skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, they demonstrated the capability of developing one at some point in the future. The test article isn't even capable of reaching orbit, or returning from orbit, or landing yet.

This is the easy step – comparable to the American X-15, X-23, ASSET, and SpaceShipOne projects, the Russian BOR-1 to -6 or ESA's IXV demonstrator –, turning this into a Space Shuttle / Buran / X-37b style actual space plane will be a long, expensive undertaking.

And, as the Space Shuttle demonstrated, "recoverable" and "reusable" are two different beasts: The Shuttle's engines returned to Earth, but were so burned out from each launch that they required a refurbishment 80% as expensive as a whole new engine, and only managed an average of 5 launches even with that – planned were 55 flights without major refurbishments.

It's also different from reusable boosters as developed by SpaceX, in case anyone is wondering: This is the upper stage portion that goes into orbit, and needs a booster to get into (or close to) orbit first. Those can be more expensive than the actual plane, depending on the design:

• The X-37b launches atop an Atlas rocket, and its expensive stages are completely lost.

• ESA's Hermes was supposed to launch on the similarly fully expendable Ariane 5.

For regular satellite launches, you don't save much money with these designs – since you don't need to return the orbital part anyway, you can just launch the Atlas/Ariane without the expensive plane on top and still come out cheaper. It's mainly relevant for manned programmes, which is why the Hermes was cancelled (since ESA's manned programme never got the necessary funding) and Ariane 5 just launched without, and why the X-37b is restricted to classified launches that probably involve returning things back to Earth (which is where space planes really shine!).

And even for manned programs, space planes don't necessarily lead to cost savings:

• The Space Shuttle put all expensive parts – engines, avionics, and so on – into the orbiter, and only the big external tank burned up. The solid boosters were also recovered, but since they were just steel tubes, they didn't require much refurbishment (unlike the main engines). If the engines and heat shield hadn't been such massive failures, it might have worked out to be reasonably cheap in the long run. Alas. The way it turned out, it was a ridiculous money sink.

• The Russians, as always, decided to out-crazy everyone and put engines on the Buran orbiter, even more and even bigger engines on the external tank, oh and let's use four boosters instead of two. And make those liquid-fueled, so that each side booster is as complex as a smaller rocket on its own (and can be used as such). To everyone's surprise, this bankrupted the Buran program. There were plans to put foldable wings on the side boosters and orbiter-style delta wings and heat shields on the external tanks and turn everything into UAVs that automatically land on runways after detaching, but the Soviet Union preferred dissolution over funding any of that.
> Was it unmanned? On Autopilot?

Note that the US Air Force has a re-usable winged unmanned spacecraft that plays a somewhat analogous role to the now-defunct Space Shuttle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-14/a-supersec...
While Turkey has conflicts with some groups who want to grab part of the land or overthrow the government, they are FWIW a useful ally in the region because they have mostly-friendly dealings with UAE, Saudis, Iran, parts of Africa and also Israel. The degree of diplomacy varies, but there aren't many NATO members in that region who are as compatible when it comes to diplomatic ties with the region's powers. Russia, unfortunately doesn't deal with Iran, Israel and the Saudis the same way.

Given their growing business ties and influence in the region, maybe China can be another powerful ally. Or India. It certainly would help to have more than one dependable ally there, but China, like Russia, is in a weird power-play game with the USA, Australia, etc. Russia is more biased than Turkey, and that says a lot since Turkey cannot be a neutral Switzerland type because of their borders and demographic, so they're less of an option.

Also, let's not forget that Turkey has better relations with some ex-USSR nation that have considerable natural resources, due to cultural heritage, but then again strained relations with most of the ex-USSR countries.

It's a mess, but that's world politics.
Thanks for your comment. Taking that license into account, should be there a reference to my project on the other project?
One thing most people don't hear in the traditional American story about the Cuban Missle Crisis is that we put our weapons close to Russia (in Turkey) before they put any weapons close to us.
Intent to damage is not an absolute requirement to be malware. The infamous Sony rootkit had no intent to damage. However, it overstepped the bounds of its authority and was capable of damage through gross negligence (as overstepping software often is). Software that forcibly dikes out someone's OS without their permission is malware.
Thanks for the URL!
"Implementing a DSL, which is its own beast and is more often a bad idea than not"

Those using languages supporting that disagree. Let's assume the DSL is syntax embedded in a language like LISP or Haskell so you don't get stuck in the DSL. Essentially, there's not much difference between a DSL and library in terms of what's required to use it. You still learn what you type to achieve a certain effect. You still can use rest of language. Main difference is both (a) matches the problem domain more closely and (b) limits you to expressing just what you need to solve the problem.

