skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't seen the Hohlraum article before - interesting stuff. And for the earth-side receiver, I was generally assuming hugely-sensitive equipment. But I may be underestimating the sensitivity of what we can build - clearly we can detect individual photons, so the probe emitter would just need to ensure it sends enough that the receiver can capture enough to reconstruct the message...

In any case, interesting stuff :) I'm sure there's a calculation that we could do to figure out the actual power requirements given background radiation and receiver sizes, but I don't know the associated math.

--

A thought just occurred to me - given a big reflector, you could emulate a transmitter by varying its reflectiveness / target, beaming a massively-powerful, regular pulse from Earth, and watching what comes back. That could eliminate transmitters (and their power requirements) entirely from the probe, though you still have the solar wind problem if it's really big.
How is it proof enough for you when you haven’t even heard what this wretched person has to say in their defence? Imagine you were a juror. Having heard the prosecution, would you tell the defence that they are wasting their breath calling their own witnesses?

I don’t know if you intended to scare me out of my skin, but I find that phrase chilling. Men have been lynched and hanged without trial given that very same sentiment.
Oh, please. That's just your list, which you haven't provided any evidence for. PaaS is still tiny in comparison to the overall market for commercial hosting.
Thus the following quote:

"Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste." -- Donald E Knuth
Aol Employees Make Zombie Video About Talent Exodus
I didn't even knew how the author changed User Agent to be IE 7 from Safari..wonder how accurate it is to real IE 7.
Nice job, this looks really useful - would certainly help for the times when I'm stuck with no internet access and need to look something up.

One minor niggle - when I changed the file I wanted to use in settings, there was no confirmation or notification to let me know it was downloading the new file. I ended up stopping the download, erasing the data and starting again, to be sure. It might be worth adding in a confirmation to let users know it was changed OK, and is being re-downloaded.
Lsyncd works pretty well. It was much simpler to install, operate and develop for than the MogileFS solution it replaced.

http://code.google.com/p/mogilefs

http://danga.com/mogilefs
I've been running my old paper books through a scanner and throwing them away. The resulting pdf's are readable on the Kindle or my computer, or even on my ipod.

I've probably done around 500 books by now. There's a looong way to go yet :-)

I don't see much point in having physical books anymore other than coffee table books. I like having my library at my fingertips rather than scattered everywhere.
Rabindranath Tagore: The Relation of the Individual to the Universe
Assael Architecture  (raza58)
London-based firm with practice areas in private residential, restaurant, office, hotel and leisure sectors. Find Out More
http://q.gs/916651/assael
Wing Commander (the game) is Coming Back
I'm the one who said cheaters would get in over their heads. Plagarist. God is just. Same holds for affirmative action.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\BIBLE.TXT

th among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle
afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.

39:26 Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward
the south? 39:27 Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her
nest on high? 39:28 She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the
crag of the rock, and the strong place.

39:29 From thence she seeketh the prey, and her eyes behold afar off.

39:30 Her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain are,

--------

Jesus said not to take the place of honor at a banquet. Affirmative action?
Agreed. I built something like this in a few minutes when it was needed for a recent project. I was looking at Javascript "libraries" to do this, and then realized that it could be done with a tiny bit of CSS.
> This is completely false; Internet companies are regulated by the DMCA, which provides them safe harbor from private lawsuits related to copyright infringement

Look, I don't want to get in an argument but the DMCA is a joke. You know it and I know it. If it really worked, do you really think these idiot music/film companies would try to pass SOPA? The DMCA is supposed to protect IP and it doesn't work.

The internet is one of the least-regulated industries in the United States. Pardon me for saying "unregulated" - but ti basically is. Also, sales taxes are the exception to the rule right now. Last time I checked -- that's a whole lot of freedom.

I pride myself on seeing things the way they are and I know -- Congress is like a legal protection racket. If you actually want to do something, the big players need to pay the protection money. Hollywood execs paid $91M in lobbying for SOPA. How much more was paid in other methods of political support as well?

Our (consumer internet) industry needs to step to the plate. We make a lot of money but want to pretend we're somehow immune from the idiocy of Washington -- we're not. Reid Hoffman, Jack Dorsey and Sergey Brin need to wake up and realize that writing a letter to Congress isn't going to change anything...

Money is the only form of communication that matters in politics.

Let's stand together and fight SOPA now.
Lorentz factor only makes a large enough difference when you're very close to the speed of light.

