Many of these are debatable, obviously.

But the only issue with mentioning is that I think it's a much better idea to send a developer that needs help with MySQL to, eg, the MySQL Performance Blog.

Relational theory is hard stuff and I think a developer would be better served to understand a little bit about it than to just follow bullet points like those listed here.

For example, indexing search fields. Could be a great suggestion. Could be a poor one. That depends on a lot of things.

For example, not using natural keys. Same as above.

For example, Enum over Varchar. Same story again.

A lot of these are 100% harmless if your table has 1000 rows. But, honestly, if your table has 1000 rows you'll get good performance from MySQL no matter what you do.

But take the Enum suggestion. Seems safe, right? But adding a value to an enum field forces a table rebuild. That's a blocking operation. And it could take quite a while on a big table.

Also, it will change the way your data is sorted. Enums are sorted by their position in the enumeration, not alphabetically.

So on, So Forth.

The guys at percona and MySql performance blog are super informative. Spend some time there. You'll learn tons.

And we've been using their storage engine in production on a write-intensive system for a year now and love it. Check it out.
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NIH?
Not so silly. As elsewhere noted, you will smell ozone when thunder storms are around. The high voltages involved create 03(ozone) from O2(oxygen).
Previously mentioned in Doctor Dobb's: http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/184406478
This made me think to "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely too, quite a good example of the anchoring phenomenon.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...
Btw, i agree with those that says that is quite hard to come to any meaninful conclusion just using the average and max donation, why not analyze also the median value or the std dev/complete donations distribution?
The author seems to be conflating two very different things both called "launching".
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Try Saturn, through the rings.
Why is this Ask HN?
I'm an Emacs user myself, but I hate using complicated plugins with dependencies in Emacs.

So what IDE among the three (Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ) has the best Clojure plugin? Do you have any experience with any of them?
is anyone else tired of seeing all the techcrunch submissions pasted in hn?

this discussion has been had probably a year ago, but it seems like it's getting worse again.. seriously, why?
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This is a powerful tool for peer programming, distributed work environments, and working on the go.
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>Fifty-two minutes after leaving St. George’s, Bermuda, on its way to Boston, the Royal Majesty’s GPS antenna cable became detached from the GPS antenna. This placed the GPS in dead-reckoning mode, which does not take into consideration wind or sea changes. The degraded GPS continued to feed the ship’s autopilot. No one noticed the change in GPS status, even though the GPS position was supposed to be checked hourly against the Loran-C radio navigation system, which is accurate by roughly one-half to 1 nautical mile at sea, and a quarter-mile as a ship approaches shore.

Is there some reason why the GPS device couldn't raise an alarm when it dropped into dead reckoning mode?
Your core point is correct but your examples are pretty weak/wrong.

Momentarily has meant “in a moment” since the late 19th century. Sometimes (more commonly a couple hundred years ago) the word also means “at the current moment.”

“Oblige” and “obligate” still have different sets of connotations, but I really don’t think your case is very strong here, since their main overlapping senses, in which they’re roughly interchangeable, have been in common use for several centuries, perhaps since the words first arose. The word “oblige” is still extremely common, in my experience more common than “obligate” for this use.

“Silly” originally meant “pitiful” (in the modern sense; “pitiful” originally meant “full of pity for others”). From there, it transformed into meaning “unsophisticated” and then “feeble-minded” or “foolish.” The OED doesn’t have it ever meaning anything close to “young and innocent.”

“Nice” has had a very complex set of evolved meanings. It began meaning “foolish” or “ignorant”, but in the past 500 years has meant at various points “lascivious,” “ostentatious,” “elegant,” “fussy,” “refined,” “respectable,” “virtuous,” “appropriate,” “effeminate,” “lazy,” “fragile,” “modest,” “shy,” “intricate,” “subtle,” “precise,” “slim,” “trivial,” “dextrous,” “doubtful,” “tasty,” “pleasant,” “attractive,” “friendly,” &c.

> used to be that people knew the word "pedantry"

First, “people” do know the word “pedantry”. Second, you realize that the “now” that we use “pedanticism” is since about 1850, right? “Pedantry” is still vastly more common. Compare: http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bpedantry http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bpedanticism

> "literally" [is] just used for emphasis.

Not in any kind of careful writing, unless for ironic effect. People still know what “literally” means.

> will the written distinction [between “there,” “they’re” and “their,”] eventually vanish?

Not any time soon?
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I don't know.

What really hit home for me was the sphere of radio signals. To imagine that, from all that space we can see, that tiny little bubble is the frontier of where man is detectable.

