skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a huge assumption. Let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet: Orbital Sciences thought they could create cheap launches with Pegasus too. As failures occurred, customers requested more and more safeguards and testing and the cost per launch rose correspondingly.

SpaceX has done an awesome job, but there's a ways to go before the system is confirmed as reliable with consistently reproducible performance.

(For what it's worth, I think they'll do it in time, but it may cost quite a bit more yet)
Bug report, see this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317983
I believe this is fixed in Firefox 2 but for some reason the fix doesn't work in FF3.
http://www.searchyc.com/
that makes the game even more fun. otherwise it would just be an exercise of wandering around until you got shot by someone camping the objective. this way theres the fun of switching it off to sneak around but being unable to see anyone.
Wil Shipley on OCD and depression
Which, when you look at it, is just another name for "undefined". It didn't solve anything, and seemed to me like a bad troll on the mathematical community.
really?

you will not be shooting accurately (if there is such a thing in airsoft) with limited to no depth perception.

decent NVDs pick up ambient light, even more advanced ones thermal imaging systems.

read up on it :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_vision_device
Thanks for the update on previous attempts. I do think that you could send habitat modules and oxygen tanks up without a huge cost if the rocket blows up. With people, safety becomes crucial. With satellites, less crucial, but still expensive if it fails.
I post this b/c articles and comments about depression seem very common here and on programming.reddit. I'm curious if OCD and depression go together?
They are cool looking. I was in Target yesterday shopping for my son's birthday and thought of getting them, but the predictable "take those things off and get back in bed" conversations made me decide on a Transformer instead :-)

OTOH, it would be pretty easy to build one of these with a webcam, a small screen and some IR LEDs. I live out in the country and I've been thinking of doing that to spy on the wildlife at night. I have everything I need except the screen.
You're sitting at DH0 after "this is dumb."

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
LFS.
Finding jobs for an old school Comp Sci graduate?
Business model? People want it? Hell, it already has more going for it than a lot of the ideas I see floated around here. Go for it!!
artists, musicians, writers and soldiers also get macho about sleep deprivation. I'm not sure if they really fall into what people mean when they talk disparagingly about the "liberal arts." It would seem strange to stay up for days reading sociology textbooks.
Computer science is not a science. It is a math.

Science is the attempt to find counterexamples to disprove your ideas on how a given system behaves. It involves conducting experiments to give input data for constructing a model, and then trying to find corner cases that break the model and allow you to refine or otherwise rework your model until it accounts for all your data.

Computer science has none of this. Computer science is the art of coming up with definitions that are of use to solving certain classes of problems, with formalisms to back them up. That is math.
For those who don't want to read/load N pages:

1. Debian - The grand-daddy of some of the other distros here, and still going strong

2. Fedora - The community distro from Red Hat

3. OpenSUSE - Novell's completely open Linux distro

4. Mandriva - The golden child is making a comeback

5. Ubuntu - The most popular distro of all time... So far

6. Gentoo - The DIY distribution especially for those who want to understand and define how it works

7. DSL - A tiny distro for older machines

8. Arch Linux - A self-assembly distro for power users

9. CentOS - The community variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

10. PCLinuxOS - Could this be an Ubuntu-beater in 2008?

11. Sabayon - A binary distro built with Gentoo

12. KNOPPIX - The king of the Live CDs is still going strong

13. Zenwalk - A lightweight Slackware derivative ideal for reinvigorating older, more limited computers

14. Slackware - Back to basics with the oldest of the surviving distros
this. to the OP: do you think that novelists worry about someone else writing the same or similar book before they start? do you think painters worry that someone else had the same inspiration? do you think that investors worry that someone else out there is spending money the exact same way as them?

sure, some probably do. but the vast majority don't. they follow their ideas/gut/inspiration. if you think the idea's good, give it a try.
The love test from Robot Co-op (the guys behind 43things, 43 People, 43 Places etc...):

"When we started working on product ideas, one of the tests we subjected every idea to was what if it works?

We had lots of ideas: a better answering machine, online education tools, job hunting sites, baby blogs, personalized text ads, personalized news services. Sure, we could build a personalized text ads service! But what if it works? Do we really want to run that business?

Before long, we realized we had one primary criteria for an idea we’d want to work on: it had to be an idea we loved so much that if it works, we’d be happy to work on it. Reflecting on the love test I found myself contemplating the word Amateur. The root word there is love, and an amateur is someone who pursues their interest out of love, not a hope for professional recognition or market success.

The test we were concerned with wasn’t how great a business the idea would be. It was whether we could love the work. We thought about products we admire: del.icio.us, flickr, upcoming.org, craigslist, bloglines. Some of these are going to be great businesses, but all of them have an amaeteurish edge in the best sense of that word. They look like works of love. It was the amateur roots of them, the passion behind the product, that we admired."