Edit: changed from 'c' to 'the speed of light'
When's the last time you had to do that?
A public accusation requires no due process. If the named student wants legal redress, let him sue for defamation.
Don't stop there:

bsdiff, bspatch, bzip2, dtoa, hunspell, ICU, JSCRE, libjpeg, libpng, libxml, libxslt, LZMA SDK, modp_b64, Mozilla interface to Java Plugin APIs, npapi, nspr, nss, Pthreads for win32, sqlite, tlslite, V8 assembler, WebKit, WTL, zlib, pcap, winpcap, openssl
And there's a difference between just accusing someone and linking to that person's public posting of the essay.

Process is always warranted in the case of punishment, but when someone makes the evidence of their wrongdoing public on the internet, it's silly to act like it's some kind of witch-hunt or lynching to point it out.
I kind of dislike the fact that proven platform-supplied facilities like Core Data and the wonderful NSPredicate-Stuff isn't used ( from what I've read on the parse.com homepage ). Building an whole app around a proprietary framework, thereby abandoning the standard stuff wouldn't have been an option for too many projects I've done..
from comment I made on the website:

Here's my thought. I don't read a whole lot of "crap fiction." I typically read the kind of books i want to reference later and would like to lend to people.
If I could lend books an unlimited number of times (as i should be able to), I would never buy another hardcover again.

As it is, I often end up finding a book I think I'd like to lend out, since I can only lend once ever on kindle, i buy a hardcopy used book (giving nothing to the publisher) for a few dollars used, then download an ebook copy pirated and read it on my kindle....

ticks me off that this is potentially the best thing since sliced bread and I'm fearful the model will be broken for the rest of my life due to these fools.

if i could lend books i would buy books like crazy from amazon, everything from amazon, and the publishers would get something. as it is, i buy rights to the book used and then read it how i want.

annoying.
>> These aren't collectors items.

That's in the eye of the beholder. I don't think cars, stamps, watches or baseball cards are collectors items, but the slightest imperfection in any of them is a tragedy to some people. I don't think a lot of people out there "collect" devices, but the same instincts apply.

A watch actually might be a fairly good analogy here. When you pay hundreds of dollars for a shiny, shiny device, it's natural to want to keep it in its mint state. The primary difference is related to, of course, the original topic - watches just get extra care, devices get plastic wrap put on them. I would attribute this to the fact that watches are generally inert, and can be chosen for an occasion. A device, for many people, is something that's always carried and is frequently set down, picked up, manipulated and pocketed.

Additionally, device screens are precise, touch-sensitive instruments with increasingly high resolution. A small scratch in the right place can substantially diminish the experience.
the title of the article is "why do C++ folks make things so complicated", not "Why does C++ make things so complicated"
"The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work." - Steve Jobs
i would agree, but the new kindle touch makes notations super easy... and more importantly, finding those notations even easier.
Sometimes, you can see the negatives straight away. No experience necessary! A 40 second compile time is a pretty big negative. I wouldn't even suggest this is exaggeration; my experience with boost is not that wide-ranging, but what experience I have does include waiting for programs to compile.

(Maybe experience is even the problem. A C++ programmer might suck up a 40 second round trip time, but I bet no PHP or Python programmer would!)

Large C++ projects already tend to suffer from monstrous compile and link times. Anything that increases build times is inherently a bad idea. Iteration time has been THE major issue on every project I've worked on. Sucks up man-hours like nobody's business. All the other C++ junk... borderline irrelevant, by comparison.
And it's amusing to google that phrase.
Is it the same girl? They certainly do look very similar, but I wouldn't bet it was the same actress if my life hung in the balance..
Yes, I agree with you again. The author of this post is just one person. I am not saying whether he should or shouldn’t name this person or link to a web page that appears to be an essay submitted as part of course work.

I am only speaking to what we should do in response, namely laugh uproariously at what appears to be a finely crafted piece of work, and use it as a catalysts for serious discussion about where our institutions of higher education are failing, and eschew debating this named person’s crimes or character. I think the essay would be just as thought-provoking if it left the person’s name out, it would still pose difficult and important questions:

How does such an essay get accepted?

If someone cheats and gets a degree, how do they prosper in life? Should there be a correlation between honest work on a degree and success? If not, why do we care about the degree?

How much of submitting an essay is composing the essay, and how much is mechanically rearranging existing ideas into a form that passes the professorial filter?

Is there a Turing Test going on here? If a professor can’t tell the original works apart from the plagiarized ones, is the test flawed, or is there really no distinction between the good and bad students?

I really like the post, it provides much grist for my Olde Mill, which lies just west of the Forest of Runnymede.
"Regardless of the fact that legally, college students are adults, they are still very prone to making mistakes."

How is it that you define wholesale copying of someone else's work and passing it off as your own a "mistake"? You might as well call burglary a "mistake".

"I see no reason to punish this one simply because he had the misfortune of copying a paper from an internet blogger."