These are why the BASIC-oriented 4GL's were quite successful. LISP, too, given it's also easy to process. REBOL & recently Red take it further. Kay et al are working wonders where a whole system is expressed in readable code that's a tiny fraction of code in a non-DSL system.

The combo of easy-to-modify language and DSL toolkit (esp Racket or Red) also leads to methodologies like this one from sklogic where it's easy to do components with a series of DSL's that are thrown together & many pieces autogenerated:

"The method is very simple:

* describe the problem in plain English (maybe with some diagrams)

* iterate it a few times until you have a syntax you think is unambiguous enough

* strip this syntax from all the sugar you just introduced in order to define an AST

* find DSLs in your toolbox that are potentially close to the one you're building and cherry-pick the necessary language components from them

* write a sequence of very simple transforms that would lower your source AST into a combination of the parts of the ASTs of the target DSLs of your choice

* Done. An efficient DSL compiler is ready, with a language designed as closely to your current view of the problem domain as possible.

* If you later find that your DSL is inadequate and your understanding of the domain was insufficient, than just start over again, this entire process is so cheap and simple that it does not really matter."

It also helps with verification. You can define DSL's for specific types of OS components or app software that make correct-by-construction easier. CertiKOS is doing that:

http://flint.cs.yale.edu/certikos/publications/ctos.pdf

http://flint.cs.yale.edu/certikos/certikos.html
Absolutely. Otherwise it has to compete with all the other things I could be doing with my discretionary time (otherwise known as the rest of my life) and I suspect therefore isn't going to come out on top.
Some gems:

> It turns out if you accept the 90% of each paradigm that is practical, and reject the 10% that puritanically rejects other paradigms, you can get a pretty decent general-purpose language out of it

> But there's a long history of people confusing "general-purpose" with "Turing-complete".

Yeah. Things that are formally equivalent are not (usually) equally easy.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

http://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/
Curious what sort of Windows license hasn't already been paid for.
If you have difficulty concentrating, are easily distracted, impulsive (i.e. checks Hacker News a lot), are irritable, etc, you might look into whether you have ADD/ADHD.

I had all of those symptoms, but never considered I might have ADD until a few months ago. My doctor had me try Adderall, and the difference has been like night and day.

I'm not saying you have ADD or ADHD. I'm not a doctor. But just based off of what you said, I wanted to mention it, because I wish someone had mentioned it to me like 10 years ago.
> What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team?

That can still be hard to accurately measure. You can measure, of course, how much revenue was attributed to sales of the product developed by the team, but how much of that is attributable to the team's work and how much is attributable to company-wide marketing and how much is due to company image developed by public experience with products developed by other teams is...not always readily obvious. (And, of course, then you have teams that aren't devoted to particular products or which provide company-wide services supporting product teams, but not directly generating revenue -- unless, of course, you organize your company so that accounting, HR, marketing, etc., are all broken up and product-team specific.)

Of course, if you measure by the entire company a lot of that uncertainty gets washed out.
Sorry, you're getting ripped off "Down Under." I've been to Sydney/Melbourne twice and I love it. Bondi Beach Yeah!

But you can get a brand new 15" Macbook Pro Retina for about $1900 total from an authorized dealer. Check out website Appleinsider.com

Besides being able to go to stores for Genius Bar help, you're when you call for customer service or tech support you get Americans who are very helpful and speak English well not people from Philippines, India, whatever. Nothing against these people of course, just when it comes to tech support.

There was a recent NYTimes article about how companies make tech support awful. Apple is not one of them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/technology/why-tech-suppor...

My times calling Microsoft Tech support (having to do with Office 2016 Mac and other MS products running in Windows 10 VM) were miserable. Switched to the wrong people, people who can't speak english well, who don't seem to understand what I was talking about. Having to call over and over and over again.

Part of the added cost of Macs is precisely to ensure that you get quality support and is well worth paying for unless you absolutely cannot afford it.
In an IRC chat [1] on 2016-04-15, pmurias, the lead developer of rakudo-js [2] said:

> Perl 6 -> wasm won't be happening any time soon

> for now wasm is just bytecode asm.js

> if we really wanted to compile to it we would have to use enscripten and run MoarVM on top of wasm

