skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Black-body radiation is hard to aim. If you have any active systems on board, I imagine you would have to actually refrigerate your exterior to keep it from lighting up in the infrared range.

Exactly. A long, skinny, highly reflective parabola would do it. You'd have to refrigerate the exterior of that, too, of course.

> This also assumes that your enemy doesn't have observation platforms scattered throughout the solar system that can spot you from dozens of different angles.

No, this assumes that you have high confidence that you know where those platforms are, and that you can aim your emissions in a tight enough beam.

Also, don't discount sabotage and espionage. If only one enemy sensor is in a position to see your stealth infiltrators, then there's a single point of failure which is a good target for espionage. When the US military goes in with stealth bombers, they don't just rest on their technological laurels, they also send in elite forces to knock out radar sets. This means that the enemy should maintain double or triple redundant observation platforms. Or does it? What if their observation platforms are stealthed? Then an attacker is playing a guessing game.

Stealth in space won't be perfect, and it will be fraught. However, it will serve a deterrent purpose against other stealth. It will exist because the disadvantage of having no stealth at all leaves open a powerful game changing tool to be exploited by your foe.
Just learn BASIC, which will give you the least frustration and the most enjoyment. Head over to basic.mindteq.com and choose a compiler (yes, compiler - they exist) and integrated development environment. You might be interested in Freebasic, which will enable you to create games or other software without having a whole lot of dependencies to download. There are versions for Windows and Linux and you can easily interface C code to create slick GUIs on both. Head to zetcode.com to find out how to mix GTK to freebasic. Head over to petesqbsite.com to find a great community and lots of tutorials.

Other nice BASICs are AutoIt (Win), FnxBasic (Win), Envelop (Win), Microsoft VB Express edition (win), Gambas (Linux), Xbasic (Linux and Windows), GFA32 (win)

After learning that language you'll be able to move on to others, even to C which has pointers because freebasic uses pointers too.You'll find a lot of tutorials on the web and a great community for almost all of those.

Lots of people are going to say BASIC is inadequate for serious computing but if you go their way you'll find that the desire to learn has left you by the time you finish reading even one text. Ultimately it's your decision, not theirs.

TL;DR: You can learn BASIC in a weekend. Great community, easy to learn, will accomplish great things, will help you understand other languages.
You're right, that is skeumorphic. And many other things Apple does are too.

However, that doesn't mean every thing -- like the leather stitching in "find my friends" -- that Apple does involving natural textures is skeumorphic.
So the voice search is called Google Now? During the keynote it was confusing because they kept calling the voice stuff "Voice Search" and "Google Now" was only used when talking about the cards (which are confusingly in the same app).
About frickin' time. Firefox looks horrible on retina Macbooks right now, to the point that it's unusable.
The IDE isn't just for novices, unless you really want to hand-configure every I/O pin and block on the device. That can take a hell of a lot of time to read through the documentation and figure out. It's not just a matter of "oh this pin is an input and this is an output" like Arduino/AVR.
Good bye old friend. See you beyond the rim.
Doctors Grow New Ear on Arm of Cancer Victim Sherrie Walter
I'm not sure, but the entire application looks pixelated and blurry, like it's rendered at half-size and scaled up. It's really bizarre.
There are enough articles that re-enforce that Apple Maps (in its current incarnation) are sorely lacking, even in popular areas... A few examples,

- Park Hyatt Tokyo
- Tokyo Railway Station (the MAIN station)
- Paddington Station in London
- Melbourne Aus and Frankfurt Germany Airport roads
- Hong Kong is misplaced
http://www.ausbt.com.au/6-reasons-travellers-should-be-wary-...

The list goes on across the net. I support several other posters in that only an Apple fan would say that the maps are good overall. All you will hear from these people is how TomTom had a bad map 5 years ago, or how Garmin is missing a 3 year old suburb in their area. The fact is that in this instance, Apple stuffed up severely.

It was a brave decision of Apple to go ahead with this version of maps - they would have known full well just how bad it was. Maybe it's the kick in the butt that Apple needed to catch up quickly. I expect that within 6 months, the situation will be a lot better for Apple.
> I cannot, almost as a rule, trust anybody who has not tried a variety of mind altering substances.

EXCUSE ME? I'm sorry, but give me a fucking break!

I work hard, hit my deadlines, contribute to open source, am loyal to my friends, ready to help at the drop of a hat, and I'm risk-taking enough to be an entrepreneur, yet, look out, I can't be trusted because I choose not to smoke it up? How does that follow logically?

I've attended many parties through the years (the early ones were what are so commonly called "drinking parties" because, well, they're college and high school kids getting drunk), and I grew up in a family who enjoy with a few beers after work and on the weekends.

