skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...and then you get to the Q/A section and start to understand how we ended with a self-aggrandizing anti-intellectual presidential candidate
Setup Windows 10 for Modern/Hipster Development
The difficulty of identifying poor hires scales with their impact. If they are hard to identify, they are minimally harmful. At a big company, poor hires are diluted by size and revenue. At a small company, it is easier to identify poor hires.
Elon Musk’s proposed spaceship can send 100 people to Mars in 80 days
Many human artifacts don't need to be fossilized and could be preserved for millions of years (e.g. a gold ring, a stone bracelet, concrete). Also humans deliberately bury their dead (and lots of other stuff), which in some cases might help with fossilization and preservation.

If humanity were wiped out tomorrow, I think it would leave plenty of traces that could be found and understood in millions of years by a later civilization with paleontologists are as active as ours. It's just that those traces would be relatively small and/or buried, like human fossils with jewelry and caissons (with geometric iron oxide deposits from the rebar!) from the foundations of large buildings. No monuments or cities, but enough to indicate that we were here and had technology.
It is a nice idea, but why would you punish biologists like that?
>Which seems to be a different argument entirely, namely one of weighing the positive externalities against the negative externalities?

Not just that, it's also about weighing the restrictions on personal freedoms against the extent of negative externalities. In some cases the protection of personal freedoms is absolute. The ban on torture is a precedent for that.

>Now, there is actually precedent for banning consenting adults from sharing private information in order to ensure the survival of the democracy [...]

It's a precedent only if it's comparable, which it isn't.

You are overstating your case. There is no reason to believe that letting an algorithm parse some of your data for clues as to what you might want to buy makes democracy fall apart.

What is likely to have an effect on democracy is when governments analyze data for political reasons. Where that happens, people will simply stop volunteering so much private information. They don't need to be banned from doing that.
who needs a framework

just a pinch of jQuery

encourages growth
Sorry, I didn't mean to say that adtech as a whole is well behaved or cares about user experience, if it was, ad blockers wouldn't be as popular as they are. But I do think there is also an education issue where most people think that PII is being exposed that makes it sound creepier than it actually is.
You're too lazy to look up the start time so you ask some one to tell you, then when they tell you, you're too lazy to convert the time zone they used. You're acting like a child. Use Google if it's so damn inconvenient for you.

You're an adult with the Internet right in front of you, act like it.
That's not even remotely comparable. McMurdo is not self-sufficient by any measure. People do not live their life there either. (Oh, and they can breath outside. A minor detail.)
So what you're saying is that in general, transactions are implemented, but the begin/commit syntax for transactions is not yet supported?
This is really interesting. I wonder if they would work to try to create a standard? If every bank creates their own blockchain system, that would only perpetuate or complicate inter-bank transactions.
Successful terraforming becomes easy once we can send alot of rockets to a destination? We are emperically terrible at sustainably making our own planet more hospitable to human life, how is Mars easier? I'm actually bewildered here; just baby me and spell out how the Mars colonization process works if the only significant requisite is being able to move things from point A to point B. Do not dodge by saying we've colonized land on Earth.

Remember, the talk was about a method of transportation, not colonization as the title suggested. Optimism is great; don't let it be a means of deception.
The quality of the Q&A seems grossly sub-par compared to the incredible quality of the vision / content / presentation.
There's yet another kind of startup founder, who merely starts a successful company that makes millions of dollars per year and is still in business almost a decade later. The company doesn't fail, but it doesn't have a huge blow-out liquidity event, either. The founder remains heads-down, in the trenches, with no interest in going the VC route. Regardless, they're in a boring B2B niche, so you'll never read about them.
yeah, some made me cringe.
I think he meant places that are potentially habitable.
I want to, but it got to the point where the hivemind has pushed me away. I have noticed recently that HN is becoming self-aware. More than ever, I'm seeing comments by good users telling the bad ones to take their bad attitude elsewhere. The contrarianism going on really drove me away. I started to believe that there were people feeling the need to be contrarian just to appear more intelligent than the other users.
If exploration is the goal, wouldn't you get a lot more bang for your buck with a swarm of robots and probes around and on Mars? Sending people is very expensive in contrast.
"Additionally the current theory is that if Venus will be sped up to below 56h per rotation it would regenerate it's intrinsic magnetic field which should be near earth levels."

That's great and all, but how exactly do we realistically speed up the rotation of a _planet_?
This Q&A is painful... it's a combination of people shamelessly plugging their own products (Funny or Die you just lost a viewer with that stunt) and people who sound like they may be (literally) mentally unstable.

There are scattered in somewhat normal questions... but not by anyone I would consider qualified to even be asking questions.
14 consecutive days of darkness in the moon creates issues with solar energy, heating, etc.
I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that Elon's presentation ends with requests to throw comics onto the stage and ask him to allow receiving a good luck kiss from a girl in the audience.

