skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A space elevator only provides access to geostationary orbit. One can climb up to LEO altitudes along an elevator, but that doesn't mean much. You wouldn't be in orbit, but sitting stationary as if atop a tall building. So we would still need to launch rockets for any space use in LEO (GPS and imaging sats for example). And any such orbiting objects would of course have to be navigated around this obstruction. Many useful orbit types would have to be outlawed to protect the elevator.

I wonder, is easier to launch into a LEO from the ground or from a fixed point at say 300km altitude? If you climbed a space elevator you would still need 8km/s of speed laterally. So you jump off and fire your rocket. You still fall towards the ground, requiring some thrust to keep out of the atmosphere. Without the arcing trajectory of a ground launch you would have to accelerate roughly twice as quickly, requiring larger engines. Is that really any better than starting from the ground as we do today?

Or you could climb to a near-geostationary position, burn retrograde until you touch the atmosphere, then aerobrake down to LEO. That's still a heck of a lot of effort.
> Are there good startup-oriented books on go-to-market strategy, distribution channels and business models?

- Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter. (But just reading the HBR On Strategy book is probably good enough to get you started.)

- Positioning by Trout & Ries

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Model_Canvas

If you search for things like 'marketing channels map', there are plenty of results. But it's more important to have a few key tactics that play into your strategy, and then your engagement with the rest of the marketing channels is going to be pretty generic for most businesses.

And I don't think there is an authoritative encyclopedia of business models, or at least there wasn't the last time I looked into it.
I have a set of slices which weren’t so healthy. Let me know if sharing them would be of value to you.

https://d0921abcf0d58ba49c3d-6ecbc7565855acc8ab3c742259f09fe...
On the other hand, the long list of terms and conditions on the Toys R Us gift card actually makes it feel more legit somehow. ("Ahh, there's the catch"?) Maybe have the front page end with that list, or the intersection of all terms, or a similar terms and conditions for muxme itself, rather than "many pages of EVEN MORE PRIZES".
I'd like to add that getting to a coherent strategy takes time and understanding what it is that you're trying to do. Given the example of Tacoda they probably needed those first 4 ears of 'fooling around' to get to a point where they could figure out, and clearly formulate what it is they should be going after.
This is very impressive in itself but what is the practical use?
I mean you probably could get (almost) the same result with much less work. For instance, "Academic" is every mail send from an .edu domain, "financial" is everything that comes from your bank, "personal" mails come from a sender that is in your personal address book and so on.

In short, there are "good enough" rules that require much less processing.
It's largely about massive economic churn. The population of Flint shrunk by about 1/2 since 1960 (a good portion of the decrease has happened since 1990). The infrastructure and obligations entered into by a city of 175,000 are now being serviced by a city of 98,000. That would be hard to manage even if there were no mistakes made (and not fully funding pension programs at the time the employee is working is a massive mistake, leaving today's smaller population on the hook for yesterday's municipal services.).
IMHO,

Coding a simple mainentence script is equal to writing a diary entry.

Coding a CRUD web app is as hard as writing an average short story in a college writing class.

Coding an app that uses heavily system programming principles, concurrency and networking probably equal to MFA level creative writing and so on...
They don't because it's not considered cool.
>The Broad Institute is a non-profit

so is Ikea
This is a nice example to use RiveScript in python, as I found the docs on pypy a bit lacking: https://github.com/aichaos/rivescript-python
First, Let’s Get Rid of All the Bosses
I hope he wins something similar for his work here. It's outrageous that he had to take out a mortgage on his home in order to be able to complete this project. I don't know the man but I have much respect for him.
You're right. But it's complex because this is an irreducibly complex problem space. Making distributed systems Just Work can't be made simpler.

Yeah, but that's my point: I want a PaaS for the ease of deployment and upgrade, but I don't actually need a distributed system; all our servers work isolated from each other, only receiving occasional commands from our office.

Unfortunately, it seems I have to choose between barebones deployment helpers like Dokku and systems designed to deploy Twitter and Whatsapp. We're more like WPEngine - where's the PaaS for them?

I'll look into MicroPCF, but is it production-ready? Sounds too focused to the development phase.
Ah, I honestly assumed it would use an existing set of weights such as from word2vec. Though I now realize that does not make sense since you can also embed images or really any real numbered inputs. I will give this a try.
You wouldn't have to contend with gravity loss (energy expended by performing work against gravity) or atmospheric drag, so all else being equal it would be a net energy win. Definitely not a free ride though.
> what is missing is an epistemological principle that tells us what our brains do to create true knowledge

Yes, I think even Deutsch would mostly agree with that, though I think his position would be: we know what the principle is (universal computation) but we don't yet know the particular mechanism by which our brains produce new theories, and that when we do figure that out it will be a major breakthrough.

