skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some numbers from the conventional-engine version:
http://pipistrel-usa.com/models/alpha-trainer-tech.html

The wing area for this aircraft is 9.29m^2, and the glide ratio is 17:1 at 74mph. Let's say you fly for an hour and then glide through a descent of 12,000 feet (ceiling is 18,000 at max weight). That gives you about 90 minutes of solar absorption time.

Assume we only fly at noon on clear sunny days to get 1kW/m^2 of solar energy (nice round number). That's 13.9kWh of incident energy on the wings. If we can capture that at 25% efficiency -- today's best commercial cells are around here, although about twice the efficiency has been achieved by researchers -- it's 10.5 minutes of additional powered flight, or about 3 minutes of climb. (I think that 3 minutes of climb yields an added 3660 ft of altitude or 11 minutes of glide.)

4kW from propeller generation during the glide phase yields another 6 minutes of powered flight.

I agree with your conclusion for this particular aircraft's geometry; it's not enough to sustain flight indefinitely. Still, other solar aircraft have demonstrated that sustained solar flight of manned aircraft is possible, and one such aircraft, Solar Impulse 2, has even circumnavigated the globe (albeit interrupted by a few stops along the way).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16087154
> If the likelihood of Americans to go to college remains similar

That's a problem. Prior generations became more educated than their predecessors, more able to understand the world, and did higher-skilled and better-paying work. Now, it's stagnated (or is going backward).
The disruptive quality companies like in blockchain technology is its ability to ignore local legislations.

Facebook is not allowed to issue dollars but may issue likecoins, warn that US residents are not allowed to sell them for dollars and get away with it.
There was a segment in Blue Planet II where they showed an infestation of sea urchins devastating a kelp forest. It turned out that because the predators that kept sea urchins in check--the sea otter--was over-hunted. I somehow suspect that the starfish infestation here might stem from a similar issue.
Other types of businesses choose to maintain large chunks of code in a "legacy language" and paying people to maintain it overtime, at a cost (e.g., banks and COBOL).

Let's say there's a COBOL -> C/C++/Rust/someotherfancylang transpiler. Maybe there is one, maybe not. Would it make sense for a bank to invest in something like that, or is there really no incentive to do so? Why would there be an incentive for a startup to do so, but not for a bank?
How Not to Design a Microwave
> The underlying problem is that college is the wrong thing. College focuses on capital-E “Education.” Book learning, “big ideas,” and “learning to think.” What we need is training—teaching people the concrete skills they need for a job.

Can you back this up? It's a big statement. Even if it's commonplace, I don't think it's well thought through. Education is for far more than jobs: People have to be citizens, community members, parents, individuals, and more - they need to be able to understand and reason critically about the world.

I'll note that the world's major problems now are not a lack of software and science, it's a lack of critical thinking about the (mis)information they read, and lack of understanding of politics and public affairs. For example, we know about climate change; the science isn't the obstacle. We've developed Facebook; more technology isn't the need.
LiquidHaskell
Daftar Poker Terpercaya – ASETQQ.COM
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Mainkan Game-nya & Menangkan Jackpot-nya.
Ayo segera daftarkan diri anda.
Prototype: discussion groups only accessible with certain email domains
Hi,

I've been thinking about an idea for a while, and would like to know how other people think of it.

The idea is to automatically create a forum for each email domain, so that people within the email domain can have open discussions in the forum, but people outside the email domain can't access the forum.

Some scenarios where it may be useful:
(1) a university of students with the @someUniversity.edu email can access an exclusive forum that automatically created for them (and they "just know" that it's their);
(2) a company of 20 people use their @someCompany.com email to get an online discussion place for free.

The deeper idea behind this service, is that a person may be more open to other people with a similar background, and email domain seems to be a good indicator of "similar background". For example, there're a lot of topics a student may be open to discuss online, if he/she knows that the discussion is only visible to people with the same .edu email.

I spent some time to implement the idea, and a prototype was just released at www.commonbuzz.com

It's an over-the-weekend hack of Flarum(www.flarum.org), but at least show the essence of the idea. Feel free to check it out.

Cheers,
- Andy
> We have too many English majors and not enough physicians and engineers, and the English majors can't all find skilled employment.

Can you back that up? As far as I know, it's a myth about employment; generally, the world is run by liberal arts majors and not by engineers (at least outside SV).

Also, as I point out in another post, college is not vocational school; it's far more important:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16089866
> (no compose for π)

You can create your own compose sequences in ~/.XCompose. I mapped pi to Compose * p, taking the idea from Plan 9: https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man7/keyboard.html
Do you know what kind of bias could we call that?
tl;dr- Programming code serialized to binary seems like a Base-2 number to them, so they were looking for "illegal" C scripts that would be prime when read as a Base-2 number.