To be honest I think it's a really bad fit to have these kind of questions during such an event; but hey, because of them I'm pretty sure this is all really honest and not at all orchestrated... Which is good, I suppose.
Low rent spaces: artists and musicians need them (although the ones near here have toilets now). In cities where the rents are too high, the artists - the new artists - leave.
Absolute claims about humans are always false [1].

1. Yes I know I just made an absolute claim about humans :)
I meant, old enough :)
FCC official: “Something’s not right” with Wi-Fi at Monday’s debate
There are 1,400+ different editions of Monopoly. Most of them are terrible
> That's the part that really drives me nuts. A lot of wealthy people are doing things that are highly questionable or are outright destructive, but they don't get this much criticism.

For one part, I think many people just expect wealthy people to do questionable and outright destructive things. If there's someone that doesn't fit these expectations he or she shatters that worldview because wealthy people can't at the same time be good people, too, can they?

This has a lot to do with a warped sense of equality and equity: People who aren't so well-off don't get to have these opportunities to change the world in one way or another so the ones who are in that worldview shouldn't get to embark on positive endeavours either, so everyone is equally miserable.

The fallacy with that of course is that with everyone feeling equally miserable everyone's worse-off whereas if people - wealthy or not - make the most out of the deck they've been dealt everybody (or at least society as a whole) will profit.
Once you get there, what do you do? Just go back?
https://business.stackoverflow.com/blog/how-hiring-has-an-ef...

Several citations in there, but it seems like a common sense thing to me. Why interview at all if you're so willing to take on the risk of a bad hire? Just take them out for lunch and ask them how they like coding.

It's also bad for recruiting purposes. If I have an easy interview I'll be reasonably assured that my future coworkers went through that same process -- what metric do I have to assume they're going to be good engineers to work with?
No one is suggesting living on the surface until it's terraformed, the dense atmosphere allows for easy construction of floating platforms.

As far as terraforming goes, Venus is just a better candidate for long term colonization.
I don't know if you actually stayed for the Q&A session after the video, but this question came up and he addressed it directly.

His viewpoint is that SpaceX is a transportation company, not a colonization or habitat company. He drew an analogy to the railroad companies that built the first railroads to California. Once they made California easily accessible, others came after them to settle down to and build the state.

Two-way transportation is the biggest obstacle in the way of Mars colonization. That's why SpaceX is focusing on it. But colonization is what gets people excited, and it is the long-term vision, so it has to be the central pitch.
To some extent, that already happens. My wife and I had children in our late 30s and so got extra screening and ultrasounds to screen for possible devastating birth defects. Fortunately, both kids are healthy, but had they not been, we'd have been pretty far from "taking our chances".

In our case, the resources were a good health care package from my work, but it's not very far from there to designer-by-selection. I'm perfectly comfortable with our path, even though we didn't have to take any action, but would have been equally comfortable (though disappointed) had we had to intervene.
I wonder if the 1-way ticket to mars would appeal to older folks who can survive the trip, but don't have the physical strength for much adventure on earth.

Ref: Old man's war.
Terraforming isn't necessary. Growing food is probably a necessity, as even this cheap transport isn't that transport, but you can do that in greenhouses. Water is available. Energy is available in the form of either solar or nuclear. Getting the colony to be self-sustaining is hard, but it boils down to getting enough people and infrastructure there that they are able to build everything they need on site.
Label your axes!
The Ultimate “Both Sides” Article
Same reason why we read books. Most book authors just write on stuff. They are very good at communicating a topic clearly but haven't 'achieved' much themselves.

Same with Sam. His observations and insights are very useful and he is able to communicate them clearly.
> You basically couldn't buy any games online, you'd have to install from DVD, and every game basically had to implement an inbuilt update/patching system.

And it worked fine.
Musk answered that in the talk.

Using parachutes limits you to only landing on places that have a thick(ish) atmosphere.

Being propulsive, they can land this thing anywhere in the entire solar system. (Then he said Venus would be tricky, and it must be solid, not liquid)
If only there was some way to suggest or make improvements...
Linguistics fails to come up with a competitive alternative that leads us to better real application, that is why. In a data driven world, that is nothing to complain about except themselves.
Dumb question: it can't be coincidence that our days are almost identical in length. Why are they?
It funds anti-homosexual political activity, attaches onerous religious proselytization to their poverty outreach, subsidizes in-your-face guilt-tripping bell ringers, crowds out other anti-poverty efforts, and reduces the charitable effort that donators bring to more worthwhile causes.

