skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zubrin is talking about the deaths in Apollo I, Space Shuttle, etc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...).

His point is exactly that, get them into space already. Or rather, give them a mission that is worth risking their life.
In my case it was a desire to be an engineer!
He's referring to the entire space shuttle program as "the multi-decade preparatory exercise adopted as an alternative to real space exploration". There were 14 astronauts killed on the Challenger and the Columbia disasters, 7 from each.
The cost of a million school children watching a space shuttle explode is the cost of the million conversations with parents and other adults that occur afterwards. These should be conversations that help develop each child's understanding of the world and the risks, challenges, and rewards of great human endeavors.
>C makes tight resource control possible, and to do that it sacrifices a lot of ease.

I'm not a C programmer (yet), but I would say that depends on what you define as "easy" or "simple". What I am is an Arch Linux user, and I embrace KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. Arch understands "simple" as "technically elegant and uncomplicated", but that doesn't mean it's easy to understand or foolproof to use - for the inexperienced user, that is. C is an incredibly powerful tool exactly because it is this kind of simple.

What I also am is someone who learned programming with Python, and I initially couldn't understand the appeal of C-oid languages either. But I've since realized it's all about using the right tool for the job. A programmer is a mechanic, and a mechanic that only knows how to use a hammer is a pretty useless mechanic (in general, of course. If all you deal with are nails then it's not an impediment to your abilities).
I've thought about this for a few minutes and I really don't know. What are you getting at? I'm not even sure if the dollar value of the cost is negative or positive. It was a tragedy, sure, but what's the lesson the kids take? Not to go into the sciences? Or to think about heroes who take on great risks to earn the knowledge that they're now learning in school?

I honestly don't know how to incorporate that aspect into the dollar cost/benefit the article proposes.
Twitter commits social suicide
I second this, the service could be awesome, but I don't necessarily know if I will like the tshirt each month.
Same here. And I haven't touched my linkedin settings in a very long while.
Dart Puzzlers by Joshua Bloch
Once you have Arch set up, there is very little tweaking that needs to be done. It "just works", well unless you have an AMD or NVIDIA graphics card and a new kernel or xorg comes out which isn't supported yet...
(We posted at the same time.) No, he's just talking about Shuttle programs. He considers the Apollo programs to be real exploration.
I like the article but I wonder a little about the figures. He seems to assume that the extra research measures push the likelihood of a successful mars mission from 90% to 95%.

I think this underestimates the complexity of the problem. Two thirds of automated mars missions have failed, with an especially dark period around the time of the 1980s, when we were to have sent out the first Astronauts.

I think that there is also an issue with the military/contest aspect. The moon mission had a cold war battle feeling which would be hard to ignite now -- deaths in space just seem tragic and expensive in a way that they did not before (his description of the finger paints being a good example). Would people have the stomach to spend billions to kill 5 people on their way to Mars? How many times before they lose interest?
Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats
We had a server with half a TB of ram. It was a lot of fun until we had to reboot it, and then it took half an hour to perform a memory check.
Introducing Pusher WebHooks
I assume you are looking at the 'Total current assets' in the balance sheet of their latest 10Q [1]. Instead, add together 'Cash and cash equivalents', 'Short-term marketable securities' and 'Long-term marketable securities' to get $97,601 million.

[1] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/1659381773x0x536...
There's also a demo + code of the WebHooks in action here:
http://blog.pusher.com/2011/12/7/filtrand-a-demo-webhooks
i have done some testing for jQuery Mobile and the problem is that the amount of devices is huge compared to desktop browsers. E.g. someone makes a change to a CSS file to change something simple, but it still has to be tested on all different platforms and devices. Still v1.1 looks promising.
> as a percentage of the Federal budget it was over 5x today's level.

This is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the absolute budget, adjusted for inflation. In addition, given the greatly improved technology, we should be able to get to the moon for far cheaper. In fact, all the R&D has already been done. It should be a cake walk on half the budget.
I reject the notion that we should coddle our children. The teacher is there for a reason. To provide context to what the child is being exposed to. And that can make all the difference.

