skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not that simple. You are vastly underestimating how much scaleup is required to sustain that acceleration up until you get a reasonable trip time.

Here's the summary from NASA:

"Here are four examples [large graphic][1] of what it would take to send a canister about the size of a Shuttle payload (or a school bus) past our nearest neighboring star...and allowing 900 years for it to make this journey.

Well....If you use chemical engines like those that are on the Shuttle, well..., sorry, there isn’t enough mass in the universe to supply the rocket propellant you’d need.

So let’s step up to next possibilities, nuclear rockets with a predicted performance that’s 10 to 20 times better!

Well...it’s still not looking all that good. For a fission rocket you would need a BILLION SUPERTANKER size propellant tanks to get you there, and even with fusion rockets you would still need a THOUSAND SUPERTANKERS!

Even if we look at the best conceivable performance that we could engineer based on today’s knowledge, say an Ion engine or an antimatter rocket whose performance was 100 times better that the shuttle engines, we would need about ten railway tanker sized propellant tanks.

That doesn’t sound too bad, until you consider that we didn’t bring along any propellant to let us stop when we get to the other star system...or if we want to get there quicker than 9 centuries.

Once you add the desire to actually stop at your destination, or if you want to get there sooner, you’re back at the incredible supertanker situation again, even for our best conceivable rockets.

In conclusion, we’d really like to have a form of propulsion that doesn’t need any propellant! This implies the need to find some way to modify gravitational or inertial forces or to find some means to push against the very structure of spacetime itself."

The rest of the website[2] has some good information, even if the organization is a bit disjoint.

[1]: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/images/content/84509main_w...

[2]: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/ipspaper.h...
I created two accounts a while ago with completely different personalities and friend circles. They didn't have any friends in common. One day I logged onto both accounts from the same PC, logged into A, logged out, logged into B.

The next day when I logged into A account B appeared as a suggested friend.

This PC wasn't blocking cookies/js or using a vpn.
Yeah, the ModPo class is impressive thus far. They are producing a ton of content in the video roundtables, and the prof seems to have endless enthusiasm for the online forums. It's a tough subject to teach remotely, but they're really pulling it off.
This used to happen to me all the time on all sorts of pages. I haven't noticed it since upgrading to 12.04 so perhaps it has been fixed.

I did find the bug report for it at one point and a workaround is to right-click and open the web inspector. For some reason this forces a re-render that fixes the problem.
For Weight Loss, Less Exercise May Be More
A6 still outperforms the new one:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/18/motorolas-razr-i-benchmar...

Also, it's important to note that JS engine optimizations play a huge role in this test, so it's not all just hardware performance, but that doesn't necessarily mean Intel has a disadvantage here. I believe Intel has been working just as heavily to tweak the JS performance in the phones that shipped with their processor.

Also, Intel is being misleading about having a "2 Ghz processor". The thing is it will use that frequency when it's doing the benchmark, so you'll be like "wow, great performance from this chip", but then in 99% of the situations, you'll be using it at its "real frequency" of 1.6 Ghz (Anand says it's still 1.3 Ghz, Engadget may be in error there), so the real performance is probably much worse than the benchmakrs make it look.
I also frequently experience this glitch, default zoom level is 100%.
Best one yet in my opinion. Thanks.
Errors: part of the learning curve
History on Twitter, Is Vanishing From Web, Say Computer Scientists
> The problem is that they have not been built for you.

As well as not being built for you, it was also not built by you. I believe NIH syndrome is responsible for the glut of half-finished programmer tools that litter the SaaS market.

That's not to say that there is not room for another bug tracker, nor that there is anything wrong with a touch of NIH syndrome here and there.
Magnolia Free - Infographic PSD Template
Magnolia Free is a package of elements used to create infographics. We took care of the design quality, you can download a Infographic PSD template for free.
Honestly? I'm not sure. I know there are at least a few physicists who post on HN, and perhaps one of them could provide a more informed estimation than I.