It's not literally the worst charity - that probably belongs to Susan G. Komen - but it is pretty terrible.
>>> Using the messaging service is a voluntary decision
>>
>> Once a critical mass uses a messaging service, it's not a
>> completely voluntary decision, especially when there is
>> no open standard with inter-operable competing apps.
>
> This is false. Market dominance does not transform a
> proprietary product into a basic utility. What I mean is
> that simply because a proprietary product has a large
> mass of users does not mean the users have the right to
> demand that it be regulated like a public utility.

(Emphasis added). Messaging services are special because of network effects. The postal service, the telegraph, the phone system, the Internet are all special services.

I would argue that email should probably have some special regulation beyond SPAM - the way big players like Google and Microsoft handle email is actually a problem already - perfectly good email, from a perfectly valid domain, from an ip without any terrible history - can sometimes end up as SPAM. This in turn makes it harder for people to compete by hosting their own email, in essence market dominance prevents competition -- and harms the commons.

(Yes, the initial harm has been caused and is being caused by spammers -- but the dwindling possibility of running decentralized services on the Internet could very well end up being much more damaging than the cost of SPAM ever was).

And IM and video chat and so on could probably also need some more regulation at some point - because it seems obvious the big players are actively working towards artificial monopolies in order to control the flow of data, so that they can sit on the biggest pile of meta-data (and sometimes data/content) in order to make money (in the short term from simple meta-data/network analysis and advertising, in the long run from having the richest data set on which to do more advanced, automated machine learning).

In this crazy world in which water and other natural resources, previously controlled by and for the public, I can see how people would argue that it somehow makes sense for a private entity to curate and profit from the information that hides in the rich metadata of all human electronic communication -- I think it would be a very good idea to regulate this along the lines of other commons. An example might be parks and spaces accessible to the public - where there are certain things that owners cannot do - or have to do.
>That's effectively a vacuum.

That depends entirely on the effect in question.

You'd have a hard time pressurizing the moon's atmosphere to harvest it for propellent.
Greenland's receding icecap to expose top-secret US nuclear project
I'm not arguing, just stating simple facts. I have quit many of these things and went back to phones for communication, which still works perfectly well. Do I miss out on things? Maybe. It doesn't harm me in the least.

I certainly made no proclamation as to how anyone should live, which you seem to have mistakenly inferred. I suspect that level of unprovoked defensiveness to have an interesting underlying cause.
You haven't heard of seasteading?
It's not like NASA or anyone else is going to make it happen anytime soon if this weren't happening. If anyone else wants to take a shot at Mars, they're more than welcome to. Even long after SpaceX's plans come to fruition (assuming they ever do), Mars is a big place and there will be plenty of room for other organizations to do their own thing.
I don't know of any billionaire that's run for president. /s
Exactly. The only time I have needed to implement a quick sort was for university exams or interviews. The rest of the time, pick an appropriate library.
Just an idea: sentiment analysis has gotten pretty accurate.

What if HN included sentiment in the sort algorithm?

The post score you see would stay the same (upvotes minus downvotes). You'd just multiply the sort score by, for example, 1.25 for posts positive in tone and 0.8 for posts with negative tone.

So if two comments have about the same number of upvotes, the nicer one appears higher up.

Criticism or disapproval could still become top post with enough upvotes, but it wouldnt happen as often as it does now.
Didn't work well for Chinese though, or Asian languages in general.
This new launch vehicle has a realistic chance of getting people and materials to Mars in sufficient quantities to build an outpost. I'd like to hear more about how they plan to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars though. There are some pretty big challenges to overcome, such as the relative lack of Nitrogen. A colony is going to have to grow plants but, to do that on Mars, we're going to need a way of fixing Nitrogen for those plants from an Atmosphere where it's just not very plentiful.

Please note that this isn't an argument against going to Mars now. There's a lot we can learn by building an outpost on Mars that is supported heavily by Earth, including how to build a self-supporting Mars colony. I'm just asking what the current state-of-the-art opinion is on the challenges of building a self-supporting Mars colony.
So, a person who is a citizen, could have their citizenship revoked for being a terrorist (by some definition) and then be detained indefinitely? Am I reading your, and the parent, comment correctly?
Process termination has always been the cheapest way to do GC :-)
Talk is cheap; rockets are expensive
Yup, time to move to other planets - the virus has almost killed its current host.
You're also free to critique an idea that's been put out there in public. The so called free market of ideas where people get to express their opinions on said idea. Or do you only want to see cheerleading? Because not all ideas are good, or feasible, or appropriate for now. The might be ahead of their time, and so forth.
Simon from Realm here - just wanted to chime in and clarify some details on this. It would be more correct to say that we are using Lamport timestamps, with the addition of a globally unique ID for each client and some tracking of changeset ancestry. No two identical [timestamp, id] tuples will ever be produced in our system, so there is always an unambiguous way to decide which side "came first" in case of a causally unrelated conflict.

