skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's worse because 1) even with the "best and brightest" in charge, we've had one disaster after another and 2) the "meritocracy" we have is horribly broken on its own terms. Making the meritocracy we imagine should exist would require fairly radical reforms in terms of taxes, redistribution, college funding and regulation, youth economic and educational support, and a whole host of other interventions that supporters of the present establishment find anywhere from distasteful to anathema.

"In public life, our pillar institutions and the elites who run them play the mechanic’s role. They are charged with the task of diagnosing and fixing problems in governance, the market, and society. And what we want from authorities, whether they are mechanics, money managers, or senators, is that they be competent—smart, informed, able—and that they not use their authority to pursue a hidden agenda or personal gain. We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade. Elite failure and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society."

"..what we’ve seen time and time again is that the two aren’t so neatly separated. If you don’t concern yourself at all with equality of outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish."

- Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites

There's a good reason social mobility in places like Denmark is so high compared to the US; they do meritocracy better.
Yeah, it's really weird, huge apartment buildings and then just greenery and farms. If you look back at the final row of buildings it looks like a realization of some sort of "the inevitable wave of progress" metaphor.
Why would you ever think of Don Knuth as an evil person?

From my few years of contacts with him in the early 80's (he was on the board of our company, a spin-off from the TeX project), he was one of the most gracious, kind, thoughtful, humble people you could ever meet. And I think anyone who met him would agree.
Although, the plan for the Energia launch vehicle was to return and land (the boosters vertically, like SpaceX is doing, while they planned to put wings on the main rocket) - however the program was canceled before they got to that phase of the project.
I have tried and thought about many things until finally writing my own tool that is extremely fast, powerful, and flexible. Currently it could be seen as org-mode replacement that addresses some of the key challenges (hard to learn, awkward) while keeping some key benefits (efficient from keyboard, extremely flexible), and adding huge flexibility in what can be done: http://onemodel.org (AGPL).

It is a personal organizer, is something like really fast mind maps but (currently) keyboard-driven and handles very large amounts of interlinked data, different topics at once or mixed etc: the beginning of a platform to change how individuals (or mankind) manage knowledge overall. Future features involve much more than note-taking, but exploiting the internals for collaboration, anki-like repetition, to-do reminders, and more.

For current org-mode or evernote users: The app has export (& import) features to convert anything to (or from) an indented plain-text outline. The FAQs have links to a discussion of a more detailed comparison with org-mode that seemed somewhat well-received at the time (link is on this page which discusses evernote: http://onemodel.org/1/e-9223372036854614741.html ).

Feedback would be much appreciated. If one has any interest at all, I suggest signing up for the (~monthly?) announcements list, and participating in discussions on the general list, for suggestions & input on things going forward.

(Ps: in the next week or less I hope to have a demo version available to play with easily, without having to install anything first but the .jar.)
The principal functional difference between the Shuttles and Buran is buried in the last paragraph:

The main advantage of Buran over STS is that
it was made from start to be fully automated.

The entire test flight from launch to the landing was done _completely_ autonomously. The most impressive part of it though was the landing when Buran aborted first landing run that happened to be into a strong crosswind and retried with a different runway, ultimately landing just few meters off the target point.

PS. Now reading the linked article, it appears that all its software goodness fit into less than 4 Megs. I'd totally read the memoirs of whoever was behind that firmware masterpiece.
I might be strange in this, but I dislike languages without a canonical implementation; is there a canonical implementation of Datalog?
I tend to do email once a day in the morning when I get to work. I mostly don't look at it again after that unless there's something particularly critical at issue.
Yes, and? Both launches had the Energia in a fully disposable configuration – the launcher was never equipped with the hardware to recover the boosters, nor did the hardware exist.

Only the orbiter returned, like with the Shuttle.
Like this: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21g%2Bop3AZBL.jpg
Digital Ocean for the cost conscious. Linode for the support.
> But, looking back on it all, it was mostly luck. I wish I could say that I had some part in it, but really, I didn't.

Don't discount the value of the choices you made, like 1 (choosing to graduate), 2 (making good choices of friends), 4 (there's a lot one can do to improve attractiveness, like standing up straight, haircut, choosing clothes, demeanor, etc.), 5 (choosing friends), 6 (choosing to pay attention to a mentor instead of dismissing her), 7 (choosing to go to college), 8 (choosing a major).

You made a LOT of choices along your path to success. The individual details are luck, but recognizing those opportunities and taking advantage are very much a choice on your part. Life is complex, and everyone encounters lucky details that they may or may not recognize for what they are. You did.
> There's just no reason for corporations to take RMS's "ethical" route when the profits lie squarely in the other direction. Lofty academic ideals don't buy your family groceries.

