skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> esa doesn't have a suitable supply of plutonium 238

In fact, the link you give explicitly mentions safety and political risks in addition to availability.

> not only are there sourcing issues with Pu-238 (reserves are running low and production is not high enough), there are safety concerns and political issues related with its use in RTGs.

Furthermore, it's not an accident they don't have any Pu-238. The lack of it is deeply connected to the general fear of doing anything radioactive, and hence no effort to develop production capability.

It's clear ESA is being forced to consider nuclear power sources simply because it's almost impossible to fulfill certain missions without them. But the fact that they are willing to consider it when absolutely necessary does not mean they haven't seriously scaled down mission potential in the past by using solar power.
I'm always going back to them, never 'finished'
I moved to Puerto Rico at 32. I didn't really speak any Spanish, though I had a few years of it in high school. So I had some familiarity with the grammar. Nearly a decade later, I consider myself fluent, though I know at times I sound funny to native speakers.

PR turned out to be an exceptionally difficult place to learn Spanish (for why, see: http://www.speakinglatino.com/study-spanish-in-puerto-rico/ particularly #2). It took me longer than it would have taken had I gone somewhere that English was not an option, and my biggest jumps forward were on business trips to those places.

When I arrived, I started taking lessons twice a week, and continued that for about 18 months. I spoke Spanish almost exclusively for work, usually over the phone, which is much harder and likely helped. A few years in, I moved to Miami, where I actually speak more Spanish at times (here, social situations are in Spanish, in PR all social interactions were in English) Later, I married an Argentine, and found out that I had to learn a whole other language!

Other things I did that helped:

1- I decided I was going to say dumb things, and that I had to be okay with that. When someone would point something out, I'd laugh. An example, I remember mixing up the words for 'butterfly' and slang roughly equivilent to 'faggot' in American English. I didn't know that's what it meant. I had heard the word somewhere and associated it with butterfly because they sound somewhat similar. Be ready to laugh at yourself, that makes it much easier to just throw it out there and try. And let's be honest, pointing at a butterfly and saying, "Hey look at the faggot" with no other context or offensive intent is pretty funny.
2- Find people to speak with regularly. Daily if you can. The really valuable people are those who will correct you without switching to your language unless absolutely necessary.
3- Focus on communicating, not grammar. You need enough grammar to be understood, and you should keep correcting it when you make mistakes, but if you work on communicating effectively with people, the grammar falls into place.
4- Have fun with it! Its interesting. Enjoy.
5- Learn the bad words too. I used an offensive word above. But its important to learn those words, because that's how people actually converse. You'll learn whole other levels of both language and culture by doing so. Sometimes, its important to realize when someone is being offensive, or even that you're being offensive and don't know it.

But mostly, have fun with it.
Countless solo-made phone apps, with decent sales. Sort of a like a return to the 1-man video game shop.

And although you're talking about solo... There's was a 2-man dream team in the DC area. Not sure if they're still working. They would tackle any project and get it done fast. Any language or tech stack. Design docs, requirements, working project, everything. They tackled in-distress projects where a large team and multi-million dollar budge failed.
Try flipping the image. Or turning off the light: if you have actual light coming from above you can't imagine it is coming from below.
I thought the Netflix for film geeks was Mubi.com ...
there is lots of buzz around this not just to come up with the next use-case for a unicorn but also to provide break out of the costs associated with securing and maintaining the infrastructure.

server less computing would in applications where this makes sense reduce the latency down to what is dictated by the last mile. on the other hand there is a huge push towards going mobile in many industries (thanks to LTE, LTE-A), but these wireless protocols do horribly poor routing P2P traffic. (this is a problem that operators are just about getting to grips with in their fixed networks).

When it comes to use-cases I think we have some realistic opportunities if an industry is big or desperate enough to also buy data from individuals (rather than a broker). I ran recruitment firm the last few years and a recruiter would always do anything to get their hands on a larger pool of data. If you give them a tiny new cloud service to search for "niche skill candidates" they will pay for it provided they can add additional people to their database. And a distressed candidates would sure rather sell their data directly to the company (earning a few cents along the way) rather than paying linkedin to host their profile and suck up all data.

the bigger challenge (than creating a p2p network) is how to structure services on top, the article mentions btc miners as the profit model for bitcoin. it is for me perfectly logical to have a company with a centralized service/buisness model that builds data applications on top of the decentralized p2p paradigm (most trackers are not really decentralized and the total decentralized bootstrapping of the p2p network itself is also a problem which isn't totally solved afaik).
Isn't this what extensions are for?