They give the example of a C script that breaks an old DRM crypto scheme.

It seems kinda silly since primes have a fairly regular distribution, so all they need to do is:

1. Pick any program they want to be "prime".

2. Serialize it and check if it's prime. If so, done; if not prime, continue.

3. Perform some minor code modification that doesn't change the script's functionality, e.g. tweaking a variable name or the content of a comment.

4. Return to Step (2), looping until a prime representation has been found.
> There are many transpiled languages working on-top of js.

That's only because JS is literally the only language allowed inside the browser (back in the day you had at least two other possibilities: ActionScript and Java. However, both Java applets and Flash-based sites fell out of favor (for good reasons)). No matter how well designed a language there's always going to be a particular combination of problem domain + programmer type for which the language does a poor job. And that's assuming the language is well designed in the first place, which is at least debatable with JS.

It's also worth noting that the JS itself tends to be transpiled to itself with Babel or other tools. There's nothing inherently bad about transpilation, and source maps solve the most serious problems with them.

> As many things in JS world, they tend to end up as an abandonware.

That's not really the case. After initial development, once a transpiled language implements all the features an author wanted, there is little more to do with it. New features of JS, which would have to be implemented in a transpiled language, are few and far between. The last such features were generators, and most of the "abandoned" transpiled languages had them quickly implemented.

In other words, there's a difference between "abandoned" and "feature complete and in maintenance mode". While some transpiled languages are indeed abandoned, others are not - there's simply not that much to do with them, aside from fixing bugs.

> This all make long-term mainainability of large JS + "featurelang" projects hard.

Why? Most of the "featurelangs" are stable and were stable for a couple of years at least. You can reasonably expect CoffeeScript code from 2011 to get properly transpiled today. What exactly makes it hard to maintain the code written in such languages, compared to pure JavaScript?

> [TypeScript] had initial burst of interest, but seem to be waning now.

I believe TS is here to stay, even if its popularity diminishes a bit. There are programmers who want their languages statically typed and that's one thing you cannot, in any way, emulate in pure JS. TS is only going to get replaced once the Web gets first-class support for other languages, but that's not happening anytime soon.

> no featurelangs in my projects has paid off massively whenever I took post-delivery maintenance and support contracts.

Again, what problems did you have with long-term maintenance of transpiled code bases? I never had any and, if anything, updating JS code over time to take advantage of its new features was a bigger pain than having all those features available since 2009.
Zero to Driver
Indeed, the part about overachieving relatives hit home also. Mine have big houses, lots of cars, and a big screen in every room. I'm not interested in any of that but would like to meet them a bit closer in their direction, i.e. motivation.
Web developers code to Web browsers, so bugs in Web browsers lead to sites depending on those bugs, making those bugs unfixable unless you have developers testing in multiple browsers. Spec bugs don't become unfixable that way.
> How "hands on" was the government in kicking the economy back into gear? Did we do much beyond lowering interest rates?

If by "we" you mean the U.S. government, it spent about $700 billion to stimulate economic activity and employment.
No mention in the article of Switched on Bach 2000. This is the album that was a distillation all of her knowledge and skill. Entirely digital (DKS Synergy and Yamaha FM), except for a single Moog note! (She leaves it as a challenge to listeners to locate it...)

The tracks are almost unreal: as different from 'modern' subtractive 'fat' analog-style synths as can be. She champions complex timbres and original tunings, and it makes a tremendous difference to the music. I compared a classical organ recording of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to her version, and what a difference! Her tuning makes the music so much richer, and she surrounds the listener with a dizzying web of sound - the surround sound is incredible!

Her articles in Keyboard magazine, about the making of SoB2000, were a huge influence on how I came to perceive music.

BTW, Wendy Carlos is also a brilliant eclipse photographer: http://www.wendycarlos.com/eclipse.html
This is why I'm obnoxiously cautions about adding external dependencies.
KHU+ĐÔ+THỊ+SWAN+PARK+NHƠN+TRẠCH+|+KHU+ĐÔ+THỊ+SWAN+PARK
> indeed, using Chef/Puppet/etc can be completely unnecessary for the containerized workload

This is more than naive. As long as your software needs any kind of configuration, there is a need for configuration management. There will be access tokens, certificates, backend configuration, partner integration of various kinds, and monitoring and backup configuration and you will want guarantees that these are consistent for your various testing and staging environments. You will want to track and bisect changes. You can either roll your own framework for this or use Ansible/Puppet.

Whether you distribute your software pieces with tar balls, linux packages or docker images or completely orthogonal to how you tie these pieces to a working whole. And the need for configuration management absolutely increases when moving towards containerized solutions, not by the change in software packaging format but by the organizational changes most go through where more people are empowered to deploy more software which can only increase integration across your environment.