[1] https://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2016-04-15/text

[2] https://github.com/pmurias/rakudo-js
Sorry, it was ambiguous. I assumed the writer of the original code intended to execute them in the order of the line numbers and that was the "correct order". Otherwise, the line numbers are meaningless.
For those who don't know Walid Phares was a high ranking political official in a Christian religious militia responsible for civilian massacres during Lebanon's civil war. Now he's a favorite Islam "scholar" for right-wing reactionaries in the U.S.
With current cad/cam systems I think it is possible to design a not bad Katusha analog in a weekend. And produce a couple in the next week. 20-30 of those build in secret could deliver a nasty first blow.
9 years for an agency with lots of space and rocket experience vs 8 years for a company with no space or rocket experience at all. There is no comparison between the two.
That was kinda my point. As long as they're being okay neighbors and keeping the human rights violations in line, IMHO countries deserve self determination without the superpowers bullying via overthrowing (Assad)--or just plain invading (eg Ukraine).
Setting Up Caddy for PHP 7 on Debian Jessie (Automatic HTTPS)
Command and Control lays out the internal fight over Pals; the military wanted easy access and reliable bombs, and the Pals added complexity, reduce ease of access in an emergency, and so on. So the parts of the military less concerned with safety were arguing for more promising designs. I believe the early Pals could be over ridden with a screwdriver. But yeah, I don't know about these particular ones.
Ah, thank you. Some faulty bits in my memory caused an early nul termination.
I'd have to look it up online, but while they used to import jet fighters from the US, Turkey builds similar F?? fighters and also drones like the Heron and other tools. But as a NATO member, I don't think they'd have a problem getting gear from third parties.
Where do I put my microhome?

The bulk of the cost of buying a house in the UK seems to be land price. In fact, those microhomes are _more_ expensive buildings than a traditional build - from this calculator (http://www.jewson.co.uk/working-with-you/for-self-builders/p...) the price of a 100m2 build might be ~112k, compared to the microhome 70m2 'lifetime' model.

Microhomes are a nice idea, but they wouldn't help me in East of England.
Moving in the hooping flow
I think you're vastly underestimating 1st world intelligence capabilities. By the time anyone is brainstorming how exactly they want to take the base the big players in NATO already have guys sitting in jets idling on the taxiway, an aircraft carrier is taking a hard turn into the wind and an aide is popping popcorn and cracking a beer so Mr. Putin can enjoy the spectacle.

When nukes are involved things get taken very seriously. Nobody wants to be the guy who thought it would all blow over and got it wrong.
You are going to have to define what you plan to do with the information. e.g. let's say you are harvesting email's, address and contact information on construction contractors and then you will create a database from it and sell access to that information to home owners looking for a contractor in their area. Your company is not sending unsolicited emails to the contractor, and in a sense you could be seen as a lead aggregator that is providing them with valuable business leads.

A difference scenario, you do the same harvesting, but you are contacting each contractor to determine if they want to join your lead generation business (or whatever you are planning). In this case, yes the email could be considered unsolicited but it is specifically business in nature and not a scam or spam and the company was advertising the email address/phone so they could be contacted for specific business purposes. You will need to understand the specifics of the Canada anti-spam laws but almost all leave exclusions for genuine business purposes. If you are contacting the business to sell him Viagra, then you are in obvious violation as a general contractor's business has nothing to do with Viagra.

All that said, to stay 100% above board still talk to an attorney and get a reasonable legal opinion. Just remember this, if you talk to an attorney and do it anyway after you have been advised you are breaking the law you loose the 1 time ignorance (oops sorry) defense. While ignorance of the law is not an excuse overall, most of these types of "violations" are excused with an oops sorry defense and maybe a small fine, e.g. its not the same as committing an armed burglary and saying oops sorry didn't know that was against the law.

As for your reputation, that is more important then what a VC thinks of you at this point. Guard that more carefully then caring what one or even ten VC's think initially. In the end, if your methods work, you gain traction, sales etc and you have not shown you have a reckless reputation the VC's will look and judge you on the results. There is a fine line between reckless and forward thinking or aggressive, just find it and walk it the best you can.
It's often used in en-gb in a sarcastic insult way to denigrate [in the sense of disparage!!] someone's behaviour "yeah, real classy mate" but that only works because its use conveys the opposite meaning without the sarcasm.
If only they had some bombs to defend themselves with...
This is not a concern if the platform is open-source (like RethinkDB's Horizon) and you can choose to self-host.
Code Like a Girl: Harassment of Our Authors Is Not OK
It wouldn't have to have a port. The US has had radio programmed artillery shells for a long time so using the same tech to set and arm bombs isn't a stretch.
I think the idea is that the macro expands into an efficient template. Instead of having to always build the same constant strings for every request, you can expand into a bunch of WRITE-STRINGs, with the dynamic parts in between.
You would notice that the IT and security teams brought in zero revenue and fire them all.
They could have but would removing those 3rd party libraries be in the best interest of your project? It appears that the other developer merely wanted a trimmed down version of what you have.

As for possibly dividing the community: first, there's always competition. This is especially true in software where anyone with a keyboard and know-how can create a competitor. Second, if you're really concerned about community division, consider what happened with Node.js[0] and io.js[1]. Initially, io.js provided a slimmer and more frequently updated version of the same framework. Then they got together to discuss how they were dividing the community and decided to bring their projects together. Perhaps you should discuss such a merge with the author of the other project.

