skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently there are some innovations in pressure suit design going on here. This will be the first time we have a supersonic skydive. This jump would be useful in verifying their models. Use cases of supersonic sky dives... pretty much limited to space launch aborts.
I don't understand how PDF could be reflowable.

I'd like a nice ePub, but again, no page-breaks. They'll be wrong for most devices anyway.
Where is the outside camera located?
Cool. I like the fact that his implementation in Javascript is only 630 lines of code. Seems like a good reference for game programming in Canvas!
I think you underestimate kids' intelligence. I would worry about constant bombardment from the TV, and product placement in all their favorite shows far more than an event like this :)
Plessey returns: Chips with everything
So if I comment that the behavior on Ars is surprisingly similar to HN, I should receive up votes from people who had the same thought, and down votes from those who think that's obvious and doesn't add to any new insight?
It's heartening to see high-tech manufacturing return to its roots.
wow. is he that white haired guy in base station?
seems he was also that guy who has set the previous freefall record in the 60s.
Does someone know the reason behind the poor quality of audio coming from Felix? You'd think they had the resources to put in a decent microphone, and data transfer -- judging by the high quality video -- shouldn't be a problem.
What's the problem, and how does your solution work?
Cached:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8InlVBD...
A technical question: how do they get require()ing .sjs files to work, as opposed to compiling and require()ing the output? Is there some way to add hooks that change the behavior of require() to insert a compilation step?
Because no one other than you can see through the marketing spin?
compact-array seems like a specialization of a rope, with the tree structure arbitrarily capped at depth=2, and without the benefits of O(log(n)) insertion.
Web framework for smartphones & high-end devices
If the salaries really go to $400k, saving up a million in the five years seems possible

How good are you against peer pressure?

Everybody else is living it up; you sure you can get by being the only one bringing PBJ for lunch?
yea I heard that too, and then the live feed stopped working as they were talking about the problem... freaked me out! But the feed is back on now.... Was the heating fixed?

(edit: the feed cutting was probably just me, just saying it was an unfortunate time for it to do so)

edit 2: They just said that the problem is specifically for the visor (to prevent fogging and icing), not the whole helmet... They still haven't found out what's wrong.
If only the reef where infinite...
What I find interesting about this post above and beyond its content, is the signal it sends from moderators to the community. We have guidelines, but a post like this from time to time might help reinforce them.
It's a bit of a mistake to classify Wittgenstein as a philosophy professor.

He studied aeronautics originally - bleeding edge in 1908 just after the Wright brothers flight - to the point of starting a Phd as well as holding a patent, and only then became interested mathematics and logic. It was as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army that he wrote Tractatus not cloistered in Cambridge. He then worked as a rural elementary school teacher and architect (he was friends with Adolf Loos, and his family had been patrons of the Secessionist movement).

He only began teaching at Cambridge when he was 40, and was not a professor until he was 50.
Video was never cut, but the radio is still off.
Question - is he going to land in the same country he took from?
The business relationship between a musician and their publisher and a game developer and their studio are nothing at all alike.

Most musicians don't make a dime on their recordings, and nothing more than subsistence on live appearances. For most musicians, "live appearance" means the corner of a bar, or a wedding. And music publishers as a rule don't provide musicians with a salaried job. They're much more like venture capitalists than employers, funding cohorts of 10-20 artists hoping that 1-2 breakout successes will cover the losses from the remaining 18-19.

Developers are as a general rule full-time employees, with steady salaries and benefits. More importantly, when a developer leaves one job, they are (relative to the broader economy) extraordinarily likely to find another job at comparable wages. A developer's role in this market is cushy enough that employers who are willing to accommodate them can be reasonably sure of eventually finding a good developer.

There is a word for the kind of developer who commands residual income from their work: startup founder.

Reward tracks risk, not merit.
Extract:

" We need our own equivalent to the Screen Actors Guild!

