skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least three unrelated "nuclear" things are involved:

* Radioisotope power sources (like this, Cassini, New Horizons, etc.)

* Critical fission reactors (popular in the early space race before solar PV, still the best option for high-power deep-space missions like (cancelled) Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter/Project Prometheus)

* Nuclear pulse propulsion -- setting off nuclear weapons, riding the shockwaves (e.g. Project Orion)

Pulse prolusion is banned, quite pointlessly, under the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. (Note it extends not only to atmospheric explosions, but ones in deep space). The others aren't. Contained, critical nuclear reactions are legal -- NASA chose a nuclear reactor a few years ago for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, before they cancelled it. And no one cares about radioisotope sources except confused hippies.

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

Obscure history: a running Soviet nuclear reactor crashed from space into the Canadian wilderness in 1977. In case anyone's curious of the consequences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
When did they announce that?
Writing Interpreters in JavaScript using CPS and Trampolining to avoid blocking
Interesting. As I understand it Google, realising the increased importance of mobile, developed Android to ensure that phone manufacturers would not be able to lock Google's services out, or provide and encourage alternative services. By making their own platform they can push their services to the forefront.

But in doing so they antagonized Apple with whom they had a good relationship, and now find their services being replaced or dropped (first maps and now YouTube, and iOS 6 and Mountain Lion not including Google sharing options).

Given that Google makes four times as much money from iOS then it does Android [1] I wonder if this was a good plan? If Apple replaced Google search with Bing as the default, it would have to hurt a lot. On the other hand if Apple did all this anyway but Google didn't have Android up its sleeve it would be in a much worse situation then it is now.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/5897457/google-makes-four-times-more-mone...
They don't seem to want their democracy back.
Want to participate in Olympics 2012, there you go. #GoogleDoodle
To me the app.net approach is no taking it far enough!

I would absolutely back a p2p twitter like service and also pay for the "official" client and it's updates.

But just another corporate owned service...naaa
A tablet is more likely to be used as a computer replacement than a phone.
Isn't there also an issue of impulse though? There must be an acceleration dip compared to earth since I'm basically pushing a mini cooper on earth but only a bicycle on mars.
Note: I'm a scientist so I'm embarrassingly bad at physics.
"Don't do the crime if you can't do the time"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQeVIJ8e_z8
Agreed, he had one pill in his pocket and apparently he doesn't do drugs at all.

Therefore he CLEARLY deserves to have his career ruined. Also, he should probably be humiliated and stigmatized for the next couple years... then for the rest of his life just to be on the safe side.
I also do this on iPhone. It's just nicer, the app hasn't been updated for ages.
What results? He got probation and an expungement. It cost him his job as a stock broker, because stock broker jobs are exquisitely sensitive to the appearance of bad judgement. He got his MBA, and is now working on his second graduate degree. He never went to prison. Like many, many, many people in this economy, after losing his preferred job, he found the next available job was pretty terrible. Welcome to the club; they have jackets; the jackets read "English Majors".

How sorry do you feel for the short order cooks with postgraduate degrees who weren't caught with Oxy?

This is simply not a story about someone who's life was ruined.

Losing your medical license and then going to prison at age 53 because your intractable pain practice was targeted by a sting operation and you were found one time to have not followed the absolute letter of the 3498739847 page law on how to prescribe vicodin to a cancer patient: that is a story about a ruined life. This isn't.
Hopefully they WILL allow third-party Apple TV apps, and Google will provide a superior YouTube app.
The bigger issue using it in pacemakers is it's actually beneficial to have a battery that needs replacing every 10 years or so - pacemaker tech gets better so fast that a 30 year old device would be crap compared to the current generation.
Other than a bank or cheque cashing service, anyway...

The niche seems pretty small: payments too large for cash, too small for certified bank drafts, to people taking too few payments to have technologying up make sense.
Drug dealers. That is who benefits from it most. The prohibition makes drugs one of the most profitable commodities in existence. That is why people are literally giving their lives up for it. The mark up makes Apple look negligent to its share holders.

Question is, why does government support the profits of drug dealers?
Maybe my industry (consulting) is different but yes, absolutely yes, this is a tactic with nice ROI. I can't think of a single good reason not to leverage your existing contacts.
Ask HN: Why do "Databases as a Service" often die?
I've recently (in the last 1-2 years) seen a lot of databases as services die, or disappear. Is there a reason for this, or just another opportunity to get it right?

By DB-AA-S I don't mean throwing up a MYSQL server and charging service fee's, I mean actual sites where you can create a database and use it through the companies front end.
This is the kind of thing I would have loved to do in high school. Alas, it was the early 90's, so I tried to write BBS door games instead.
You just committed the same error that you're calling on mullingitover; he didn't say the person in the story was on the brink of suicide, he said, "I'm surprised he didn't commit suicide."

