skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From http://www.nanosats.eu (Oct 2018 stats)

Nanosats launched: 966
CubeSats launched: 878
Countries with nanosats: 58
Companies in database: 323
Forecast: over 3000 nanosats to launch in 6 years

OMG is working on an open SysML reference model for CubeSats, https://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?space/18-09-04.pdf (starts on page 20)

> A SysML compliant and tool-independent CubeSat template model that provides building blocks that can be specialized to support MBSE CubeSat design will lower the cost of development ... start-up and mature satellite development organizations can benefit from ... common model structure and framework to support increased production without jeopardizing successful deployment and operation.

> Many of these organizations are university programs that combine aerospace engineering instruction with fundamental research while developing, launching, and operating a spacecraft. With a planned turnover of most of the engineering staff within a short period of time ... need a common engineering framework and knowledge base that stores the institutional knowledge acquired by previous space missions, so that incoming personnel can quickly contribute
Hopefully, soon it will be "just another AZ".
Sounds like bait and switch to me -- quite literally.

"Hey, we have HQ2 for sale. Name your price."

"...hey, highest-bidders, we actually only have two smaller satellite offices for sale; each of you gets one for the prices you named."

Can't speak for NYC, but I hope Virginia refuses to honor any corporate welfare packages as a result of what's basically an entirely legal form of bait and switch.
Weird. Why do I keep seeing 4-5 million in the press as the number of people waiting for green cards?

The 30-40 million comes from the fact that there are lot more people who would come to the US that haven't bothered to apply. If you relaxed the criteria the number of applicants would expand.

I'm not anti-immigration (I'm Canadian and we're slightly more relaxed about immigration) but there needs to be some controls in place.
I hate it. Constantly being pressured to move some stupid card or add some stupid tag so people’s graphs look nice. I just want to get work done, Scrum just adds overhead.
Show HN: Indonesian stemmer library for Ruby
python3 is breaking my heart. I upgraded my code from py2 to py3, and since then, seems like every 6 months my code will break due to a new python update (I'm on Fedora, fyi). Just last week a bunch of my python3 code stopped working for my IRC bot. I honestly regret switching to python 3 at this point.
What's wrong with pet food?
Dumb then dumb now, thanks.
“Data transfer” for iOS is making sure your old phone is backed up and logging into your new phone
with the same account.

Don’t most apps like WhatsApp store your contacts on their server? I don’t use WhatsApp but all of the chat apps I use do.
Apple's new bootloader won't let you install GNU/Linux
"下图中，U盘旁还插着一根USB有线网卡+HUB (RT8152B), 它的上面还插着 mt7601u USB-WIFI，这样就扩展出一个有线网络 eth0 和一个无线网络 wlan0."

Not 100% sure about the meaning since I don't see a eth0 in the pic above. The Chinese text refers to the pic "below" but I still don't get it.
I'd highly recommend buying a CO2/PM2.5 measurer and seeing what the levels are in your house or workplace. CO2 over 1,000 PPM has been linked to reduced cognitive performance.
As an aside they function as excellent temperate and humidity readers for general use.
I'd say it's been good for programming communities. It's improved productivity by a significant amount, meant far less hair pulling over tiny bugs and oddities and prevented a lot of wheels from being reinvented.

That's especially good in less technical companies or ones with less expertise in general, since it means they can get more done without having to rely on third party developers or hiring extra employees.

(it's also been pretty good for non programmers too, since the non programming Stack Exchange sites are filled with some rather fascinating questions and answers. Like the world building one).
It's not research, it's just a manifest.
Doesn't seem to be actually free-free - you need to sign up for a free trial as best I can tell from a 5 minute attempt to get some family details.
Looking back at Project Athena
At least in the UK this isn't really a thing.

In London you have share of freehold apartments in the outer boroughs, but in Central London it's almost all leasehold. You have a long lease, but ultimately you have a superior landlord, pay a service charge which can vary, the exterior of the building isn't yours, etc.

A huge benefit of buying a house over an apartment here is that you can actually meaningfully own it. Repairs are up to you, the postbox is up to you, if you want a thing done you just do it (no negotiation or cost sharing), the land is yours forever and the superior landlord can't change to one who's less amenable, etc.