For the rest of the universe, we are only a tiny speck of rock orbiting a very average and unremarkable star.
The "Store IP addresses as UNSIGNED INT" hint is a really bad idea. The application will break on IPv6 connected servers. The same applies to storing IP addresses in a very short field like VARCHAR(16). It's better to just use VARCHAR(254).
My perception is that MSR has the same flaw as Bell Labs once did ... they keep coming with cool ideas that aren't getting productized (of course, I'm too young to have an opinion here :))

Anyway, on the programming languages front, Microsoft is releasing some pretty cool stuff and they should get some credit for that, regardless of their history.
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Cloning Pong (with Clojure and Arduino) Part 2
Not everyone...I'd say about half the people I know are above average drivers :)
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Hey guys this is Gilad, CTO at CodeRun. Thanks for all your notes and remarks! We appreciate it.

@romland: it is on our TODO ;) The IDE will be open sourced soon on
http://coderun.codeplex.com/

@caduardo21: we've created CodeRun IDE with a C#/JavaScript converter named SharpKit. Check it out on
http://www.coderun.com/sharpkit/

this too will soon be open source

@biotech, @nailer: Vote for your favourite language:
Python: http://coderun.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=94...

Ruby: http://coderun.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=94...

Perl: http://coderun.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=97...

@dotBen: jmonegro's answer hits the spot. Sorry it wasn't clear enough on the website. We'll work on it.

@vyrotek: F5 is a real pain. I hear ya. Maybe Html6 will let us take control over the function keys.

We'd love to hear more! Feel free to ask or suggest anything.

Cheers,

Gilad
Me want Clojure implemented on LLVM. Call it Lure.
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Examples have never been my strong point, but even so, I suggest that more people use "pedanticism" than "pedantry," and I have rarely heard "literally" used in anything other manner than for emphasis.

But I suspect we are more in agreement than otherwise.

EDIT: Recently found:

http://literally.barelyfitz.com/

http://gizmodo.com/5422405/this-robot-jedi-will-literally-bl...

http://www.slate.com/id/2129105/
Actually, "literally" means "just as I said it, no irony or similar".
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I agree with most of your post, but the incident with the unit conversion deserved to have a stink made about it. There are so many things that can go wrong on a mission like that, and having the point of failure being something as simple as unit conversion is a pretty big mistake.
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Or fund the development of Skylon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_Skylon

(Altho' arguably ESA or even the British MoD ought to be, whatever anyone else thinks)
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If it's any consolation, for anyone more than 4.5 billion light years out the rock and the star don't exist yet either.
Are they crazy? They could have made an awful movie with that money!
TMZ seems like a more reliable source for gossip.

TMZ isn't a good example. When it comes to breaking celebrity news, they actually exercise a great deal of journalistic integrity and restraint. They're very reliable and very well-sourced.
I agree. I always address LEOs at traffic stops as "Officer". Of some 15+ traffic stops in my years of driving, I've only landed three tickets. "Sir" just seems like it's begging for trouble.
I am a new-comer to Clojure, and an intermediate user of Emacs. I have found that configuring Emacs to work well with Clojure took quite a bit of fumbling around on my part (I am pretty sure a lot had to do with my lack of understanding) but one I do have everything up and running, it usually just works.

Unfortunately my experience with DisClojure (Netbeans) left much to be desired. Its progressing slowly, but its not there yet. I haven't used Eclipse or IntelliJ so I really can't comment on those.

Tools like leiningen [http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen] and Clojure-Maven-Plugin [http://github.com/talios/clojure-maven-plugin] do make it a lot easier for you to set up a project quickly, and have a REPL started with the correct classpath.

I guess what I am trying to say is if you are comfortable with Emacs, then it's probably the best tool to work with Clojure (IMO) out there.
I've been trying to find a way of saying this nicely - I hope I've succeeded. My apologies to all if I haven't, and I would welcome suggested rewordings.

While some may find your comment witty and amusing, it presupposes that my programmers lie to me, and that I am taken in by their lies. It presupposes that I am in fact a bad manager, and that my programmers feel they would be better off without me.

In short, you are implying that I am either incompetent, a liar, or both, and perhaps worse, that my programmers are liars.

I find it somewhat offensive that without knowing me, my management style, my work, my company or my programmers, you feel free on a public forum to make such suppositions. I take very seriously the relationship I have with my staff, and to have it criticised unfairly is, to my mind, obnoxious.

I write this mostly so that you know how your comments can and have been interpreted. If this is not what you meant then I invite you to clarify them. If this is what you meant, then I invite you to say so.

On the other hand, if you were making a quick, witty, snarky comment, then I would suggest it's out of place on this forum.