When SAG was formed, there was an argument that it would ruin the Film Industry. Many refused to join SAG and of course there were the Blacklist Years as well...

But look at today. SAG is just part of the backdrop and the Film and Television Industries have done just fine, while still managing to pay scale as well as decades of residuals for syndication."

It ain't gonna happen in software while the majority of people want a 'job'. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with that mindset, but it shift the control to the job providers, vs the laborers. The SAG seems to have been set up to help actors in lieu of having a 'job' which would provide a degree of stability. I'm not sure the idea of 50+ year residual royalties was a primary factor in getting SAG off the ground, but I may very well be wrong here.

The closest thing we may have in software right now is working for 'equity' in a company, or profit-sharing options. I've proposed profit-sharing to some consulting clients, and only a handful were even open to the idea. The blog author may be (probably is) looking at this solely from the games-industry point of view, and it might work there, but it's not something that I think most orgs are ready for.
Last I saw his breath was still fogging the screen so not yet
Felix Baumgartner now on his way to free fall from stratosphere
try - http://www.ustream.tv/cbsnews
3.2M now, never seen it so high.
50 years ago today humans went faster than the speed of sound for the very first time. Now we're slightly jaded where we think there's nothing to learn by having a human fall faster than the speed of sound in a suit?
Actively cooled IR sensors can achieve higher resolution and accuracy, but ambient temperature IR sensors have been around for a while. As long as the incident IR can drive the sensor element away from ambient temperature, then you can have sensing.
Left unsaid is some of the craziness associated with Hollywood unions:

I have a friend who was a PA (e.g. drive cross-town to get a particular type of food for Christina Aguilera). Every ten days or so they would get fired and rehired the next day. Why? Because if they worked past ten days they had to be part of the union.

On a set, the unions require a certain amount of union workers to be present (even for extras). To get around this, they hand out union vouchers (which makes you virtually but not literally a union member for a 'day').

Why are movies so expensive? A friend of mine has a cousin who is one of the on-site EMTs for a Hollywood studio (e.g. he idles near the ambulance in case of emergency). For that, he gets paid north of $200k/yr. For (usually) doing nothing.
Article begins with
> ON SEPTEMBER 26th Google, an internet-search firm,

And then the article describes Maps, a major business component that is not Internet search at all.

Also, nice aptonym on Dr De'ath studying coral reef death.
I worked at a successful game company in the mid-90s and we did get royalties (ours were on the net, not the gross, and they stopped when we left the company, so not exactly what Dustin is proposing).

I see two problems with his proposal: the VAST majority of games are commercially unsuccessful to break-even at best. So, for most devs, this would be meaningless.

Second: we're already well paid, and I think of some of that up-front comp as pre-paid royalties.

If you want back-side royalties, you probably have to give up some up-front comp, which is a bad trade for the overwhelming majority of game devs.
yeah and not he seems to be poking at his suit
Or use a heat exchanger.
This is nothing new, e.g. Student's T-distribution came out of statistical research financed by a beer company (http://www.mlive.com/kalamabrew/index.ssf/2009/03/because_of...).
I don't even use downvote buttons. They are the worst idea ever and anyone who uses them is an utterly insecure moron who downvotes to make themselves feel superior. This is one in a long line of downvoting articles on HN that are not even worth the time to click the link.

(EDIT: Apparently some commenters on my post did not read the article. Meta-trolling FTW.)

(I intend to harness the inevitable downvote singularity as a new form of clean energy.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygienic_macro

Hygenic macros are limited to 'safe' operations. They let you extend the language without creating opportunities for incredibly complex and hard to debug stuff like you can do with un-hygenic macros, for example C macros.
Show HN: Minespace, a minecraft social network build during the rails rumble
My iPhone has the same problem :(
so long? twitter bootstrap was released 14 months ago.
It reminds me of Tube, that aims to create an animation movie with content and data cc licensed. The idea is to make elements (modules) such as a characters, moves, light patterns, easily reusable. http://urchn.org/
I often wondered about a possibly connected thing about airplane pilot's microphones:

Why is it that pilots, when addressing the fliers over intercom always have terrible sound quality? You'd think that airlines could afford a high-quality microphone considering the cost of the plane and the pilot's time. Air traffic control should appreciate quality audio as well.

