skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good analysis. A potential option for his proposed build output format is http://nixos.org/nix/ expressions.

Nix is already kind of a fusion of a package manager and a build system. It's rather mature, has a decent ecosystem and does a lot of what he is looking for:

- Complete determinism, handling of multiple versions, total dependency graphs
- Parallel builds (using that dependency graph)
- Distribution

One major benefit of a solution like generating Nix files over compiler integration is that it works for cross-language dependencies. A lot of the time integrated solutions break down is for things like if a C extension of a Ruby gem relies on the presence of imagemagick. Nix has no problem handling that kind of dependency.

Also of course it is a lot less work to generate Nix expressions than it is to write a package manager. There are already scripts like https://github.com/NixOS/cabal2nix which already solve problems of the packaging system they replace.
The biggest problem is that E-mail demography tends to be broader than many of the other services.

Some of E-mail users are very conservative and specific about how they handle their E-mail. (Some of which are very risky behavior, which I actually tried to correct by explaining why that's bad idea, but ultmately given up...)

There are demography between novice and expert. Novices tend to not care about changes so much; some even won't notice changes, as long as features are somehow accessible. Experts may have some particular tastes, but they'd be quick to find solutions to change things around when they have to. But people in between tend to be very vocal about any changes and they can't (or not willing) to find and accept "solutions" -- they will be the first one to complain when UI elements like buttons shift around the screen. Unfortunately, as universal E-mail gets, a lot of E-mail users fall under category. (Though, in different ways, "experts" can be very particular about how they handle things can be very stubborn when there's no good reason presented to change -- but it's a bit different context.)

I can't even imagine how tough it will be to migrate some of people I know to anything other than what they are used to.
I find your uninformed fear mongering unhelpful, the dangers posed by these drones is relatively negligible. The laws already exist to prosecute those who deserve it and the currently proposed registration system should help with that.

The current problem is twofold:
1) We need better education of new UAS owners (and articles like this one don't help).
2) We need sane new rules and guidelines that allow drone operators to safely and legally do the sorts of things that are currently not allowed (autonomous operation, FPV flight outside of line-of-sight, and commercial operations)

I think 2) is important because you need buy-in from the community so that they self-police and self-educate. If your rules are asinine and un-informed you will alienate pilots and your enforcing job will be MUCH harder.
So what would have actually happened if the drone had hit the Helicopter, in reality and not paranoid helicopter operator world?
I nearly got fired cause I played so much nethack at work in the early 1990's.
Not sure why I was voted down, it relates to the same things talked about in the parent post...
Helicopters are pretty safe (well, not quite as safe as airliners but not bad, just stay away from the really small ones). But rotorstrikes with metal/plastic composites change the equation in a fairly bad manner. Especially a tail rotor would be pretty easy to break with a 3 pound drone and losing the tail rotor on a helicopter makes your day suddenly much more interesting.

Has there been a controlled test where someone flew a drone purposefully into the rotor of a helicopter?
AFAIK he did't. And that was mostly a manufactured outrage about semantics.

A taboo that I am glad he does break is not being able to discuss the potential negative aspects of different cultures/races. It should not be taboo to say X culture/race has a problem with X crime, etc. But yet it is. That's overbearing political corectness IMO and I'm glad he breaks it.
Hands down, Air Jordan is the best logo ever created. Designers might not think so, but people bought $2.6 million worth of products last year just because of it. It's hard to beat that.
>...the emerging modern definition...

IOW, people want to feel special so they are calling their toys by a name the feel is better.
The Guardian in 2013: "Abandoned NHS IT system has cost £10bn so far"

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-s...
How to Rip and Convert DVD to WMV
> It's a pain to change cell providers (in the US).

What!? You can port your number from one carrier to another with ease, for several years now.
Well, I sure hope they didn't rush things. Great games take time.
Installing and Using Research Unix Version 7 on a PDP-11/45 in SimH
There is a problem but you're looking at it the wrong way.

What's in the compiler's machine code generation phase that the build system needs to know about? If nothing, then making a monolithic system is only going to make your life miserable.

Well-designed compilers are already split into (at least) two subsystems: frontend and backend. Frontend takes the program and spits an AST (very roughly speakign, although there is also the semantic-analysis phase, and intermediate-representation-generation phase). Backend is concerned with code generation. What your build systems needs is just the frontend part. Not only your build system, but also an IDE can benefit greatly from a frontend (which as one of the commenter pointed out, results in wasteful duplication of effort when and IDE writer decides to roll his/her own language parser embedded in the tool).

I think AST and semantic-analyzer are going to play an increasing role in a variety of software development activities and it's a folly to keep them hidden inside the compiler like a forbidden fruit.