Bear in mind, this article only addresses one of the many fundamental challenges to the Alcubierre drive: the energy requirements. Typically, the energy requirement has been considered the primary challenge to the feasibility of the device. But it's not the only one. Science hasn't completely worked out what would happen inside the bubble, or what happens to particles of matter interacting with the bubble at its leading edge. I've heard at least one speculation that the bubble would fill up with Hawking radiation and pretty much roast everyone alive inside it, like a big, interstellar dutch oven.

Another issue is the stability of the bubble itself. Again, the article doesn't really address this issue. But it's a pretty big one.
i'd rather code in brainfuck than this
Lobbyist “Internet Association”: Roster Full of Tech Giants
God sees you. You are stupid fucks.

God says...
angers dwelling-place strikes broughtest unskilfulness proclaiming
MS whomever knowest lies Cross make_my_day look 'that
Jesus regular eyes providedst indulgent liberty derides
deride speedily Kuwait Texts DOMAIN predicted Whatsoever
sittest Carthaginian humility injure dieth fables Swaziland
submitted I_planned_that tides confiding life-giving harm
talent passengers diligent renewing Genesis quickness
conclude Divinity fly pitiest assuring it_was_nothing
age sleepest enter
Looks like some poor guy ran in to a creeper:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/clickdrag/18s3e.png
Would you not call the manufacturing process for the aluminum case innovating?
Let Shit Happen
> Also, it's important to note that JS engine optimizations play a huge role in this test

Running the bench on a 4S running iOS6 should fix that.

According to the article (and the original source on anandtech), the actual insight provided by SunSpider is its stressing of the memory interface (this was apparently Intel's original explanation for why Atom crushed A9-based SoC in SunSpider even though the raw processing power was pretty similar), and is a datapoint in support of the hypothesis that Apple's custom core design put a high emphasis on on improving the memory subsystem (and much higher than the stock ARM designs).
The recovering programmer
That would work as well, yes.
It's depressingly true. It's also why non-insiders are increasingly not bothering to edit/contribute to Wikipedia (http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/19/157056...), and the organization now finds itself practically begging people to edit (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_add_a_love...).
XKCD: Click to Drag, full-screen with cursor control
1 French telecom company has a monopoly on the iPhone 5 4G Network
Great work, much easier to explore now! I spent far to long this morning dragging myself down a tunnel.
3 Ways to Keep Your Non-Profit on the Corporate Giving Radar
Well I doubt he'll be winning many new converts with this article. It is dense with straw-clutching and credulity. Some it seems to be simply borne of delusion. This sentence, for example:

"The bored-by-the-iPhone tech press/industry experts surely value niceness, but they do not hold it in the same top-tier regard that Apple does. They are not equipped to devote an amount of attention to niceness commensurate with the amount of effort Apple puts into it."

is the fruitiest thing I have read in a while
I copied a couple of the hints people have given here and there, and thought I'd share. If anyone has any more nice ideas, let me know and I'll try to add them.
The real link:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/19/us-nokia-strategy-...

I wonder if they will quickly switch to Android if they will kick Elop out and decide the Microsoft partnership has failed. That would be great news in my book.
Dear language creators

Stop creating non-googlable language names

R already is trouble enough, at least C is more known
but still confusing
New Office 2013 icons show cosmetic updates
An anonymous tipster has contacted Neowin with a few of the icons that have been updated for Office 2013.
1. The Sun uses gravitational confinement and will run for over 10 billion years, producing nearly 400 yottawatts of power all throughout that time. The relationship to the average power density of compost is utterly, utterly irrelevant.

2. Oh no, neutrons! If only we'd spent 7+ decades working with neutron reactions and their interactions with materials. It's a shame there are no functional power reactors anywhere in the world that are subjected to a high-neutron flux.

3. Magnetic confinement of fusion works just fine, we're at a point where it looks like it's simply a matter of scaling things up to get to greater than break-even energy-wise. How practical and competitive such reactors might be remains to be seen, but it's fairly unlikely that they just plain won't work.

