skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a pretty big difference. In vacuum you want a huge nozzle to extract as much energy as possible from the engine's exhaust. In atmosphere, there's a limit to how large the nozzle can be before the exhaust flow separates from the sides and you get asymmetric thrust or worse. Since the nozzle can only be optimized for one particular altitude, that means that rockets which launch from sea level spend a good portion of their ascent with a smaller nozzle than they'd like to have. By launching from high altitude they can be significantly more efficient.

As others noted, this has been done before, but it's not too common. I think that's mainly because rockets need to be really, really big to get a decent-sized payload to orbit. Launching from an aircraft would let them be a bit smaller, but they still need to be huge. Pegasus (the one currently in use) is a small rocket and can only orbit a small payload. This plane is designed to carry about 500,000lbs of rocket. For comparison, a fully loaded Falcon 9 is about 1.2 million pounds, and that's only a medium-sized rocket when it comes to orbital launchers.

Amusing aside: in the 1970s, the US Air Force tested the feasibility of air-launching ICBMs. The test was carried out by loading a Minuteman ICBM into a C-5 Galaxy transport, flying it over the ocean, and then essentially shoving the missile out the back door and lighting it up. In this case, the advantage wasn't efficiency or payload, but rather the ability to move ICBMs around to make it more difficult to destroy them in a first strike. They decided it wasn't worth all the trouble in the end.
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they're supposed to
On one hand, the beneficiaries are the smaller parties, since it allows somewhat effective participation in elections without requiring that much money - they get some free airtime (gov't funds a specific amount of airtime in largest TV & radio stations for election coverage, allocated equally for parties; I'm not sure whether all applicants or all those who got some minimum number of votes in previous elections), and if you have an active volunteer force, you can get your message out without being overwhelmed by a massive campaign of the established parties. This also makes it practical for new parties to get started and get some seats whenever some voter group or key issue gets ignored by the parties in power.

On the other hand, it has some advantages for the established politicians as well, after all they set the rules for this system - in essence it avoids an arms race. Lifting the limits would give them some advantage over the smaller parties and upstarts, but nothing over their real competition, but that would mean that all the major players would suddenly need to raise many times more money, making everyone more dependent on donors.

Who are the losers in this case? Probably the very wealthiest individuals (not "the 1%" but the top 10-100 richest people), since it limits their influence. At any one point of time one or another party (not necessarily the largest one) may have an advantage in financial support and would be happy to lift or raise limits so that they could buy more votes, but if something like that happens, then it motivates everyone else to not let that happen.

Regarding your questions - it depends, that's more a question for the lawyers. IMHO ads supporting some issue would be fine but talk hosts arguing in favor of some (any) candidate would be prohibited in pre-election campaign time window - e.g. all mass media interviews with candidates during that time would be only in the scheduled slots or as advertising. Sure, if you control important media or people then the limits can and do get bent quite a bit beyond their intent, but it still sets a limit. I mean, if the stated limit is 10 then everybody might push it to 11 by various means, but you can't really do a meaningful large scale money-influence campaign without it being obviously illegal.
Neat - I kind of intuitively knew about B. from playing KSP, but the other two are interesting.
The biggest issue with PubSub and Amazon's alternative is the cost. Being capped at a per-message cost would be a no go.

If you can get away with using PubSub or the like it would be far easier than to manage your own Kafka deployment (correctly).

If data loss is unacceptable then Kafka is basically the only open-source solution that is known for not losing data (if done correctly of course). NSQ was great but lacked durability and replication. We can guarantee that two or more Kafka brokers persisted the message before moving on. With NSQ, if one of our instances died it was a big problem.

Managing Kafka in a cloud environment hasn't been easy and required a lot of investment and we have yet to move everything over to it.
Looks like mostly gravity losses [1], which I understand to be essentially "how long does it take to reach orbit".