I agree he's a bit too extreme; I recall a video where he told a proprietary software developer that between continuing to do his job and letting his children starve, he should do the latter.

But there does have to be someone advocating for this, because free software is in general a social good and is unarguably indispensable in our industry. It's not impossible to make money off it either; look at Red Hat and Canonical, for example. But I'd never argue that all software has to be free or that everyone should do it.
This is very common. In general inventing your own headers as a sideband channel is a bad idea. It's not just firewalls - many proxies do this too. Just put your metadata in the body or URL instead.
This article made me change my[0] business' choice from Odoo to Tryton. Thanks to RMS for pointing me/us to this better option.

http://medicalcannab.is
But, success is actually a prerequisite for imposter syndrome. It's the haunting feeling that you don't deserve that success and that you will be somehow "discovered".

One thing I can relate to though is working really hard for fear of underperforming or proving to be under qualified, only to learn later that others felt I was performing exceedingly well.
Zika HOAX exposed by South American doctors: Brain deformations caused by larvicide chemical linked to Monsanto; GM mosquitoes a 'total failure'

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/052943_Zika_virus_hoax_larvacide_...
> All a Coursera completion tells me is that you were persistent enough to go back and re-take the (multiple choice) exams enough times to get a passing grade.

Doesn't it indicate that a student is willing to learn?
Ask HN: How do you test your websites on different device while developing
I have a small project and while developing I push my changes to github and then try it out on my phone with the gh-pages branch.

I've seen people making changes to a website and then having them load up automatically on multiple devices in front of them. How do you do something like that?
I'm having trouble making any sense of your comment. Are you trying to say that writing code is the only effective way to spread free software, and that activism and awareness efforts are useless? But then you just fall back and insult RMS's computing habits, as if they somehow affect his ideals or the message he's trying to get across.

While I agree that we're not going to see companies mass-adopt free software as long as there is no legal or economic reason for them to do so, I don't see how randomly insulting one guy has anything to do with the movement.
Funny thing is the cable UI for preview is pretty much identical to this today.
If you have any interest in helping to improve how mankind organizes its knowledge (as a whole or at any level), I'd love participation here (or just your exploring it in an academic way): http://onemodel.org (AGPL, a new approach I call "atomic knowledge" because of the internal structure, which I discuss if you explore the web site a bit, but it could be described better than it is).

I just made a more detailed description here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11461985 .
Chernobyl – As tourist in the death zone (translated)
Girl Sings Like Angel, Boy Spits Fire
It wasn't at all obvious to me, but a random click revealed that each paragraph on this page actually links to a full (short) story...
This isn't news. It's fear-mongering.
> With a lot of hard work, I believe anyone can break out of poverty.

I'm glad you made it; that's impresssive and great news. The data and research overwhelmingly disagree with your statement; so few make it. Read the stories of those kids in the article; it's not reasonable to say that they merely lacked hard work. As I posted elsewhere, the bar obviously is set much too high for most of humanity (and I assume we are talking about people in wealthy nations).
If you are so worried, don't have a kid. The world is overpopulated enough as it is.
I like this website more: http://buran.ru/htm/molniya.htm
It has tons of info, not only on Buran, but also on the earlier Spiral and Bor prototypes.
Do you have an actual source as opposed to an ad-packed blog that says autism is caused by vaccines and promoting 'natural cures' and homeopathy to cure cancer?
SpaceX's approach is much more "big and dumb."

There was a self published Sci-fi book from a few years back, where some dot-com billionaires funded a "big and dumb" design philosophy reusable two stage to orbit rocket. It also used aluminum computer aided machining and friction stir welding to increase seam strength and lower structural weight.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rocket-Company-Library-Flight/dp/1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_News

> Natural News (formerly NewsTarget) is a website for the sale of various dietary supplements, promotion of alternative medicine, controversial nutrition and health claims,[2] and various conspiracy theories,[3] such as "chemtrails", chemophobic claims (including the purported dangers of fluoride in drinking water,[4] anti-perspirants,[5] laundry detergent,[6] monosodium glutamate[7] and aspartame), and purported health problems caused by allegedly "toxic" ingredients in vaccines,[2] including the now-discredited link to autism.[8] It has also spread conspiracy theories about the Zika virus allegedly being spread by genetically modified mosquitoes.[9]

It's a whole big bag of crazy.