For an otherwise lawful person to lose their career and most of the prospects for their near future, their schooling, a decent place to live, and be subjected to idiotic and hypocritical drug classes twice a week for a year, and then in turn to be given bad advice by their probation officer which leads to further punishments ... well, yes, despondency to the point of suicidal desires depends then entirely on the individual's emotional constitution. (Before you object to that, you should know that merely losing her job led to a downward spiral which has resulted in my mother attempting suicide three or four times -- that I know of -- and my father then attempting suicide just so that he wouldn't have to deal with her anymore.)

His record may have been expunged, but as he says in the article, that didn't matter once the various private background check organizations had gotten ahold of it.

I think the article did a pretty damn good job of a case study which should make "the system" look ridiculous and over-punitive in this instance. I think that the subject of the article made a good point when he said that it makes sense that many otherwise-lawful citizens might turn to illegal sources of income during a situation like this.

So I find him to be quite a sympathetic character. In what way am I surrendering my critical thinking faculties?
otterley - Don't walk away yet... we do support arbitrary dimensions!

You can attach any arbitrary set of tags to metrics or events - on a per-datapoint basis, and slice / dice / alert based on those tags. Datadog will automatically tag your points by chef role or AWS availability-zone, for example, and you can add any other tag you want. Tags also don't have to be tied to a host and can also relate to a specific volume, mysql index, etc...

(Note to HN, this is a feature of datadoghq - pup will gladly collect and filter on tags, but won't aggregate them, yet)
WPDevCon cancelled due to changes in the Windows Phone ecosystem
From: Stacy Burris <sburris@bzmedia.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 12:02 PM
Subject: Important information about your registration to WPDevCon in October 2012
To: <name>

Dear <name>,

Thank you for registering to visit the exhibits at WPDevCon: The Windows Phone Developer Conference, scheduled for Oct. 22-24, 2012, in Burlingame, Calif.

We wanted to let you know that due to changes in the Windows Phone ecosystem, WPDevCon has been postponed until next year. We will notify you when the event is rescheduled.

Because the event is postponed, the group rates at the Hyatt Regency Burlingame are longer valid. If you had made a hotel reservation, we strongly recommend that you cancel it at your earliest convenience.

Thank you again for your interest in WPDevCon. We’ll be back to you when the conference is rescheduled.

Best regards,

Alan Zeichick
Conference Chair, WPDevCon

If you do not want to receive future emails from Stacy Burris, click Opt-Out.
"I don't think Page is a good judge of when people are lying to him."
There's Pu238 in our nuclear fuel rods, we aren't allowed to reprocess spent fuel to extract it.
You could do worse than start at the NASA Github page:

https://github.com/nasa/
So that's your entire point? Other people are demonstrably much more innocent, and have much more severe results, and so we should be much more sympathetic to them?
It's an Americanism, too. The last time I was playing tourist in Mexico, they talked about how amazing TVs were because they were basically used as free, national education.
I often stick to things like PayPal or strype - they're pretty cheap, considering you don't need to deposit $5k safety deposits on account openings, etc. They also take care of the security, etc for you.
So. You recognize the laws are stupid. Still, this article doesn't talk about what you think it's important, so let's blame the victim for getting caught. Hmm. Yeah, that was callous, and a bit pointless.
SPDY patches some of the problems in the more common use cases for HTTP for today's applications. It doesn't really change much of the spec, and it doesn't even pretend to address potential future use cases. Here's a recent criticism by the lead architect of Varnish https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4253538
His punishment was probation and mandatory attendance for a year of Narcotics Anonymous meetings, where he repeatedly watched "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail".

The criminal record itself was expunged.

He lost his job. But that wasn't punishment. Thousands of people have lost jobs simply because of bad credit reports.
I'd be happy to see the native Google Youtube app allow me to copy a video URL. It is extraordinarily difficult to make such a simple thing happen on iOS right now.
From Apple: YouTube app will not be in iOS 6
> [I] didn't really get why there was a YouTube app

Because back in 2007 there was no such thin as "HTML5 video", and youtube was already the most popular video site by a pretty long shot. So they built that one in via a dedicated application.
Open-Source solar technology - Solar Steam Engine
If you happen to make the local news for an arrest, and have an even slightly unique name, you'll also find that Google has a very long memory indeed.
(I'm saying this from a regular user's perspective and not developer): First of all, what's boggling my mind about this app.net thingy is the vague pitch and description. They should explain themselves first as "a paid social network where users own their own data and without any ad disturbance". Then they can elaborate more stuff. I really had hard time to comprehend the importance of this yet-another-social network and spent a lot of time reading others' people blog/HN posts just to understand what it is all about.