[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=9959.msg18...
Dumb question: why don't they launch rockets from the tops of mountains?
You would think persuading doctors to prescribe unnecessary opioids is the kind of crime that has the DEA kicking down doors and arresting managers.
I'm one of the original authors, happy to answer any questions.
Introduction to AI Techniques [pdf]
Got a question on de business-model side of things: if Brave will block ads on websites, and replace them with their own advertisement and pay the user for looking at it, won't the owner of the website (aka the person that generated the valued content) get cut out of the deal? If so, assuming Brave succeeds, wouldn't it "kill the web", as there is no incentive to generate web-content anymore (a big % of websites gets financed through ads)? Am I missing something here?
If I use the Assistant integrated in Allo on Android and ask it to send a text to someone, I get a card with the contact information that asks me for the text for the message this send. (Same thing if I do it from the Google Search bar in Android.)

You seem to imply this doesn't work, but I'm not seeing it.
Indeed, the whole permutation is invertible and I'm not sure why either.
I used to walk to the grocery store in Germany six days a week with a toddler and an infant and a backpack for my groceries. I was in American military housing.

After I moved to Kansas, I ran into a soldier I did not remember, but he clearly remembered me. The soldiers who knew what it was like to carry a 60 pound ruck sack had all kinds of respect for me.

It can be done. Not by everyone and I am not saying you are required to live that way. But giving other people options doesn't preclude you from driving everywhere. And that's the entire fucking point here.

Feel free to drive. But I like walking. I liked walking even when I was carrying groceries home in a backpack with an infant strapped to my chest and a toddler sitting on my shoulders.
they were spinning, right?
I've also worked for a defense contractor, and the company I worked for, and the facility I worked at, took securing classified information very seriously. The consequences for screwing it up can literally be prison time, so I'm really surprised to hear the company you worked for didn't take it more seriously.

In this specific case, it doesn't sound like the "sensitive Pentagon Files" were classified at all, though, so it's probably not as big of a deal as the article is making it out to be.
Your UTF-8 decoder is identical to just "emit a REPLACEMENT CHARACTER for every bogus byte".

Also, the use of surrogate pairs mean you actually don't have a UTF-8 decoder at all, you just have something that's similar but produces a sequence of potentially-invalid unicode scalars.

> we also need to ensure that when some U+DCXX occurs by means of a valid UTF-8 pattern

It can't. Trying to encode surrogate pair codepoints in UTF-8 is strictly invalid.
follow-up question: will they block Google ads, as in Adwords? Messing with the big fellas here.
Official site with info + application: http://www.agenziademanio.it/opencms/it/ValorePaese/camminie...

They haven't translated to English yet, Google version in the meantime: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&tl=en&u=h...
Keep in mind that it's not just a matter of getting the second stage up high, but giving it enough vertical velocity so that it can reach orbital speed before it falls back into the atmosphere. If you could magically drop the second stage off at its separation altitude but with zero vertical speed, it wouldn't be able to reach orbit. An airplane won't provide much vertical speed, if any, so it's not really doing the same job. Still, just letting the rocket start up high is a big advantage.
Unless you are very particular about the commands added, most configurations end up being equivariant to ALL.

Some examples I've seen: ip, less, vi, tar, cp, mv, mount, chmod, chown, zip, mysql, dd, ...

Any of those and many many more allow for trivial jumping to any command as the target user and you're not improving your security posture compared to ALL, though you make some work harder and some mistakes less likely.
Not a dumb question—Saddam Hussein was trying to do this. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Babylon

It's prohibitively expensive and logistically challenging to build on a mountain, and mountains on Earth don't go nearly as high as planes can.
Uber Posts $708M Loss as Finance Head Leaves
They have to impose it, it's "impose or be imposed" since there is only one law and one culture for everyone in a centralized nation-state.
What does skinny mean? Are you American? If so I have a feeling our definition is going to differ. For me skinny means 100 lbs.
but not everyone can use postgres
Building a mountain is expensive and not scalable
AI is about to accelerate, and applying technology in the physical world. Internet and mobile are now taken-for-granted infrastructure like the power grid.
Since the article referenced "Louie"building out his product in a 3 months Ramen-fuelled binge, I don't think he's talking about SaaS like Workday, which is basically a gigantic ERP, just delivered via the interweb.
> When a movie gets something so essential to the plot wrong, you rightfully dislike the makers for being so damn lazy and not bothering to do their homework.

