skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run a small company that specializes in digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing. We’ve been in business for about 3 years now with moderate success. During that time, the progress I’ve witnessed in 3D printing technologies has been extremely disappointing. Meanwhile, our studio’s laser cutters do 10x the business of our 3D printers.

When desktop 3D printing was hitting the mainstream media in a big way a couple of years ago, the message was about how the technology was revolutionary and you could construct anything you could imagine at the press of the button. The public ate this message up, while industry insiders knew it couldn’t be further from the truth - of course that didn’t stop them from riding the frothy crest of the hype wave, further fueling the public’s misconceptions about the technology.

In the intervening 2 or 3 years, consumer desktop 3D printing technology hasn’t improved in any meaningful way. Most desktop FDM printers (the kind you’ve mostly likely seen that extrude a thin bead of melted plastic), are no better than the early Makerbot Replicator launched in 2012. They’re still slow, fairly user hostile (require a great deal of maintenance/calibration to get consistent results) and have many limitations regarding the types of geometries they are able to print due to limitations in support material.

The machines available at the consumer scale just aren’t capable of making truly useful parts. This is why there is a glut of green Yoda heads, and machines collecting dust on the back shelves of trendy digital agencies. This isn’t to discredit the minority of scrappy makers who are willing to work within the limitations of the equipment for novel projects - but for the larger public there just isn’t a ‘killer app’ for this type of device, beyond plastic trinkets.

The industrial/commercial scale printers are certainly much more capable. But like other types of manufacturing equipment, the development of these technologies is slow, mired by patents and driven by stakeholders who have no interest in cannibalizing sales of their expensive product lines by offering affordable consumer versions at a fraction of the price.

There are amazing things happening at the frontiers of digital fabrication. Laser cutting and CNC machining technologies are becoming much more affordable and easier to use for a wide variety of designers and engineers. For most applications these types of machines are infinitely more useful than 3D printers. They are providing an avenue for prototyping, short run production and the mass-customization of products to segments of designers and entrepreneurs who could never have afforded them previously. It’s almost a shame that the crappy desktop 3D printer has become the poster child for a much more varied and robust ecosystem of digital manufacturing technology.
Technically, Dash is a different product from Dash Button. The Dash is a barcode scanner/voice device for Amazon's grocery business (Amazon Fresh). You say a product's name or scan its barcode and it adds it to your cart on Amazon Fresh.

https://fresh.amazon.com/dash/
It would make the rocket too heavy. To add another engine, they would have to make the rocket larger in diameter, increasing the weight by a fair amount (they currently have the 9th engine in the middle, so it would have to get moved to the ring with the rest). Reducing the power of the center engine would also reduce the amount of payload to orbit.

Rockets that can reach orbit have very bad weight to payload ratios (Falcon 9 is ~2.5% takeoff weight to LEO) so there isn't much room for dead weight.
You have to have capital or someone who trusts you with capital to buy large things, though, which is exactly what the previously vilified federal subsidies provide.
Elon Musk has already been quoted as saying that the United States is "the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Nationalism
Falcon 9 First Stage Landing – From Helicopter
The web itself is a federated system, running largely on Free software, built to open specifications. (Email, too.) The idea that we don't have federated systems and that those that do exist are unused isn't particularly based in reality.

It's true that the Free Software federated systems that are more strongly based in ideology that bringing use-value to users have generally failed to experience uptake, but that should probably not be considered a surprise.
Of course Apple does not perceive the GPL as in their commercial best interest. Back when NeXT was writing what would eventually become Apple's toolchain, Steve Jobs tried to convince Stallman that he could come up with a plugin architecture and keep the Objective-C bit private. Stallman went to his lawyer and came back and said, no, you can't do that.

Steve Jobs' perception, and NeXT/Apple's perception, never changed. What changed is that in the NeXT days, GCC was so much better that Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of using GCC even though we don't want the GPL. A few years ago Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of avoiding the GPL even though we want GCC. And they went and invested significant resources into LLVM.

The GPL was meant to be a tool to get people who did not perceive free software as in their best interest to contribute to free software anyway. It might not have changed whether they were "haters" as a matter of opinion, but it was definitely intended to change their concrete actions. And it did -- for a very long time.
I live in the city, pay outrageous taxes (ie. taxes are about equal to my mortgage), and now my son is 4. So I'm faced with sending him to a school district with lousy outcomes and no budget, sending him to Catholic school, or moving to the burbs where they have sponsored robot teams and some of the best schools in the state.
First they get to recover all the video that they didn't get in the other stages :-) This one lands with its cameras and flash chips intact. If I were them I would tear it apart, learn from it, reassemble it, and then display it.