Wikipedia is rather unusually to-the-point on how nuts it is, given that that's the first paragraph of the article. This place is just that insane, to the point that any attempt to portray it as even minimally rational would be a massive violation of neutrality and show an utter disregard for what actual experts think.
Very impressive, I hope things are working out for you :)
My father told me that the reason most people don't recognize opportunity is that it comes disguised as hard work.

I.e. nobody is going to get lucky by watching TV.
The question includes the phrasing, "after inflation"
> The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite

Seriously? In 1945, Japan literally submitted wholesale to a rich nation (the US), allowing it to change their laws, customs, etc. It was called "unconditional surrender". General MacArthur ran the country for a few years. Japan is probably the best example of how that approach can be successful.
How 'Maintainers,' Not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn
Ultra-low power microcontroller development kits for Apollo MCUs launched
At the very least you need both opportunity (access to a computer, which was a luxury 15 years ago) and you have to have the aptitude to be able to learn programming. (Remember a lot of these kids in Baltimore have lead poisoning). As well as the free time to do so. (I knew kids in my neighborhood who had to quit school to work full time [and overtime] to help their parents pay rent).

Not to mention I don't think that you can really "force" yourself to have the "correct" interests.
> Soviet intelligence couldn't quite figure out what the Shuttle was supposed to be good for.

I'm reminded of this famous joke: http://militaryhumor.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/military...

> Only much, much later was the ISS planned around the Shuttle's capabilities

IIR, the STS program (of which the shuttle was the only surviving part) was always intended to ferry cargo and some future spacestation parts into orbit. The ISS was the eventual compromise station and was a mere shadow of the original proposal.
It's not impossible, it just requires an intelligent weighting approach. Tax rates on yachts, private jets, estates, and luxury goods can safely be made much, much higher than taxes on groceries and other staples, for example.
Am I the only who's noticed that there is always one and exactly one major disease of which we should all be mortally afraid?
Swift only provides object storage and we need block storage.
Paper title is about yet another build system (this one written in Haskell), to replace Make. While make is awful, Most other build systems I've ever used have ended up being awful in their own way, and have the massive disadvantage that my users probably don't have the CMake 2.8.9.2 that I wrote my build script for.

Also, I find it amusing that they claim Make's language is horrible, when they admit their replacement isn't shorter, I have to learn Haskell to use their system, and it looks like this (random snippet). No better than Make (in my opinion), and further I have to write unicode arrows?

"∗.o" %> \out → do
let src = out -<.> "c"
I second this, it was HIV, then bird flu, swine flu, Ebola, now Zika.

Edit:

Actually the NYT article is quite nice in evaluating the risk and giving information about the danger zones.

But most probably all those viruses/microbes required public attention to get required funding to stop and confine them.
Muzak dates back to the 1930s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak_(brand)
Yes. It is coronary heart disease.
> in America people mostly make their own luck.

That's clearly not the case. Off the top of my head, success depends heavily on the neighborhood and family you are born into. Are your parents divorced, in prison, are they alchoholics, do they teach you values and education, do they abuse you, do they rear you at all, can they afford food, electricity, or college? Does the school in your zip code have books the classrooms? Are you going to get shot in the streets, do your friends sell drugs? Is it a wealthy suburban school where 90% go to college, a poor urban one where 90% are literate?
People don't care about privacy with a cashless society, they fear they'll have to pay taxes like they should.
I think this article is saying I should build an iron man suit.
In addition to zoning, parking minimums mean that US landscape is mostly asphalt with some buildings sprinkled here and there, instead of actual city.

Really, look at satellite photos of a modern American city and it's primarily car infrastructure.

http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par...

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/04/10/parking-craters-arent-...
And global warming, right?

How is it that people who are sensible about energy policy suddenly turn into conspiracy theorists when it comes to public health policy? This guy isn't making any radical proposals. He's just suggesting a sensible mosquito abatement strategy in a particular part of the US where it makes sense.
The engine reuse isn't exactly the Shuttle program's brightest moment anyway. The SSME was designed for 55 uses… By the time of the Challenger disaster, that number was 4-5. By the end of the Shuttle program NASA counted themselves lucky when some of the engines managed 15 uses; and refurbishment between each flight was only marginally cheaper than building new expendable engines for every flight. Even with the added benefit of 30 years of progress in material sciences, SpaceX is unlikely to manage 55 reuses on their engines specifically designed for it.