Actually, that's when I feel compelled to give it a pass. We watch movies all the time that start on a ridiculous assertion. Allowing one major mistake I have to let go, but in the beginning and service of the plot as a whole is okay with me, as long as most of the rest is done well. Having something that just plain seems wrong but without any reason beyond laziness is what really gets me.

For example, without allowing for the core problems of orbital physics of the debris and the relative distance and speed if different space stations, there is no movie. I found the rest of the movie enjoyable enough that I allow for those mistakes in service of the whole (in a similar way that I allow for a lot more in a superhero movie).
CRC32 is slower because implementing it in software a way that exploits modern CPU's instruction level paralelism is non-trivial, also the obvious way how to implement CRC32 on 32bit byte oriented CPU isn't exactly cache friendly.
We don't have to get caught up in definitions of consciousness.

What we see in the case of microbe cell division is goal-directed behaviour. The physical details of how it happens are very important to cell biologists, but the bigger point is that one way or another the thing will behave in ways that help it grow and divide.

In that light it seems perfectly fine to say that the cell wants to divide. Indeed it is the most correct explanation I can think of -- and then I can invoke evolution as an explanation of how it came to want this.
I think it's mainly that the difficulty of building infrastructure up there, and hauling rockets and payloads up every time you launch, isn't worth the benefits. If you could magick a launch pad and rocket to the top of Mount Everest and launch it from there, you'd get a small but decent performance improvement.
The pharma companies have some liability, but there was a perfect storm

The "war on drugs", and the racially motivated moral panic about crack cocaine and addiction created a social attitude that casts addiction as a moral failing

Inadequate safety net healthcare provisions lead people to the cheapest treatment option, generic opiates fit this bill
The goal of the DEA is not to reduce crime or address drug usage. The prime objective is to generate profit via asset forfeiture and cash seizures. The doctors and pharmaceuticals can sue back, and nobody wants that.
Isn't "declaring a major" almost synonymous with applying for a degree, presumably the declared major in this case would be "computer science", so requiring some programming knowledge for those declaring that major would be possible?

In theory can one easily go to a USA Uni based on relatively unrelated abilities - lets say history and cooking? - and leave with a degree in Electronic Engineering? If there are no subject-based pre-reqs why does one need to declare a major, or is that done later?

My UK degree was modular so I could have done something quite similar, but I was assessed for entry based on abilities pertinent to a nominated degree (not the one I ended up with as it happens). Modules still had [relatively loose, unassessed] pre-reqs such as reading particular books or understanding specific concepts.
> Virtually anywhere you could use it, you would be better off be using a SHA-2 variant instead

I don't see why, unless you're google and you care about small performance improvement in hash implementations. My point of view is that SHA-3 (or Blake2/K12) are THE hash functions you should use virtually anywhere.

> Length extension attacks only apply in cases where you've chosen to use the wrong cryptographic primitive (a hash) for your purpose (a MAC).

Two things:

1) so what? People actually use it this way. Are you just going to say "oh they're using it wrong there is nothing we can do about it"?

2) why is it wrong to use a hash to create a MAC? It is the most logic thing to do imo. The H(key | data) makes total sense to me. It is only when you know SHA-2's internals and their weaknesses that you realize you can't use it like that.
Red Hat doubles down on cloud development investment
Most of the buildings are not castles, but abandoned farms, and they're obviously not free since their use is tied to the kind of investment you need a business loan for. Good luck getting one if you don't already own something with the same value.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend some years ago. My friend comes from a family of home builders. None of them do it professionally anymore, but they all spent every summer growing up helping dad do everything from digging the hole to putting in the carpet.