Interest question about safeing it once it is landed. You can't just dump excess liquid oxygen are you'll end up starting fires. Fortunately it isn't like the shuttle which had Hydrazine in the OMS tanks that had to be managed post landing.

I can't wait until they land one in the daylight, and on the west coast so I can watch in person.
More batteries to get over the slower generator startup time, and likely quite a few smaller generators to do the best they can to keep the batteries going if the big generator is slower than expected to startup that day.
I tried this a few years ago with an android on a stick device. It's definitely doable, but I'm fortunate to have the resources to not need such a thing.
I just saw this - but funnily enough, this is how I handled it. Thanks man - appreciate the comment!
Social software can perpetuate existing power structures, but it can also create new structures. Software can also evolve to eliminate power concentrations. That's why it is important to always recognize that inequalities can arise in social software, and to devolve power in the system as much as possible.
that were really expensive.
In all seriousness, when did schools stop teaching shop class?

I'm not that old, but at school I learned to measure and mark, to drill and tap, to saw and file. If I want a quadcopter frame, I'll cut it from a sheet of aluminum or CFRP. I'll need nothing more than a hacksaw, a file and a hand drill. In less time than it takes for a 3D printer to warm up, I'll have a stiffer, stronger and lighter frame than could be produced by a consumer 3D printer.

If you want to make stuff, I urge you not to waste your time with 3D printing. Learn the basic skills of woodwork or metalwork. It isn't hard and the tools aren't expensive. Despite endless pleas to the contrary, FDM machines will only ever produce tchotchkes.

If cheap DMLS machines ever hit the market then I'll be first in line. Until then, no amount of clever technology will overcome the basic materials science that prevents FDM machines from being useful.
It was probably edited by a crisis management firm.
The true genious is bill gates who invented closed source software in 1976 letter to the hobbyist.

Now everybody cannot think of sofware as naturally different than propietary.

Hence giving an opportunity for a natural monopoly. Bill gates used security an argument a lot, and only became a little more secure by using permissive open source or buying software from poorer concurrent that had no good backup from their banks.

Bill gates is the baron de Beaumarchais of computers : whining about being riped of software he did not created because people would give the interpreter so that their code could be used.

A right on the second creation.

Just for the record Beaumarchais, whining for special treatment as an artist. He was a smuggler, a weapon dealer, a baron, an aristocrat, and a revolutionary AND he created the fundamental rights of authors.

The true fundation of liberalism: as long as it works for me, let's do revolution.
(...and if it makes you feel any worse, I got curious when I saw your response which ones didn't reset, and it turns out I had it backwards: most of them don't reset, except the one that does :/.)
As a German I don't use Facebook. Most of my friends also don't use Facebook. For me it's just a waste of time and doesn't make sense.
Nitpick on both links. They say `alpha . beta = id = beta . alpha`. This is wrong: `alpha . beta` composes to a different `id` from `beta . alpha`.
One Rep Maximum Calculator
I am not complaining about Elon Musk. I'm complaining about the people worship I am reading all over the internet whenever he makes the news. I am complaining about you and me.
Laravel 5.2 Released
Rock-Paper-Scissors-vs-COMP-C++ console app
> Ctrl-C no longer kills the backgrounded gdbserver.

Woohoo!
Elon Musk's blog: Background on Falcon 9 rocket launch
How does a guys blog post saying he like 3D printing get this high up?
Your comment is kind, and appreciated. Thank you.
Your point is well taken, but if memory serves, the specific technologies listed were developed by private corporations and industry consortiums. Would be interested to see a fact checked history on this, however.
RMS -- and perhaps the FSF more generally -- seems more concerned with preventing non-Free software, with creating Free Software as a means to that end, than increasing the volume of Free Software.

To RMS, non-Free software isn't just worse than Free software, its a net harm to society such that it's better to have no software than to have non-Free software. Its even often (apparently, to RMS) better to have no additional software than to have a lot of additional Free Software and some additional non-Free software.
The dream of a GPL world only ever worked if the entire ecosystem was GPL and it was possible to derive a living from ecosystem. The revolution never happened. One could even argue that RMS' more civilized age never really existed outside of the MIT AI lab so it was doomed from the beginning.

Due to his stubbornness in not accepting the realpolitik the savannah has now become a reservation that is shrinking daily as people abandon it for more liberal climes.
Yet another pointless example of how FUD dominates tech articles. Are there any verifiable data to back up their claims, like actual sales numbers dropping or even a single losing quarter? Any new competitors that may disrupt the market? Does the article make a testable prediction? Are they willing to bet anything tangible to back that up?