Holy chutzpah Batman! He chose of his own free will to copy someone's work rather than do the work himself (which is CLEARLY against the rules). But because the person he copied from is a blogger who has the means to expose his misdeeds, that's unfair?
The competition looks stiff, but I'm rooting for them. Terence Pua, Insync's co-founder, is a seasoned internet entrepreneur -- one of the guys behind Friendster (Philippines) back in the day, before getting killed by Facebook.

I had the opportunity to join Insync's team back when I was living in Manila; but I came across Payguard ( http://www.younoodle.com/startups/payguard ) and decided to try to revolutionize online payments instead.
> ebook: $31.99

> print: $29.99

The fact the ebook costs more than the print book is just laughable. It reminds me of Ticketmaster's "delivery fee" that they charge when you print tickets at home.
Mobile Morning Coffee (12/30/11)
Lessons Learned from Verizon's Flip on $2 Fee
A Quick Thought...
> To say a language such as C++ is responsible for overly complicated interfaces is just plain dumb.

I don't agree with this. C++ is a massive language that virtually nobody understand in full. As a result it makes it hard to know how to solve problems the best way, so people solve them the way that they learned to solve things which may not be how other people learned to solve things so what looks straightforward to one is a complicated mess to the other. And the worse part is, C++ is only getting bigger.
My daughter would be appalled by this. (I'll ask her over to look at the screen right now to see what she thinks of the link.) My daughter (third grade age) says "What?!? Lego's gone girly. What did they do that for?" I asked her what she thought about that, and she said, "I don't like it."

My daughter plays just fine with the regular Lego products we've had in the house for years. Ever since my sister gave my oldest son (an occasional HN participant, now living on his own) a Duplo set for his second birthday, all the four children who live or have lived under my roof have been confirmed Lego maniacs. They can make Lego configurations of various shapes and sizes into action figures for fantasy play with dialog, and love to combine pieces from the dozens of Lego sets we've accumulated over the years. It's very hard to see what new interest there is in Lego Friends for anyone in our family.

As long as the company stays in business making the classic Lego stuff, I wish it well in any other business venture it pursues in a free-market economy. But I think for true Lego lovers, it has never been necessary for Lego products to have girl appeal, as they already have plenty of builder appeal, and every child can grow up to be a creative builder.
Find Real Estate Investors in Memphis
Want to invest in property? Memphis Real Estate Investing Expert Robert Feol teaches you how to make money investing in Real Estate in Memphis and surrounding areas.
Contain it with what? The results of an explosion are gamma rays.
Could you share an example of the quizzes you are doing?
Calling someone out for misdeeds is covered under libel laws.
Michael Jordan Engaged to Model Yvette Prieto
I wager the OP knows more about the Magna Carta than I do, but boy did he miss the point.

He says himself that the Magna Carta was written to restrain the king. That does not translate to not calling someone out for a transgression. For example, in America, if I witness you beating my child to death with a bat, you are still innocent until proven guilty...in the eyes of the court. But I have every right to call you a murderer and blare it across the land if i want
"Misfortune"? Seriously?
I think I may have had less idea about what your product does after clicking "See Revisu in Action", three cat pictures does not a demo make.
It reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Anathem where the Internet (called something else in the book) essentially became worthless because competing search engines polluted it with misinformation to screw with each others algorithms.
Sony, Nintendo, EA hide behind PR move. Still support SOPA
One thinks of Kipling's story "Dayspring Mishandled"...
I can attest to the unreliability of AWS Micro instances for production environments. Two examples:

Ex 1: We had a request triggering an asynchronous job that would take 3-4 seconds of processor time. Several times, this job was being throttled, so even in a low traffic situation each time one of those requests came, a whole micro instance was consumed on it making it unavailable for anything else. Switching to small instances solved the problem.

Ex 2: When launching a new load balancer, due to some sort of wrong DNS/elastic-ip configuration, it's not uncommon to be hit hard by traffic coming for the last owner of the given ip. We've seen this happen several times in the past. Again, switching from 10+ micro instances to 2 small instances cleared the problem.

There's an interesting post by Greg Wilson addressing the throttling problem better than I could: http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instan...
I doubt that all of git commit is implemented in main. So I'm sure that there is still plenty of use for unit tests.
I think there is an unbalanced amount of effort and enthusiasm spent these days on development methodologies: agile, waterfall, what-have-you. I think the thing that makes or breaks a product is the customers; and customers don't care if your product is well made, they just care that it solves their problems.

As long as you are moving forward (even if it is by inches) you are doing fine. A shipped working product that solves an important problem is better than a late unreleased one that tries to do everything.
Then the title should have been "Why do bad C++ programmers make things so complicated?" Good C++ programmers can make very complicated things extremely simple.

