skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Power for an actual helicopter or multirotor is extraordinarily unlikely to ever be sufficient with solar, even in the short term, on a sunny day.

Power for an efficient sailplane is alright for an afternoon... but only barely have we achieved the 48-hour golden timespan with extreme size, expensive materials, good weather, and working the batteries to within an inch of their lives.

Power for a hyperblimp, which is probably the closest to what Stephenson described (but 1-2 orders of magnitude larger), is easy to provide with solar. Expect them reasonably soon in military applications.

There is experimental-but-also-just-barely-workable laser propulsion, and also what I like to call a 'Flying Pole' where a wire-tethered quadrotor sits in one place 100 meters up for a vantage point, indefinitely, with significant practical payload (this is used experimentally by various militaries).

Lastly, there is the holy grail, autonomous swarm launch, landing, and refueling, which allows a large number of quadrotors to blanket an area of several kilometers around with close-in distributed surveillance. With the right code and minimal hardware, and importantly a large enough swarm to justify infrastructure, this is highly practical, the engineering just has to be done. I have my doubts that this will be reliable for a while with small fixed wing drones - the wind and approach makes it a much harder problem than VTOL craft.

In case you're interested, UAV construction is now a large sector of the RC aeromodelling hobby. I've tried to catalog developments on my wiki, http://dronepedia.com , but it's a firehose of information out there. If you want to dip your toes in, check out a day's discussion on http://diydrones.com
SCORE: Free Small Business Advice
There's no need to be a jerk.
any comments on how it compares with say Restify (http://mcavage.github.com/node-restify/) from folks who have used both ?
There is no link bro.
"`const` is not part of the EMCA spec"

It's called ECMA.

"V8, the engine powering Node.js, does offer support for it."

There's no guarantee that const will be used in the same way in the future. I bring this up because of the bevy of articles that discuss the express framework (remember when it shifted major version number?) and other frameworks that have seen backwards-incompatible changes.
Ask HN: How Do You Stop Your Mind From Racing
Hi hackernews ever since I was a kid my mind has always been racing.Wherever I go I am thinking about things,physics mainly. It has gotten to the point where I am unable to enjoy anything. I can't relax,I can't sleep, I can't even enjoy a simple conversation. Any suggestions on how to stop my mind from racing. I have been taking Ritalin LA since I was 5 but it has been less than helpful in that area. My doctor had me try strattera and adderal before but it didn't work. No workout only school and programming. I am attempting to meditate on a daily basis, which I have been failing at miserably.
Do note, that most big companies claiming they do 360 degree feedback don't. It is much like a lot of companies claiming they do "agile".
I'm not entirely sure the article is calling for CEOs to roll up their sleeves and get directly involved in the development of their sites. Instead, it seems to me that the author is calling for CEOs to gain a better understanding of this emerging trend, so that their interactions with project managers and others will be better informed.
I'm actually not a native speaker, so indeed, I might not know. I checked in the dictionary though. This is an analogy, but not a very good analogy, because of the reasons that I pointed out. Are you disagreeing with any particular reasoning there? Or should I just say "they're similary, but"?
You're onto something. Africa is often typed as one monoculture. It is a continent with an insanely diverse set of cultures and income levels. Americans treat "Asia" almost as ignorantly. North Africa, West Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa are all radically different... just like the Phillipines, Vietnam, Japan and China are all radically different.
How Not to Sell a Business (2009)
Show HN: WordPress Customization Made Easy
I do, but I also appreciate further distinction between pypy and llvm in this context.
I didn't realize how little was going on in my extended internet life until I installed this app.
Ditto. Still have fond memories of GW from my pre-teens. That they'd do this really offends my adult (sci-fi reading) self.
Looks pretty amazing so far. I've gone through a couple Google mail extensions, and using Chrome for Linux and Chromium for Linux with my google sync setup, I've had trouble finding one that works properly.

This seems to work great for Chromium on Ubuntu.
You really don't want a list of what is wrong with email.

I agree that facebook seems a little silly to use for something like that, but if the author is young then that may be his primary (or only) contact with the world that he regulary checks.

As for web-only? That would be the way I would go, if I had to -- very little spam issue and you can put a captcha on it if it becomes a problem.

But honestly you sound like an whiny complainer in that comment -- people have given you some very useful software for free, do they also owe you a bug reporting tool of your choice?