Secondly, I see why they charge for it for access; I mean, we are customers when we pay for it. I get it. However, I still don't think people are willing to pay for it. Social network will forever (well may be not, but we'll see) be free because when the stuff is free, we can be sure that we can allure our close friends, relatives, or whoever in our circles to join the social network, thus the social network itself. Even more so when regular users are pretty content with the existing free social networks we have. If there are less users in a social network, the less motivation any developer to develop application on its platform.
Sorry for being honest. Would you prefer:

Stripe is an amazing service and their founders are amazing people. I wish I could blow them, but they probably wouldn't even let me b/c the VCs are already all over that. On the other hand, for people who enjoy saving money, becoming PCI compliant and saving 1% + trans fees is another alternative and there are numerous tutorials available to help anyone do that within a few hours even if you are severely autistic.
Yes. Or, put differently, if we're going to use cause célèbre cases to argue against drug laws, let's pick more convincing ones.
Build Something Useless
Fun to see an article pop up on this - it was very interesting talking to you a few months ago about this, Jeremy. Hope its going well.
"Suffice it to say there is a) a customer group which needs between 8 and 15 cards and b) they really, really like pretty checkouts."

I think this is more "people who are on the margin where they MIGHT be interested in paying for more cards can be convinced when they hit the pretty checkout page". If you don't need more than 15 cards, you probably don't have a burning need for the paid version.
Rent Your Paper Textbooks from Amazon Now Available in the US
Did you ever drink alcohol before turning 21? That would probably be a roughly analogous crime (along with ridiculous enforcement and penalties), when considering the harm and risks involved to the user. It's not punished as severely, but it's definitely a much more well-known offense.

I actually hadn't known the legal status of oxytocin, though I was familiar with it from all the studies about it being related to people's natural production of it. I have been out of the US for a long time and I don't exactly know any of the raver-type people, but it's not (or at least wasn't) a famously abused prescription drug like valium, ritalin or adderall.

Edit since HN won't let me reply:
Good point. I hadn't realized you were restricting your "he broke the law" point to felonies. I suppose sharing a drink with a 20 year-old (still very common) would be a better comparison in terms of punishment then. I have read articles about parents allowing their teens to drink at home safely instead of going out getting jail time for this.
Ask HN: Best blogging platform?
I know this questions comes every now and then, but I'm curious to know what your thoughts are in terms of starting a blog (personal or for your startup) which platform would you choose.
SPDY is an IETF draft, working toward a ratified standard. https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00
Subscriptions work fine in the very nice mobile version of YouTube. Since switching to Chrome for iOS I have really enjoyed being able to use YouTube's website instead of getting forwarded to Apple's YouTube App.
OpenStack Community By The Numbers
You know what's worse for Google than "antagonizing" Apple?

Being at complete mercy of Apple.

Google has Android, which has a bigger market share than iOS. If Apple kicks out all Google's services from iOS, Google still has Android.

If Google didn't have Android and Apple kicked them out of iOS, they would have nothing.

This is a long term game for both players. Google's strategic plan is to advance Android. Apple's strategic plan is to advance iOS and don't be dependent of Google, which is why they are kicking out Google's maps and invest in their own solution, even though I'm certain it's way more costly for them to do it compared to licensing Google's service.

Both Google and Apple act perfectly reasonably given their long-term strategy.
No need to be an ass. Also, it's business 101 to focus on your core and outsource the rest: so yes, it absolutely is worth using stripe rather than building payment architecture yourself. You are probably the only person on Hacker News that thinks building all this yourself makes sense.
It's really just the entertainment media version of patent trolling... it will eventually be killed or moderated just like patent trolling is. We just have to wait until someone figures out a better system to replace them with.
I like how it's not enough that I agree with you; because I don't agree with you with the right measure of emotion, I must be your adversary.

This is a problem I have in general with _Reason_ (and also with Radley Balko, who I also enjoy reading and often agree with, and whose writing introduced me to _Reason_). They have a bad habit of building emotional narratives around cases where the facts don't support them. As a result, every time I read one of these pieces, I find myself having to dig in to see where I'm being manipulated. Often, it turns out I'm not, and the piece is completely honest. But sometimes they're not.

This isn't a dishonest piece, just kind of a dumb one. Other stories about narcotics laws have turned out to be directly misleading: key facts of the case had been withheld to create an undue perception of victimhood, because victimhood suits the ideological agenda of the writer.
Relevant: INL helps power mission to Mars
http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/08/06/2219647/inl-helps-p...

"In simple terms, Curiosity runs, in part, on a $100 million nuclear battery developed at the lab, said Stephen Johnson, division director of Space Nuclear Systems and Technology.

The 2-foot-tall, 2-foot in diameter cylinder aboard Curiosity is packed with radioactive isotopes generating heat. That thermal energy is converted into the electricity fueling Curiosity's wheels, arms and other gadgets, as well as recharging its bank of lithium-ion batteries."