And that's the exact opposite of monolith. It's more fragmentation, and splitting the compiler into useful and resusable pieces.

(At this point I have a tendency to gravitate towards recommending LLVM. Unfortunately I think it's a needlessly complicated project, not the least because of being written in a needlessly complicated language. But if you're okay with that it might be of assistance to your problems)
A Phantom 3 officially weighs 1280g (just under 3lbs) which is pretty heft. It's dense, too. As the article says, probably the biggest risk is if it goes through the windscreen and hits the pilot. I wouldn't be surprised if it could do some unpleasant things to a helicopter rotor as well, but I'm not sure just how strong those are. Birds are a lot squishier so are probably somewhat more benign at the same weight.

Bird strikes do cause significant damage with some regularity, even if it's not too common.
Should Millennials Get into Internet Marketing? [Forbes]
On the other hand, sweet consulting gig if you can get it.
Depending on where it hit, anything from a "did you hear that?" followed by normal flight, to an unconscious pilot followed shortly by a spectacular crash.

Worries about three pounds of machinery coming through the windscreen aren't really "paranoid" so much as "justifiably cautious."
> your primary adversary in these challenges

"Challenges" or "programming challenges" sounds good to me.

The textfile was a fun read, best of luck!
You mean I have to deal with government purchasing processes? No thanks. I guess I'll never build that billion dollar OSS company. Or, maybe I can hire someone to handle that part of the equation.
To extend that: their work on the webtiles implementation is wonderful. I bounce between webtiles and console.

Here's a screenshot of me at the moment: http://i.imgur.com/mZXTnh1.png

There are a bunch of available servers:

* Sydney, Australia: http://crawl.project357.org

* Arizona, USA: http://crawl.akrasiac.org

* Georgia, USA: http://crawl.berotato.org

* Georgia, USA: http://crawl.s-z.org

* Paris, France: http://crawl.xtahua.com

* Falkenstein, Germany: http://crawl.lantea.net

* Seoul, Korea: http://webzook.net

* Tokyo, Japan: http://lazy-life.ddo.jp

And of course you can watch others playing on webtiles, too.
Experimental Design and Analysis [pdf]
I highly suggest that if you have the time to read about Portugual, and their results 14 years later after decriminalizing all drugs. It is what I would call a great success story, and it is a case study that I rarely see get brought up. There are two things that really get my blood boiling, the first one sadly works as intended, and the second one usually doesn't. The first one is fear mongering, and which usually perpetuates the second one is prohibition.
No - I'm not. But my connection works well enough and I don't notice any delays on either SSH or VoIP connections. So why should I invest time/energy into changing something that doesn't affect me?
It's hard to be accidentally dangerous with a laser pointer. People know you're not supposed to point them at others, and the only reason to point them at an airplane is if you're up to no good.

UAVs, on the other hand, have lots of interesting uses which are also potentially dangerous. That means your risk is from normal users who are just ignorant or careless, not just pranksters. Thankfully there are not a lot of people out there willing to deliberately endanger aircraft, but there are a lot of stupid and ignorant people.
When I'm getting proposals from people who don't have the full picture or less experience in a specific subject, I just shut down any part of me inside that wants to yell "you're wrong!" and empathize with their position first and see where they are coming from. The communication is often much smoother that way.

Not everyone is an engineer, and it's something hard to think about when you're usually around technical types all day as an engineering IC. As a corollary, not everyone understands security. We should all be making a better effort out where they are coming from first, and then go from there. Assume it's up to you to keep the conversation civil and relevant to them; if both people do this, everyone is better off. If one of them doesn't, well, hopefully you were the one that tried.
I have friends that worked there. Note the past tense. Just check out their Glassdoor reviews and you'll see how they treat their devs.

Anecdotally, I find it hard to believe they can build truly cohesive software with an insane amount of developer turnover.
If you don't you end up with bad passwords.

Maybe we should just get rid of the damn passwords and replace them with a system that makes it easier to remember and use without compromising security. At the very least one password + a smartcard system would be way easier. You enter your password once then you just have to swipe your card when you login to another system.
The basic format of structured proofs is surprisingly similar to how middle-school math typically teaches students to write proofs, the "two-column proof" structure. A proof is a sequence of numbered statements in the left column, each of which has to be justified by reasons noted in the right column, which are either appeals to a previous numbered statement, or to a named theorem/lemma already introduced in the textbook. Instead of using the second column, Lamport instead writes "PROOF: ..." and gives the justification below each numbered statement, but it otherwise seems quite similar.
I did some time at a healthcare IT startup and had to suffer through some Epic training. It's terrible. But so is most health software.
I'm definitely a lisp fan, but the Nix language isn't as bad as I used to think.

