skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They didn't pack a microphone! Bastards! :P

Considering the propensity for dust storms I'm going to say windy. But the atmosphere is thinner, so this makes it harder to hear? Or quieter?
Here's a full-resolution picture taken by the descent imager as the heat shield fell away:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16021.ht...

The descent imager uses the same sensor as the main mast cameras, but with different optics.
That's a pretty fair decree of the App Store.

Doesn't mean even slightly that Steam is a better alternative. It's a horrible launcher and a terrible Mac OS X app. It's a great service and games store and I use it all the time, but as an OS X app it's awful.

It requires you to have "enable access for assistive devices" on just to render its interface. Valve knows absolutely nothing about the platform except what it needs to to make basic ports.

Mark my words, they will not become a viable distribution system in OS X without completely and radically overhauling Steam from the ground up. Just "adding apps" isn't going to do anything.
It would be interesting if Google provided a switch in Chrome/ium to allow you use Incognito as the default mode, and Ctrl-Shift-N to pop up a normal window. That would mitigate this scenario somewhat, at least on one browser.
Yeah, I just don't see grocery delivery becoming feasible until it's done using UAVs. But the main issue with that (aside from getting FAA approval, which is in the works) is that it'll require retrofitting houses with delivery chutes.
It has 92 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at the surface. This would be a bad idea. It would be like being 900 meters deep in the ocean on Earth. 150 meters is about the limit for humans before High Pressure Nervous Syndrome stops the fun.

But around 50km above the surface of Venus, the temperatures are nice, and the pressure is 1 earth atmosphere. You just have to to stay up there.
Notice that I didn't say I was supporting app.net because this group of people are supporting it. I'm supporting it because these are people who I find interesting will likely be there for a while. I don't really care _why_ they are there, just that they are there. Add Horace Dediu, Jim Dalrymple, MG Siegler, KenJennings - and I can now transition over. Of all those names, only KenJennings is unlikely to care - but, I have to believe, that for a while, crossposting to twitter/app.net, and a client that can sort out the two, and keep a unified feed, will resolve that issue.
Hollywood movies do a pretty good job of reminding the US public of the facts of the cruel world out there. Well, the paying US public. Hold on a mo', perhaps there's a case here for allowing unrestricted access to such movies to those who can't afford it, or would rather buy something else. Unrestricted access via, say, Megaupload.
That market is extremely small. Most people don't use applications like that, or OSes like that, nor do devs really offer cross platform applications like that.

I also don't understand why the MAS is a dud and this would be any better. Steam's standards and review process are way more strict and cryptic than Apple's. Plenty of indie devs have felt the sting of Steam rejection. I have little doubt they will also require sandboxing.

Is it just the cross platform aspect? Everything else about it seems to be the same or worse. Not to mention Steam's integration with its host OS is just awful. It's like a completely segmented world rarely following any UI guidelines or making any attempt to fit in.
Pretty funny to see a video from a Color employee: http://www.tapin.tv/#video/132bdb3fbadc4fa0ae89a640ece9e918/...
If Amazon sets up a physical business in any given state, they have to start collecting sales tax on all their sales to that state. So "cost effective" for Amazon Fresh means not just cost effective in isolation, but also accounting for the cost in infrastructure, lost sales, etc. that comes with collecting sales tax.

That's one of probably a dozen reasons why what works (or doesn't) for Amazon might be different for Instacart.
I really hate it when iOS developers make Android apps.

Android has AccountManager. It automatically integrates with the accounts on your device. If you ever present you own UI for a login screen then you are doing it very very wrong.

What should have happened is that on start when I said I wanted to use a Google account it should have shown me the accounts from AccountManager, and then I would have picked and authorised one. No need for passwords etc.
If Google starts messing with my email then it might be time to unplug from _all_ of Google's products.
New Unlimited Detail video and story
The biggest problem here obviously is that nobody does, or wants to use Google's Closure library.
I read HN every day. It is probably the site I read the most after Google reader. It is my go to for filling time between doing actual work and doing more actual work. I'd like to think I'm vaguely down with the Internet kids, but..

Wtf is App.net and why do I care? Am I supposed to know about this already? Is this supposed to be as common knowledge as twitter or facebook in my nomenclature?

Dalton is sure as shit not going to tell you, and the site is far too awesome to waste its time telling you either.

Reading the API docs (really, I have to read API docs to work out what this does?!) tells me it's a "real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers.".

Taking that knowledge on hand and looking at alpha.app.net, it looks like a twitter clone, but presumably one that you pay for.

Aren't there free twitter clones already?