Yes, you can die. Yes, it is dangerous. Yes, these brave men risked their lives and they lost. And if they had to do it all over again, they would risk their lives again.

Because if it wasn't for men like them, we would still be sitting in a cave poking a fire with a stick.
Cornell: How a Parrot Learns its Name in the Wild [video]
What happened to valleyschwag/startup schwag? Why did they shut down?
Indeed. Arch is an education on the Linux software stack.
Mandrake, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and a few others I'm sure.
Is that WebRTC with GTalk contacts on the home page?
I use arch at both work and home. It's not really that bad to configure and setup although I guess my usual setup isn't really "a normal user" in terms of 99% of PC users. If you are familiar with linux itself then it's straightforward to get running. I actually prefer it over the likes of ubuntu.

I'm a developer though that's been using Linux as my main OS since the days of red hat 4 in 1996 so I'm quite used to it. Arch focuses more towards seasoned users that want to do their configuration this way. The rolling release schedule can introduce some issues for me but they typically are fixed within hours to a few days as new packages come in.

All in all I'm very happy with it as my primary OS for both work (within a creative agency) and at home. Certainly as a developer I've found it far easier to get things to work on it than other linux flavours.

Different strokes for different folks really. I still continue to recommend Ubuntu and Fedora to friends looking a more friendly and "out of the box" experience. Arch is not there to fill that niche.
Do the companies pay you for this distribution? They should. It's advertising for them, after all
Not going to do hoodies yet since they are expensive, unless a startup wants to subsidize it and send them.
He seems like a caricature of a cheesy used car salesman.
Ask HN: Which SaaS products does your startup use on a daily basis?
More and more work nowadays is being done using SaaS. I'm curious to know which ones you rely on and what you use them for.
33rd Square | US Ready for Autonomous Combat Drones?
Either you decide you want to do something worthwhile, or you eliminate manned spaceflight. But right now we're spending billions and getting nothing worthwhile accomplished. It's not tight-rope walking, it's the worst of both worlds.
I'd concede that. But it's still possible to have brief code that is less clear than verbose code.
Yep, we think its a good targeted way to do merchandise, getting it into the hands of the most passionate startup fans. The best part so far is that we are connecting to people around the world, especially in places where there isnt as strong of a startup community.
Seriously.js: A Realtime, Node-Based Video Compositor for the Web
I think this is a reasonable outlook. Unlike those that die of cancer or asthma or car accidents or whatever, astronauts get a choice. First, estimating the astronaut risk is done a priori and is much more uncertain than the observed risks. Second, it seems the same value should not be applied to those that choose to accept the risk compared to those that are at mercy of things beyond their control.

Does anyone know if the military applies the same kind of calculations? Seems hard to believe.
I think it's actually a bit more selfish to want people to give up their earned conveniences to satisfy your own particular desires, in this case, making the city 'how it should be', when it clearly works fairly well the way it is. Saying cities are 'ruined' by cars is hyperbole and guilt-based rhetoric, plain and simple.
It would be pretty odd in base 7.
Yes! This is what we need. Big shots in academia pointing out the obvious, paving the way for the revolution.
Preview: Privacy Policy – Policies & Principles
Invaluable. That's a wonderful opportunity for the million schoolchildren to develop a more nuanced and deeper understanding of the real world and the existence of failure.
Social Bankruptcy
Pyro is neat, but not advisable as a general RPC solution unless you're 100% sure that you will only ever have Python clients, sometimes even the exact same Pyro version on both ends.

We've used Pyro extensively in the past at work, and are now trying to migrate away from it and towards a RESTful API, though it's slow going with interdependent services needing to all be updated.
$50,000 is your share of the US Public Debt
The question is... Why?