I suppose this could fall under your:
> happen to have a decent choice of apartments for sale

comment, but it's really more that the legal structures in the UK hugely favour owning a house. (I'm not really sure it could ever be different, an apartment is always going to be "closer to renting" because it's communal to a degree).
Actually, L1 is the visa which is also responsible for keeping wages low. Generally it doesn't get a lot of attention. The employees on L1 cannot switch jobs. So a lot of the people coming on L1 accept any wage they can get. Of course, eventually they have to switch to an H1 in order to stay here longer than 5 years.
A Simple Plan to Dissolve Facebook, Google, and Amazon
It's an easy enough mistake to make, since SmartMesh is also abbreviated SMT (conflicting with Steem's Smart Media Tokens) and it is an ERC-20 token.
I use Option in Java quite a bit because I'm real sick of NPEs and cascading null checks in all-or-nothing flows. I would have preferred Java starting with something like Kotlin's approach where T is T not T|nil. You and the sibling might be missing the point of the post I linked, I think. It can be convenient to have formal assistance via e.g. the type checker that a function taking a non-null String returns a non-null Person with a non-null FirstName and LastName. But in the zeal to be rid of null to make programmers' lives a bit easier, when faced with a name that doesn't compose into 2 parts, someone has to decide what to do about that and who needs to care down the line. You can make up data ("FNU" as in the blog), set a convention (empty string), throw an exception, or declare either the whole Person structure Optional or at least certain fields. If you use a dynamic late-binding language you may have other options. Whatever you do, it ought to be consistent or robustly handled where the references interact with your DB, your processing programs, and your data displays. Finally when these references escape your system, as lots of real world data does, they necessarily escape any static criteria you once had on them, thus it's important to consider those third party systems have to live with your choice. Null is a convenient choice, not something to be villified so casually.
It’s actually better. Using private undocumented methods leaves one or two alternatives. Either Apple will have to put in bespoked hacks for software when they decide to make changes like Microsoft does or applications will break with every release and then OS upgrades will get a reputation for being buggy.
It sounds like you are in the wrong profession.
Almost all UK banks charge 2.75% above the visa/mc wholesale rate for overseas transactions. Plus they usually charge 1%-1.5% for overseas ATM transactions.

This is so prevalent that it's common for new banks (or existing banks doing a push for their new current account) to offer commission-free overseas spending. But many of them have pulled the 'perk' after they've gained a large enough customer base. If I recall correctly, at least Halifax, Nationwide and Metro Bank have in the past offered accounts with no commission on overseas card transactions, and then changed the terms to the standard (2.25%-2.75%) after 1-3 years.
twisted.internet.threads is always, always my go-to personally. Twisted is an amazing project and has especially shined brightly in the past 3 years or so.
It makes it more difficult to reseal in a non-noticeable way after someone has opened the the envelope and read it.
Cloudflare launches 1.1.1.1 mobile app
Small companies also aren't shipping 25,000 people in from all around the country or world to displace your family and friends by raising rent and living costs hundreds of percent. The incentives are given so that already rich individuals get even more rich; so already rich property owners get to drown in profits while the poor and lower middle classes struggle and are segregated out of their cities.

Incentives for small local community buisnesses that care about your community should be a higher priority for all Americans.
> Conclusion: Go with www

Am I missing something or is OP using a non-www domain? I'm using Chrome fyi (mentioned because I know safari messes with the address bar)
"Take a look at the line for Indians waiting for green cards. It's apparently 150 years long. That is absurd."

There are about 4 billion people waiting in line to enter the US if they could.

There is infinite demand for migration to wealthy countries, just as there is now infinite demand for healthcare services now that we are getting older.

The number of people in this or that queue is no longer a valid metric unless we're talking purely about bureaucratic wait times, in which case those should be short.

H1 I think is a good program overall, it needs to be tweaked for fraud.

If it came with a bigger fee, like 5K for approval, it might cover the cost of an 'inspector' popping into the office to check up on H1 status granted individuals.

If companies knew an inspector would pop in once a year without notice, they might be hesitant to go on with the fraud stuff.

I suggest the blatant fraud is done by bad actors outside normal operations but they're enabled ultimately by BigCos who turn a blind eye.

i.e. anyone hiring contractors for more than 6 months have to also back their residency status, i.e. Cisco hires from ABC consulting and the inspectors come in and it's fraud, Cisco is on the hook as well.

That would be one way to help clean it up.

I think there is truly quite a bit of real business demand for H1s - even outside of the scammy stuff and 'replace our engineers' stuff.
Foxconn in Wisconsin. Football stadiums everywhere. Car plants. This has been going on forever. Why was anybody surprised?
That’s a gross oversimplification.

I’m a competent, experienced developer. I’be worked in agile, waterfall and “faux-agile” teams. The agile ones have been the best - they adapt quickly to change, have good estimates of progress, and keep all of the team members and wider stakeholders involved in the project.

If there are useless meetings in your development team, remove them. If you can’t remove them, then your team is being mismanaged and no form of development methodology will fix that.

And also, bear in mind that even among developers on a team there are different sets of skills and preferred working patterns. You may not need some interactions, while other team members benefit from them; remember that the useful measure is the amount of work the team as a whole can achieve!
«Хотели как лучше, а получилось как всегда» is better translated as "We tried our best — you know the rest".
Show HN: Start automatically programs or scripts associated to a MAC Addresses
30-40M is the high range of estimated undocumented folks in the US. The more conservative number is 15-20M.