Anyway, rant over, colour me confused. Idk... there are lots of projects people could be building, and there is every kind of possibility this has really useful stuff in it, but from the outside it just looks like another twitter clone.
Sure they have a 2 megapixel camera, but there are probably good reasons, of which you mentioned one I can think of. The other being that they can only send back limited data which has to contest with scientific experiments and navigation data, and they can take multiple 2MP shots to make a panorama like they do, effectively making a higher res image (assuming they can zoom).
That was long ago proven to be false, and either way it has absolutely nothing to do with this. Apple would never collaborate with an outside party on an alternate app distribution system. That's ridiculous.
> But in the past pioneers didn't expect me to pay for their adventures through taxation.

Last time I checked SpaceX was a private company, either profitable already, or on track to become so pretty soon.

And even if you were talking about the NASA mission, I'm still all for it, no matter what Zombie Ayn Rand is mumbling in the basement.
NASA's problem with the DMCA
The Just Procure Lockheed thing is never heard around JPL. I'm not doubting that someone said it, some time, but that's not the Lab mindset at all. If you want to make an institutional characterization about JPL, you could say "hardware-centric", or "arrogant", or "cocky", but not "Just Procure Lockheed".

I agree that there are a lot of subs, but JPL and other centers have a very strong interest in maintaining a core capability in strategic areas. Launch vehicles: not a core capability, and commercially available -- subcontract these. Planetary robotics and deep space communication: core capabilities -- keep in-house.

Also, your comment underestimates how much distributed expertise is required to develop and integrate a set of instruments like this, and to get it to Mars. It's not practical for all that expertise to be NASA only.
This isn't as hard as you think. Place an optical indicator (like a QR code), on a piece of paper, and put it where you want the groceries to wind up. Drone finds your house. Finds your landing spot (which was presented to you via a nice "print this" dialog when you ordered), and sets the stuff down.

Alternatively, if you're going to be doing this, you can purchase and register an IR beacon that is more permanent than a piece of paper.
> as I understand, if you could cool it down to an
> acceptable temperature, you could walk on the surface
> with just a breathing apparatus, right?

Sadly, probably not. Cooling it down is already a very tall order, and even then, you would need to find a way to remove most of the atmosphere in order to reduce the pressure (~90 atm at the surface).

Mars is a much better bet for human habitation in the short term. Chemically, it has all the ingredients we need to support human life. And it is much easier to build structures that can withstand the thin atmosphere (0.6 kPa) and relatively tame temperature range (-87 C to 63 C, all figures according to Wikipedia) than to build something that can survive the 9 MPa and 450 C on the surface on Venus.
Judging the UI and video, it appears they are catering their market towards consumers when I think they should be catering towards businesses. The only time I've used a spreadsheet for personal use was calculating a budget; but there are better apps than Grid for that (Mint).

If I wanted to go camping with friends, I'd call/text/email them and use a text editor to keep track of names and items that we need.

Now if they can get businesses to be productive on their tablets and phones on the other hand....
My takeaway is that this is not profitable on the global or national scale, but on a local or regional scale, it can be. Amazon might not want to pursue a strategy with limited scalability, whereas Instacart might not even need to worry about that.
NASA adheres to planetary protection procedures and requirements. For MSL...

"Selected components were heated to temperatures
ranging from 110 to 146 degrees Celsius (230 to
295 degrees Fahrenheit) for durations up to 144
hours. Tools and other equipment that could come
into contact with rover hardware were also cleaned
routinely with alcohol wipes."

More details here:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/pdfs/MSL_Plan_Prot_FactShe...
I thought this concept of grocery deliveries for free had died with WebVan back in 2000 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan]
Mix that with the highlight buffer and middle-click to paste, and I can't stand working on any desktop that doesn't support that kind of workflow...
The zdnet site is just... awful.

That said, the review was fairly light on content. A lot of 'almost' and 'mostly' but no actual discussion as to what the gaps are!

Plus for an article setting this up to be a comparison to the air... there weren't any actual comparisons!
How could contributing to an OSS project be a zero sum game?
> I have trouble comprehending the size of other planets

I'm not sure this will help, but the surface area of Mars is about 1/3 that of Earth. Given that roughly 2/3 of the Earth's surface is covered by water, one can think of the surface of Mars as being roughly equivalent in area to the entire land area of the Earth.
velodrome:

You can make the Unity launcher (i.e., the sidebar) less crowded. Just run "Appearance" (<Super><A>, "appea", <Enter>) and change Launcher Icon Size to 32. I had to do this myself for the same reason.

You can also switch quickly between all windows of the currently focused app -- just tap <Alt><`>. (The <`> key is right above the <Tab> key on US keyboards.)