If going to the moon is 75% less than it was in the Apollo days, that is cool, but what do we accomplish by going there?
Note that package signing is turned off by default so not strictly introduced.
Www.winclubvipextra.at : Estimated Value, Competitor Analysis, Indexed Pa
ValleySchwag went on to start GetSatisfaction. StartupSchwag (which I ran) shut down b/c after 31 months, it was time for other projects. Really excited to see this coming back and I've already signed up!
Ask HN: WHat are online resources for learning data structures and algorithms?
I'm looking for beginner resources for understanding data structures and algorithms.
I think this is a great idea. I have a bunch of civilian friends ask me to "steal" a shirt for them when I'm at a hackathon or a meeting. Now i can just point them here. Thanks Frank!
Hopefully, Valley Threads won't pick up from you a few years from now :)

Awesome service, by the way.
"the movie and tv industries are and have been the best employers of artists this side of the Medici clan."

Your definition of "best" and mine are vastly different.

They exploit artists, for great profit. There's such demand that they are able to exploit many artists. The costs are so low, that they can afford to employ many more artists than will succeed. The artists love their craft so much, and are often so desperate to make it big, that they will work for ridiculously low wages AND absolutely zero job security.

We all know that distribution used to be hard, and now it is not. Distribution used to be the main reason why you needed to sign with a label, or a studio. Reaching a "good enough" level of quality used to require an enormous, up-front investment of capital. Now, it doesn't.

Kill exploiters. Reward supporters.
How Y Combinator and 500 Startups Are Different
>And price is not necessarily a cost, it can be an investment

not in consumer electronics its not. Quality products continue to exist, but availability of cheaper, but functional lower quality goods has its place too. Just an example: I'm a graduate student, so I greatly benefit from this, since I can buy a cheap product, use it for a few years and then throw it away without feeling too bad when I move out of the University town.
That's a wise policy:

===
To avoid such deadly waste, the Department of Transportation has a policy of rejecting any proposed safety expenditure that costs more than $3 million per life saved.
===
Just slightly a link-bait-esque title. Can we rename it to e.g. “Tau: Why 2π Would Be a Better Constant than Pi”?
I have been looking for a service like this. Some questions I have:
1. Is there a way to view what the t-shirt will look like?
2. The monthly package we receive, are all the goodies from one company? Or will the sticker and surprise be from a different company?
3. Will you be able to opt out of certain months?
What is the risk a mountaineer or fighter pilot or car racer facing? Should we ban these people from taking calculated risks? Are there some stats about how risky various adventure sports are compared to Space Exploration?

Another question is what is the worth of revisiting the moon to set up a hyper expensive tourist camp there? Should it not be NASA's job to focus on research that lays the groundwork for entrepreneurs like Elon Musk to expand human presence beyond Earth?
Particularly noteworthy is the point that if a program sets an unusually high value on human life, it diverts resources from other programs also intended to protect human life

It's an interesting thought experiment, but of course that's not really relevant to the example at hand. If NASA insisted on 1e-10 astronaut risk, it would not divert any money from other programs that protect human life, because the NASA appropriations are not for that purpose. It would just mean that NASA got nothing done, and maybe eventually it would be shut down. But assuming that there's a rational and efficient allocation of resources for a clear goal seems just as much a fiction as other economic concepts like "efficient markets".
Thanks for this comparison. I hadn't noticed the similarities, but I'm the same way.

VERY happy Arch user for 2 years now. And also planning on building my own bicycle from scratch for the same reasons you named.

I wonder if this is one of those spectrums like Introvert ←→ Extrovert.

People who study the roots ←→ People who just pick the fruit.
Oppose HR3699, the Research Works Act
Really? Wow. I remember a spin-off of this in that terrible movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley," but in that scene the plane had started taxiing and Gates convinced the employees at the gate to call the pilot and have them turn back.
I am using Arch with gnome3 on 5 different machines and still think of arch being minimalist in the sense that you only need to know a handful of commands and config files and you are ready to go.
Why would you want to be a minimalist?