If there are 600K people of Indian descent waiting for Green Cards, then it seems rational there are a few million waiting overall.
Be careful with the TTL RGB levels, though. You should add some resistors.
Climate change as threat multiplier in California wildfires
You can blame the architect if you want, the aesthetic was certainly...austere. But I find a different argument far more compelling. The city politicians knew exactly what they were doing in housing large swaths of the urban poor in a small section of the city.

Not only that they used those projects as a way to punish independent political adversaries in the city government. Everyone who originally conceived of the programs tried to build mixed density communities spread throughout the city that were only partially social housing, but racism & power politics prevented that.

Then the city doubled down & didn’t provide services appropriate for the number of people now densely packed in one place.

The book “Blueprint for Disaster” outlines the history of this very well.
No I’m saying that if people don’t like the iPhone, they can go buy an Android in 18-24 months. The usual amount of time that people buy new phones.

But people who care about “freedom” and “openness” and not being in Apple’s “walled garden” can easily by an Android.

But how aren’t the two substitutable?
For what it's worth, this specific launch was polar, I believe. But yes, for equatorial launches, it will take a lot more dV to flatten it out.

I do like their little kick stage on top that finalizes payload delivery, though. That will be useful for this sort of thing.
The part I really hate about Agile is how it almost encourages "sloppiness" in requirements (execution too sometimes, but requirements is the part that really drives me crazy).

You need to always be "sprinting". There is no time to take a step back and think deeply about the product you are trying to build. No time to think through what a new feature means for your customer and for your existing system.

How often do you work on tickets that are completely ironed out? All the actors of the feature are described, all the interactions with their outcomes, all the things to test for, all the new metrics to add to the system?

And don't hear me wrong. It's probably the right MO for small companies/products. But once you've reached a certain size for the company, the system and the user base, it's not gonna work. People often laugh at how long it takes for Twitter to introduce a minuscule change in their product, but seriously, I wish a lot of "agile" companies would apply this extreme instead of the completely opposite side of the spectrum: "just start coding this shit, and we'll figure it out later".
Site is down. Mirror:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181111141630/https://bjornjoha...
>>Not sure about India

Not had this experience to comment on this first hand.

But as an Indian, I guess they ask you to surrender your Passport at the Indian embassy, and then ask you to apply for a PIO(Person of Indian origin) card.
I think photocameras are a good analogy. Early on, it was all about digital storage being so constraining, now an average digital camera can store more photos than a kilogram of film.
Some of those embedded devices are not even designed to be updated on the field. And some have support planned for a limited time and then anything resembling support is dropped.

No company is going to support a product forever without getting money for it. So either the support is priced in or it is not, and if it is not, the product is correspondingly cheaper but then you get what you get. And people tend to select cheap, so there are no or few updates.

Bottom line: embedded Linux devices with outdated software and security holes are that way through conscious intent, really.

Running aftermarket firmware sometimes helps (the consumer), but only if there are no crazy things like binary blobs involved, since porting those is unlikely to be feasible.
yep he defaults without www.
Absolutely. We adopted 'Agile' a little over a year ago and the perverse incentives carried with it brought a markable decline to the quality of the software being produced. We've made strides in righting that ship by returning to proper software development planning methodologies to build good software again (the results we're being paid for), but at the expense of angry PMs who don't see it as fitting their Agile system, which makes for an unhappy work environment.

Shame too, as this used to be a really great workplace.
I’d support a federal law basically outlawing these tax breaks for single companies.

Game theory means almost no single state can resist the temptation.

But it has the net effect of pushing the tax burden down onto smaller companies who are competing with the Amazons of the world.
I think that's poignant. The example that comes to mind is SAP: their dev teams embraced both, OpenStack and K8S, culminating in this glorious monstrosity[1] called openstack-helm, by which you could run Kubernetes on bare metal nodes, then deploy OpenStack on top of that, and finally running Kubernetes on those virtual machines again.

The idea being that if your customers need Kubernetes clusters, you should be able to provision them on-demand from elastic resources.

This seems like a great approach, since you can pick a layer to apply redundancy at, and only apply it there. You do not need a triple-redundant control plane built on a redundant backplane, if you are confident in the redundancy of the backplane. I am not a customer of SAP but I am a fan of many complex uses of Helm, and this seemed like it had been very well-considered application of the tool.

Anyway learning about this implementation left me with a slightly dirty feeling that I was idolizing a Rube Goldberg level of complexity system that didn't need to be so complicated.