Also, note that the little triangular pointers on the launcher are different for applications running in the current workspace versus those running in other workspaces.
Sounds like a great blog in the making
I wish image-set was more efficient to use. I'm way too lazy to maintain explicit lists of every variant file path for every image if I can avoid it (which should be possible if we take advantage of systematic file naming conventions already commonly in place). I'd take this proposed solution over image-set, simply because it avoids that extra work, not to mention being more backwards-compatible; image-set would require you to list the path for the 1x asset of an img element in both the 'src' attribute and the image-set attribute in order to maintain backwards-compatibility.
You don't feel that someone like the Rev. Al Sharpton would fit into such a category?
It's not that simple. There are a lot of people living in apartments - how's it going to work for them?

And where exactly would you place the indicator? In your front yard? Normally, delivieries are made to your porch, but the drone would have difficulty finding an optical indicator on the porch from above.

And what about groceries that need to be refrigerated? Those will need to be dealt with specially.
We abandoned Github issues for Trello and also use it for project management amongst other things.

The single most useful thing is having all items in one place, be they features, administration work, bugs etc. It is trivial to reprioritise and trivial to see what is going to be done and has been done. You can also assign more than one person to a card which is handy sometimes.

The problem with most trackers is that they are project based and you often end up with your backend, frontend, Android & iOS apps being different projects. But often issues and planning span the projects, so you end up with arbitrary information and issues all over the place.

For wikis we've mostly ended up using Google Docs. Having people learn yet another syntax hasn't been helpful, and again you end up with cross project issues and linking.
Circumcision is something people do for either religious or medical reason, it has a long history behind it. It may be useless but at least it is not invented yesterday by the chemical or porn industry.

For the "jungle down", I think shaving it make boys and girls look like prepubescent kids, or some kid of caricature of kids. When I said weird I meant it because presence of pubic hair has been for a long time the marker of the beginning of sexual life.
I run 12.04 on a similar netbook but I don't feel Unity particularly slow. Of course, the Atom processor in it isn't designed to be fast, but it's usable.

And the launcher can be turned off.
Er, why am "I" expect to muck around like that to simply protect my privacy, which was more private in the first place?

Here's an idea, privacy first, ooooh anit we cool coders second. Privacy very much has to be the default, not google's cleverness or revenue stream.

All I can say is thank the non existent one that I don't use gmail for anything even vaguely important.
I was offered local locations (all 7-11s) for an order I placed to the SF Bay Area yesterday, so it looks like SF can be added to that list.
That's an attack on the author, don't you think?

(Shrug) Quinn effectively attacked and discredited herself by posting that Tweet. It's fair to bring it up when suggesting that she might not be the most qualified person to write articles on subjects related to cryptography and information security.

If there are any subjects that don't benefit from uninformed opinions posted by dilettantes, cryptography and security would be near the top of the list.
Yes. For example Amazon offers quite a poor consumer experience for clothing and shoes, even if they do sell them. There are reasons why Zappos can thrive (and presumably why Amazon acquired them).

[Edit in response to comment below: I do not believe it is right to try something in a store and then go buy it online. Even if you believe that is okay, it actually proves that the purely-online consumer experience is sub-standard, otherwise why bother go to a store at all?

While Amazon is great at issuing refunds for, say, non-functioning electronics, they don't issue full refunds if you buy a hat and there's nothing wrong with it but it doesn't quite fit/look right, and you have to pay for return shipping. Contrast this with the Zappos approach where returns are both free, and hassle-free].
Are you suggesting users pay per follower? You've essentially turned it into an advertising platform; which gets us right back where we started only worse (can't get influence at all unless you pay for it)
What? It says "App.net is a real-time social feed without the ads." right at the top of https://join.app.net, and "Continue to join.app.net, our Kickstarter-like project to create a real-time social feed." right on app.net.

How is he supposed to tell you what it is if you don't even go to the website?
And it's not just when someone else is using your computer. At work, I frequently have people in my office asking me questions, and I often do a web search while they're sitting next to me. I wouldn't want personal stuff from my e-mail being displayed to random co-workers. And I really don't want to have to remember to open an incognito window for searching every time someone is in my office.
Ah, ok.

Don't know if it'd help (and not to suggest you didn't try), but sometimes quotes can help on that front. Also, can't speak to the apps version--haven't used it myself.

Thanks for the reply.
In Canada (at least in southern BC) almost everyone uses their credit or debit card for almost everything. Cashiers assume it and if you hand them cash they'll often have to back out of the transaction they already set up on the debit machine and sometimes even say "you're the first person to pay with cash today". It doesn't matter if you're buying a TV for $2000 or coffee for $2.
Perfect. Given Venus's gravity is 0.904g, we could work something out in a few years.
Wait, you got live stream video with SOUND without needing a $41M price tag?

And we get to see everyone testing out Tapin.tv live lolz...