Less is more.

My Arch system doesn't inundate me with pop-ups to update my system with out-of-date libraries. It doesn't integrate "the social web" into my "desktop." In fact it doesn't do anything unless I specifically want it to.

Some people are happy with everything and the kitchen sink. I don't need all of that, so why have it? It takes up resources, clutters my space, requires maintenance, and often just gets in the way for no good reason. I don't need that and Arch serves me well.
This is awesome! Thanks for providing this service - there are loads of nice pictures on Facebook that I've been meaning to make a backup of for ages, now there's a tool that lets me do that without any fuss.
For wifi it's much easier to install networkmanager, add it to DAEMONS (after dbus) and then configure your network with one of the KDE/GNOME networkmanager applets. It pretty much just works after that. For example I plugged in a USB wifi adaptor and it automatically appeared in the applet and found various SSIDs.

For sound, the best solution that worked for me was ALSA + esd. I could never get PulseAudio to work properly.
Futurity: A New Musical by the Lisps
This is what 864GB of RAM looks like after you laid it all out on a table without using ESD (electro static discharge) protection. A few of these DIMMs are probably bad now, but you won't know which ones because you're going to stuff them all in a Linux box that you built yourself... this is such a bad idea for a production system.
Great Customer Service Matters for Small Businesses – A ZenDesk Success Story
Why we're moving away from printing books
If he considers it a failed launch and then stops, it is a failed launch.

Though the failure then is that he didn't keep trying :-)
> more accepting of people's flaws

Based on what they say when customers aren't around, I'm not sure it's accepting people's flaws so much as just being careful to rant about them out of earshot.
Jon Rubinstein leaves HP
Yes. But let's look at the other side too.

Before Google came along and showed the business people the benefits of horizontal scaling, any software engineer would be automatically considered crazy if they suggested an architecture that wasn't built on a central RDBMS.

So you have to weigh it against the other cargo-cult. How many startups along the way have failed due the inability to scale horizontally?

How many have failed due to too much cost and complexity associated with re-engineering an architecture in which the assumption of fully ACID transactions permeates the entire codebase? (While the phone is ringing off the hook because production systems are falling over under load.)
I've seen articles like this before, but wondered if pi originates from astronomy working with a more or less 180 degree horizon.
I wish I could find the source for this, but I recall one of the Mozilla designers saying that the reason they were reticent to implement a speed-dial in the new tab page was because they envisioned the new tab page as a blank slate for when you're on-task, free from the distractions of your favorite websites. As someone with mild ADD, I agree with this assessment.

Don't get me wrong; it's nice that this feature exists. But, personally, I'll be disabling it immediately.
"I can't imagine a single situation where you expect variables used in a sum operation to be arrays/objects."

That's precisely the problem. You don't expect them, but there's nothing to prevent it from happening, so it does.

Your proposed solutions don't solve the problem, they occur too late. By the time you're adding together two non-numbers (and non-strings) you've already lost, trying desperately to cast them to numbers first is also wrong, along with so verbose that nobody will ever do it.
So awesome, glad they're still developing this. I was at the Open Video Conference where they demoed this.
Emscripten - LLVM to JavaScript Compiler
The share of the budget reflects the level of political support. So it's not irrelevant---undertaking something like a lunar mission requires long-term commitment, not just year-by-year budget equivalence. And during the Shuttle era, there was no political will to commit to a lunar or Mars mission in addition to building the Space Station. Even if the lunar mission did cost half as much, it would still mean doubling the budget.
I second that @speg. My disappointment went beyond slow transitions though.

One instance, for example, was in having "fixed" header/footer on the web-app. The rendition of fixed elements would fade-out and fade-in again once user stopped scrolling. This really felt naive and I decided to do that part myself instead.

