skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interview with Tom of the Physics of SpaceX Blog, on Mars Colonisation Logistics
Recently I did an interview with physicist Thomas Myers. He's a regular contributor to /r/spacex

He runs a website The Physics of SpaceX (http://thephysicsofspacex.wordpress.com), dedicated to breaking down various SpaceX topics, specifically:

- Explaining the infeasibility of second stage re-use
- Comparing first stage rocket engines
- Comparing upper stage rocket engines

The cool thing is that he does so from a first principles standpoint.

In the interview we cover a bunch of different topic areas related to SpaceX and mars colonisation.

The interview can be listened to online:
http://radio2.marssociety.org/2016/09/18/rpr-episode-3-thomas-myers-physics-of-spacex-blog/

or via iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/red-planet-radio/id1153447975?mt=2

Content includes:

- Intro to Tom and how he came to start his blog “The Physics of SpaceX”
- Why SpaceX only reuses the first stage of the Falcon 9
- What SpaceX Mars colonisation logistics may look like (BFR + MCT). How the MCT could re-fuel in space
- How “breaking” when arriving at Mars works
- Fuel options on Mars (Methane or Hydrogen)
- Who might be the first people to go to Mars?
- Discussion of Skylon’s single stage to orbit liquid hydrogen concept
- Ion engines and “going the long way around” to Mars
- 38m – How ion engines work (vs liquid propellant) (loosely explained)
- SpaceX plans for creating an internet satellite network
- 51m – In situ-resource utilisation. Why we want to go to Mars vs building something in empty space.
- Asteroid Mining
- Feasibility of living underground on Mars
- 1hr – Future Mars governance & future independence
- Self driving cars on Mars
- 1hr 18m – Virtual Reality utilisation on Mars
- 1m 28m – Various rationales for going to Mars
- 1hr 31m – Comparing the discovery of the Americas to Mars exploration

Hopefully the conversation is of interest. If you want to discuss it, reach out to either me or Tom in the comments.
That a quarter bill.
The comment above yours clearly states HN users don't want to divulge exact address. In fact, they specified their ideal (zip code->quote) but you start justifying why you ask for name when nobody pointed as that being the issue.
Reagan's Nashua Moment
> But why do devices suck them in so easily if I don't direct or enforce their behavior?

Advertising had nothing to do with my addiction to gaming.

When I was a kid I played games nonstop on atari before I got an apple ][. Then I played games on that until I got a nintendo, then a PC clone, then a sega genesis, then PS2, and then at some point I had to cut myself off. Cold turkey. I would honestly play the dumbest simple game for hours and hours. I'd beat the same game over and over sometimes.

Young children don't understand moderation. They will eat a bag of cookies or play on a tablet for hours at a time without guidance.

You must direct them and always have an activity at the ready. Set an old school egg timer for say 60 minutes and when it goes off, go shut off the game, take away the tablet/phone, and suggest their next task. Don't wait for them to save the game or fall for the "I'm almost done with the level" nonsense.
Samsung, LG and Vizio TVs saddle customers with extra $120M in energy bills
But nobody can afford to fix their gamma handling code for on-screen rendering, because all the screen fonts we use were designed with the assumption of wrong gamma treatment, which means most text will look too thin after the change.

OS X dilates glyphs when using (linear) LCD antialiasing to counteract this effect. Chrome was having problems getting consistent text rendering in different contexts because of this dilation: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Oct/0109....
I have heard nothing but rave reviews for the XPS laptops which come officially supported with Ubuntu out of the box.
I'm struggling to see how that can be done without in vivo genetic engineering (to ensure immune compatibility), constant blood surveillance of the population (to detect pathogens), chemical infusions deployed en masse like a firmware update, and giant cube-shaped space ships.
Organizing Bloom filters into (e.g. daily) shards allows for deletion without much trouble.
The world wouldn't end without computers either, or in fact, without humans, so this is a moot point... :)

As I mentioned in the article, you can get away with working directly in sRGB in some cases (general image processing, non-photorealistic rendering), but in some other cases it's a must (physically accurate photorealistic rendering). But ignoring it will always produce wrong results. You actually might like those results, but the important point I was trying to get through was to be aware of these potential issues, and then you may ignore them at your own peril.
Really poor choice of name.
If he picked randomly, it's entirely possible that he could do a better job :)
Hardware that works better = better sales, more money, less support cost?

There's only so many ways you can slip and slide on this ;-).
... if one ignores Petterson och Findus ...
Reinsurance isn't generally done on a percentage basis. It's generally done on a "the value of any single claim above X amount" basis. "X" is commonly around 1 million dollars.