And throughout this exposure, I've never once had even the slightest itch to actually partake, despite the incredible amounts of peer pressure. But I attended the parties, I hung out with my friends and watched them get drunk (and later high, as they experimented further), and never once I did think "Hey, these conversations are so stimulating, I should totally do this too to improve my cognitive faculty."

No, I thought "Hey, you continue doing what you're doing. Me? I'm going to go back to playing the piano and talking with whomever is coherent enough to hold a conversation, and tomorrow, we'll laugh about all the stupid shit you won't remember doing."

Instead, watching folks get drunk, and holding conversations with folks who were high has only helped to strengthen my complete lack of desire to do these drugs. Not because of some aversion to risk, but because I just frankly don't like what I see in people when they are under the influence - they're generally just idiots.

And yet, despite all this, I know I can trust the trustworthy and not trust the untrustworthy, and I do not hold it against someone if they choose to enjoy certain recreational drugs. Indeed, despite my teetotalism, I paid for the open bar at my wedding.

Frankly, your almost complete trust-wise dismissal based on such a trivial criterion as "willingness to do drugs" is as closed-minded as I can imagine. At least I haven't completely written off an entire section of the population because of a disagreement in how we spend free time.
No, Apple has a "liberal arts problem" in that they don't seem to have the hard core folks to do algorithms in the way that Google does. Apple has a lot of smart people, but can you really see them building a self driving car with tons of lasers spinning on it in order to have super accurate maps? I can't. But that's what Google did.

Its also a "device centric problem": I'm always struck when talking with someone from Apple about how device centric they are thinking (running algorithms locally that should run in the cloud, etc.). The cloud is eating the world and device centric thinking, while its done them well for a while, is increasingly incorrect.
Firs thing: Your homepage does not tell me anything about what your site/company does. No idea.

Colors, too many. Tone it down.
RE: When people say efficient market

The hypothesis is predicated on perfect rationality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_rationality

vs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
> Hide and Seek can work in space, even without magical cloaking technology

You put the high-power components of the ship at the focus of a very long and narrow paraboloid with a highly reflective interior and a special absorptive and selectively emitting exterior. The whole ship will be refrigerated, with the radiator at the focus of the paraboloid. Then, all you have to do is to aim your thermal emissions in a direction your enemy isn't -- which is easy to do if your enemy doesn't have stealth.

Hence, stealth will exist, but primarily as a deterrent to keep your opponent from using stealth with 100% confidence.
I agree. But also:

> Maps is likely to improve, and fast.

This is going to be the real test for Apple. They need to fix stuff, they know that, it will be interesting to see when improvements will be noticible.

Cook spoke of 500 million searches in two weeks. If only 1 promille triggered a feedback or "report problem", that would be 500.000 change requests. How can you brute-force this massive amount of data?
Applications need to be 'retina aware' to actually get the full resolution, otherwise they are told the resolution is 1440x900 (this doesn't include fonts, and other system-rendered features, which the OS can always render at full resolution). The program icons also need to be shipped in a higher resolution.
No, but the point is that Apple needed to break away from Google at some point (note: the timeframe to breakaway is subjective). I would say that within 6 months, things will be a lot better for Apple. If they'd stayed with Google, the answer would still be "no" in 6 months.
Dunno about any one else, but I suddenly went right off sugar, suddenly it tasted foul.

I have no idea why at all. I used to have 2 teaspoons in coffee, like normal coke, sprinkle it over cereal and fruit, and so on. One day I made my usual coffee and it was just sickly. I chucked it down the sink and made a new one with out sugar and its was fantastic. Same for everything else. Weird, but there it is.
The pharmaceuticals industry could never have grown so big without patents. That kind of drug research would have had to been done by publicly-funded bodies, such as universities. I kind of feel like this is an argument in favor of this article. It also explains why it will never happen. Now that we have big-pharma how are we doing to disassemble the thing that keeps it alive?
Part of the reason why people want others to use the same drug is to feel less guilty about their using. That goes for people pressuring others to drink alcohol at parties, in high school to try cigarettes, in college to try marijuana, and other substances. The fact that there is a person in a group who is consciously not using the drug brings the idea to mind that using that particular drug might not be the best long term investment. Note that this does not apply to friendly advice given once (which I have no problem with), but it certainly applies to repeated social pressure or emotional blackmail. Even the grandparent borders on that territory: if you don't use drugs you can't be trusted, you have neither an open mind nor a deep perspective, and you're a wimp.

If anybody who is encouraging others to use a drug wants to see the other side of the coin, try ordering a tea or water instead of a beer at a bar, and see how people react. Repeatedly I have been asked what I wanted to drink, answered tea or water, and a couple of minutes later a beer arrives. Don't be so boring, it's here now, drink it! Note that sometimes I do drink alcoholic beverages, so it's not even that they want me to experience something new. I never replace other people's drinks by tea, heck I've gladly helped people buy marijuana (legally).