If the answer to most/all of these questions is "no" you may be dealing with another example of time-wasting BS.
Baidu was a strategic investor in Uber, and they lead another $1.2B round a couple of months ago. Both companies have local giants backing them, so anything can happen. If I had to bet, though, I'd bet on Uber winning in China if they can win enough of the rest of the world.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/07/uber-confirms-its-raised-1-...
Many nations have money, but no Space X. The American people have been wasting their money on military contractors for decades, and the United Launch Alliance, with no visible progress. If anything Elon Musk is saving us taxpayers money. No one is claiming that the amazing engineers, project managers, and many others don't deserve applause.
This man makes valid points about the state of GNU and BSD. I've been tempted to leave linux completely as of late, but the truth of the matter is that I love GNU too much to go.

Yes, RMS is pretty pegged on the autistic scale, but he's not wrong, and Snowden proved that GNU as an ideology is pretty much our only hope against nation states intending to deprive us of our freedoms.

GNU is the closest thing to a soul the software industry could have, demanding nothing less than freedom for the users of software and writers of software. Their (not) unix is a beautiful thing to look at, and companies like Novell/SuSE and Red Hat built their empires on its foundation.

Now, Red Hat is taking an active role in rewriting everything but the kernel, in order to push-out and/or marginalize the GNU crowd. If they were honest, they would have Poettering come out and state publicly that they are creating a replacement Operating System for the linux kernel. but they're not. They're wrapping themselves in the GPL (and the goodwill that comes with it) while trying to destroy Stallman's creation.

Red Hat has quietly declared war against GNU, and those that support it, embracing and promoting the watered-down (and far more profitable) "open source" concept as they go.

In that war, systemd is merely another salvo that (I think) began either with Havoc Pennington writing dbus off the back of Nat Friedman of Ximian's hard work and research, or their complete takeover of freedesktop.org. NetworkManager, Avahi, and PulseAudio being pushed into all the distributions, always long before they were stable (and all written by Poettering), proved with a paper trail that they had worked the kinks out of their embrace-and-extend plan long before systemd was ever mentioned on a debian mailing list for adoption.

I wish the author well, but some of us are gonna stick around to try and keep GNU strong against this new threat. We've lost Debian, Arch, and Ubuntu, but this war is far from over.
That's the correct response.
At this point, basically never. Sad but true.
You're designing a standard for people to implement in their specific compilers, and you want to let them generate fast code... I hardly think the mere existence of "undefined behavior" indicates incompetence.
Brightly colored pieces of crap echoes my sentiments exactly. Eventually they'll end up in the trash; only take up space in a landfill, or end up in an ocean gyre. I don't doubt the utility of some of the "exotic filaments", but these are even less recyclable (or biodegradable compared to PLA). The only useful example he gives is a quadcopter. The majority will just print stainless steel Yoda heads, and fractal vases, that sea life will choke on.
Show HN: “Blog” via GitHub issues
Unfortunately, nobody will use that compiler. They will continue to use the high-performance compilers, because this is what happened decades ago.
App Developers on Swift Evolution
I interpreted this whole thing as 'I'm sorry you're mad.'
Ask HN: Launching with network effect
I'm looking to launch an app suffering from network effect (value for user is proportional to number of users). Any thoughts on how to avoid a cold start?
I don't think it is worship so much as it is respect. While its true engineers did the work there is ample evidence that the exact same team can have very different outcomes with different leadership. This is shown again and again in sports where one year the team does poorly, but a new coach or manager can get that same group of men into the playoffs. Same guys, different leader.

That is true of engineers as well, I've met engineers who, under a great manager, have achieved results that they themselves didn't think they could achieve. And I've known engineers who were superstars and unable to perform well at all under poor management.

The point is you need both, the talent to do the work and the leadership to inspire the talent to do their best work. Without both you don't make the playoffs and you don't advance the state of the art in rockets.
As an adult I don't want to get into a car with a huge pink mustache on it.

Get over myself? Sure, but the brand is terrible.
Does Instacart make a loss on each delivery?
I don't see how this will fly even with robot taxis. Not for too long at least. I think self driving cars will be commoditized easily. Any new player can simply leverage the technology. The economy of scale is simply not there in this business, compared to the leverage Google and Facebook have. There is hardly any network effect, and it is still highly capital intensive even with robot cars. So while they may succeed in being and maintaining their status as multi-billion dollar companies, I am not seeing how they can go much further in the long run.
I am not sure if that answers my question.