The insurer pays 0-X, then the reinsurer (and their reinsurers respectively) pay X onwards.
I wonder how "being selected for mandatory service" works. You are rewarded for being fit and healthy by marching platzes without money without sex without life?

Why less fit and healthy hedonistically enjoy?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...

He quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.

This general topic sometimes comes up on HN (most recently, yesterday†). Here's a good starting point:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.phdcomics.com%2...

† https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535880
Sometimes it's better to invest in yourself, if your current role is helping your grow. You want to make sure, you're not only enjoying your current role but you'll be more marketable as well if you continue.
That is how the original IBM PC BIOS worked with basic hardware, more or less. Both Open Firmware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware) and EFI (http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/EBC_Driver...) include a bytecode interpreter for portable device drivers - the idea is that the hardware device stores the driver as bytecode, the Open Firmware controller loads that driver bytecode when the device is plugged in and uses the CPU to execute it, and provides a uniform API to the OS. From what I read EFI was developed at Intel to be a deliberately incompatible Open Firmware clone for the Itanium.

There really is not that much savings or advantage to this approach so there are not a lot of Open Firmware and EFI drivers out there. You really do not want hardware manufacturers writing drivers either - they tend to be terrible and full of bugs. Having the manufacturer publish the hardware specifications so that drivers can be easily implemented by developers is a much better approach, sadly a lot of manufacturers cannot be bothered with this.
The discovery of fission was not the product of the Manhattan Project but a continuation of research into the atomic nucleus that had been proceeding for decades. Once that happened, Einstein's theory told you that the process would release a large amount of energy, and a bomb became simply an engineering task. By the time someone wrote a check, the basic mechanism of the runaway fission reaction was understood.

That's totally different than the current situation with say cancer. In the world of physics and engineering, a "coin-toss" shot at working is actually a pretty well-developed idea. There is no ready-to-go idea you can point to and say "if we spent $20 billion building this it's have a coin-toss's chance of curing cancer."
I'm using Guile for Ao, a Scheme-based tool for solid modeling: https://mattkeeter.com/projects/ao
(previous on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319406)

It's been a generally good experience. Scheme is fun, and Guile is a fine implementation. I'm not experienced enough to be pushing its limits – the only unusual corner I've explored is the C FFI, which is quite nice.

My only complaint is the consistency of Guile's documentation. It's generally of high quality, but there are corners that are completely undocumented – I've had a few cases where I had to dig into the implementation to figure out how to do something.
Let me simplify your life a little

http://www.printfriendly.com/print?source=homepage&url_s=uGG...
> deny the substantial character of reality

It's a popular belief but neither Zen nor Theravadan Buddhism makes any claims about "Reality". They only talk about the lack of a substantial self. (After all, the only "reality", so to speak, from a Buddhist perspective is the reality of dukkha or suffering. The question of the reality of the material world is of no importance.)
You are 100% correct about what could have been. However, the reality is that Einstein's work paved the way for Leo Szilard to envision an atomic bomb before fission had been discovered.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Med/Discfiss.html

Edit: Reflecting on this, without quantum mechanics (which stemmed from Einstein's relativity work), Oppenheimer would not have had the mathematical tools that were heavily leveraged building the bomb. The bomb is more than throwing together two sub-critical pieces of material, knowledge from quantum mechanics was critical in the prediction of which fissile materials could yield a functional weapon (of which there are very few).
People here are very passionate about correctness, and get hung up around technical definitions of terms like "safe" and "unsafe". It's not a bad thing, just an expected outcome around a bunch of engineers.

IMO, its a lot of irrelevant noise. Even if it was safe to human health, its also ineffective, is marketed misleadingly, and has environmental impacts.
It wasn't a coin-toss away. The Hiroshima bomb was almost guaranteed to work.

The question if Nagasaki would work, which is why they did Trinity.

The theory was there when the Manhattan project started - it was an engineering hurdle, not a scientific one.

Manhattan Project : Curing Cancer :: Apollo : Warp Drives
Right, and a lottery winner who wins a $500MM jackpot on a $1 ticket has annualized return of even more than that, when annualized over the same timescale.

None of that matters if you can't pick the winning players in advance. With enough variance and enough players, someone will eventually have double-digit annualized returns over decades, it doesn't mean that they are necessarily superb investors.
Health insurance is a whole new ballgame. But let's stick to P&C, and especially homeowners and renters, whereas companies are conflicted in paying out claims, as it impacts their bottom line. When they pay you your claim, they make less profits. So they're in this conflicted situation in which they have to decide between profiting, and paying your loss. A flat 20% removes that conflict and aligns interests.
I agree with you, but I'd like to point out that it's easy to say "x is very specific" if you know exactly what x is after-the-fact.
I strongly disagree that you can only compare difficulty after the fact. The full class of cancers is an object of lots higher complexity than quantum mechanics. For one, you need a theory of quantum mechanics to fully predict from the details of a cell (this is not the same thing as saying cells leverage entanglement and maintain superpositions).

