skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every story about SpaceX satellite Internet (Starlink) is plagued by questions about high latency. I think Elon needs to plan on spending a lot of marketing money to overcome this specific misconception.

Starlink latency is quite good. LEO is a lot closer than GEO (less than ~1000 km* vs 35786 km.) SpaceX actually intends to compete with terrestrial systems on latency; many important routes will have significantly lower latency than any feasible terrestrial system.

Remember, fiber isn't latency free. It isn't even speed of light. It's about 70% SOL. Radio, on the other hand, is SOL (or so close it doesn't matter.) So there is a cross over point where the latency of a LEO satellite system is actually superior despite the uplink/downlink path.

*depending on which orbital "shell" is involved. figures range from 340 km to 1200 km.
To correct my comment: `-dip1000` is still needed because `@safe` is overly restrictive. `@safe` prevents taking the address of `s` entirely regardless of how it's used, so `-dip1000` is needed to allow it when it's safe (such as using `&s` without letting it escape scope).
That'd be me (fellow HNer and belgian programmer)... Very happy to see this upvoted up to HN's frontpage! Any question welcome but I cannot post the solution until the time-capsule opening ceremony on the 15th of May : )

EDIT: WIRED article just in. Haven't read it yet. Link if anyone is interested: https://www.wired.com/story/a-programmer-solved-a-20-year-ol...

EDIT2: forgot to tell but the mining pool Antpool posted a message in the block header / coinbase data of Bitcoin's block 573138 saying "Congrats Bernard Fabrot for solving LCS35!". My brother tried to time this with the press release which was supposed to come out on friday but then the press release got pushed back to today/monday. So yeah, coinbase data of block 573 138 is kinda very cool (it requires cooperation of a mining pool because it's not just in a transaction but in a block). TYVM to the everybody at Antpool! Big thanks for that : )
Or, to realize that we did in fact keep it active, just through archive.org, the modern day Library of Alexandria on steroids.

EDIT: Makes things hard if the warning sign was a link however, yes. Could just add a published date then, and I'd assume things would be fine.
Let's try to achieve a higher quality bar for comments here than Reddit memes.
> Personally I don't see anything wrong with the idea of the redesign.

You don't think that there's anything fundamentally wrong with designing an aerodynamically unstable airframe, that needs software overrides to keep the plane flying?

A 737 shouldn't fly like a fighter jet.
> Mr Muilenburg said that both accidents occurred because of faulty data from a sensor which triggered the plane's Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).

As if Boeing wasn't responsible for the faulty data and the poor programming that caused the plane to nose into the ground?

I suppose we should just go ahead and blame the earth for being in the flight path as the leading factor in the crash.
The reality is mostly this is a legal issue not a technical one.

And 90% of the time source code itself is very much worthless to anyone outside the company. By the general rule 90% of everything is crap.

The other 10% of the time. You need to block things like github on work networks an make it clear that employees will be canned if they are caught copying sensitive info.
I don't know of any specific research. I've been to Jakarta and have friends who live in Indonesia, so my opinion is based largely on their impressions of the political situation there, that it's a basically a geographical hierarchy: Jakarta is where the money and power are, Java is fairly modern and somewhat middle-class and is where the majority of the population live, and the other islands are mostly treated as primitive and as a source of natural resources to be exploited.

I don't know if that's still true or if Indonesia has made progress in recent years in balancing out the political power.
The Suburbs Can Be Fixed. No, Really
Windows and Mac OS are not walled gardens in this way, although both Apple and Microsoft have shown signs of wanting to make them more so. Despite Windows not being a walled garden it has better continuity than any platform Nintendo has ever made, and ironically not only for Windows (and DOS) software but for most Nintendo platforms too via emulators.
Alternatively, if you move the capital from where most of the people are, there's less opportunities for the governed to interact with the government, and more murky behavior can happen in odd corners of the faraway capital.
> "Rubble Landscape": A square outer rim of the caliche layer of stone is dynamited and bulldozed into a crude square pile over the entire Keep. This makes a rubble-stone landscape at a level above the surrounding desert, an anomaly both topographic and in roughness of material. The outer rim from which rubble was pushed inward fills with sand, becoming a soft moat, probably with an anomalous pattern of vegetation. This all makes for an enormous landscape of large-stone rubble, one that is very inhospitable, being hard to walk on and difficult to bring machinery onto. It is a place that feels destroyed, rather than one that has been made.