[0] https://nodejs.org/en/

[1] https://iojs.org/en/
It's very popular in countries and continents like India, Asia and Africa. Specifically on small, cheap phones.
Does anyone know of a good open-source Agent-based model simulation platform?

I want to create some educational simulations to help people understand various emergent "natural" phenomenon, such as evolution, the invisible hand of the free market, and the Matthew Effect. I want the simulations to be interactive so users can see how changing a parameters effects the outcome.

I could custom code each of these, but I'd rather us a platform, especially one in which the agent model and logic were easy to understand without being a hardcore coder, so that anyone could look under the hood if they didn't trust the accuracy of the simulation.
Uh, yeah, totally! Note the language used in your excerpt -- it's all finance and macro-scale consequences, job loss and less expensive services and economic growth. He talks about NASA trying to import "Internet age" thinking (by which he means, of course, entrepreneurship and disruption) into an analog world. Read some of the other posts and they're awash with the same language.

>Is it really that surprising that someone who wrote that turned out to be a regulator with reasonable positions on things like net neutrality?

No, not at all! The position I've been trying to take throughout this thread is that the perception of Wheeler being an ascended lobbyist (read: hostile to consumer interests) was reasonable, in the absence of mainstream knowledge otherwise (like eg this blog we're discussing). After reading the post from which you've excerpted, I still think that perception holds. He's not pro-consumer, he's pro-capitalist. Just because the view espoused here ("established corps should not have the ability to extinguish potential competition, via regulation or fearmongering or citing national security") happens to benefit consumers does not mean he's taking those actions for consumer benefit.

>Maybe "obvious" was a bit strong of a word (Wheeler's writing is a bit heavy on long-winded metaphors...)

Really? I think I've established myself as a fellow sentient, but whatever, maan.
I curate the number of accounts I follow to be exactly 187. That seems to be my sweet spot for Signal to Noise.
The article mentions the problem of "local minimums". The author suggests occasionally accepting worse solutions, in order to escape from such. "The hope here is that by following this worse solution, we can eventually get to the global minimum." This is good but one may wish to take it further.

I once messed with something called "metropolis coupling", where you run multiple threads in parallel, with different thresholds for how often they accept worse solutions, i.e. one thread is "cold", one is slightly "hotter", and so on. If a hot thread's current solution is better than the solution of the neighbouring colder thread, the solutions are swapped. In this way the coldest thread (which is the one we're paying attention to) gets pulled out of the local minimum.

As I say, I messed with this once and it did seem to help. It seems to have been developed for inference in evolutionary phylogenetics, and is perhaps a bit obscure?
Then how come they are still there?

If what you write is true they should have had clear warning about that coup attempt. It might have succeeded.
Scientists upsize nanostructures into light, flexible 3-D printed materials
Engineering for the web
Linus Torvalds: “So please don't stop.” (2004)
Really? I thought that Kennedy's secret agreement to trade the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba was the standard ending to the story.
Prometheus cofounder here - we're happy to take any questions. Huge congrats to everyone who made this release possible and for all the excellent work over the years that lead up to this!
I was under the impression that many nuclear bombs had arming mechanisms that required special electronics in the plane. Is that not true for the b61?
Wait what? How else should we be exchanging routes? Should we shove them into a distributed key value store and then having each of the nodes pull out the routes and installing them?

> As an admin that's just another mess of processes and communication to worry about.

Yet we fully expect admins to understand and build HA redundant clusters for databases, or how to manage and update all the machines under their control, and a variety of other tasks.

There is nothing inherently different about running a BGP speaking daemon. It's all config.

I don't have a heavy networking background at all. I'm a software engineer that's currently working as a system architect, but even I can understand something as simple as a route distribution system.
I think you are giving people far too much credit, and wrapping it in too much nonsense. The amount of absolute intelligence failure (intentional or otherwise) in the last 15 or so years has been astounding.
>>Unfortunately, there's another camp that (with credible arguments) claims that task-estimates are almost always meaningless.

This is largely because people cook up all kind of bull-crap work just to keep busy and have it look like the equivalent of 'moon-landing' just happened.

Over years I have seen this phenomenon play out in every major company. The absolute worst I have seen is a whole team of 10-20 members dedicated to build that would be the equivalent of cron + ftp, implemented in super verbose java written and rewritten to make class hierarchies as complicated as possible to make it look big, and then have it projected as the biggest project ever. The team went to bag a lot of bonuses and promotions. Stuff like this is why goal based evaluation don't work.

Also look at: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
What do you guys think about my startup?
I'm the co-founder of this startup http://swipecity.xyz/, what do you guys think ? Basicaly, we install beacons on monuments, historic buildings and when you pass nearby, you receive information on the object. You can download the app, and criticise it, I'm looking for feedback. Thanks :)