Full link: http://blog.robotcoop.com/2004/11/15/the-age-of-the-amateur/
My one mis-understanding for Linux is ..

Let's say Firefox 3 has just come out. It is available for Linux as source build, but when it comes to packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, or whatever else that comes in depending on the distro correct?

I know for example Gentoo is for the hardcores who decide to build everything from source but I do not have a true understanding of how packages in Linux work across distro's .. can anyone enlighten me on that?
you ever used NVDs?

I think it's difficult to understand for those who haven't tried them out.

Even with a good set of NVDs, like the PVS-7 or PVS-14, its still a bit difficult to get oriented, and depth perception -- well good luck with that. I really can't imagine using an $80 pair and expecting anything more than marginally better than just adjusting your eyes to the dark (although admittedly this can take 30 minutes or so)

Humans clearly were not made to see in the dark.
This also goes back to pg's article on where you live and what defines "power". In the past 7 years, I've lived in the following places and definitely have seen what constitutes wealth/doing well:

Cambridge- Definitely education, but in a weird place. I studied for the summer at Harvard. Everyone was unique, some cases weird, but absolutely brilliant in their specialty. It was about being the best in their area of study.

New York/Northern NJ- I grew up here, and this is where I was before going back to Boston. It was about more traditional routes of money, and nothing earth shattering. You were a dentist, a doctor, or wall street trader. There were some celebrities around too. It was all about the traditional path. Go to a private high school, go to a good college, get the right internships, slave away 9-5, then become rich via Goldman Sachs or something. Boy did I break that mold...

(Went to Boston College next, but not adding that in since Cambridge covered that area well enough)

Miami- Now this is interesting. The whole Miami Vice attitude you see is 100% real. My thoughts on this area are indicative of it as a whole, NOT the technology sector, which is flourishing very nicely down there. Success was measured by how nice your material possessions were. Lamborghinis, bottles of Cristal, and overpriced penthouses. Most money here wasn't really earned, but through family inheritance or foreign overseas money. Yes, drug money still powers part of the town.

Silicon Valley- This can include SF, even though my experiences are from living in Palo Alto. It's all about what you're building, who you're going to help, and what the "delta" is. How were things before hand, and how are they once you're done? No doubt money is important, but it's a by product of the previously mentioned statement. In my 5 months here, I've met the founders of insanely successful companies, billionaires,etc. Honestly, you wouldn't know it, if it wasn't for the companies they founded. Everyone is also willing to help out here. In short, wealth is valued by what you have created and the people you help achieve that same goal.
Arch is really fanastic. The PKGBUILD system is basically a customizable package system. It also has a standard package manager too.
Sure math only allows deductive proofs but without induction how would people ever get to the proof? Mathematicians do hypothesises and experiments too.
I'm sure mathematics is regarded as science.
I'll stick with my gallardo and continental gt. nothing compares to listening to a v10/12 rip the road apart! although admittedly, I do miss a stick shift.
Elon Musk Interview Sept 26, 2008
This was surely alien technology.

(ducks)
The video I really wanted to see was "this" on 9/11. I wonder if it looked similar to what happens if you 'interrupt' a stream of ants and the 'panic' sets in.
Infinity is not a number... its a concept.

Say you were to count every integer, you would count to infinity. Now what if you were to count every number between 0 and 1? Would it still be infinity?

I've always thought in degrees of infinity, but either way its still not a number.

If you kept the degrees of infinity separate, you could divide 5 by zero and it would not be the same as dividing 4 by zero.

If you wanted to play with limits, you could say the limit of 5/x as x approaches 0 is infinity, but we don't really have a name for what x/0 would be. Someone did come up with nullity, but that's not good enough.

Plus, you can't have Zero of something. Having implies a positive net, thus it's not correct to say that you have zero of something... you could say you don't have something, but they're semantically different. Zero is just another concept.
The new UI wars: Why there’s no Flash on iPhone 2.0
How to land a 747
Download Brothers and Sisters 3.01 Glass House
A scene from the “Brothers & Sisters” episode 3.01 has been given, revealing how secrets in the Walker family can not be kept too long. Entitled “Glass House”, the family will have a vacation in a luxurious house where the items inside it cost a leg. Troubles come when an expensive glass whale is broken.
Jamestown was a money-hole until John Rolfe developed a special, sweet strain of tobacco that became the basis of an export economy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown_Settlement

Due to the aristocratic backgrounds of many of the new colonists and the communal nature of their work load, progress through the first few years was inconsistent, at best. By 1613, six years after Jamestown's founding, the organizers and shareholders of the Virginia Land Company were desperate to increase the efficiency and profitability of the struggling colony.

.

The investors had been tricked into believing that it would be a profitable venture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Company#The_London_Com...