Obviously, now the situation has improved that we have property 'fixed' acknowledged on the iPad Safari. Will give 1.1 a look again, thanks to this heads-up!
It's funny how things come full circle. Circa 2004, Firefox was the browser that forced Microsoft to reinstate its browser team (which had been disbanded around 2001 after the release of IE6). It had a revolutionary interface, and did a lot of things right (although it did lack some important features that IE6 had). Firefox was pretty much static after that point, adding important features (such as contenteditable), but not pushing the envelope much in terms of interface.

Then Chrome came out. It was rough around the edges, but Google released a new version every few months, and it quickly improved to the point where it was better than everything else. It represented a generational change in user interface paradigms and development cycle time.

So now Firefox has been forced to play catch-up to Chrome, much as IE had to play catch-up to Firefox. To be fair, this happened when Firefox abandoned the monolithic development cycle, but the UI changes represent the full acknowledgement of this.

I wonder where the next revolutionary browser will come from. My intuition is that it will be on the mobile side...
How much does it currently cost to obtain a 16cm^2 sheet of graphene oxide?
Unfortunately, mathematical notation has tons of historical cruft like this. And there will be people who will fight tooth and nail to preserve all those artificial complexities.

Personally, I always believed that improving the notation would have huge benefits in the future.
No they don't, you can still use your favorite text editor and use the command line to build, or use Titanium Developer which still works.
Learning to use vim in my iPad (even if I'm an emacs geek)
No, not much has changed about our regex engine in the last month. However, our `re` module is fully compatible with CPython's so I'm bit confused, are you saying it didn't run something, or was slow?
"Because if it wasn't for men like them, we would still be sitting in a cave poking a fire with a stick."

Because of them, we now have large sticks which take us to space by poking the Earth with fire. :)

I agree with your entire comment. Think about the explorers of old, crossing oceans and continents, in hazardous conditions, with little technology to aid them, and with even less knowledge of where their journeys would lead. We stand on the brave shoulders of the countless who have come before, and it would be an insult to their accomplishments if we, as humans, suddenly abandoned, in the name of ultimate safety, the wonder of exploration, and the courage required to see it through.
"First of all, nothing works out of the box. You will have to manually set up the driver for your video card, ...Xorg, "

I stopped there
http://xkcd.com/963/
This is also opt-in for me - flagging as inaccurate.
Just because a system gives you the freedom to customize your environment, it doesn't mean you required to "retool [it] to no end." I have used a simple Arch Linux installation for years and it has never interrupted my work flow.
No, but a lot of "sysadmins" are being raised with no knowledge of hardware and some others like to cache knowledge for years and need a good shock to bring them into the present.
clubbin baby seals?
Its tendentious title aside, all very useful and reasonable, up to but not including the "\newpi" symbol at the end of the article, which IMHO is an abomination with three legs.
Well there are still record stores, so books have a model to follow.
Knowing C but not JavaScript, I can think of uses for all operations that are defined on C pointers. Yet, I cannot come up with one for String - Number or Hash + Array. If you want to argue that they are useful shortcuts, I think examples would help the case.
The human-exploration portion of NASA has shrunk in comparison to where it was during Apollo. We have a lot of Earth-observing instruments now, planetary missions to Mars, etc. (This is not a bad thing, but it complicates the comparison.)
I was surprised by the lack of fixed headers/footers, too. They say it's coming, but in the mean time you can use iScroll without any side-effects:

http://cubiq.org/iscroll-4

And, as you say, use the 'fixed' CSS in newer Safari versions that support it.
Google says privacy change won't affect government users
I don't understand why so many people are complaining about Twitter but no one is complaining about Facebook, Google, etc. Both already do this.
Exactly -- nature isn't doing any calculations. The correct statement would be "it takes difficult calculations to describe what nature does using numbers."
It’s relevant because it’d be much easier to get the major browsers to implement a minimalistic language than another JavaScript. Simpler implementation means fewer security concerns and more time to focus on things that are directly relevant to programmer experience, such as that standard library.