"Landscape of large-stone rubble" describes, among other things, New England, where all of those stone boulders were carefully (or more often carelessly) stacked into stone walls to more-or-less clear the fields for planting or pasturage.
It could have been worse. One of my coworkers worked at a BigCo back in the day, and those layoffs didn’t give you anything.
LEO vs. GEO networks are like plutonium bombs vs. uranium bombs.

One is simple to engineer, but resources are limited and expensive. The other is extremely complicated to engineer, but resources are cheaper and more available.

In this case GEO systems are simple: satellite is stationary (ignoring slight drift which causes microsecond changes in latency), beams are stationary, antennas on people's roofs have no moving parts. However, the GEO satellite is extremely expensive, the spectrum it is using is expensive, and the GEO orbital slot is expensive. Also, it's so far away that it's high latency making online gaming nonviable.

LEO systems are extremely complex by comparison: satellites are moving, thus the beams are moving, antennas are moving (motor driven, unless using electronic phased array which are currently super expensive). With everything moving you have to do constant beam hand offs, doppler correction, etc. But, the satellites are much cheaper and the latency is much smaller.

Kudos to whomever can pull it off - there are several contenders other than SpaceX like OneWeb.
Yeah, definitely a stretch, and one that I feel distorts the picture.

"Billionaire ranchers" conjures up an image of some guy with a cowboy hat and gold chains in a mansion overlooking endless expanses of pastures and barns. In reality most independent ranchers don't live so lavishly :)
SpaceX has a competitive advantage because they own the (reusable) rockets. I mean, it's in their name...
I think its already mentioned about Jenkins Configuration as Code. But in general stick to a configuration method, I have had to migrate from JJB > groovy scripts > init.d groovy > Jenkinsfile.

And can we PLEASE open up the issues tab on the Github repos especially for plugins. There is currently no way to provide any feedback/report issues on these plugins because the "issues" tab is disabled. Our current options are
- Put a comment on the plugin wiki page
- Hunt down the the relevant support forum for the plugin
- Find the original source repo and post an issue

All of which are not ideal and does nothing to directly help the development of the plugins.
Alright, everything sucks, there's no hope, never mind.
> It's especially frightening because this data could be used to deny people reasonable insurance rates in the future and they weren't even aware they were being logged.

More expensive insurance is getting off easy. After getting caught two or three times people should lose their license over it, IMO. It's as dangerous as drunk driving.

That said, it is concerning how they're collecting this information.
Sure, if you want to say that "I can think whatever I want, I just can't act on it" then they're not preventing me from thinking for myself. Neither is any authoritarian regime for that matter, since they can't stop people from thinking a certain way, just from acting on it.

Action follows from thought, infringement on action prevents individuals from thinking and concluding for themselves.
It's certainly terrible for their employees, I wonder what the implications will be for their customers? Will Cozmo continue to work if they shut off their servers? I remember they offered an SDK, maybe people can host their own?
Great! I do similar things.

In my view, it all counts. Surround the problem.
Bug Bounty Hunting Tools Every Ethical Hacker Needs to Know
I took a look, and it seems like a lot of them were removed from the App Store. If you happen to have any of these in your purchase history:

* Convertbot

* Tap Tap Revenge Classic / 2.5 / Dance

* Roland 2

There were definitely way more, but I don't remember which ones, and now that I'm on iOS 12 I can't test any of them (all 32 bit). These are the three I specifically remember not working.
1. Who is the OAuth provider?