P.S. my kid brother is addicted to cigarettes and it's certainly not because one day somebody suggested it to him as friendly advice and he thought "Wow, you're right, smoking cigarettes would be so beneficial for me".
I understand your frustration with how the travel guides under-utilize potential of new media.

I would like to ask you, though: do you find electronic renditions of Lonely Planet (for either e-ink reader or tablet computer) an adequate substitute for the paper version? I understand that they could be much better in theory, but are they at least not worse? I am going to go on a tour around Europe and I seriously consider buying an iPad or a e-ink reader in part for Lonely Planet, because they should be easier to carry around than even a single travel guide.
> Somebody out there actually patented a method for moving information through the fifth dimension. As in the Bruce Willis movie. As in faster than the speed of light.

Which movie is that, exactly?
The programming language isn't really the important thing to learn. The important thing is learning how to think and how to break large problems into smaller ones.

I really recommend against starting with C or assembly because they are hard and can discourage you. Even trying to start by making something with Ruby on Rails can be very discouraging.

The best way to start is to work from the beginning and learn the fundamentals of programming and how to think rather than focusing on a language.

I'm making CodeHS (http://codehs.com) to help teach beginners in the most user friendly way possible by stressing the way of thinking rather than the programming syntax.

We're providing help to beginners because we know that people can get stuck.

We're about to change our pricing, but for now, you should check out the free trial. We'd love to hear what you think.
Fizzbuzz isn't a coding test
I think apprehension comes from never realizing $5 worth of value. Myself and others have come to spend money on many apps only to be dissapointed. Theres more times that I will use a free app and pay for the premium version after realizing the value. $1 is a simple impulse buy, $5 not as much.
Abstaining from sugar, tobacco, alcohol, or marijuana seems kind of silly to me. I know that the culture on HN is to try to empower people to be supermen and do extraordinary things. But, when I think of the dedication required to abstain from all these things given the environment I live in, I feel anxiety.

I think anxiety and stress is something that is much more harmful to me than smoking a blunt or drinking a glass of whiskey. I never understood why some people take such a black and white (simple) perspective on this. I guess the only reason I could see is if someone very close to them died from one of these vices, but that is kind of an irrational reaction. I understand it, but wouldn't advocate anyone reacting that way.

In short, I don't really see how soft drugs or unhealthy foods in moderate quantity are really harmful in the grand scheme of things.
"I vowed to simply abstain from any drug at all. No Beer, Wine, Spirits, smokes, hash, coke or other dope for me. I wanted to be healthy and to live as long as possible while keeping my body in as good a shape as I could."

Well Jacques, it is quite strange and disappointing to see that you have spent your life following such a simplistic approach to human brain chemistry.

You seem to have accepted uncritically the message promulgated by your local government about the effects of psychoactive chemicals, that is, that alcohol, "smokes", hash, coke, or "other dope" is bad for your health, and will reduce your lifespan.

In the first place, does it seem rational to you to group the effects of such a wide range of different chemicals together? Tobacco and alcohol, for example, have nothing in common chemically or pharmacologicaly. Their effects on your health or longevity are completely independent of each other. What they have in common is that they have a psychologically pleasant effect, like the other varieties
of "dope" you mention.

Perhaps you have bought into the Calvinistic worldview that what is pleasurable must be ultimately harmful. Do you not indulge in such temptingly wicked practices as dancing and umm, recreational sex either?

How about an item by item rational, scientific approach to each chemical? I'm not going to attempt to be exhaustive here, as anyone can look up a hundred resources, but, as a first approach, I think that your strategy of "complete abstention" is misguided at best. Of course anything can be overdone to the point of being harmful, even internet usage, so all of my comments below apply only to moderate,
reasonable, sensible use.

Alcohol: Legal, moderate addictive potential, overuse increases violence and recklessness. Numerous studies have shown than moderate usage is beneficial to health. Overuse causes liver problems and Korsakoff's Syndrome. Social lubricant enjoyed around the world.

Tobacco: Legal, highly addictive, carcinogenic. Mental stimulant.

Cannabis: Illegal. Barely to zero addictive potential, cancer preventative/therapy. No known overdose. Stimulates
creative ideas. Dissolves obedience to authoritarian world-views.

Coke: Illegal. Highly addictive. Mental stimulant. Causes holes in internasal septum and generally manic asshole behavior.

Psychedelics: Illegal. Highly NON-addictive. A large proportion of users say they have caused the most significant experiences of their entire lives. No known physical effects.

Personally, although I agree with you about sugar, I'm really more concerned that you have accepted a bland, timid, dumbed-down, boring, government-dictated life, than that you are taking any serious health risks.

I think you should take a few risks and get out a little, before you die. How about a fat spliff, a hearty Merlot, and an Ayahuasca trip to the Amazon? You never know, you might find that you've been living your life so far in black and white.
I'm so sick of the "curation" discussion - if companies like NYT go belly-up, there won't be anything for Huffington Post et al. to "curate". It's inherently derivative.