To the disappointment of its investors, the Virginia Company of London failed to discover gold or silver in Virginia.
Induction isn't the core of it. The idea is that you try to find counterexamples in science, and you don't have proofs in the general sense. Ever. The best you can say is that "If I guessed right, then I have math that worked out." Nothing more. Mathematics allows a definite "This is a solution that exists to this problem.". In Science, you can say that a solution exists to a problem, but that's not the tricky part -- the tricky part is figuring out the right problem to solve.

Science is effectively an attempt to reverse engineer the universe. Imagine that you were given a clock by a client. A very ornate clock that he doesn't want you to take apart. Then he tells you he wants you to make schematics for the clock so precise he could put together a precise functional duplicate. But you're not allowed to take it apart.

I would say that does not that count as mathematics, although mathematics would certainly have a use as a tool to prove that the behavior is correct in all observed respects. But you could probably find a new minute difference in the way the hand moves, and that would blast all your carefully crafted mathematics to bits.

I'm not slagging on mathematics, and I'm not trying to glorify science and say that one is a more powerful superset of the other.

They're both very useful and very tightly intertwined disciplines, but they're also very different. In a way, you could say that math is the study of solving problems, and science is the study of finding physically meaningful problems.
Download America’s Next Top Model  Natural Beauty
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Experimental Port of Valgrind Memory Debugger for Mac OS X
Having a business idea
Wait, but the integers don't form a field anyway (not closed under division).
I'm surprised he can even afford a Lotus Elise. But do you think he was able to afford those cars by Delicious MOnster alone? Or were they a purchase from his earnings at Omni?
Tesla is incredibly awesome. First electric-car-project that I believe in.
Deisgn is awesome. I have never even been interested in cars but I really want a Tesla.
So you were being sarcastic? The incentive was gold, silver, farming & the other normal colonisation incentives.
"I'd like to welcome you to this course on Computer Science. Actually that's a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art. We'll actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic. We will see that in this course. So it's not a science. It's also not really very much about computers. And it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators. And biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. And it's not about computers in the same sense that geometry is not really about using a surveying instruments."

From Abelson in the first SICP lecture: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...
There were colonists, and there were investors. These were not the same people. There was no more economic opportunity for the colonists in the new world than there was back home. There was the opportunity to die prematurely and painfully. Perhaps that was an attraction to the adventurous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown,_Virginia#Challenges_...

The settlers who came over on the initial three ships were not well-equipped for the life they found in Jamestown. In addition to the "gentlemen", who were not accustomed to manual or skilled labor, they consisted mainly of English farmers and "Eight Dutchmen and Poles" hired in Royal Prussia.[6] Many suffered from saltwater poisoning which led to infection, fevers and dysentery. As a result of these conditions, most of the early settlers died of disease and starvation.
I think the test is if you have a significant enough competitive advantage (via execution stemming from knowledge, the team, idea and implementation) that if entrenched powers try to follow on, it won't matter hugely. For example, youtube was bought by google after google had tried their hand at google video. If your approach can jump this hurdle, the competitors are not something to worry about.
> So how do you decide?

By actually trying it. In fact, you could say the whole point of a startup is to run experiments to figure out if an idea makes a viable business.
Life Episode 2.01 Find Your Happy Place
We meet John Armstrong, a man who works at a stationary store with greeting cards, is suspected of murdering people by putting people in trunks and letting them suffocate. Also, an ice cream truck driver sells more than ice cream from his truck.
Without a Trace 22 x 42
Click Here to see more details
I'm not offended. I just think the viewpoint is incorrect.
a lotus elise isn't that expensive a car; brand new they're only about $45-50k. my lotus exige was only $57k new.

though the tesla roadster, while initially based on the lotus elise chassis and body, is about double the price of an elise. i'd be more surprised if he was actually able to find one for sale since i thought all 2008 models were spoken for. though i don't think his article actually said he was buying one, just that he took one out on an autocross course.
Folks (myself included) have been "thinking" that since the 60s. If you put some commercial numbers on that problem, you'll see it's a lot harder than it looks.

Satellite launch failures alone can cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars -- and that's not even touching the issue of revenue lost to the broadcast company who bought the thing (and waited 3-4 years to see it constructed and launched). Although awful regulation has played a role in preventing launch vehicles from becoming a truly commercial market, The Man hasn't been the only issue keeping launch costs high -- this stuff is hard!
Take a look at Cantor's work, if you're interested in this stuff.

The number of integers is known as a countable infinity.

The number of numbers between 0 and 1 is called an uncountable infinity.

The proof that these are not the same (Cantor's diagonalization argument) is my favorite proof - it's really neat. It's quite clear and maybe even obvious in retrospect (I like to explain it to friends who are curious about higher mathematics), but probably not something you would have come up with if you weren't Cantor!