For example, I'm working on a program where I was trying to do a mass comparison of file names between 2 directories. Essentially, I wanted to get the intersection between two sets of strings. I wondered if there was something that already did this, and after a quick google search, lo and behold, there's an STL algo that handles this, set_intersection.

So in a single line of code, I was able to solve my program that would have taken me a lot more. It wasn't complicated at all, it was extremely simple.
I think you mistake my point, or I missed you when I aimed it. My question is not whether the essay should make a factual statement about the existence of a web page that purports to be an essay submitted as coursework and more than it is about a fictitious accusation of murder.

My essay is about what we do when we encounter the accusation. I am not all that concerned about someone shouting “Jim Henson murdered Frank Oz.” I am concerned with whether people hearing this cry repeat it and turn it into folklore (“Everybody knows Jim murdered Frank”) that becomes the basis for punishment in practice (“Hire Jim? No way, I heard he’s a killer”).
i'm not convinced that app discoverability is a problem that needs to be solved. yes, there are 600K iOS apps and most of them are dying in obscurity. but that's a good thing. most of those apps are utter garbage and deserve to be obscure.

good, useful apps do not have a discoverability problem. it isn't hard to find the evernote app. i go to their website and get a link to it, or i type it in to the search box in the market. it is much more difficult to find an evernote rip-off, but why would i want to do that?

i find the list of obscure startup names tackling the app discovery problem to be fairly telling. if i've never heard of your discovery service, i won't be discovering much on it. they need to solve their own discovery problem before they attempt to solve anybody else's.
Maybe you're right and I'm being a bit heavy-handed here. But if I painted a painting or released a song that showed up in someone else's portfolio, I wouldn't think twice about writing a blog post naming them. This doesn't really seem much different to me.

Accusing someone of plagiarism on the Internet and sentencing someone to death are such completely different scenarios that I have a hard time comparing the two.

edit: Upon further reflection, I do think that creating a honeypot essay for the sole purpose of shaming whoever copies it does seem rather malicious to me. However, I'm speaking more about the general case of publicly naming plagiarists than this particular witch-hunt.
Thanks for posting this. I attended the conference and was wondering when I'd be able to get to see the rest of the presentations that I missed.

Anyone else from HN attend this event? What did you think?
Only today I was thinking how agile "sprints" are the wrong terminology. No one wins a marathon by running back-to-back sprints. I know it's only terminology but I think it affects our approach and in practice can encourage a Continuous Death March instead of the intended manageable workload.
c, as in Earth's view of ship's speed?
I don't know about you, but getting fired and having my professional reputation ruined is a fair bit worse than being an "internet villain".
Zen Cart 1.5 Released - tightens security and more good stuff
Huh, I stand corrected. Thanks, looking forward to playing with it.
Google the old SNL commercial "Chess For Girls."
Mashable would disagree: http://mashable.com/2011/12/22/google-drive-predictions/ - and Google would be wise to follow. Google's arch enemies - Amazon, Apple and Microsoft - all have their clouds to dance on.
The pdfs should be generated automatically when you install from source - or could be forced through a command line option (there were some changes to v 2.14, I don't recall them exactly)

Also most pdfs for R packages will show up in a google search somewhere.
Also, there was a Wikipedia/git project a while back (offline editing). All of the revision history was dumped into git.

http://scytale.name/blog/2009/11/announcing-levitation

http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/08/gitjs-a-git-impleme...

Why does mediawiki have its own version control system, anyway?
"I think you'd have to put in at least as much energy as you get back out through annihilation of the antiparticle, which would be half the energy released"

Yes, but if you put ten kilograms of matter in, and get back 10 kilograms of antimatter, the energy equations are balanced; 10 kilograms times c^2 on both sides. Some sort of hypothetical device which somehow reaches into matter and flips it to antimatter via some relatively cheap technique, such as perhaps rotating it in a rolled-up dimension in such a way that the result is antimatter (to give one example of plausible sounding English words that have no actual referent in the real world), does not violate conservation. It just doesn't seem to be possible, either.

And if you're going to get technical, nuclear power plants have no special claim on converting mass to energy. All power plants do that. Combustion products are ever so slightly less massive than their original components, corresponding to the energy released in the chemical reaction.
Stanford offers a peek into its extensive Apple history archives
I'd have said that for impressing people with small pieces of code something like SecondLife scripting would be ideal. You can manipulate objects in a 3d environment using simple code. Who doesn't enjoy programming a gun?
doesn't seem to work on the ipad
I don't about you guys but when I did

0) Open notepad
1) Write <html>My name is Ely <img src=''></html>
2) CTRL + S as index.htm
3) FTP to server
4) Then went to site.com/

That's when I knew I was going to be an amateur programmer for life. Yeah, yeah I know, it's HTML. But that gave me the courage to later jump into server-side languages.