The Energia solution wasn't as high-tech, but it was highly pragmatic: The boosters were also used as expendable rockets on their own right (Zenit), so high production volumes – and easier to handle fuels – decreased prices significantly, to the point that several Zenit-derived engines are in use by American and South Korean companies; and the main engine was exactly the scaled-down, cheaper, expendable SSME that NASA could have used to drive down Space Shuttle launch costs.
Ignorance is the largest point of failure regarding anything to do with issues of security and understanding the pitfalls of electronic commerce. I don't know what percentage of people fully understand how these system can be used against them, but I'm sure the majority don't understand.

We are at the mercy of corporations which push much of the technology to their financial benefit and also the large policing agencies which want the easy route to surveillance of the general population. All of this together with the main-stream-media are an enormous barrier to to cross in order to inform people of what could become if things continue on the current path.
Or use flexbox anyway and structure your HTML and CSS to afford progressive enhancement. You'll get the full styling in the wide range of browsers that support flexbox[1], falling back to a still-reasonable styling in the older browsers when they ignore the flexbox CSS.

It's easy to forget that CSS' forgiving nature, silently ignoring future/unknown properties, can be a powerful tool for creating backwards compatible sites that gracefully degrade in older browsers.

[1] http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox
That looks like a place that has all the negatives of the city (small, cramped apartment living spaces) combined with the negatives of the suburbs (too far away from things)
Apply HN – HireFemale
Job portal for women job seekers.

Problem: Where are the women job seekers?

Solution: Take the struggle out of searching for female candidates with the right skill set.

4 team members: 2 software developers, 1 QA engineer, and 1 business developer/designer/junior developer
Systems Admins: We Need to Talk
Rebuilding an aircraft on the fly – A Pattern Library integration at trivago
Soldering iron solves a lot of "convenient features"
> The minimum wage is creeping higher every day.

Not in constant dollars [0]. It peaked in 1968. It's a bit lower than that now -- if you accept the official inflation estimates, which some argue are understated.

> Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending has never been higher.

True, though as a percentage of GDP, Social Security hasn't increased that much since 1975 -- it reached 4% then, and is around 5% now. [1] I'll let you look up the numbers on Medicare and Medicaid.

The situation with the ACA is complicated -- it is costing some money in the short run, but (a) it's less than originally projected, and (b) more importantly, it does seem to be curbing healthcare inflation (something is, anyway).

All that said, your point that the welfare state hasn't been shrinking, either, is a fair one. Perhaps it's fairer to say -- as I think the OP is arguing -- that economic conditions, particularly since the Great Recession, and especially the fact that the middle class has been shrinking in recent years, put us in a situation where the need for the safety net is arguably greater than it had been until recently.

[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/23/5-facts-abou...

[1] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/social_security_spending...
Maybe we need more gentleman adventurers willing to further the patriotic cause by living for a year and a half in a small sunless box, risking horrible death and scurvy? These guys went for years subsisting on mostly meat-like substances preserved with 19th century technology and structural biscuits.

Actually, Robert Zubrin advocated such an approach for years. Mars One shows that there are plenty who would volunteer for such a thing. Hell, Mars One crew are essentially volunteering for semi-solitary exile unto death. I wonder if the Chinese or Russians are going to go the, "So it's risky? Screw It!" route?
Interesting, consider creating an issue for that and crosslink it from the existing issue.
Wait what? You actually have to pay for Coursera courses nowadays? I remember they used to be completely free (as in "free beer")
I wrote this comment a while ago but I think its still very relevant...

I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8767092 and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433316

Long story short, the biggest mistake I see people making is not actually rolling up their sleeves and learning the math.

People are often content to watch hour after hour of Udacity, Khan academy and Coursera videos but the applied follow up is where most people drop off. At the very least any course work should be followed up by something practical like a kaggle exercise to prove that you can apply the technique you just learned. Consider the benefit of just watching videos vs doing actual applied work.

On one hand if you just watch videos you might learn alot but how do you prove that to someone hiring you? On the other hand if you sit down and spend a week attaching a Kaggle excise then at the very least you have something to point people to, to show that you can apply machine learning techniques.

My recommendation has always been to read the first 5 chapters of Introduction to statistical learning: http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/

and if you fly through it then sample Elements of statistical learning http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/ for the topics that you want to learn.

If intro to statistical learning is too advanced, then go to Khan academy and work your way through their statistics videos.
From my experience you can bucket people into skill level by looking at how they attack a new problem.

Beginners tend to start by saying they'll need a hadoop cluster and spend the next week setting up a pipeline.

Intermediate people tend to jump into R or scikit and try to model the problem with a small subset of data and the library and technique they know best.
The advanced people tend to flesh out their hypothesis first and then work out the math and then jump to modelling with a small set of data and finally move to a cluster.