You can ask if there's an infinity between these two, and that's actually unprovable. You can prove that, without adding more axioms to mathematics, it's impossible to prove one way or another whether there's an infinity between them.

Sometimes I really miss this stuff.
He sold $250K worth of delicious library in 1 month, according to the interwebs.

http://developer.apple.com/business/macmarket/deliciouslibra...

Also, OMNI did a bunch of high hourly rate contracting throughout the 90s, even before they sold products.
The capsule is on top of the stack. Unlike the case of the Space Shuttle, if a SpaceX rocket blows up, the capsule on top can simply jetison away and deploy a parachute.
glow in the dark bb's act as tracers.

also: I find it amusing how people are trying to convince me this isn't going to be fun.
Ask Hacker News: Review our block-based collaborative editor
Nick (user nickbw) and I applied to YC a year ago with a sketch of an idea and didn't make the cut. But rejection was just the motivation required, and we incorporated and launched while holding down jobs.

Please have a look. All comments welcome. Some questions:

How should we think about pricing? For instance, as it is, the highest tier of service is quite expensive but allows you to run riot on our server. Is that worth offering, or does it look scary to have that big dollar amount on the signup page?

Draftastic sounds a lot like Google Docs, but it's quite different in practice. (GD is like a whiteboard; we're like a revision control system.) Should we worry about making that crystal clear up front, or does it look weird to define ourselves that way to new users?

Given that it could be marketed to practically any kind of business, what are some good sorts to concentrate on? Where do we look for people stuck in the mail-a-Word-file-around groove?

How can we persuade more casual visitors to try it? We made the free signup process as easy as possible, but it's still several clicks. Is it worth trying to maintain an open sandbox? Does a sandbox even make sense when we're designing for cooperative groups?
Satellite launch failures alone can cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars

Satellite costs are driven partially by launch costs. If launches are expensive, then satellites need to be highly reliable. If launches are cheap, then satellites need not be so reliable, and therefore can be cheaper.

Insurance averages out the costs of launch failures.

Dropping the costs of satellites improves the market and introduces the possibility of mass-production, further dropping the costs and further increasing demand, which further drops the costs through economies of scale, etc.

.

We know what can happen, economically, because we have experience with mass-launchings in the form of the V2.

http://www.google.com/search?q=v2+rocket+%2413000

A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away

Then, starting with the US$13000 marginal cost of a V2, we arrive at a cost of ...

One analogy in particular regarding V2 rockets, Nazis, and ignoring the use ... The recurring cost was $13000 a launch for those vehicles. ...
Don't return status codes (or null) from your methods
The last one is very interesting.....not entirely correct I don't think, but one of the rare articles where someone actually tried to figure out the nature of the things that are going on. Haven't read the other syet. But I will say this, read the newspaper or watch the TV news, and what they generally say is the right thing to do on there will be the exact wrong thing to do. Which is what we will end up with I'm sure.
I think Mr. Bigelow has the right idea. And Vectran is a great material for space-inflatables.

http://www.google.com/search?q=bigelow+vectran
The accidental pornographer
You can see this live at FlightAware.com. You can watch specific airports, flights, aircraft, etc...

http://flightaware.com/live/
Have we reached the end of book publishing as we know it?
They're both mental illnesses. While common independently, the issues that cause other mental illnesses often result in depression as a side issue.
I kinda thought I had it solved, I had a 1 million portfolio, which is more than enough for me to survive on, as long as you pay attention to what happens in the world economy and markets, since I knew everything we are now seeing was coming, and was making 20%+ per year I though I had it all figured out. Until I got server, -70% in 2 months. So my personal advice is, never think you are too smart. If if you know you are correct, and you are in fact correct, it doesn't mean you can't lose your shirt.
Indeed. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Vegetable Oil and Homicide
It depends on what you're doing. Raw details:

I've been at it for 10 years, half in california, half in boston. Just interviewed at a bunch of startups and one big firm. Offers were all around $95K + post series A equity. I made the same salary 18 months out of college. College senior interns at the last "real job" I had got hired away for $86K starting at Amazon, and I didn't think they were necessarily the cream of the crop. I decided to keep contracting until the end of the year at $95/hr and continue working on my improbable startup, even with the heinous economy. In my experience engineering salaries plateau around $100K. Maybe more if you are doing something hard (VMWare) or heinous ("web scaling expert") or are looking to be an exec (VP Eng / CTO).

Age/Experience doesn't really translate into significantly more money unless you're looking to move up the management chain. Best to make hay while you are young. Although, I haven't had a model career - I usually make lateral moves to work on something new and interesting, and have some employment gaps where I decided to travel the world instead of slogging it out. 'Your mileage may vary'