From time to time, each of the siblings has built a new home, and they just do it themselves in their spare time. My friend was telling me about helping his sister with her home. His sister has moved into a very rural community in the western U.S. When the family showed up to pour the footings, they asked for a copy of the footing plans. Their sister handed them an 8.5x11 sheet of paper with a hand-drawn floor plan.

"Where's your official plans? The plans you submitted for your permit? The ones with the footing details?"

"That is the paper we submitted for our permit. See the stamp that says 'Approved'?"

All the other siblings live in Clark County, Nevada. The permitting process there is excruciating. They looked at the paper, looked at each other, shrugged, then built the house. They know how to build a footing. They know how to frame. They know how to build a house. The sister's house was built with the same quality as the other siblings' in a fraction of the time.

But if one of the big builders tries to put in a subdivision in that little town, I hope the municipality watches them like a hawk. Big builders don't build homes. They cheat and connive and do everything to push product at the lowest possible cost.

In a world without trust, you cannot afford to let people self-manage.
I hardly ever read non-fiction but I read this book a few years ago and absolutely loved it. Was sorry when I was finished. Well worth anyone's time.
The "war on drugs" has little to do with our opioid epidemic. These are people who were given "medicine" (mostly painkillers) and got hooked.
I don't think it has the same orbit, I think it has a crossing orbit inclined relative to that of the space station. Imagine a belt of debris, much like the rings of Saturn, with the ISS on an orbit that passes through the ring twice on each orbit, on opposite sides of the planet.
I'm curious if they're using DNSSec at all. I notice they're using Dynect for this, and in my experience DNSSec and Dyn do not get along (unless you're not using any of their special features like geotargeting), so it I'm interested in hearing how they've managed to get all that working.
>Too slow! You're doing something wrong

I do now notice that my ASUS motherboard monitor software is reporting that my CPU is at 1.2GHz instead of 3.3GHz. There's probably something wrong there. However, even if I get it up to 3.3GHz, the relative speeds between different benchmarks won't change. I got the same relative numbers on the Macbook.

>measuring a hand-optimized assembly version and then compared it to a C version compiled with optimization disabled? O_o

Because there's lots of Wei Dai code that's C++ code instead of asm. He delivered his MSVC project with optimizations disabled instead of "/O3" so it made the most sense to start with optimizations disabled everywhere as a preliminary benchmark. If I recompile Wei Dai's code with optimization, it will make Crypto++ perform faster and make blake2sp look slower. In the end, it's a moot point because blake2sp with "/O2" is still slower than Crypto++ SHA256.

>Using such large buffers will generate a lot of noise in benchmarks.