"Fuel cells in the energy source are 1 inch tall and 1-inch diameter cylinders. Each puts out a mind-boggling 9,000 to 10,000 degrees of heat, shift supervisor Dave Hendricks said."
> I would say that he ruined his life, not the other way around.

You can say that about everyone and everything. We are, of course, masters of our fate.

> He accepted what he knew was an illegal drug at the concert, and kept it, planning to 'give it away'. Who does this?

Everyone who doesn't want to offend a friend, but at the same time, has reservations about taking whatever was given to him?

> His passenger was carrying screens and a pipe, and he had an illegal prescription drug in his pocket. Why would he consent to a search?

Fear?

You clearly have no experience dealing with an aggressive police officer. Neither do most people. So when they encounter one, they take a submissive posture and pretty much agree to everything without thinking.

> He went to court and plead 'no contest'-this is equivalent to a guilty plea. Why not spend the time to tell his story? He gave the judge no opportunity to be lenient.

Because nobody cares. Not your defense attorney, not the prosecutor, not the judge, nobody. They see dozens of these sob stories every day. They don't have time for it and they don't care. You broke the law, you're going to pay and you're going to pay the same thing the guy before you did.

Have you actually been to municipal/county court? I recommend you go. It's open to the public. Very educational. You don't have to stay long to figure out how things work.

> After getting on probation, he made no effort to educate HIMSELF on the rules. Instead, he operated on assumptions.

Which is what 99% of people do? Laws and systems should be designed for the worst of us to be able to live well ... not the best and brightest.

> this guy screwed up.

He most certainly did.

1. No officer, I do not consent to any searches of my property.

2. I'm sorry sir, but I have a constitutional right not to respond to your inquiry. I am exercising that right.

3. You smell marijuana? You may not search my property. (cop searches anyway - guess what? if he doesn't find marijuana, anything he does find is not admissible in court)

4. Defense Attorney: Just plead guilty, it'll be fine. You: No. Go talk to the prosecutor. Do your job. Get me a plea-bargain in writing and I'll consider pleading guilty. And before you hand me that piece of paper, all of you talk to the judge and make sure everybody is on the same page.

Also, every state is different, so make sure to know your local law! In New Jersey, they have something called PTI (Pre-Trial Intervention) for first time offenders. A much better option for those who know they're heading for the gallows. Know the law and don't trust people to give you accurate information! Even your defense attorney!
Gathering the Comments of the Web
Thanks for the link. I read a little about solar sails in some of the other stuff I saw. This is a bit more comprehensive on the topic. I would imagine, though, that converting it is theoretically possible, since thrust is just the expenditure of energy, which the sun provides. I just didn't know if there was some technology that would allow for it.
American culture is quick to dismiss the abilities of teenagers. But often, the biggest barrier to, say, teens making video games, is the doubt we've taught them to harbor.

"the developers get 70% and MakeGamesWithUs will take 30%."

That's incredibly generous. When I was making games in high school I'd just be thrilled that anyone was actually playing my games. Good on them for not being greedy.
I am not sure how you are reading that statement, but it seems to me that she is very clearly recognizing that what they are doing is the correct decision, from a practice of the law standpoint. She is not saying that they should do otherwise.

schraeds: You have been hellbanned for 126 days. Nobody can see your posts unless they opt-in to seeing 'dead' posts.

Regardless, you would have to ask her to clarify her reasoning. The way I see it though is that she is speculating on why that happens to be the correct thing to do in this case.
Why this Facebook Post Could Destroy a Business
Newer technology made buggy whips and radio tubes unnecessary in the marketplace so the businesses behind them died. Are you making this analogy because you think newer technology has rendered music unnecessary and you think musicians and recording/distribution companies should no longer be making their unnecessary product?

Or is your viewpoint more along the lines that you still want them to make this so-called unnecessary product, but due to your "philosophical considerations", you feel that it's okay to take a copy of the product without paying the asking price?
> It's still a centralized system with one company acting ultimately as a gatekeeper.

USENET was pretty decentralized. If that could me made to update faster, it could be the basis for a decentralized Twitter-like service.
I think this advice really depends on each hackathon in particular. I've only gone to hackathons at my university, and I haven't found that good design is enough or even necessary to get first place. In fact, the first-place projects I remember had fairly poor design and won because they were impressive technically. Of course, really beautiful apps that were far less impressive technically did place, but only second or third.

The first-place winners I remember were: a program that synced lyrics to music automatically, a distributed computing framework for JavaScript and a rather accurate face-recognition system. All of these did not have beautiful (or, frankly, even passable) front-ends, but were nontrivial and rather interesting from a CS standpoint. Moreover, this is not because nobody had good design--there were certainly very polished apps, and they even often placed second or third. They just never won first place at any of the hackathons I've been to.
Sensor uses body’s electrical signature to secure devices