4. The biggest advantages of fusion as an energy source are that it's safe and clean. It won't be until quite some time in the future when we have the ability to make use of something like p-B11 fusion reactions (which are far, far beyond our capability at the moment due to the much higher plasma temperatures required) when fusion will be, potentially, much cheaper and easier than competing alternatives (due to the potentially lower capital cost and conversion efficiency of an aneutronic fusion reactor which wouldn't even need a steam turbine).
A relevant question on the Quantitative Finance StackExchange as to whether J/JDB can be used as an effective replacement for Q/KDB+ can be read here: http://quant.stackexchange.com/questions/1870/can-the-j-lang...
Wacko in the Morning 09/19 by Wacko Bob
> 95% of the information on the web is written language.

Really? Youtube videos, Facebook photos, TV shows, movies, music, etc only 5%?

To be expected from a company that sells a text editor that's 95% typography.
Approving a bad flashlight app might not hurt Apple, but a bad app for payments certainly would.
Personally, when I was a manager and going over CV's, I liked it when a person would add a title in the form of "Looking for xyz".
Where the statement is not generic and is actually aiming at what you want to do. If there is more than one such thing you'd be happy to be hired for, put aside these statements and just updated the CV before sending it based on the specific job offer.
most founders are selfish morons compared to some
of the people they hire later to make them rich.

Lets hope there aren't many startup founders reading this forum - or they might get worried :-)

Anyway, enough silliness, is it feasible to create an expectation or culture that rewards early hires in line with the (expected) drop in salary - the argument being that if I could earn 150K contracting for a year, but work for you at 50K, I should expect to garner 100K worth of equity.

Or are we going to see a simple return to the basics of start-ups - it takes money to start a company. You need lots of it to hire good people. Or is it really feasible to do everything with three guys in a room?

Or is it simply that heaving a compny into existence takes more than just technical know-how. it really is about hustle.

I honestly doubt that start-ups that become profitable and breech the magic 1m /pa are purely taking the employees pay cuts and moving them around - I mean that money does not really exist.
Very nice, I've been looking for something like this for my own open source project, have even been thinking about developing one myself (also using clang/llvm, to get metrics for visualization, call graphs, usages, data dependencies etc).

Current similar systems, as far as I know, are either very limited, or slow, or almost impossible to get to work for other projects than what they're based on.

Nice work. I hope the system itself will also be open source some day :)
The Porsche - Diesel
Given that this language predates the founding of Google by almost a decade I think we can forgive them for not thinking about how "googlable" the name is.
Email Intelligence
Look at the Trackpad page in System Preferences. There's a reason why it's called "Three finger drag" instead of "Three finger scroll". :)
IEEE: 75% percent of cars will be autonomous by 2040
> Having a strong brand is not an abuse of monopoly power. That's ridiculous.

I was not speaking of brand, but OEM agreements. IIRC, if the OEM posts "X recommends Windows Y" on every product page, they get a better license price.

> ...would be something like denying Windows licenses to PC makers unless they agree to exclusively produce Windows 8 ARM tablets

Or differentiating their Android patent licenses according to the licensee's willingness to manufacture Windows Phone devices too. Or only licensing Windows 8 to ARM tablets that can never run anything else.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&#...

Not entirely sure I understand the problem here.
"In fact it is possible" is a pretty strong way to talk about moving something that might not exist.
I have built a similar one for Github hosted .Net projects http://sourcecodereader.apphb.com , detailed description is provided on my blog http://rajeeshcv.com/post/details/47/introducing-sourcecoder...
BTW what's the difference between the youtube urls? I've never head of tech talk archive before.
there are so many established android players already. I doubt that would help them much.

At least the premium W8 strategy differentiates them from samsung and co.
I understand your point of view: just watching the lectures offers an interesting high level overview.

However, the weekly quizzes offer a great learning experience. After watching the lectures for a week, keep taking the quiz over and over again until you really understand the material. Each time you take a quiz you get (mostly) different questions.