The laziness allows for some really cool and clean patterns that work intuitively and simply while still enabling powerful features. Also the syntax is tuned for clean hierarchical config files. And in some cases being pure helps you not shoot yourself in the foot with determinism.

I still would probably prefer Guile, but Nix is nice enough.

Mainly I just like the much larger ecosystem Nix/NixOS has. I can forsee myself being productive with NixOS as a desktop OS, not so much for GuixSD.

I think of it this way: one new somewhat-fancy config language to learn is much better than the 100 simple config languages you learn to tweak Arch Linux.
It seems like there is a fundamental difference between awareness of a fit back signals from various systems (fear, hunger, cold, pain, etc.) and awareness of the self as an separate entity. Animals obviously have fit back awareness but probably does not have the concept of the self, like toddlers and young children.

Self comes with language acquisition, which rewires the brain. That's why almost no one remember their baby days, it seems.

Before that language conditioning you are a perfect animal.)
This is pretty nuts: even going fairly hungry, he will start with at least 150 lbs of food, so he's probably starting with 200-225 lbs of stuff, climbing from near sea level to the 10,000-ft Antarctic plateau.

It's also pretty dumb:

> Henry will make the first solo descent of the Shackleton Glacier.

While going unroped on a glacier can be far safer than is often preached, it's not something to brag about. Falling into a crevasse is much less predictable than falling off a cliff, so this guy "free soloing" a hairy glacier is much more like Russian Roulette than e.g. Alex Honnold free soloing Half Dome.
The real-life weather warriors behind Kurt Vonnegut's fiction
> I envy the way in which the generation who trained me could relieve the intense stress of their work by losing their temper, at times quite outrageously, without fear of being had up for bullying and harassment.

> Years ago, I would have stormed off in a rage, demanding that something be done

awww poor little surgeon can't treat people like shit because of minor inconveniences.
> As someone who occasionally takes sea planes, which have already had close calls with drones in my area

I call bullshit.

If you really had 'close calls' in you area, then across the country/world and all the airports there would have been a drone strike by now.

I can't find any evidence of that.

And even if/when one accidentally strikes, there's no evidence people will die.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/wh...
Perhaps I'm just not very good with fashion, but that is not at all what I picture when I hear the words "puffy coat".
For me, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is hands down the best book of 2015:
http://hpmor.com/
Financial news aggregator by machine learning web crawler
Or mandatory rescue insurance.
Incidentally, the logo is called "Jumpman", and it's actually based on Jordan doing a ballet grand jeté to make it look like a more prodigious jump than his usual style.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpman_(logo)
Show HN: Swift online playground/API with networking
As a programmer in my first year of med school, I can only confirm the frustrations with medical software. As someone that gives a damn about usability/UI/UX, most (all?) EHR systems make me want to bang my head against a keyboard.

I honestly don't know how long I will be able to practice medicine before deciding that I can build something better (as foolhardy a notion as that is).
> "Contributing to the accident, the board said, were the lack of [Federal Aviation Administration] regulations and guidance requiring helicopter windshields to be resistant to bird strikes," among other factors, the NTSB said in a news release.

So why aren't windows typically polycarbonate? A few layers of that can stop bullets.
Basically it solves the problem a different way than you think. Instead of allowing you to control order, it removes the possibility of order mattering at the system level.

Nix and Guix use special file structures to make sure everything is isolated so no build can affect another, unless there is a depedency, in which case one will be built before the other.

It is this powerful isolated file structure that allows NixOS and GuixSD to deliver on the promise of deterministic system set up in a way Puppet and Chef will never be able to. It works incredibly well.
Siege is great! Really nice and easy to use.

Also noteworthy is Tsung[0], which is (far) more complicated but can speak more protocols, be configured to emulate user behaviour a little more closely and send crazy amounts of traffic.

[0]: http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/
Give Thanks for Williams-Sonoma and the Garlic Press
> Besides, surgeons can no longer get away with such behaviour. I envy the way in which the generation who trained me could relieve the intense stress of their work by losing their temper, at times quite outrageously, without fear of being had up for bullying and harassment.

This is a good thing. Good lord, the ego of some professionals never fails to astound. Treating people like people in the workplace and not harassing them shouldn't be a difficult concept to come to terms with.
I think their goal is to get coverage of commercial areas partly through nearby residential subscribers, since lots of them are in mixed-use areas. Even if the pizza joint doesn't have Comcast, the apartment upstairs (or across the street) might. So Comcast has a bigger chance of getting xfinitywifi coverage to places like the pizza joint if they turn on the functionality for residential routers too.
> I think AST and semantic-analyzer are going to play an increasing role in a variety of software development activities

It would be fantastic if source control systems would work on the AST instead of the plain text files, so many annoying problems could be solved there.
Hail was mentioned in the context of, "I'm assuming 'copter windscreens can handle hail?"