Anyway, thanks for clarifying.
What I said is if you define merit as merely "the best person for the job" you are only really selecting for wealth in the end. Let me direct you to a little cartoon that explains it very succinctly.

http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
> As the elevator ascends the cable, it's "ground speed" must continually increase

That is backwards. The higher you are the less speed you need. This is true in all orbits. Contrast the orbital velocity of Mercury vs Neptune.

The rocket is aiming for low orbit. I.E. you go fast enough that you fall around the earth rather than into it. The only reason a rocket's ground speed increases as it's altitude increases because it's hard to add a lot of speed while still in the denser sections of the atmosphere. Altitude is needed merely to clear the drag imparted by the atmosphere.

We go fast and low because it's the easiest way to get something to stay in orbit using rockets. But mechanically as we gain altitude we go slower relative to the ground. Eventually when you go high enough you are standing still relative to the ground (geosynchronous orbit) or even go backwards relative to the earths rotation (high orbit).

A space elevator is aiming to go so high that there is no parallel acceleration necessary. The rotation of the earth provides all the acceleration needed. A space elevator that ends in geosynchronous orbit requires no parallel acceleration relative to the ground. A space elevator in high orbit could get something of a free ride out of earth's gravity well powered by the rotation of the earth.
This is good description of how different classes of people think.
"If your account's trajectory is positive, your natural instinct is to spend it" - that pretty much explains why most of middle class people do not move up into capital class.
Title is misleading; article is about PTSD, phobias, and other mental disorders, rather than fear.
Charitably, I think "easy" is the wrong word here. I think Fred meant something like, "get the strategy right and the execution is straightforward hard work."

Still, if "strategy" is "deciding what to do" and "execution" is "doing what you decided to do," then Fred's statement is almost tautological; there's nothing left for execution but "straightforward hard work" once you've drained out all the decision-making.

On the other hand, if we say "strategy" is only decision-making at the highest level, then I don't think execution is just straightforward hard work; there's logistics and tactics, too, which are critical.

Think of the dead companies with the right strategy who spent too much money, or who bet on the wrong technology platform, or who couldn't marshal a top-tier sales organization.
> Remember they switched to flint river to save a "whopping" $1 Million per year.

It's starting to look like they were offered a deal from their previous water source that would have come in under the price of switching to Flint, so the decision making process was especially weird.

> Even without the lead leeching issues, everyone knows the Flint river was an industrial dumping ground for decades and was very toxic - no amount of filtering would have made it safe for constant consumption.

As I understand it, the science is that it would have been fine if they hadn't failed to add an anti-corrosive agent, against normal best practice. The lead did not come from the river; the lead came from water pipes being corroded by the water.
I believe you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the speed of the top of a space elevator. The counterweight at the top of a space elevator would be approximately at geostationary orbit. If you were to be up there and "drop" a baseball, say, it would appear to hang there motionless, as it would also be (approximately) at geostationary orbit.
How is it any different from the idea of voxels?
Okay; I took the Skeleton CSS and gave that a try. It had some issues but I plunged into tweaking. In the end, I got a good-looking result. But that end result could be obtained with probably some 20 odd lines of way simpler CSS.

We are talking about this Skeleton hopefully: https://github.com/dhg/Skeleton

I am, anyway.

Some of my observations:

* Didn't like the scatter-brained mixture of units used in this CSS. Some things are given in pixels, others in rem. This is annoying because when the user zooms, the pixel stuff won't scale, but the font-relative will.

* Elements are arbitrarily given display styles for no good reason. For instance, a checkbox is "block" displayed. I have some checkboxes in a table, and this caused them to align squarely to the upper left of their cell, not obeying the vertical-align coming from the table.

* Some elements are given spurious inner padding or margins, so they cause extra space. Tables blow up because of this. I had to hunt this down and kill it.

* Speaking of tables, the CSS has a rule for TD and TH that text is left-aligned. Firstly, why when that is the default? This caused a middle align given inline in the table itself to be overridden. I had to hunt this down and remove it to re-enable the middle alignment in a table column.

* The h1, h2, h3, ... guys were sized way too large. The author of Skeleton seems to think that the purpose of headings is to have a crescendo of font sizes, whereby h6 is normally sized, and things get geometrically bigger from that, culminating in h1 being a billboard on an interstate freeway. This is not the case. The h elements are for document structure. While you don't want h<n> to be smaller than h<n+1> it doesn't always have to be bigger. Styling can use other clues to indicate the hierarchy to the user, such as depth of section numbers or indentation. And who the heck even uses h6 and do they really still want that heading to be smaller than h3, h4 and h5? Needless to say, I had to tweak all those sizes.