I see organizations that have ignored this because they believe this magic container dust will alleviate the need of keeping a tight grip over what they run, and find themselves with this logic spread over their whole toolchain instead. That's when they need help cleaning up the mess.
Here in New Mexico ñ is very common in place names. And I’ve known people with accented names who, though they don’t insist on it, appreciate (sometimes visibly brightening) when their names are spelled accurately.
I sincerely hope all modern package managers, when invoked with sudo, immediately spawn a very-low-privilege process that does most of the work sandboxed to /tmp/whatnot, and the root process just copies files to the right place and runs some system calls to update databases etc.
The secret ingredient in SoB is the fact that much of it was recorded at half speed and played back at double speed. This doubles the tempo and also hugely alters the timbres, making the sound much brighter, punchier, and more sparkly than the usual rather ponderous Moog sound.

You can use an editor like Audacity to halve the pitch and you’ll hear the sounds become much more like the usual Moog timbres on later records from that era. (And yes, Carlos has admitted this herself.)

The records were a team effort. The arrangements were shaped by producer Rachel Elkind, and Baroque specialist Benjamin Folkman.

I’m just as impressed by the fact that Carlos built her own mixer (difficult, but not entirely exceptional) and multitrack recorder (extremely difficult, and definitely exceptional) for the recordings.

Creatively I prefer some of the other work, especially Beauty in the Beast, which is still far ahead of its time now, and By Request, which has some outrageously clever and fun arrangements of other music. (The Elgar pastiche is genius-level and just plain hilarious.)
Yes. Only when you completely eliminate the conventional kind of speculative execution [0] can you have a hope of being immune to these sorry of problems.

[0] https://millcomputing.com/docs/metadata/
Ask HN: Delay buying new devices due to Meltdown/Spectre CPU bug?
Is it advisable to put off any device purchases until this issue is fixed in a new generation of CPUs? So in 1-2 years?
The key is to have powerful ones that you re-use a lot. Then most of the time you just have simpler functions with standardized annotations.
I second the Victorinox, but prefer the Climber as the smallest model that has both corkscrew and scissors and screwdriver. Very handy at parties where there is wine but no one has brought a corkscrew! The blade is ok, but a bit flimsy and does not lock, so light duty only. The overall look is innocuous or even dorky rather than tactical. Which suits my needs since I prefer to attend parties and avoid knife fights.

That said I would love it if there was a clone or similar knife with the main blade in an abrasion resistant steel like VG-10. Cutting open packages will dull a knife surprisingly quickly.

https://www.amazon.com/Victorinox-Swiss-Climber-Pocket-Knife...
Tonight's NBA Tips – 8/1/2017
Xapian https://xapian.org/
If it makes you feel any better, changing a few lines of code and glueing together APIs to send data from A to B is what 80% of Google engineers do each day too.
Though spec bugs go the opposite way: if you discover an issue in the spec, then it is very difficult to change it because someone somewhere may have been - at the time correctly - relying on that behaviour.
> Where do I go from here? How do I find an idea and convince myself that it's good enough to move forward with?

Perhaps you don't. Perhaps you just need to wait. Keep working on side projects and keep learning. Also ask yourself this - "Why do I want to start a startup?" and be really honest with yourself about the answer.
On not reinventing the wheel and consistency, this is where all "Electron Desktop" apps are at now, UI tends to be "fancy" and alien to the host operating system.
There was a fascinating article recently about sentence complexity and embedded clauses in language: https://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/the-rise-and-fall-of...
The GOP has refused to increase spending and has tried to cut it on principle, and in some places has cut it dramatically (e.g., Kansas).

Most importantly, the Budget Control Act of 2011 (the "Sequester") was designed to set spending so low that both parties would be forced to compromise on regular-order spending bills in order to fund what was important to them (generally seen as defense for the GOP, domestic welfare programs for the Democrats). Instead, GOP spending hawks refused to compromise and spending has been locked at an insanely low level since then. That includes a lack of funding that is crippling even the supposed GOP priority, the military.
Whoops! Thanks for that
A security hole in a web app is only confined to that app/domain. Where a security hole in a native app can be much more detrimental. It's also less work to make a web app if you want it to work on more then one platform. Making a web app is also a better dev experience, at least for GUI apps.
> With cases like the current one, or the leftpad incident in 2016, I'm surprised package registries still allow recycling old package names after a package was deleted.

CPAN requires the old author to explicitly transfer or mark it abandoned-and-available-to-new-owner.