2. What does the registration process look like?

OAuth helps with federated authentication. It's not federated registration.
or define the cultures ;)
So wait, he did "an immense amount of pen testing", while at the same time this was something he snuck in at the last minute on a whim? Something doesn't add up here.
WHat do they/you use now?
Also, if one claims 0⁰ must equal zero “because multiplying by zero always gives you zero”: there are zero zeroes in the product 0⁰, or, said another way, there are no zeroes in 0⁰. So, why would it have to be equal to zero?
I do wonder a bit why why they need THAT many satellites. Assuming an orbit at 200 miles altitude, we have a horizon distance of about 2000 miles. Comparing the area of that 2000 mile radius ground patches with the surface of the Earth, we need about 10 such patches. Filling in the gaps between patches might require 10 more satellites. Naively I would have assumed that orbital mechanics costs us another factor of two, so fourtyish satellites required. But they plan to launch more than 4400 satellites. More than 100 times the naive estimate. And at the cost involved they don't do it for fun. Where does that discrepancy come from?
If your concern is theft of proprietary source code by employees, there are really only two things you can do:

1) Change to an open source model so there's nothing to steal

2) Treat your employees well, so there's no desire to steal

I've worked at companies who see this as a problem. They take a two-pronged approach: removing opportunity, and enabling detection + punishment.

They filter and scan all Internet access, whitelisting only sites and services that they trust not to have upload functionality (ie. no GitHub, StackExchange, etc).

They disable or remove all removable storage from their PCs and OS images (no CDs, no USBs, no Bluetooth, no Wifi. Desktops are thin clients logging into a Citrix VM).

Phones, cameras, MP3 players, and any other electronics must be left in your locker, and you're scanned (like at the airport) on your way into your office.

But there's nothing you can do about what's in people's heads.

Needless to say, these are horrible places to work. Aside from everything else, it's an absolute productivity killer to have no access to the Internet when coding.

Generally, there's no secret sauce anyway. Source code is only valuable in aggregate, as an expensive and time-consuming thing to build. Stealing one file or one function is typically worthless, which is lucky because it would only take a few weeks to memorize and recreate it, a few lines at a time, anyway.
https://lob.com/ is a YC backed company.
Challenger Engineer Who Warned of Shuttle Disaster Dies (2016)
That could easily run into zoning issues if the neighbors figured out what was going on and didn't like it.
Appointments are not unusual when arranging for commercial space. Norms are similar to any other professional/B2B environment. I suspect it's a filter. An appointment only process allows the property managers to notify current tenants beforehand; to schedule around shared facility use (e.g. conference rooms); and to research what's available when for how long.
What a dying star's ashes tell us about the birth of our solar system
What about people who already bought it? Does it stay installed on their consoles? And if they uninstall it, can they download it again?

It's probably moot because I'd expect Nintendo to demand a patched version of the game with Ruby removed to replace the existing version for those who bought it even if Nintendo decides not to allow it up on the store again.
A few years ago the Washington Post fired ALL of its copy editors, forcing others to pick up the slack.
AWS Fargate – Run containers without having to manage servers or clusters
I guess it's time to move onto the next shiny thing to keep the fan-investors entertained. I wonder how long they can keep this up.
600 ms is for those with geosats Internet. Low flying constellations offer 10-100 times lower latency, see other comments here.
Do you have a citation for this? Curious about how they figured that, given:

* The emissions from the livestock themselves should be identical given the same number of cows and the same dietary input; CO₂ output might increase for pasture-raised cattle, given the higher physical activity, but methane output (IIRC the primary concern re: cattle and their environmental impact) shouldn't change all that much

* Non-livestock emissions (from e.g. motorized equipment) seem much easier to minimize in a traditional ranch setting - especially considering that independent ranchers once upon a time ran their ranches without motorized equipment at all, and some still do - than for a modern factory farm
A Programmer Solved a 20-Year-Old Forgotten Crypto Puzzle
And they have plenty of reasons to bank of that ;) .
Is your horizon distance calculation based on no obstructions? Most people don't live on the plains ;)

I am genuinely curious how you arrived at that number, FWIW – I don't know how to go about calculating something like that.
I agree that we were disappointed when they dropped the cloud version, but we started hosting it ourselves and couldn't be happier. Works much better than Jenkins did for us.
This can also indicate a problem in architecture: if the monitor can go away any time, you shouldn't store long time references to it and instead, for example, call a function to get current default monitor every time you want to do something. Or at least validate those references before usage.
I believe the plan is for phased arrays, at both ends, at substantially lower prices than are currently commercially available.