A population of cells is more complex than an atom as it requires more parameters to be fully specified. It is also harder to predict because there are several levels of non-linear feedback interactions within an environment that can never be fully given ahead of time. A population of cancerous cells is more complex than a population of cells because their dynamics are not stationary in time. Unlike a typical population of healthy cells, cancerous ones are able to, in effect learn and more effectively than even the immune system. Extend this to the full class of cancers to see why a simple mathematical theory of the kind we find in atomic physics is highly implausible.

As such, we have an object of higher descriptive and predictive complexity than atomic physics. Searching for this theory will take longer and is much, much more difficult in a formal sense.
> I think phenomena are the atomic building blocks of science

Lacking context, this could seem somewhat opaque.

Would you mind clarifying which definition of "phenomenon" you are intending to convey? (eg Kantian or otherwise)
You mean UEFI. Not BIOS.
Statefarm is owned by its policy holders.
Do you think that, if this program had not been invented yet, that it could be introduced now, by the current government, in Finland?

I'm from the Netherlands (supposedly more compassionate), and we have something like this box. Only the program is run by a marketing data company that wants to sell your data, and box is filled with low value goodies and commercial offerings. The Finnish box is much nicer, as it seems offered with the right intensions and the content is really helpful.
No joke. Apparently he deleted the original tweet. https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/status/766372347892920320
https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/status/768137697554731008
Someone could make an account called "package/library of the week", and make weekly posts.
While I'd like to slag science for this, we also have a bit of counterexample in other fields.

In art, we have studies that show that those who produce more also produce better. And it compounds. There is no reason to believe that at least some of this isn't operant in science.

The real problem is the lack of positive incentives for negative results. And I don't know how you fix that.
What every coder should know about gamma (function)
n! = gamma(n+1)

can be computed very quickly with Lanczos approximation:
https://github.com/jcboyd/study-no-1/blob/master/lanczos.c
Cocteau – A Life
Top 3 Sheldons that will blow your mind!
> one of the main contributors to Germany's low household debt is a 10 year cap on mortgages.

Where did you get the idea of that cap?

10-year mortgages were the common case, but there's no actual cap. (See here for current mortgage interest rates up to 30 years: https://www.baufi24.de/tagesaktuelle-hypothekenzinsen/)
If we were to cure all known diseases of today, new diseases would emerge, and in fact, our definition of "disease" could even evolve. Case in point: Homosexuality was once considered to be a disease.
The teleportation process involves using a measurement to entangle the receiver's side of the pair with the original state in a useful way. Since measurements are probabilistic (and the measurement is along two qubits) there are four outcomes of this measurement with four different kinds of "garbling" of the transmission (one of which is no garbling).

The receiver needs the two bits to choose which of four kinds of garbling occurred, so it can correct them with the appropriate post-processing (if necessary).
I had the same problem on my laptop which, like many phones, has a high density display. When a website hasn't explicitly provided support for high DPI displays, the browser is forced to scale up the source image (typically by 200%). To see the expected effect, you just need to lower the browser zoom level a couple of times to get the image back down to its native size. You'll know you've got it right when the A block suddenly appears lighter and matches the C block rather than B block (which will now look too dark).
It also doesn't detect if you aren't logged in, in my case.
How about using commensal bacteria to design an "external immune system" which can respond to any pathogen we program it too. Bacteria coat basically all cavities in your body and could scan incoming threats and respond to them before the human immune system is every involved.
Sure. The Novena is not for everyone; it's a hacker's dream laptop but not necessarily a power user's. Still, I strongly suggest not wasting money on a Librem and instead spend a little time researching a good Linux compatible laptop.

The last I heard, Dell still ships Ubuntu on some of their XPS models, and there are a few companies whose business model is based on officially supporting Linux on their own branded machines. System76[1] and ZaReason[2] immediately come to mind, but if you're seeking a fully open machine with no closed source drivers, look to Libiquity[3] for an older but FSF certified ThinkPad. Yes, it's a rebranded Lenovo so it may be a sour choice given the subject of this article, but it's a solid buy if you don't need today's CPU power. Ditto Minifree[4].

[1] https://system76.com/
[2] http://zareason.com/shop/home.php
[3] https://shop.libiquity.com/product/taurinus-x200
[4] https://minifree.org/
I do agree. Neither the HN Guidelines [1] nor the FAQ [2] are clear about what expectations they have for downvotes (unless I'm missing something). I never saw the original comment when it was, I assume, greyed out, prompting the second poster to ask about the downvotes. It is second-highest ranked now, so I assume the downvotes are a minor component to its rank.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
So now we're expected to trust the billionaire that gave us a crappy OS and the billionaire that gave us a shitty social media website with eradicating all disease within the next 84 years ?