For all the things wrong with perl5 (and I love it dearly but have spent enough time I can probably list more things wrong with it than the people who hate it ;) it's always a trifle depressing to watch other ecosystems failing to steal the things we got right.
I thought this was about leftpad, but nope we're doing it again!
> Let the professionals do it, because they can, first, do no harm.

:O=
Show HN: FinTECH Report (MVP Launch)
I don't see either of the bugs going away for consumer hardware? Both are somewhat fundamental optimizations and does not affect running trusted software.
BlackBerry Mobile site hacked to run Monero cryptocurrency miner
npm also does not allow you to remove packages. read my comment more carefully.
Hi, I am the creator of FinTECH Report.

As somebody who is focused on FinTECH I was planning on creating a list to track products etc. Instead of keeping to myself, I figured why not run a site to help others too. After running a short survey ad campaign on Facebook with positive feedback, I decided to build and launch a prototype.

That prototype has just launched and I am interested to hear peoples feedback.

The site is initially focusing on the UK FinTech space but I do not intent to keep that restriction.

Thank you

EDIT: For those of you curious. This is all static HTML hosted on AWS S3. I have a CSV file with the product data, which is written out to a template via a quick application I wrote in Go. It's manual but quick really. My frontend web skills are very dusty now and I need to learn a new JS framework.
FWIW, I worked there and used this stuff. I think my interview was a good but incomplete window into what I would need to know to do the job.
Hrm. In which case, the metadata searching has proved fairly useful.

In the longer term / larger scale, it's not going to be sufficient though.
The Meltdown reference there does not include Sierra or El Capitan (only High Sierra). Apple had included them in a previous version of the page, but have since removed the references, suggesting they remain unpatched.

There's been some previous HN discussion about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16078414

And The Register claims macOS before High Sierra remains unpatched:

https://twitter.com/theregister/status/949358083431546880
Read also https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-tha... for some context. In my opinion it shows how 'marketing' in pharma is a recepie for a disaster.
That equation doesn’t hold, as open source software has demonstrated time and time again.
Binge drinking on the weekends... /s

But actually, sometimes. I am really not online much ever, I spend enough time in front of screens so I sign off, all the way. Don't even bring my phone 9 out of 10 times.
>Has democracy failed?

The US is only 5% of the World's population. There are plenty of Developed countries doing much, much better than the US.

You're doing it wrong, but the rest of the world is ticking along.
The Meltdown and Spectre attacks require code execution on your local machine. You can avoid both the Meltdown and Spectre attacks by not downloading and running untrusted software.

The Javascript attack vector for Spectre will be patched by browser vendors.

If you operate safe computing practices it is unlikely you will be hit by either the Meltdown or Spectre attacks.
I can't see any reason you can't do something like:

class MetaDec(args, here):
...
def __call__(self, func):
# Decorate function here

def meta_dec(args, here):
return MetaDec(args, here)

@meta_dec
def decorated:
...

(apologies for any syntax fails, python is not my best language)

At which point one would imagine you can abstract out the __call__ part and just have a 'decorate' routine on any class designed to work what way or similar.

Whether this is an improvement or not over closures almost certainly depends on the use case, of course.
> highest corporate tax rates in the world

You might have missed the tax law that just passed, greatly lowering those rates.

Regardless, the statutory rate isn't important; the question is, how much do corporations actually pay after deductions, etc. The rate was 35%, but U.S. corporations actually paid around 20%. Also, overall taxes paid by Americans is among the lowest in the OECD.

http://time.com/money/4862673/us-tax-burden-vs-oecd-countrie...
I'm incredibly happy that the em dash is gaining the attention it deserves. However, if honest—I am also a little upset that the good people the comments section are tending towards placing white-space around each dash and the text it forms an abutment with.

This space is not needed.
Accessing data either require's identification to a database or you access the data over the web/http. Do you have any examples where you can access public data without logging in ? I can only think of FTP servers that lets you access anonymously ...
That's an interesting question.

If I cross into the US with nothing digital at all (no phone, camera, laptop, etc.) do I have to provide logins and passwords to all my online accounts?

That would be very scary if indeed true.
At scale or for personal use?

If at scale, you probably don’t have an option because you need it now.

If for personal use, we don’t know what the fix would look like, or whether there would be a perf hit. If you can hold off for a few years sure do it, but it’s not a huge part of the equation now.

How long will this device last you? If less than 2 years buy now.

Honestly very few reasons to wait. Everyone has this problem. The only thing I might wait for is clarification of the attack surface area of spectre since that can’t be patched but it seems like it’s difficult to pull off in most cases.
I don't know anything about FSD so I'm asking as a layman: why only have one fiber? If you could focus, say, 16 fibers on the same plane (as spirals making overlapping circles) then each one would only need to cover 120x68 pixels of the HD display so they could move much more slowly.