When is Mozilla going to channel its resources into building a JavaScript engine that can keep up with Chrome's so that the web is actually usable in FF again?
The obvious of course; I'd assume you're asking that to entrap me in a 'misogynistic' statement of 'women should be owned by their man'.

Not how I feel at all.

But sure, here's a brief summary of tasks previously(generations ago) assigned to almost solely females:

-Household chores

->laundry
->cleaning
->cooking

-Child rearing

Again, we're talking about the past here, women today obviously live in a different world where they are empowered.

Do I think women should have to do those things now? Nope.

Did I say they did? Nope.

Do I think women choosing this lifestyle are 'stupid' or not 'empowered enough'? Nope.

Do men owe women anything in this context? Nope.

This is equality. Men have _nothing_ to apologize for or work towards. We are equal.
I'm pretty much in the same place. I have gEDA symbol and footprint libraries that I like, and the cost of redoing those and climbing the learning curve for KiCAD isn't justified. Many of my friends use KiCAD, and it seems both have issues, just in different places. I've looked at the KiCAD footprint library format, and it is a sad mess. Of course, gEDA's footprint library format also has limitations of probably equal measure.

In any case, I've done many rigid PCBs and one flex PCB with gEDA and never had to resort to hand-editing files. That said, I have written my own footprint creation tools to get exactly what I want. That up-front cost is part of getting either KiCAD or gEDA to yield the desired results.

As in many things about EDA, libraries are the speed bump that repeatedly jars your brain case.
Harvard and M.I.T. Are Sued Over Lack of Closed Captions
*Temporarily banning. He's since changed his tune, saying that we need to heavily scrutinize those coming from countries that are terrorist hot beds. Jimmy Carter did something similar, so don't say it's "unheard of."
Date 2015.
ZFS's 'panic on on-disk corruption' behavior is a serious flaw
The most expensive part for any "decentralized web" is going to be data storage, so the question basically boils down to "How can a person in a P2P system incentivize other people to host their files for them?" Bittorrent sidesteps this question by focusing only on very popular files and enabling hosting by default in most clients.

So far, no established solution exists for doing this. The most promising projects working on this problem that I know of are IPFS[1] and Ethereum Swarm[2] but both are still struggling with the low level protocol that makes sure person A gets paid for hosting files from person B.

[1] https://ipfs.io/

[2] http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/swarm/
duolingo, weekly classes, then spent 3 months in the destination countries [spanish]
Do you really ever begin to break even with those on the expenses you have on kids over your lifetime?
He's not avoiding the question. It's a stupid question. And this isn't nearly the first time dhh has butted heads with pg on Twitter (for no discernible reason other than to pick a fight).
Ah, good point -- cash deposits and big paper checks (>$10k, IIRC) are a good reason to maintain a big B&M bank account. Didn't think about that since I never do either.
Are you thinking of this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puer_aeternus#Peter_Pan_syndro...
BGP is a path vector protocol so traditionally it only receives information from its direct peers. Community strings are for sending targeted info to a distant (or close) autonomous system, enabling you to effect mutually agreed upon changes in that AS. With a larger number if bytes available in a community strings it enables us to use community strings to convey a more complex set of instructions.
I definitely think fragments should be an added feature of a 2.0 version of JSX - just take a look at this Github issue that continues to house active discussion now for 2+ years.

https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/2127
> There's something in it for them.

That's untrue.

A Trump presidency following the major Snowden leaks would likely be an international death sentence for US tech companies. Other nations might tolerate presidents they feel they can deal with controlling the NSA apparatus in their nation, but almost certainly will take steps to prevent Donald Trump from having the same tools.

For an internet company, the split between Europe and Asia insisting that your service not be an NSA tool while Trump is being tough on terrorists and immigrants likely means that you can no longer continue operating in all markets.

So for someone like Google or Facebook, the hit on taxes is smaller than the potential risk to their European and Asian markets from those regions deciding that they need a localized technology company which isn't as at the behest of US presidents.

tl;dr: Big businesses will pay for international stability, so the hit on taxes from Clinton versus Trump is off-set by better international relations from Clinton than Trump.
I am learning french as well, via Duolingo. Spoken french fries my brain, I just cant keep up. So many words seem to be pronounced the same way. And they speak so fast!

For example, did they say:

jeune

Jaune

john

je une

Je un

Joan

Je ont

Jean

Je ne

....

Perhaps it's just an unconscious bias on my part. Just for reference, I am fluent in at least two more languages apart from my mother tongue.
Ask HN: Favorite WM/DE?
What's your favorite Window Manager and/or Desktop Environment?