>I'm a German living in the United States and find this part of German society pretty annoying: Being super careful about anything that could potentially encroach on your privacy

In the case of Google Maps, I understand that a non-functional application might be annoying and at least Google makes some effort to blur data. But in my reading of the original post, the poster is annoyed that the German community at large has decided to exercise their rights to privacy.
the non naive way to look at this is that you and your friends gave up a little freedom (using open, standard and interoperative ways to communicate) for a little convenience (proprietary controlled communication medium)
upvote! -bobby
Honest, authentic straight talk is the solution.
Android is an OS for text messaging and web browsing. If that's all you want to do then it's great! Otherwise it's absolutely aweful.
I wholeheartedly agree. I think part of it has to do with the "everyone must go to college" movement that looks down upon manual labor and blue collar jobs. People have that yearning to build (or "make") something but don't even think of using hand tools.
I honestly recommend you don't worry about it. If your users love your product then you'll be fine, and the only way I know how to do that is talking to users, iterating and just trying to figure things out. If you get those things right you won't have problems with press, VCs, etc.

I know this is a gross simplification, but it's really worth trying to focus on what matters because there's so many ways to get distracted.
To give people an idea, this is the difference of scale:

http://i.imgur.com/RVOKED2.jpg

Blue Origin's achievement is nice; just as older prototypes that achieved suborbital landing (Grasshopper, DC-X), but it's unclear yet what it meant for the industry (hope they keep going though, they're a good track). SpaceX's landing is a landmark for space travel, rapid reusability is now much closer. I'm much more confident now this will change the cost structure of the whole industry, seeing how launch is a dominant factor.
so, instead of acknowledging my response in any way, you create a strawman, then answer your own question you made up?

why not just edit the grandparent post, rather than waste time with a response?

Try again: are you really mystified by mob mentality?
Counterpoint: physical security largely works this way too.
Another thing: You should probably go TLS-only. Set up a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, and set the Strict-Transport-Security header on all HTTPS responses.

It's very easy to do, and ensures all your users get maximal security. The future is encrypted.

Today I did this for my blog: https://github.com/TazeTSchnitzel/blog/commit/792986d18d8583...
beware of item 4. Android 2.3 is still prevalent in some markets
I am pleasantly surprised that so many people have taken the time to read the source code of multiple compilers and have an opinion on why one is better than the other.
Randall must feel pretty snide when even Elon is referencing his comics..
Wow what a crock of shit. They got called out for back room deals and ignoring products; and it's only after a revolt ready to make their entire operation obsolete that they publish a half hearted PR response that admits no responsibility at all.
Docker acquired Tutum (http://tutum.co) not so long ago. I've been using it for a few months and pretty impressed if anyone is looking for a Heroku for Docker it's the closest thing so far I'd say...
Realistically it takes my 3D printer about 90 seconds to warm up and while it's printing I can be doing other things.

I, too, love manual subtractive fabrication. But while the tools are not necessarily that expensive, they do take up far more space on the shop bench. While I'm temporarily an apartment dweller, I just don't have the space to set up my lathe or a mill.

The technologies are perfectly complementary. For example, often I'll 3D print something with undersized holes and then drill and tap them to size.
> devolve power in the system as much as possible

Can you think of good examples where this has actually happened? In most cases you have situations like where everyone has access to the sum of all human knowledge for free, but where high-SES kids have more time and ability to benefit. Part of the issue is that social software is built on networks, and networks naturally concentrate power because of Zipf's Law.

Most design elements are also really just double edged swords. E.g. lots of people argue that Facebook's real names policy is bad for the LGBTQ community or whatever. But at the same time, Xbox Live isn't exactly the world's most LGBTQ friendly community either.

One of my favorite quotes on social software is still this old one from Joi Ito, "You're not a leader, you're a place. You're like a park or a garden. If it's comfortable and cool, people are attracted." It's important to be cognizant of power structures when designing structures, but at the same time what really makes good social software is seeking out and accentuating the interstitial. But this usually eventually results in the creation of new power structures, and the best we can do is try to give a wide variety of folks the opportunity to benefit.
the calculus can change when you have kids. Then you're faced with living in a good school district (unless you can afford private school). Good school districts don't always line up with downtown cores - at least they're still lagging our shift in housing preference in many areas.
DV = Domain Validation - all that's validated by the certificate authority (CA) is that the person getting the certificate controls the domain

OV = Organisation Validation - the CA also checks that the person getting the certificate is the organisation they claim to be (the cert will contain, for example, a company name or number)

EV = Extended Validation - the CA does additional checks for authenticity and trustworthiness

Typically, sites with EV certificates have the address bar show up green, and the organisation name is visible in it. EV is mostly only used for stuff like online banking. Less important things like Facebook, YouTube and your blog will use cheaper and easier to get DV or OV certificates. Let's Encrypt! gives you a DV certificate since domain ownership is the sole thing it can and does validate.
I recently got job offers from two companies, one in downtown San Francisco and one in the South Bay. I ended up going with the one in the South Bay because I couldn't figure out a way to commute into downtown SF in a timely manner. It seems that unless you want to live directly in the city, there's no way around a 40+ minute commute each way. By contrast I plan on finding an apartment within about a 20 minute drive to the office of the South Bay company.