There could be some ruggedness requirement to these microphones that takes precedence over audio quality. Maybe they must withstand decompression?
I was working for me and now that's all I'm getting too.
>that means that NASA could deploy these same space suits as an exit plan for astronauts in an emergency.

What? For exit plan you need a way to slowdown astronaut from orbit first.
I've been thinking about a similar thing, attaching Storm-like parallel semantics to Pipes (probably Gabriel Gonzalez's version) in the Par monad.
If a game developer thinks he deserves royalties, he should probably ask for royalties. He will be laughed out of the room, because nobody deserves royalties, they are merely a particular term negotiated in an abominably screwed up relationship between two medieval cartels. The only reason those cartels are relevant to the discussion at all is the developer is experiencing monopoly-power envy, and these two cartels enjoy anomalously high social importance to impressionable young men.

Game studios will instead choose to hire developers who enjoy being exploited for low wages and in terrible working conditions. They are, empirically, legion, because many young men continue to make poor choices. (There are roughly anomalous phenomena in people trying to get into, say, publishing or non-profits, but those folks don't typically possess skills which are as readily marketable as game developers. The typical coffee-fetching assistant editor could not triple their income and halve their hours immediately by being an assistant editor at a different firm.)

If a developer wants to continue earning from code they wrote once, there are many ways to make that happen, though. Most of them do not involve videogames professionally. One not-trivial-but-straightforward path is to own the company you're negotiating with regarding employment terms.
Yup, marketing is a soft-skill that any developer with a little interest (sometimes desperation) can learn quickly. I've been learning all about it from Mixergy videos and reading all kinds of stuff on warriorforums and applying it to my projects. Its about realizing that 90% of your development effort will goto waste if you don't understand marketing.
HTML has tables - then why divs?
And vice versa. Why must both be there?
I can't recommend enough A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy[1]. It's a great and modern introduction to stoicism.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/01953...
One of the crazy things is that if you listen to ATC feeds long enough, you stop being aware of the 'quality issue'.

EDIT: if you're interested, you can go right here! http://www.liveatc.net/
I transcribed hours of this stuff as part of a research project. The first 4 or so hours were really rough. After that, it got easier, with the majority of issues being that seemingly one in 20 aircraft actually have horrendous audio pickup, and accents.
As little as I know, there are entire branch of science devoted to materials, which basically tells us than we cannot print any "interesting" thing.

For example, you will never be able to print a spare part for your car, just because of materials requited.
And just what is the point of not using JavaScript? Are there browsers that support the latest CSS features but don't support JavaScript? Are there people who turn off JavaScript but expect animations to work?
Yeah, but now almost every startup is using that.
Maybe the raw sound input is run through a band pass filter that attenuates all noise outside of the human vocal range. This would make the voice sound "bad" but it would actually make it clearer to understand, especially in noisy environments.
The edges don't align on Android, the image peeks through.
Refactoring - My Process
Yes the idea is very old, I recently happen to read 25 year old document with A/B testing and CPM discussion in it. Whats news is that people with hard skills can actually make money by working for themselves and not for someone who knows marketing.
The underlying study

http://www.kauffman.org//uploadedFiles/Then_and_now_americas...

is written by Vivek Wadhwa. His pet issue, often discussed here on HN, is policy incentives for increased immigration to the United States by persons he identifies as likely future successful entrepreneus. The key statistic from the report is this: "The proportion of immigrant-founded companies nationwide has dropped from 25.3 percent to 24.3 percent since 2005. While the margins of error of these numbers overlap, they nonetheless indicate that immigrant-founded companies’ dynamic period of expansion has come to an end."