If you're using an extraordinarily unusual configuration (changing defaults extensively, using a non-default WM with your DE, etc), please note this.
Is cloud computing another name for a render farm that's available for rent.
Good advice, just a small addition: if novels are too hard, give comics a try.
Netflix is a great tool for getting started - choose an interesting series in the language you're trying to learn, e.g French, and turn on subtitles in that language (in this case French) - it helps you decipher accents more clearly and gives you an ear for the language.
Hah, cool. I never really tried to figure it out but I always imagined it had something to do with the presenter "beaming" [1] after their successful, beautifully typeset presentation.

[1] https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/beaming
"if you are a 1-2 person team and using a frontend JS MVC framework in 95% of all cases you are doing it wrong."

You're saying having a small team makes it a bad idea to use a standard-ish library for organizing things and avoiding grunt work?

I would argue the exact opposite.
When I started working with PHP over a decade ago I had some experience with Java so I thought it was funny that in PHP everything is an 'array'. Now that I'm working with JS and Elixir and getting into functional programming I'm realizing, that hey, maybe that is the right way to go. Putting everything into structures like maps helps blur the line between code and data.
The article mentions the "Association for the German Language", which seems to refer to the prescriptivist "Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache".

It's important to understand that few Germans are even aware it exists and its conservative views are extremely unpopular and non-standard. Even the Council for German Orthography which regulates German orthography as taught in schools only has two Association representatives in its total of 18 German council members.

In practice Germans generally regard the Duden (the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary) as the ultimate authority on German orthography and vocabulary. And the Duden generally takes a descriptivist approach, adapting to language change rather than trying to halt it.

Additionally, there seems to be a strong correlation between Germans with strong opinions about loan words and Germans with strong opinions about immigrants (or more recently the loss of "occidental identity" via "Überfremdung").

There are of course people who feel strongly about language who aren't also nazis in the more literal sense but the kind of complaints people have about language use often gives you a relatively safe indicator of their political views:

Complaining about wrong apostrophe use: moderate grammar nazi

Complaining about excessive use of English loan words in office culture: red-blooded grammar nazi

Complaining about "Elektronik" not meaning "electronics": moderate actual nazi

Complaining about "Handy" or "Portemonnaie": red-blooded actual nazi
These are called wasabi eigo in Japanese, and there are enough to fill a dictionary, they change all the time.

My favorite are ones like "left over"... a baseball term for a hit that goes over the left-fielder's head, rather than uneaten food saved for later.

English admits a ton of these as well. I'd be horrified if someone recommended a board to keep English pure from foreign influences though. It seems both futile and xenophobic.

Languages are like old shoes. They are going to get beat up with use, but are wasted if you just lock them away to prevent it. And maybe as you wear them around, they'll get more character and more comfortable.
I meant the house. Kids are huge money sinks.
Germany says Tesla should not use 'Autopilot' in advertising
I use RescueTime (https://www.rescuetime.com/ref/386085) (disclaimer: referral link but I am an active and paying user) which can track time based on open/active/focussed app, per-site productivity tracking based on your settings, open API, mobile and offline tracking, focussed mode (block all distracting sites), integrations and much more.

I've been a paying customer for over 5years, and well worth EVERY penny!
like Tab Groups? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...
I think someone seeing this from the ground, not understanding what it is, might think it's a UFO
It's a WIP. Still, you don't need to wait for the integrated sandbox, you can sandbox Firefox as a whole using tools available for your OS (eg. firejail for Linux).
http://aleagues.com (not hosted)
Technology deserts create structural inequality
IMO Mozilla would be wise to spend time on improving Firefox’s memory footprint and responsiveness. As it is it’s slower and more cumbersome than Chrome (at least on Linux). Some of these features are nice, sure, but perhaps they should be provided as extensions? The core user experience is browsing, and right now that’s a huge pain.
Ask HN: Which is a very good book to learn and understand linux system well?
Here's the result of running

wayback_machine_downloader http://c2.com/cgi/wiki

and then tarring and gzipping:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/90674827/c2.tar.gz (~109MB)
My favourite German one is body bag for rucksack.
I mean we have this wonderful German word rucksack, it is so nice it even has been imported into English, then instead of just using it we import the wrong word from English.

Unsurprisingly the phenomenon also exits in English, for example Zeitgeist means something slightly different in German than in English and I wouldn't use in German in the same way I see it used in English.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12212967
The real mystery to me is the timing of this donation. At this point it's pretty unlikely(1) that Trump will win the election and 1.25M surely won't swing the outcome very much at all. What does Thiel gain by doing this? It seems like he has a lot to lose in terms of his reputation and business dealings with other people in Silicon Valley that don't share his politics.