Since SpaceX has already built the "first batch" of satellites (delivered to launch site as of a few days ago), one has to imagine they've largely solved the manufacturing problem and reduced the cost from 250k per antenna.
SpaceX actually intends to compete with terrestrial systems on latency; many routes will have significantly lower latency than any feasible terrestrial system.

I would like to see a framework, where the backend of a cloud system can migrate opposite to the direction of orbit, so the same virtual cloud server could remain (by 'hops' where it serializes a copy of itself, then fails over to the copy) more or less geostationary. Such migrations would happen as seldom as once per 10 minutes.

My game server cluster isn't too far away from having such a capability. (I was planning a variety of capabilities, such as using cheap GCP "ephemeral" instances by quickly failing over to such copies.)
Better to get approval for too many than not enough?
Does anyone know what pressure came out at the consumers end? The article mentions a 10 bar (145 psi) steam engine. Most modern air tools require about 90 psi.

I wonder what the efficiency of the system was. I am sure a lot of air leaked all over the place.
This is very cool. Congratulations!

How did you beat Peffers' team? Did you simply start the computation sooner, or did you reach some insight that eluded them?
Congratulations! I’m curious if a quantum algorithm could help with this, as the problem deals with factoring large numbers?
> Bernard Fabrot spent the last three and a half years computing the solution to a puzzle

TacticalCoder last HN comment is from Dec 5, 2015. Checks out.

Kudos to you, well done!
No mention of Jenkins Shared Libraries? When Jenkinsfile pipelines start getting complex, or need to make them more generic, you can create groovy lib-s in a separate repository. Single line to load the lib dynamically at start of Jenkinsfile. Then you can call library functions/tasks passing appropriate params within your pipeline. But as anything Jenkins, documentation lacking or out of date.
Not just canned: charged with criminal offenses, and jailed.

See Sergey Aleynikov, Kang Gao, Jason Vuu, Glen Cressman. And that's just the banks, not defense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782634
That does indeed assume a sphere. If you are curious about the geometry, maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Distance_to_the_horizo... can help.

If you run the calculation the other way around, every satellite has to service a ground patch with about 380 miles radius. And your antenna has to swivel to a point that might be more than 60 degrees away from zenith. So every obstruction of more than 30 degrees above the horizon will lead to at least intermittent disconnects.
Which can only turn into a true statement after individual inspection of each commenter. Assuming everybody that enters political discourse online is apolitical in their activities offline might turn out a right guess at times, but it stays a guess. As if you are only allowed to say something while you are out in the streets covered with sweat. No. Then they will complain that you say anything at all instead of fixing symptoms that have a systemic origin.

Within any system, be it a society a family or a friendship, communication is important to react to shifts and regain balance (or to restructure the system). Talking is not dictating, talking is talking and the other person can always respond.
The problem with IE was that it wasn't standards compliant. Oftentimes it seemed they even did so on purpose. Chrome appears to follow the standards nicely. We don't need quirks mode settings to render websites "designed for Chrome".
Show HN: Y Combinator Companies with Offices in San Francisco
forward compatibility?
No Simon Peffers' team did something more impressive: they're using a FPGA. I simply started way earlier using consumer-grade hardware (a Core i7-6700 CPU).
Why so much work into storing genealogical records?
The first thing people unfamiliar with the dangers of radiation will do, is to quarry all those dramatic spikes and walls, for usable stone.
I see this problem as simultaneously a cryptographic challenge and a DevOps one.