Okay, so the change in percentage is within the standard error of measurement; a percentage change of that kind would be seen even if there were more immigrant-founded companies than ever, as long as more native-born Americans than ever found companies; and there is NO indication that Silicon Valley's flood of innovation has ceased. What is the problem here? Quantitatively, what is the proof that any policy change is needed?
Yes, Kittinger is the man walking Felix through the procedures. This is the Dynamic Duo of high altitude jumping. I felt a shiver listening to them, this is a day I think I will tell my children about.

p.s. Kittinger is 84!
Yup, the same.
SAG came about in an era when there were relatively few studios who produced the vast majority of movies. As a result, the options for skilled workers was low, and you had no choice but to endure poor conditions for low pay because your options were heavily limited. Software engineers today have thousands of companies that can hire them.

I actually think that movies and shows should go the other way. Talent and production people should have a stake in the studio, and we should have a lot more of them. It would align interests and we'd have fewer people who are in it just for the preset day rate. We would see more innovation in content, distribution, pricing, and rights.
Kevin Kelly on The History and Future of QS
I have to admit that tech journalism is good in some aspects - especially if the journalist conveys a good point.
You beat me to it.

I'd say it's WebKit — not just Chrome — since it doesn't work with Safari 6 either.
Amazing, isn't it. YouTube started in 2005 and 7 years later it is a distribution platform for live high quality video to more people than watch most broadcast/cable TV.
I'll pipe up for Impro. One of my favorite books. Well, the first half is – it's a meditation on life and the universe as much as it is about theater, and it changed my mind in some cool ways. It's useful for anyone doing creative work, especially collaborative creative work, definitely including programmers. It's also very funny. The second half is about mask work and trance, which I was expecting to be fascinating, but it fell short of the sparkling magic of the first half. The material isn't as generally accessible and probably depends more on knowing how they use masks in production. Johnstone says that the masks have their own personalities, which actors take on when they wear them, and that's probably why he relies on them so much. His tastes in theater run away from personal expression toward simple universals. He's always telling actors to be more boring, and that the worst thing you can do is try to be interesting or clever.

Johnstone lives in my town in Western Canada. I ran into him in Safeway once. He's very tall and his eyes go in two different directions so he looks down at you rather quizzically from two different angles with his head tilted like a bird. I told him I loved his book, and he grunted "Good" and turned around and walked away. A few paces later he yelled "I'm glad it's useful!" and then went out of sight.

He's probably a genius. He was known in the London theatre scene of the 1950s, but felt stifled because he couldn't try whatever ideas he wanted without worrying what somebody famous would think. Then he went to teach at some remote place on Vancouver Island and discovered that he could think and do whatever he wanted. He liked that so much that he got a position in my town and stayed there permanently, presumably because there was nobody there who mattered!
Nicely written article - clarified some points for me.

Isn't the wait for the unordered collection to be "finalized" a huge bottleneck, though. I can see this working nicely for low level parallelisation but not so well for more traditional producer/consumer threads or I/O operations.
That might not be necessary... won't atmosphere provide enough lateral braking too? Either way, that's easier to do and requires far lesser equipment and prep than a re-entry capsule.
S/N on comments goes down as soon as the thing becomes popular, am insightful comment is as likely to appear on slashdot, on a wordpress install or on TC, if it's n a popular topic.

And no blogger can reasonably write often enough on an array of subjects wide enough to keep the level of a news site, unless she takes in some other authors, and at that point there is not a lot of difference.

Also, there are still many sites that are widely above 90% of the blogs, such as ARS o the reg.