In the end I got a nice appearance, but still with way too much left-over cruft for what is supposed to be a minimal CSS skeleton. So I put this into a branch for later contemplation, and reset my master branch back.

That later contemplation probably won't take place, and so this was a waste of the better part of an hour.

Which tends to confirm my earlier view: don't spend time tweaking something that isn't approximately right as-is.
Courriel was invented in Quebec and imported by the academy.
Ask HN: Could a “Patent Clause” Be Added to Open Source Licenses
Could a clause be added to Open Source licenses saying something like: "Any software that uses this library agrees to assign any patents arising out of software to the Public Domain" (obviously more legalese required here). Also for something like servers: "This software may not be used to host any content that is covered by a non-public domain patent."

Would this be feasible?
elm-validate: sync and async validation with state
it wouldnt, one of the major valuation factors for new companies is IP (patents).
Neither. For LEO the object is released at well above the desired orbit and as it drops it acquires the needed velocity. Some fuel is still needed but not nearly so much.
I don't know, this advice feels a little off?

Perhaps a better way to say this is "execution doesn't matter if your strategy isn't working". The way this is written seems to diminish the effort that happens between the pivot and the exit. It also seems to diminish the luck and timing involved (frothy markets, AOL's ravenous acquisition appetite, popularity of ad models, etc)

"Ultimately Dave decided to flip the go to market model to an ad network and within a year the business exploded and it sold a few years later to AOL for something like $275mm."

It also seems to contradict of most startup advice I hear [1], which is some variation of "Ideas are easy. Execution is everything"

[1] http://www.inc.com/laura-montini/john-doerr-3-things-underst...
Any height is an advantage in achieving orbit. It's an exponential problem - you need fuel to go up, and you need more fuel to lift the fuel you need to go up, etc.

Also, air resistance is much more at the surface than higher up.

So by starting your ascent at a high altitude you need much less fuel both because you need less fuel, and because there is less air resistance (friction).

Space elevators still need to use the same energy to lift something, but they use an external power source so do not need to lift their own fuel, and they lift more slowly and greatly reduce the effect of air resistance.

So no, a space elevator won't get you to "outer space", but it creates a stepping stone which greatly reduces the cost of getting there.
Interesting couple of Reddit comments on the relevant water chemistry in this situation. [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/41gqfe/is_...
still looking for the funny bits…
What about tech that generated tests automatically from code and annotations? How do you think that would affect your work?
Long but spot on!
Can't you have multiple stages with multiple cables? I guess acceleration and deacceleration between stages could be costly, though.
> pls don't ask me about space elevators until someone at least builds a carbon nanotube structure longer than a footbridge

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/559557786514632704
Not really sure this is an unsolved problem in other contexts. For example, any good image viewer would have no-shimmering at all scales.

You simply render your text as images and then apply the method already used by the image viewers.
What a ball pen tells us about China’s manufacturing weakness
Does anyone know how the OpenBCI headset compares to something like the Emotiv EPOC headset? I'm just starting to get into this stuff and looking to buy a headset for tinkering, but not sure which one to start with...
Phobias and PTSD are pathological fear conditions. The title is not misleading.
> The model he has in mind is the e-print distribution platform arXive.

> Other disciplines are emulating the arXive pre-print model

> ...something like a gigantic open-source version of arXive for all scientific research

That's not how you spell arXiv.
Sadly this is not compatible with a Samsung S5 and it's current Android version.

But Screenshots looking great.
As Zika virus spreads, El Salvador asks women not to get pregnant until 2018
Refactoring changes how various chunks of code interact with each other. Types usually provide security against a limited set of bad interactions. Abstract or compound types can provide security against even more bad interactions, among other things. So, having simple, compiler-checked mechanisms for enforcing good interactions helps when you make changes that can cause bad interactions between chunks of code.
tl;dr this is about phobias and anxiety not "fear" we seem to have Discovered a drug that when a subject relieves the trigger emotion (sees a spider) the drug inhibits the reconciliation of the memory into long term storage. Something previously not thought possible

It clearly has some value for phobias, but it's big value might be in PTSD treatment but from family experience this is a big difficult area and silver bullets are rare.