Looks like fun, would love to see more tagging and sorting of what's available to watch - I'll look forward to more features to come! Great job guys!
OptiPlex covers a large number of models and hardware, just like "ThinkPad" does. I'd imagine that the Ubuntu Certified Hardware list specifies models that are known to work well.
I took the comment as questioning the terminology not poking fun or being particularly snarky. I see the comment along the lines of "aren't numerical manipulations an essential property of spreadsheets?"

These days, a spreadsheet that doesn't calculate is an edge case given thirty years of mainstream usage of the term. Though having had the pleasure of revising letters my boss drafted in Lotus 123, I can accept the proposition that calculations are an accidental property.

Disrupting the spreadsheet requires convincing people that "spreadsheet" is not synonymous with "Excel." A task which is probably harder than it should be given that Excel is a reasonably practical tool for preparing Gantt charts or a data table for a mail merge [tasks for which I have used Excel on more than one occasion].

Richard Diehl's Tabulus is another interesting approach in the opposite direction.
My understanding was that even in those cases, most people just pirate windows xp. I am not even close to a windows lover, but have you seen the system requirements for windows xp? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865

Basically a 233MGhz processor and 64mb of ram will get you a usable windows xp installation.
The very first thing I did was try to pinch to zoom out to multiple lists. I've got a nice wide 10.1" screen. A single list stretched over that entire thing looks dumb.

Great to finally have the app, but really looking forward to some updates.
I think you're forgetting the limitations of payload and fuel...
Daring Fireball: App.net
How is it not a product? Technically I would call it a service but regardless, how is it not a product or service?
> You seem to be replacing my own experience, and that of the people that alum rocks have worked for, with your own lack of it.?

No, I'm saying that your claims are so outlandish that even the manufacturers of alum rocks don't support them.

> I don't see how that's even remotely a valid comparison. There is nothing homeopathic about alum crystals.

Maybe it'd be clearer if I used the word placebo.

> Then why didn't they spread and colonize the next day, as you have claimed they would? Ohh, you've already explained that away.

They do, which is why a good scrubbing with antibacterial soap doesn't make them disappear forever.

> My skin is not my armpits. The other areas don't have the same temperature, humidity, and sweat. Those areas don't have and breed bacteria like armpits do. And it takes time for the bacteria to spread, multiply, and get below the surface. Once you've eliminated an area, it's going to be a while, regardless of the small amounts of bacteria on other areas.

You drastically underestimate how much bacteria is on the rest of your body, and how quickly those bacteria spread and multiply.
I find this jarring. Web development is all about bending over backwards for the different systems in place. Here we have an article on how they achieved a nice minimal process for uploading images for a closed system nobody will be able to use (to protect the image they're not releasing the system yet aren't they?).
I used Amazon Fresh when I lived in Seattle & Redmond; and I think this appeals to a different impulse. The key with Instacart is it's (almost) instant, Amazon Fresh is not. The "hey I'm setting up for a bbq, and I need to a couple things from the grocery" is not possible with Amazon Fresh. Whether or not it's a big enough market... I guess they're going to find out!
JS lib would be more correct than "jQuery lib" on the title. Yes, it has jQuery as a dependency, but it's not a jQuery plugin nor extends jQuery in any way.
Weird. his last day at EA was april 25. [1]

I would guess he got the stock when he accepted the offer from zygna, not his first day.

Of course, maybe you're right, and he makes million dollar mistakes like like that all the time. If that's the case, good for zygna for getting rid of him.

[1] http://investor.ea.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-11-108...
Thanks! We figured sound would be something people would want along with their video so we included it.
In addition to samstave's comment, I prefer using hnsearch

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=svb...
I'm constantly entertained by the amazing things that people will claim.
it's a pretty safe bet that a former Amazon employee has a stronger grasp on why Amazon's not made money with this than does some random dude on the web.
I agree. While I'm not happy with the way the Unity switch was handled, this is definitely not a "KDE4" type disaster where entire apps were ported over with new bugs, and half the feature-set of the KDE3 versions.

I've been running Ubuntu 11.04 (first release with Unity) for a while as a workstation desktop, and while there are warts that I'm sure are dealt with in 11.10 and 12.04, it's mostly annoyances. Nothing that has seriously impacted my productivity.
Google Doodles Slalom Canoe 2012 – Tutorial Get Less Than 15 Seconds Score
There's a difference between modeling yourself after someone -- "Sony is cool because it cares about quality and design, and we should too" -- and slavishly copying them.

Samsung certainly doesn't model itself after Apple. It just copies their product designs down to the packaging and marketing.
Personally, I wish Amazon had stuck with books. IMO, their diversification has made their site organization suffer -- especially when they allowed 3rd-party sellers to create product listings (which led to maddening duplicates).

I pray that Newegg's diversification from computer hardware won't have the same adverse effect, but it's probably a law of retail that it will.