For some of the classes you also get a lot of additional material in the homework assignments.
This is called the "coffin corner". It varies for different aircrafts, but they all have it, including commercial liners.
VIDEO: The Making of Mr. Viral
Haha, I wrote some, too. I should have checked here before I bothered, I guess.

Ah well, it was a momentary amusement. :)
I am not a physicist - My understanding is that it is information that is limited to the speed of light. So the technology for sending people to a nearby star tends to be analogous to the to that between Clarke's hominids and the obelisk rather than that between Captain Kirk and Star Fleet.

Warp drive will allow humans to pollenize, not colonize, other planets.
Great work! Two minor problems:

1) Zooming is accompanied by a sideways wobble on Chrome/Linux

2) Solid black tiles are shown as solid white
Some of the cynicism around Coursera (and Udacity) isn't around the way the education is delivered, but the business model.

Both Coursera and Udacity are for-profit businesses, and both have yet to reveal (or decide) how they want to make that profit. Many current for-profit providers of education are not particularly well respected (University of Phoenix, Kaplan, etc). Some non-profit universities are understandable a little hesitant to work with Coursera and Udacity without a better understanding of how exactly they propose to make money (both have many suggestions, but nothing concrete as of yet).

This cynicism is one reason why some universities have decided to "go it alone" (MIT/Harvard/Berkeley being the most notable with edX).

To be clear, I'm not saying this is my viewpoint: I think very highly of both Coursera and Udacity. I just wanted to point out that some of the cynicism stems not from the idea of open access to teaching and knowledge, but from the worries over working with for-profit companies to achieve that aim.
I don't think it's a big secret that certain Wikipedia entries -- particularly those for well-known people, companies, products, and institutions -- are manipulated by SEO and PR teams to get better ranking or link off to favored sources, or sanitized to remove uncomfortable information.

Maybe it's time for Google to address the SEO problem from its end. If front-page SERPs are no longer guaranteed, the incentive to engage in these activities will be reduced.
LINQ, Lambda Expressions and Generic Delegates
Judging by the description of the video in the article, this isn't the same video.
Xkcd "Click and Drag" in a "map" interface
Incongruous Feline
In Part 2 of the series, the author recommends "hanging punctuation" (no indentation on the left side, bullets and quotation marks pushed out into the left margin) because indentation on the left side "interrupts the flow of text".

But I don't think that's right. When you switch from a regular paragraph to a list, and then back to another regular paragraph, you usually want to interrupt the flow of text. You want the reader to know that what follows is a list, not just a continuation of the last paragraph. Similarly, when you put a quote in its own paragraph, it's usually because you want the reader to notice that what they're reading is a quote from somebody else. Or if it's a novel, you want the reader to know that one person is done speaking and another person has begun to talk.

Texts have structure, and typography should make the structure clear to the reader. Not indenting on the left side at all might make your blocks look prettier, but I would much rather have large margins around lists so that they stand out from the surrounding text. Large gaps and indentations are much more effective at conveying interruption than some symbols in the left margin.
That's true, but people are not really buying. And Nokia still is popular in a lot of low wage countries now and they would want to buy Androids at sub $100, while not Windows over $200.
50 great and beautifully designed inspirational quotes
I think this speaks (good) volumes about you and your approach - without all the details you take the initiative.

As someone currently using 99designs (booo!hiss!) to get a website relaunch off the ground. There are one or two designers who have actually, well, read the brief, who engage and listen to feedback intelligently. I will want to work with them again in different areas, and am happy to see they have got some portfolio beginning.