US and UK need to do much more for long term expensive treatment of the veterans we have made - and if governments complain about the cost, we should very loudly point out they can save money in the future by simply stopping creating new veterans of wars.
Angular 2 Ebook – A Practical Introduction to the New Web Development Platform
Needs more information about you. So far Coupa Cafe is the biggest selling point. Just add a link to your LinkedIn or something.
Ladies and gentlemen, Sturgeon's law at work.
How exactly? Would not taking propranolol after 2 minutes of exposure to normal fear object eventually eliminate the fear-conditioning on that object?
"This app is incompatible with all of your devices." is what I get, but I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 on Android 4.4.2 KitKat. Not sure what the requirements are, but I would expect such a simple app to not have such steep requirements.
Not really. Learned skill and natural ability are not mutually exclusive. Being a great developer still means you have to learn a lot of things. Consider someone with a mere 1% better "natural" ability to write code but never had the chance to develop it into a viable "learned" ability versus someone who was merely "average" but had the wealth to develop the skill, the latter will get the job in a "meritocracy". So you're selecting for wealth mostly.
We were shown the TED talk on our first "Professional Communication" class this week. It sounded like placebo from the get-go (like the majority of the most-viewed TED talks).
But hey, who am I to question a Harvard professor?
Thankfully, someone else did.
Given that all i ever hear americans talk about are gas prices, i'm not sure it's correct to blame the goverment entirely.
Well, Hofstede's pragmatism dimension is something specific. Sometimes he calls it "Long Term Orientation". It was original identified as a dimension on which East Asian countries strongly differed from the west, and one of the first studies referred to it as "Confucian Work Dynamism".

So, if you prefer to think of it as Confucian Work Dynamism, it's no longer tied to the name of a quality the US would naturally consider itself as having.

Hofstede's project is a bit naively empirical and prone to generalizations, but he's trying to talk about something real.

"the long-term pole corresponds to Bond’s Confucian Work
Dynamism. Values found at this pole were perseverance, thrift, ordering relationships by status, and having a sense of shame; values at the opposite, short term pole were reciprocating social obligations, respect for tradition, protecting one's 'face', and personal steadiness and stability"
from
http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=101...
Wait until you run out of disk while running PostgreSQL with dokku. That's an adventure I don't want to have to repeat.
What android version are you running? It should be working with android 5.0+ :)

Edit: Just deployed a new version compatible with android KitKat. It should be available in the play store soon.
And how their brain works to a degree. Given what people find with MRI's, I think that will eventually have security implications.
I agree with the OP - getting rid of fear is foolish. Most of us are fearful of rattlesnakes.

This is about managing the memories of fearful situations. PTSD sufferers were right to be fearful in the original case - it's just the repeating of that fear in other situations is less helpful.
Great job with the simplicity and ease-of-use. This could work really well with https://wakatime.com/ to fill in the gaps of non-programming work time.
> A space elevator only provides access to geostationary orbit.

No, it provides access well above geostationary orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator#/media/File:Spa...

Time things right and you can basically fling off the end like the tip of a whip and head anywhere in the system.
Young, gifted and held back
See that's the model I'd expect to take - but that model makes perfect sense in the unikernel world too. So the author must be claiming that you need the debugging tools inside the container, otherwise the point about not having tcpdump etc. available makes no sense.
The app currently requires android 5.0+ because of material design stuff. But technically I could make it work on android 4. Never thought so many people are still running older android versions (My device is a nexus).
> training data and their construction

That's what I'm talking about. Machine learning systems - and everything else that is the product of human decisions - are a reflection of the biases, intentions, and other qualities of the designer. Even the initial choice to use a machine learning system is influenced by fallible humans.

Why use machine learning? What kind, and why? What is the underlying model that is being optimized? What data was it trained with? Is the design of the system a proxy for something else, intentionally or unintentionally?

The real world is complicated and messy, and any model of it is always gong to be incomplete.
America Is Still Losing at Skyscrapers
What do you connect your stages to other than the next stage?
It works well for me in several platforms.

What would improve it is when you zoom, with the mouse wheel or gesture if it would zoom in on the mouse cursor point rather than at the centre of the screen.
So it drops, but how does one translate that it into orbital, lateral, velocity?
I certainly believe an underthought of this article, which is that improved capabilities with materials such as carbon nanotubes might lead to a paradigm shift in the possibilities of what can be done with materials.
You've understood the criterion incorrectly and it's not circular logic. The tests provided by the IRS determine whether the current business relationship between a person and a company is one of contracting or employment. To evaluate the test you simply examine the criteria as the relationship stands.

So for this test: do Uber drivers pay their expenses, have they made their own investment in the infrastructure they use? If they do, it suggests they are contractors, and if not, it supports them being employees.

Yes, if drivers were employees then it would be unusual for them to bring and operate their own vehicle in the context of their employer's business, and pay for its expenses. Employees don't tend to do that, because the company owns the infrastructure and pays directly. Uber grew quickly because it tapped into this big pre existing network of private black car drivers who were small business owners and needed a good dispatching system. So it brought all those drivers on as contractors.
Anywhere up, I cannot see how it is to fling things down to low earth orbits.