"Modern medicine is only 100 years old" ? Seriously ?
> I know several academics who made quite a big name for themselves on research that was later partially or fully retracted. No one cared about that; there was no real reputational damage done.

cf. the "power pose"
If only there was some way they could have contributed to firefox to fix those issues.
Heh, though in this case we have a few more data points. But of course it'll break down at some point.
So lets say this were possible. Where would be the best place to throw this money? Just researching X disease one by one isn't going to be successful. There are not enough resources available to make that happen that way. Period.

So what if a big leap in computational biology happened? Making faster machines is relatively easier and largely unregulated.

So you focus on simulating disease and some form of automation that tries to cure it. We have the problem of building these models for the computer to crunch on. So why not build them from people. Continuously monitor everything about someone. DNA, the various omics, self reports. All the while machine learning is trying learn these models. So other automations can change them.

So the first thing we need is a way to collect all this data. Itself a major medical breakthrough. How much data do we need to build the models? This seems to be the first breakthrough we need to even approach this.
From the TechCrunch article earlier, allegedly NY has a law that prohibits that.
Chatbots: Your Ultimate Prototyping Tool – IDEO Stories – Medium
Tor Project runs several scanners for this behavior. Arguably, unless your ISP, ISP's ISP, coffee shop, etc., are all 100% on top of their game, this could happen in any one of those environments too.
If the presence of the word "female" in the title prevents males from reading it then, in my opinion those males are being dismissive based on gender. I believe that's a bit sexist. I also believe it is a ridiculous generalization and as a male find it a bit insulting. I mean, this isn't like saying people who aren't TypeScript programmers will more often than not avoid a blog about TypeScript...with the exception of a few curious ruby hackers might. Maybe a devops engineer here or there...

...you are talking about being disinterested in an article titled "Ask A Female Engineer"...because it has the word "female".
Sure, as long I get to be the programmer and deploy the updates. :) You can call me God-Emperor Tominous.
1 tax haven, 3 of Canada’s biggest banks, 2,000 offshore companies
> We've know for almost ten years (via peer reviewed science) that these compounds are unsafe and ineffective.

Ineffective? Evidence agrees.

Unsafe? Overall evidence does not agree (with exceptions for the very small number of people like me who appear to be allergic).

The main issue is that these things are ineffective and they can have some negative effects for small numbers of people. So, if they are ineffective, why take any risk at all?
NYC is a useful place to start in that it's a huge market and has some of the toughest regulation in the country.

If you're rental focused, stuff like hurricanes aren't as big a deal because most perils are excluded or out of scope. The roof is your landlord's problem.
Apple still has security updates for yosemite. So sure you cannot run a supported version of macOS Sierra, but it is not EOL yet.
All disease? I hope they mean specifically pathogens, because there are plenty of diseases that are caused by other things or have unknown causes, and you can throw ten times the net worth of Facebook at them and they probably wouldn't be cured noticeably sooner. If it's just pathogens, I could believe that if we programmed nanoprobes that could target them, making antibiotics/antivirals permanently obsolete.
Thanks.

I'm inclined to agree.
If you spend enough time with a system like Qubes, you realize there's no need for a tradeoff between freedom/experimentation/learning and security — everything is contextual. There is a natural lifecycle where tasks move from experimental to predictable.

In the experimental phase, you want security to create strong isolation between the open area and the rest of the world, to maximize freedom within the protected area. As experimental code matures and wants to interact with external systems, and (possibly) the entire world via public internet, we can whitelist expected behavior and impose contextual limits, to regulate transitions across the biological system/world membrane.

One question is, who determines policy for non-experimental systems that interact with the world? Centralized app-stores are a blunt policy instrument, not to mention their propensity for business conflicts of interest. On the one hand, we want to encourage reuse of known-good policy defaults, which have been proven by other users against known threats. On the other hand, the long tail has many corner cases and even non-expert users can search the web to tweak config/policy settings to manage their own policies.

One techno-political precedent is CSS style sheets which at least tried to model a separation between "publisher" and "user" style sheets, acknowledging (a) the conflict of interest, (b) that users can override publishers.

What if every policy layer in client systems involved late-binding runtime negotiation among different stakeholders? An unplanned variation is happening with ad-blockers and anti-adblockers and anti-anti ... what if we developed DSLs for the purpose of efficient runtime and contextual policy negotiation? That would move us a lot closer to behavioral and contextual policy rather than semantic central policy.