It's important to understand that most "conflicts" in our system are resolved without resorting to timestamps at all, which is possible due to the way we encode our changesets on the wire and the fact that we track their ancestry. It is only used in cases where we absolutely have to, i.e. when there is no causal relationship between two updates of the same property (in which case, the "later" timestamp wins).

Hope that answered your question. :-)
Sure. But if the technology needed to survive ecological catastrophic failure on Earth and to live on Mars is similar, wouldn't you rather test a colony on Mars before being required to resort to similar measures on Earth?
If you see a hive mind on HN that says more about your thought process than this site.
That ship has basically sailed, since we already do sperm selection for in-vitro fertilization.
I've nothing against Mars, more surprise that it's not via lunar orbit staging as the last several explanations of how we'd get there that I've seen. Like it was a big obvious advantage.

Mars first has the enormous advantage that it's tangibly in progress, however early, rather than being a great NASA idea that isn't getting funded. So I don't actually care which if only one is having rockets built. I saw enough artist impressions in the 80s. ;)

My recollection of the NASA idea was a Mars voyage would reconfigure/refuel at the space station but never land on the moon. The moonbase is the warehouse, fuel and whatever else would be needed to keep space station fed, and gets developed into manufacturing.

Lower G meaning larger vehicles, lower launch cost and so forth. The station at L2 was supposed to be a good jumping off point for anywhere - Mars, asteroids, rest of solar system - supposedly the most fuel efficient way to all(?) of them from here.

It's a while since I last read about that, so I may be mistaken on details.
Care to justify your claims? You'll be downvoted until you do.
That's incredible cool! I'd like to be one of the people sended to Mars
multiple data points that test for the same thing.

Based on my own personal experience, this is my assessment of the interns who knew too much about interviewing questions

They performed very badly compared to someone who did not pay enough attention to interviewing questions. Its as if the more they read about the various interview questions online, the less confident they were because there is always a tricky "problem solving question" they cannot answer.

They showed reluctance to explore any new areas of engineering except writing java code. practically no curiosity in anything else. They truly believe that their job will be only writing more java code.

Next time if you interview, change the context of the interview and talk to a new grad, some of them had solutions to 500 common interview problems and read every cracking interview book and blog and it still did not get them a job.
Musk’s Vision for Mars Travel Focuses on Reusable Rockets
Thanks for your detailed response. I'm still confused unfortunately. So my algorithm needs something more that is subject-matter specific. As a contrived example, let's say I take the quicksort algorithm. If I add something extra, like quicksort applied to data objects tagged in a very specific way that I design, that could then be a patent?
He's doing a great job of only looking a little bit uncomfortable with the questions.

Seriously this Q&A is incredibly odd.
That's what I was thinking, so if you think so too then probably.
Is this a candidate for Request for Comments?
And 97% of the land mass: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mars+surface+area+%2F+e...
One of the more "probable" and more or less energy sane suggestions would be using mass drivers to eject the atmosphere at high speeds to induce spin.

The mass of the venusian atmosphere is high enough for this to actually work and still leave you a lot of atmosphere to work with, it will take 20-30 years but it still doable.
I have an electric bus in the parking lot.........
More about hyper-v should be mentioned. It's crazy performant and very close to hardware. I am running kvm machines from inside a hyper-v ubuntu instance and it's very fast. You can even install OSX as kvm guest.

Also not sure why you don't recommend using windows bash for cli tools. It really is awesome and much easier to deal with than chocolatley or msi installers. I even run my docker client from it.

You can even tunnel X11 from ssh via windows bash into a vm or server and use gui apps seamlessly.

http://imgur.com/twGH85y
In the same way nerds got beat up because the jocks are just jealous of their brains?

There can be criticisms of a plan to send a few people to die in a metal box millions of miles away at incredible cost that do not require jealousy as a motivator.
On the other hand, that's what the interview process is for, right? What other information do you have except what you see in the interview?
the will license
I graduated in 2005 and have been working with the same company since.
Kind of reminds me of:

Train approaching

Whistle squealing

Stop

Avoid that run-down feeling

Burma-Shave
5 hacks to see at the next travel hackathon in Singapore
We have bases on Antarctica, and they're not self sustaining. Consider that Antarctica is far more liveable and closer than Mars.
I think we need to start looking at the meta-data generated by communication networks (who talks/chats/tweets/etc whom, and when) as a commons, that needs to be regulated. Beyond the European privacy laws designed to protect privacy, I think there should probably be limits on who is allowed to do what, and how one is allowed to store and profit from the knowledge. It should be a regulated privilege to be able to handle this information, in a similar way that it's a privilege to run passenger trains, or even postal and phone services.