Why? If you study the blake2sp source code, you'll see a loop inside the hash update() function to handle arbitrary sizees of buffers. Why does a loop outside that update() mean "less noise"? Why does adding more function calls of BUFSIZETOTAL divided by 8192 equal less noise?
Interesting, I thought RChain was dead after they split from Synereo and I didn't see any news on the rchain subreddit. Will definitely keep an eye on this.
Sure... if you have them memorized. Most of the time, the Echo doesn't understand what I'm saying unless I phrase it exactly the same way each time and it pretty much is me learning through trial and error what lines work and what doesn't. Siri, at least on my phone, seems to get natural language better.
As someone looking to move their production environment to Docker with Kubernetes, I'm wondering how OpenShift compares to Rancher? I've been looking at it a bit and it seems to provide everything with a nice UI as well.
I have a hard time with the notion that doctors themselves were conpletely innocent bystanders merely "duped" by disinformation on these drugs.
The Chromium bug is a demonstration of the fact that different behaviors in different implementations can lead to real bugs. There's no reason to think that one Chromium bug is the only time this will ever matter.
Consumers of a product are beneficiaries. The general criticism is for state programs, where the people that get the benefit are few, and those who pay taxes cant fight for the few cents taken away from them.
CleanMyMac 3.8.4 Crack and Activation Number
It feels like this is jumping on a bandwagon. How many competing smart home speakers do we really need? It's just like the situation with self-driving cars. How many players are there now? Waymo, Intel, Uber, Apple, Yandex, Lyft, Tesla... how many of these do we need?
I am mostly with you on that and think this is a separate issue of big pharmacy pushing unsafe drugs, but there probably is some truth to GP's statement as well. The social stigma of addiction treated it as something that happened to morally deficient people, and probably lead to defunding and demphasizing public health approaches to solving it.
Generating and Solving Imperfect Information Games [pdf]
I imagine it's a mix of mountainous terrain making it hard to transport launch vehicles to the top and most mountains aren't next to the sea (so the payload would have to travel over land, raising the stakes of an unplanned early failure).
Kids these days have it easy. You young whippersnappers! We didn't have google dorks you have today! Hell we didn't even have google! Back in my day if you wanted to hack the Pentagon you actually had to hack the Pentagon!!! And there was no tor hideurass neither... times like this makes me think the internet is just one big honeypot...
Being close to the equator is more important. And mountains that could be used to construct a base are not so high.
I was thinking of a round-trip mission, but I always appreciate nitpickery. (And I learned just how much carrying a heavy bomb load affected the range of the B-29!)
"I would love to see a remake that retains the exact same gameplay with more modern graphics."

Would a remake really be necessary for that? Sounds to me like it'd be more of an art asset replacement/upgrade (which was already in the works at one point, IIRC). Modders have already been pumping out all sorts of art assets with pretty high visual quality, and KSP's already on a modern engine (Unity 5).

The graphics are already pretty modern. Maybe not photorealistic, but KSP's more cartoony graphics are part of the charm anyway. If I wanted hyperrealism, I'd be playing Orbiter or installing that one spaceflight mod for X-Plane.
I would think a key piece of evidence would be the IMS reports which show doctor level prescription data. The companies had to know that there were a lot of outlier doctors prescribing huge amounts of opioids way above the norm. (For those that don't know, you can buy data which shows what individual doctors prescribe. All drug companies buy this to know their market share and plan salesforce activities. You better believe they knew when things were going off the rails.)
> Christopher Nolan seems like a pretty smart guy. It must have crossed his mind at some point.

Also, he had Kip Thorne as an advisor. I remember criticism of the "slow-time planet" (including by Bad Astronomy) being shot down by Kip pointing out he actually calculated it as an edge-case solution for a specific rotating black hole.
After watching a 30 year old female overdose in a parking lot and not being able to be saved by first responders or emergency responders I've realized this problem is far more prevalent then most of us realize. This is a epidemic that is playing out under our very noses all across America.

This is just as dangerous as terrorists or any other think that goes bump in the night - it will destroy this country if not stopped.

Not sure what the solution is but this looks to be a good start to push for controls needed.
Of the 3 companies, Apple is likely the most privacy centric. However, they have a fuck ton of private data. You raise an interesting point; it may explain some percentage of why Siri is worse. Although, it has been in use longer and is still pretty shit. Apple sends a lot of telemetry and search data.

Also, I find it baffling anyone would want to put an internet connected always on mic in their house no matter who makes it. Insane.
This is interesting, I've always seen it as bad because you had to decrypt first, and then you could verify the tag. But now I understand that this also allows you to have a one-pass operation.
Dear SEC: ICOs and 'Tokens' are killing innovation
What Is Product Backlog Grooming and Why It Is Critical
The Executive Abroad – Interactive Map Shows the History of Presidential Travel
Well, let's take Oxy. That drug, at recommended doses, was supposed to provide 24 hours of pain relief but frequently did not do so in practice. This lead people to increase doses, and down that road lies addiction.

Purdue knew this and lied to the medical community.

Unless doctors ran their own studies they couldn't know that Purdue's dosage recommendations were pure garbage.