1. https://www.electionbettingodds.com
The Dominican Republic (and I think other Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands) has a lot of words they use that come from English but have been modified over the years, or were brand names that are now used to describe something Generic.

SUV is "Jipeta" or "Yipeta" sounding like "Jeep-eta",
Diaper is "Pampa" sounding a bit like "Pampers",
Trash-can is "Zafacón" coming from the English "Safety-can",
and my personal favorite is the word "boche" which is a bit like a scolding or reprimand but comes from "Bull shit."
Norwegian has e.g. "light" instead of "diet" for diet products ("Diet Cokie" is "Coke Light" in Norway).

We also have e.g."vorspiel" and "nachspiel" for "pre party" (private party before going out, where you can get drunk cheaply...) and "after party" respectively.
Or he crushed an opponent in comical fashion after 8 years of antagonism.
And wouldn't the smartest fraction of the population, or at least the researchers think they're the smartest, have the best skills at shamming and avoiding individual busywork and finding careers where they can ruminate in relative peace compared to working in a busy call center, for example?

Even in general at very large scale, a world of limited and shrinking economic opportunity but unlimited and expanding education (well, until the future student loan crash arrives), means you can try to pile on busywork but the people shamming and pencil whipping it are better at shamming and pencil whipping and everything else, than any other cohort in the history of humanity...

As a cultural touchstone look at the movie "Office Space" still relevant today. He stares at the walls for an hour or two every day trying to look busy. Sure you might have to pass three interviews with ten people while proving P=NP and writing a javascript compiler to GET the job, but to DO the job you have to update TPS report headers every couple weeks and that's about it, other than loading letter size paper into the laser printer and staring at walls looking busy. Not to spoil the plot of the movie but the lead actor is not a theoretical physicist although if he were, it would be a dream job for him, work about an hour a week then look really busy the other 39+ hours while working on physics.
Except that Trump has said that he does not care who uses what bathroom at his hotels and such. So, no, Thiel isn't an idiot.
IronES2015 or IronTypeScript. Interesting thought.
I think it's obvious. People are not going to maintain a decentralized network for copyright infringement. But imagine a NAS device that also hosts something like a Facebook account which is shared with trusted others. Your personal data is also encrypted and backed up on your friends machines - even data not part of your FB stuff. When everyone has their own NAS with the decentralized P2p/backup software then we win. How one maintains that software across the network is a mystery, but it must be up to the individuals to maintain in some way.
If it's user@domain, the same answer as your email provider ?
If it's P2P, basically: everyone by disk space and bandwidth.

We might need to invent an easy and secure way to pay first though :)

Edit: and a comment here gave me another idea: offline syscs to friends when your PC is online (or syncs from friends)
I assume you mean the "Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors" by Shen and Lipasti. I agree that is a great book to read. Just quite an expensive book for a casual reading. I was fortunate to get it cheap at a local used book store.
Thank you for the extensive reply!

Maybe my intuition is: the world is round. And your reply is: no, there are mountains, rotation flattens the poles, the moon causes bulges (the tides) due the the earth's constant falling to the center of the earth/moon system. An intuition is an extremely zoomed out/abstract version of the real thing.

Not saying that this is the case. Perhaps in the above analogy the world is actually square, or donut shaped, and so my intuition is way off. But I am out of my depth to judge. So I am hoping you can. If a high schooler had my kind of intuition, or no intuition at all, with which situation would you be happier?

I can say that "Conversely, this rules out observers who see identical probabilities everywhere." is a good point, but also what I meant by "chance function", as apposed to an equal chance for all the points.

In the quantum eraser experiment, even if you erase (or not) on a much longer path, the result is the same. But it is no ftl comm, because the other observer needs the eraser data to filter the photons and find the signal. But what causes that randomness, knowing that we can rule out hidden state? In my intuition, because it is all evaluated at once. But what is the birds eye view of that answer if it is better not to have that intuition?
This should be the goal!
I was at the Decentralized Web Conference. We pay our local ISPs for Internet access, so the user side is taken care of. I donate little bits of bitcoin to my Gnu Social host. I pay to host my own content because I like to share and it helps both my consulting and writing businesses. This all works well.

What doesn't work well right now is supporting development for replacements of services like Google Now, Facebook, etc.
Even ignoring the inevitable progress of technology, 10min is still plenty of time for a crew with two of these and a stack of spare batteries to have continuous light until the stack runs out.

While one is in the air, the other is getting its battery packs swapped out.
The "ruby is strictly required" copy on the apply page is pretty off-putting. I'm not a ruby expert but it's not fucking rocket science.