Its the difference between asking permission and asking forgiveness.
That's absolutely true, but hand on heart, how many Web Designers/Developers here really have a say on when they receive content? The chance to build a design around the content would be a fine thing for many of us.
On a related note, have a look at the one page prototype interpreter by Arthur Whitney that later became J, a true work of art:

http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum
The postings by Gruber that make it to the HN front page are not nearly that one-sided.
It sounds like we are as yet a long, long way away from this being a reality, but I suppose it only takes a couple of leaps forward to make it more than just 'maybe possible'.
GlobalThermonuclearWar.info - WOPR inspired scenario name generator
I've got nothing against Go, but this smells fishy. 5-20 second load times on a page in Rails? That doesn't sound like an issue with the programming language, it sounds like an underpowered server, lack of proper caching, or an under-tuned database (or data model).
On the S3/Specs - I was looking at the 4-core version on geekbench - 1853(S3) vs 1601(iPhone5). Ref: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1052786

Of course, since Android has multi-tasking, at least the OS can take advantage of the cores that the front-end app can't.

Android is definitely not as 'snappy' as iOS. But JB is a LOT 'snappier' even on my single-core Nexus S.

I readily take your point - Apple's iPod, iPhone, iPad were magical when they came out. And they continued that with iPhone 4S, iPad3 displays.

But their competition has not stood still. The improvements in the iPhone 5 are not 'revolutionary' - there's nothing there that's pushing the envelope - 'merely' incremental improvements. Not that it's bad, but it's hyped way over what it is.
It isn't who you know, but who knows you.

Facebook is reaching a kind of herd level whereby, those people who aren't yet on Facebook, are actually on Facebook, but they just don't know it yet.
Bitcoin Thieves Yet to Spend Stolen Hoard
Loud Button launches the appropriately-named WTF pedal
Btw this would be almost impossible with dynamic languages.
Minimalism in an Age of Tremendous Hardware
I found this link that seems to be some kind of profile page for "The 2 from Antwerp": http://www.hozpitalityplus.com/profile/The2fromAntwerp
There's a photo album with pictures of Gerard Dogge, e.g. http://www.hozpitalityplus.com/photo/gerard-1

So, if this is a hoax, it's a long time in the making (this page was last updated in November 2009).
On Personal Analytics
This runs contrary to my experience. Could you back this up?
If Nokia survives as an independent company, it is going to shrink considerably. They don't need a lot of people to be a little patent troll still making a product just to avoid the NPE pigeon hole.
I was hoping for a whimsical piece discussing malevolent AIs from popular culture.
Space-time is a single entity, so it's not possible to distort the time without distorting the time. For example, if some astronauts are traveling in another rocket with a constant relative velocity (< c) they would see same of the original space distortion as a time distortion. And if they go fast enough and in the correct direction, they would see that the "faster than light ship" is traveling backward in time (in their time system, the arrival day will be before the departure day).

I don't know enough special relativity to do the calculations, but if this device is constructible I would expect to have huge modifications in the time coordinate. Just in case, say goodbye to everyone before leaving.
Exploring this took me back to the days of playing the Dizzy series of games, wondering what was beyond the next screen.
The only interesting thing would be to see how much of a performance improvement each of the separate changes brought.

Phrases like "Most of the time was spent by the server to compile the necessary dataset of time entries, but also related data." seems to hint at:

a) missing profiling (was it database queries, actual computation, network I/O, disk I/O, ... ?)

b) architectural problems (a database schema that didn't perform, missing indexes, ...)

I'm sure Go is a nice language, but I don't see how Go could improve any of those besides maybe a more managable approach to parallel computations.

Given the amount of seemingly parallel changes that happened, it's pretty much impossible to determine what actually caused the improvement (at least with the information in this blogpost).
I'm sure Microsoft would be content to continue to allow Nokia to pursue Windows Phone in a non-exclusive relationship.

No reason Nokia shouldn't be releasing high-end, high-demand Android units that sell like hot cakes, the same way HTC, Samsung, et al have done several times each since the G1. Maybe it'd keep them out of bankruptcy long enough to allow another couple batches of Windows units.
Look interesting, although I'd pay $$$ for a tool that somehow combined "trello" features with good bug tracking.

I know fogbugz+trello sortof does this, and atlassian has some similar tools.

I would've also paid $ for a kickstarter aimed at committing some usability/look-and-feel improvements to redmine.
No, this was with the default and it persists even after zooming back and forth.