I can guarantee you that a helicopter windscreen cannot handle 3lb hail. If such a hailstorm were ever encountered (unlikely, the record in the US is 1lb 15oz) then the helicopter would be completely destroyed.

If we consider a somewhat more sane hailstone size of 8cm, that has a terminal velocity of about 170km/h and weighs about 1.5lbs. And a helicopter is not going to survive flying through a storm like that either. This drone, by comparison, weighs twice as much. The helicopter's cruising speed is about 245km/h, so that would be about the impact speed.

I don't understand why anyone would think that a 3lb chunk of machinery moving at 150MPH relative to a helicopter wouldn't go through the windscreen.

I also don't understand why everyone in this thread is apparently so eager to minimize the risks presented here. There are some good arguments to be made about not over-regulating and about the low probability of an actual impact, but the attempts to downplay the potential effects of an impact should one occur are getting pretty crazy.
Do drivers who keep gaps in stop-and-go traffic worsen it? (2012)
3 letters, the X makes it sound cool.
Having worked for both NASA and IBM, I'd have to agree that both are approximately as screwed up. Different ways, of course.
Indeed, I had finally taken the plunge on Carousel for its killer feature: Freeing up space on my 16GB iPhone while having the photos instantly available if I needed them. Carousel was a breath of fresh air; it had no issues with backing up photos over WiFi or cellular data, unlike the main Dropbox app. Now it's back to the unreliable and slow Dropbox app for photo syncing.
SO many people have tried this, and the USPS has shut them down. Either the USPS will do it or no one will, because they won't allow competition.
If you were going to build a house, and could only pick one tool, which would it be? You need several tools, but woodworking tools work best for 90% of all houses whereas steelworking tools are limited to a much different type of building. Stick with what's popular and common, some techs will have more open and supportive communities than others.

I'd place a goal or milestone in your roadmap - you will learn the tech along the way - make something that you want.

To be honest, you're trying to cram 5 years and 3+ complicated techs into a beginner project; some languages and platforms are actually re-usable... e.g. If you use React Native and MERN backend, you only need to learn Javascript. Your proposal has 3+ langs, but they're wildly different in terms of code/debug/deploy in the real world.
It's a risk, but realistically not all that much of one; it'd take an amazingly unlucky tail-rotor hit to really imperil the aircraft.

On the other hand, a drone which can climb high enough to almost hit a cruising police helicopter is a drone which can climb high enough to get sucked up by a commercial jet during takeoff or landing. Jet turbines are actually quite fragile, and something the size and mass of a bird or a drone can easily wreck one. (Ever see that video where the guy feeds a brick to a washing machine? It's like that, only much more energetic and not nearly so funny.) Bird strikes in such circumstances have been known to result in fatal crashes; a drone strike could easily do likewise.

Indeed I wouldn't be surprised if that fact had more to do than any other with the heavy penalties apparently being contemplated in this case; despite there having been no harm done this time, I imagine some of the people involved in deciding what to do about it are thinking it'd be good to try to deter anyone from doing something similarly stupid around an airport, where it might well actually kill people.
My take away is close to the opposite, having worked around healthcare IT for many years. Systems are antiquated, un-integrated, use archaic and proprietary languages and databases, and the lack of cohesive design for usability encourages most clinicians to keep using paper.

IT as currently and usually practised, especially in a healthcare environment, is also mostly a disaster in terms of value for expenditure. $2 billion for an Epic system in a regional hospital system... Which was obsolete before it was installed. Heck, the Deustche Bank SAP core banking replacement only cost $1 billion.

Much of the "oh but it's regulated" excuses are just that, excuses to be ignorant and stay stuck in the 1970s.

It doesn't have to be this way, but it requires a lucky administration to find a way out of the mess given the market for lemons in IT management and systems integrators in healthcare.

Open source and Cloud solutions (from an operating model perspective way more than technology) appear to be the only way out of this mess of "your mess for less" IT because it lifts the veil of sales, consultant-speak, and opaque RFP processes in favor of actually-working-and-reliable software that anyone can see and touch.
No idea. You might as well ask why general aviation is still using leaded gas. General aviation is a bit of a shitshow.
"'We’re going to get out of ISS as quickly as we can,' said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, last week."

If NASA gets out of ISS, it will not longer have a manned spaceflight program. It's not going anywhere without a launch vehicle, which it doesn't currently have.