The clip of NYT's David Carr discussing this in a debate in the documentary Page One is unavailable, but I encourage people to watch it.

Clayton Cubitt originally described professionalism versus amateurism very well, but this will do:

“Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional?
Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand?
Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over?
Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.h...

It bothers me that people equate "news" and "journalism".
It's not just dubious it's wrong. Gluten is a protein, not a carb.

And to say legumes are bad when they are actually by far the best kind of carb you can eat is nuts. (Nuts are good too.)
sshd and an scp/sftp client?
That I can do, involves copy and pasting but it has been done, I better appologise for my grammer now, though feedback well receieved and thank you for that.
I suggest you check out google latitude - dashboard feature, its shows some amazing stats along with automatically detecting trips for you.
I don't have an iPhone, but isn't the new maps missing public transit data? Does that mean it won't route me through subways, etc, or doesn't even show bus stops and subway stations? And what about bike paths, Google has fantastic labeling of bike routes. As a city dweller, it's good to know they are "accurate", but, from what I've heard, they are missing many key components that would actually help tons in a city. Not trolling here, just asking if maps has that info, and to what degree. Cuz if that is missing from city data, that to me is just as bad as inaccurate maps for a flyover state.
What? You seem to be very confused. Just give it up. You are wrong.
StartUp Weekend San Diego, ReaderUp
The sad thing is, even non-profits are not guaranteed to stay that way indefinitely.

See how CouchSurfing turned into B-Corporation after being denied their 501(c)(3) charity status:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchSurfing#2011_incorporation

They were a non-profit, for the first 8 years.
This just happened to me yesterday. I was surprised and delighted. ...Then a little creeped out.

Overall I think it's great though.
If you look through, there are some moderately unique ones that are non-perverse and so likely to be reused. As an experiment, I googled one of those, and it looks like it was used in multiple services. There are always some people who are lazy or careless. There are, unfortunately, also probably some accidental name collisions, which will be unfortunate as vigilante justice is fairly indiscriminate.
>Market efficiency and "superiority" (I have several incompatible ideas of what you mean here, but if you could clarify...) of an idealized free market are not assumptions. They are conclusions derived from much simpler assumptions.

Well, highly debatable conclusions.

(As for what I meant, it's that I'm attacking both the idea of the EMH for financial markets, and the general belief in the superiority of the "free market capitalism", going back to the idea of the "invisible hand").

>I'm confused - apart from the fact that you (and Hayek, incidentally) don't like dictators, what are you trying to say here?

That a "science" that studies something _it itself creates_ through "policy advisory" and "legislation" is hardly a science.

Not to mention that it interprets it however fits those it is in ties with, or that its outcomes are more often than not directly inverse of the predicted ones, at which point they blame it on "not enough enforcement" etc, in a classic anti-falsifiability move.

As for Hayek not liking dictators, LOL.

>In 1978 he wrote to the London Times that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende

(...)

For instance, Hayek—writing to The Times in 1978 and explicitly invoking Pinochet by name—noted that under certain “historical circumstances,” an authoritarian government may prove especially conducive to the long-run preservation of liberty: There are “many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies.”

http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/08/hayek-von-pinochet/

Of course, his support to the regime is even worse and far more involved, utilizing it as way to fulfil his economic policy wet dreams. Yes, a great freedom loving guy, this Hayek.

>This is the nature of politics.*

And this is the role of economics and economists.

As for the academic part of economic research, when not done with specific political interests in mind and to support some specific monetary and financial policies, is as relevant as post-modernist gender-studies critical theory. That is, totally irrelevant.
1. Software costs next to nothing to produce. Why is it so easy to have startups in this sector? What is the overhead of a software/web company? It is almost all intellectual. Ask Microsoft. Pure profit.

2. It is difficult for examiners to find prior art because there is no "official" channel for "publishing" software research that they recognise. There is much know-how that is common knowledge among developers but is never published in any paper, textbook, standard, RFC, etc. The "database" for searching all these sources may end being a web search engine. That is not ideal.

1. Drugs are very expensive to produce. Not only the research, the equipment, the staff, but compliance with the regulatory regime. There are no protections against bad software to protect users (developers operate in a wild west type atmosphere), but we have many rules about medicines. These are designed to protect patients. Can you imagine an unregulated pharma industry? Profits take precedence over safety. It would be very dangerous for patients.

2. There is a littany of journals that public chemical, biological and medical research and they can all be searched easily in combined databases, to which most all pharmaceutical patent owners subscribe. It is not too difficult for examiners to find prior art and establish publication dates.

These are my thoughts.
Maybe go straight to functional. Check out Scala.
Too bad while so many people think working remotely is cool- the majority of startups demand on-location presence.