So mine isn't a cryptographic question, but I'd love to know what steps you took to ensure integrity and uptime of your consumer i7 hardware, and capture of each partial step of the solution, while you ran your algorithm.

EDIT: also, congratulations! (How did I leave that out!?)
Monopolies don't work like that. You can be a monopoly in one industry even if you're small in another.

Google was found to be a monopoly in 'licensable mobile operating systems' recently by the eu
Step 0 in enlightened crisis management: don't be perceived as corrupt and greedy

Which they've mostly already failed, so that strategy is a wash
Is there an open source insulin pump out there? That seems like it would help the sustainability of this project.

I just texted my older brother to see if he had any of his old insulin pump models. I'd love to build him one since he only has a few years of life left since he's terrible at managing his own sugar levels.
I'm genuinely curious, can you have it without your landlord (if you rent) approval and also install the ground transciever without HughesNet technicians? Sometimes they refuse to install in particular locations on the grounds of perceived landlords disapproval (?)
The StackOverflow question/whatever was taken down.

Read the post on the author's own blog: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/04/29/what-is-the-incentive...
WeWork is great for contractors operating on time and materials basis. 10% overhead + 10% profit at $1000/month is better than at $500/month. A lot of the work world operates on time and materials basis.
IIRC, OneWeb's initial plan was to use phased arrays as well, but it proved too expensive and they switched to mechanically steered antennas (at least for first gen).

Phased array is definitely the way to go if you can get cost down. No moving parts means fewer hardware/mechanical failures and less noise
I'm confused at what you mean here. If you want to run things on the host you can run a bash runner, and you have full access to the machine.

What do you want to do on the host?
It's a clear sign that we're learning as a community, and that open source really does enable innovation[0]. Someone builds Useful System iteration 1, we all learn what part of it works and doesn't, and someone builds iteration 2 because it scratches their itch. Repeat for goodness.

[0] It's unfortunate that big open source projects are never willing to pivot when fundamentals of the original design are shown to be bad. Rarely used features, for example, are never removed in order to make the software better for the overwhelming majority of users.
This is basically vmware's vmotion feature.
Just unbelievable if a company issued a loan to itself
The comment thread on the Anki Vector from 6 months ago is super telling. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18206253
Show HN: Thredd – relevant Reddit discussions in your browser
I guess I wasn’t communicating all that clearly. What I meant was that middle-aged people tend to misunderstand/underestimate even the huge rising trends like rock’n’roll — so they’re even more likely to make a wrong summary judgment on fringe activities like this.
OP here, I used this GitHub repo to collect the company information: https://github.com/connor11528/companies-in-the-bay-area

It's a spreadsheet I've been collecting for quite sometime. This site is a Laravel PHP app that queries the list for companies that have the tag "Y Combinator"

Please let me know if you have questions or feedback. Enjoy
This is a nice little script.

function wayback_link(url) {
return `https://web.archive.org/web/${url}`;
}

console.log(wayback_link("https://github.com"))
That's 100% correct, and 100% not the conversation we are having.

If you don't want a medical procedure, even if it would be beneficial to you, you can refuse it. It is your right (at least in the US).
I actually thought this might get posted to HN, so I went through a lot of pain to find back a way to get my HN login back (basically had no access to the email with which I opened an account here: I had to dive deep down in some Google Suite tied to a domain name to find a way into the user account and eventually reset my HN password). I'm glad I did in time and didn't miss this thread!
Mimetic behavior as random graph coloring
Isn't that exactly what happened with Ethiopian Airlines? The pilots knew about the MCAS, knew what was happening, disabled the system, but were unable to physically adjust the trim to prevent the crash?
I think that a legal fudge I would be satisfied with is where a manufacturer wants a branded store and some lock-in, that they nevertheless must allow secondary marketplaces, with the legal protection provided for both users and the original manufacturer that any secondary marketplaces can be contractually required to be clearly labelled as such.