There are many interesting tech blogs (acangiano's is one :) ) but they don't fill everything that tech journalism should be.
http://www.redbullstratos.com/science/scientific-values/

It is a pretty nice site, click around a bit.
Things like GPU acceleration come to mind, and also having the visual style where it's actually relevant: in the stylesheet.
I see, thank you. Does anyone have an opinion on XBian vs OpenELEC? I use the latter and it's fine, but if the former has overclocking, I should switch to that.
The Next Battleground for Open vs. Closed? Your Car
Post PC Era Predictions From 1999
If marketing didn't work, they wouldn't do it.
These are real hackers not the script kiddies that most of the media portrays as "Hackers". One of my favourite hack is "The Black Sunday Hack": http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/revisiting-the-blac...
3,694,025 watching now!!! WOW
Capping the depth gives you O(1) gets and sets though. Note that compact-arrays grow breadth-wise whereas ropes grow depth-wise. Breadth-wise growth trades insertion speed for random access speed.
It is sad but, to be fair, this is a tech forum and there are places to go for other types of news.
How to Shut Down Reddit's CreepShots: Name Names
yep - wouldn't work on my locked-down Firefox, but did fine on my vanilla Safari.
FYI, this is the anniversary of Chuck Yeager breaking the speed of sound in the Bell X-1 in 1947:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_X-1
If that's true, it's close to saying one built an MVP with the goal of it not going anywhere.
Same question here. http://www.ourtuts.com/34-outstanding-admin-panels-for-your-... are all made using Jquery. Why you want to avoid Jquery in admin panels?
I have a Galaxy Nexus and have never had this issue.
The Creation of EasyWriter
I'm a tech journalist (for Ars Technica) so I figured I'd weigh in. First of all, I totally agree that there is tons and tons of awful tech journalism, and I regularly make fun of it. But I don't think all of these examples are quite so terrible.

The Wired story has some interesting comments from a very important person in the tech world. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it seems fine to me.

I'm not a TechCrunch fan, but this particular story relays some interesting information that people might not have read if they read TechCrunch instead of TorrentFreak. I've quoted TorrentFreak in some of my own stories, it's often a good source. There are so many worse examples from TechCrunch that could be used to make the case against tech journalism, but I'll just point out one: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/24/the-lyft-launch-that-coulda...

Agreed on the BI and Mashable examples. Funnily enough, the Mashable one could have been good if it showed the actual evolution of Windows user interfaces rather than stupid illustrations of people sitting at desks.

If anyone wants a great parody of awful tech journalism, I suggest following this person on Twitter (I especially love the picture, which is a parody of the guy who started Mashable): https://twitter.com/nexttechblog
Eye Movements Could Be Next PC Password
as an american, context is not in our vocabulary. this was funny as shite, though.
You should try giving foundation a shot. http://foundation.zurb.com/

I started using it over bootstrap and I'm starting to like it a lot.
I just looked at it and it seems worse. It doesn't show examples of how it does the things it does. You can't even tell what to undo.
Update: They just said that it's just the visor heat that's broken -- not helmet heat.

Visor heat are the wires in the glass that keep it from fogging, like the rear defroster in your car.

And it seems they're not sure if the heat is broken, or just the thermometer.
I would probably move HTML button to the far right of the menu and maybe get rid of strikethrough. Also, the P, H1, etc dropdown menu icon didn't immediately make sense to me. But those are all minor gripes -- this is really, really nice work. Congrats.
Neural brainwaves. Duh.
You can analyze the "true value" of books relative to whatever particular aims you have in mind. Just because there's nothing intrinsic to the books that specifies what those aims should be does not mean the effect of the books isn't in-principle measurable, and couldn't be judged for effectiveness once you have specified your goals.
The whole electronics supply chain is optimized towards volume manufacturing. There's a second supply chain for small volumes, but it's expensive: boards instead of chips or more expensive chips and boards(due to volume breaks), complex development, testing. The assembly costs are relatively minor.

I think the first step for the kinko[1] vision would be to largely automate the development and test costs. Maybe arduino is one path to this.

[1]I think it would make more sense as a centralized source who prints designs coupled with rapid shipping, not as a kinko.