Then I heard about Gardener[2], which solves the same problem without OpenStack at all. Seed clusters create shoot clusters, with their control planes deployed inside namespaces of the seed cluster. There's no virtualization overhead, and you get all of the same benefits in terms of supervision. Also from SAP. I hope I get to work with something like this.

[1]: https://github.com/sapcc/openstack-helm

[2]: https://gardener.cloud/
> Gas Stations

Even before the EV's came along most gas stations here had been turned into convenience stores which just happens to sell gas and a few car accessories as well.

People still need to take a leak and grab something to eat and drink while traveling, so they'll be around.
There is definitely commercial/political/etc. benefit to the US if it has businesspeople from multiple countries, but there's as much diversity of business relationships and value between, say, a Beijing entrepreneur and a Shenzhen entrepreneur as between a Czech and a Slovak. A point based system could factor in a lot of things.

There's also value in having the world's 20 top OCaml developers (15 of them are likely French) as well as the world's top 20 server-side ARM multicore guys (who are also likely French) vs. 40 top OCaml people (where there may be more French people.)

The easiest way to address all of this is for financial value to be the main factor. You can bring in people if they pay something like 200% of the US average wage as a surtax above their regular income tax and other costs. There could be explicit charities to subsidize things other than direct wage income value -- maybe an arts charity covers the $100k/yr to bring in a brilliant artist who is paid an additional $50k/yr in income and pays 5k/yr tax on that.
There isn't infinite demand, come on.

The real REAL solution to this is to raise up the living conditions of people living in poor countries. At that point even if we had open borders not everybody would move to USA/Europe/Canada/Australia any more than everybody from Louisiana moves to California.

Besides the fees are already up there. I was on an O-1 for a while and IIRC it was roughly $8000 all in between lawyers and processing fees.
China's Ambitious Rail Plans in Brazil
This is common knowledge to everyone who lives in PNW. It rains most of the time so people take vitamin D.
We all know they did...
The Elephants – A system for better living
Facebook Moves Fast and Copies
Yes, but there’s a big difference between the default member access operator crashing conditionally based on null-ness — vs — the same operator guaranteeing deterministic success (thanks to static type checks), with the option to circumvent those safe defaults if the programmer really wants to (in which case they usually must be very explicit about using this discouraged, unsafe behavior).

It may seem to be just semantics, but it’s really quite important that the default (and most concise) way in these languages to read optional values is to check if they’re null/None first in an if statement, after which you can call “object.method()” all you like. It’s important that you can’t just forget this check; it’s essential to using the content of the optional, unless you explicitly type something like “.unwrap()” — in which case there’s almost no chance the programmer won’t know and think about the possibility a crash. Take this in contrast to the chance of crash literally every time you type “->” or “.” in C++, for example.
Tamper marks. The traditional "lick to seal" envelope could be opened (as lore goes) over steam or on a hot plate. Visible pen strikes make it hard to re-seal it unnoticed by recipient.

The only picture I found is this: https://coollib.com/i/39/408039/img_17.jpg

an archive picture of a letter from out-of-favor Beria's henchman Abakumov to his boss. Dated 1952, so this practice must have been there for a while.
Was hoping the author would explain what people get wrong about agile.
His non-WWW site is broken. If you manually append the WWW, the site works.

Guess he is Stallmam-serious about practicing what he preaches.

Also this is a stupid clickbait non-issue.
"admission" -> "ommission"
I don’t remember where I read this but I heard 2000 IU is the minimum to be effective.
I hope you're right. Can we apply Moore's law to batteries and energy storage?! Ah, sarcasm, sorry.

I do hope you're at least a little right, in that we start to see some hugely efficient, lightweight storage of energy in EV batteries. We love headlines about battery breakthrough science, but right now, gasoline is still much more energy dense.
short answer, climate change driven desertification -> drought -> famine -> conflict -> collapse -> refugees.

if you want the long answer this is a good book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004Z2NQCS/
Get a remote job?
Pull is also correct. Somehow merge is a little more popular but pull is certainly correct too. Remember the word "Pull Request".
Amazon putting two towns competing against each other in the amount of incentives they'll offer? Reason pretty much nailed it already:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_eG7leM6ew
Your location is already being tracked quite accurately by your smartphone. So that horse has already bolted.

Vehicle tracking and charging not only allows for effective replacement of gas taxes (they can remain in place just to address the pollution angle for legacy vehicles) but also to tackle congestion - situations where a 10% reduction in vehicles would result in a 30% increase in speed, etc.
Quickstart to GRPC on Kubernetes with GCP Load Balancer and Let's Encrypt
My bad, should've said merged.

I wrote the comment immediately after reading Linus's email.
Agile is basically the average guys "Wing it with cooperation" and wins like OO by redecorating the default human behaviour pattern as a ideology.
What sorts of privacy issues do I avoid by using that app on my smartphone?