Git-hub is awesome in that regard, because it enforces 'put-up or shut up', you have to provide a patch if you want to get the issue fixed.
Show HN: I want to work at Rap Genius, so I made this.
Yes, but betting on Python is the whole point of PyPy. The idea is to build a toolchain using a relatively high-level programming language like RPython to build new languages.

As far as I understood is that this allows for low-level concepts to be changed more easily, while low-level implementations always suffer from basic decisions (e.g. you will never get reference-counting out of CPython, while you might be free in to change that in an RPython-implemented language).

So, the entire point of PyPy is being able to implement other high-level languages in RPython, so an attempt to implement Ruby is definitely very interesting! Also, the resulting binary is not depending on Python whatsoever.
Thanks and great questions!

1. We're currently looking at creative options to support personalized notifications. One possibility is something similar to what Rapportive did and provide sites with a way to deliver notifications.

2. We honestly did this because it was a need we had. We're looking at a number of strategies. The most likely is a set of premium features for a one-time fee. That said, we might just leave it free too.
I don't think anyone saw this potential bug report for Sublime Text 2 either, because I made the mistake of posting it in a relevant context rather than starting a new thread.

http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/52275-down-arrow-doesn...
Ask HN: Renting out subdomains
I bought a domain several months ago only to use its subdomain (the domain name is my last name), and I was thinking to rent out the unused hostname/subdomain to people who also had the same last name. Is there any risk to the domain? I'm afraid if they make illegal website using the subdomain, then the domain will be taken down as well, is it true? Thank you for your time.
So that would be a very cool project to merge python <-> ruby (or any other interpreter written in RPython). It requires quite a bit of work to pull it off the ground though. I would be happy to provide guidance on that, but I definitely won't do it myself (just yet).
Yeah, although there may be other ways to phrase your admonishment which people will be more receptive to.

"C'mon dude, don't let flaming beget flaming."
Solve A Real Fucking Problem
They also have a trademark on Eldar, a term for a race of Elves in Lord of the Rings.
That's not really rebutting the GP's point, though, which is that despite using a Python-derived language, we're not running Topaz on top of a Python runtime.
You're just linking to an average drip machine, which obviously doesn't have these problems, but it doesn't help the stackoverflow user who had the original question. The machines he was asking about have a separate container that stores beans that are automatically ground. These are fully automatic machines where you push a button and coffee comes out, no interaction is needed by the user, and yet the user will sometimes "think" action is required and will mistakenly fill the bean storage with water.

Your "commercial" drip machine is probably only a few hundred dollars at most, but the fully automatic machines are in the thousands of dollars, so repair is pretty expensive.
Thanks! The three of us working on it are all using different platforms and we've had awesome beta users who have helped us out a lot!
Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics [pdf]
Boy is this new title lame. Formerly it was something like: "Pivory: the forum software that had a chance" , which told us that we weren’t supposed to be looking at the thread, but rather the software used to implement it.

Which is pretty cool.

But - as was mentioned in at least one of the other cheshirecat/Pivory threads a homepage for this project would be really handy for these purposes :)
Discussion: non-free video player in archive.org
Asteroid 2012 DA14 – Earth Flyby Reality Check
Are there alternate rulesets that happen to be playable with the same minis? Could there legally be such things?
The paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638

EDIT: Originally I submitted this write-up http://www.roughtype.com/?p=2841 by Nicholas Carr. It must have been later changed (by the mods?) to a direct link to the arxiv paper.
That's my story too, felt like leaving after a year but ended up staying for 18 months. Even got a decent pay rise, and managed to change things a little, but the enthusiasm faded quickly, it was a dead end.

The day I stepped up and tried to set everything straight was also the day I decided to quit. Fast-forward a few months, I'm earning 2x as much, and working with everything I wanted to.

I too thought I was indispensable, but the company you have in your head can be very different from the managers'.
What broken mobile web browser are you using that can't scale and zoom a fixed-width page properly?
That's probably not a fair test to use on JRuby, as the JVM is notoriously slow to start.
1) Note that the post doesn't sell its speed; all it says is that they are interested in a high-performance Ruby

2) Python is a very similar language to Ruby, and Pypy already runs python very rapidly. This doesn't guarantee that the Ruby interpreter will be anywhere near as fast, of course, but it does give evidence that it's possible.

3) As kingkilr notes below, they've taken into account your argument and they believe they've implemented enough of the language to be confident that they can run it rapidly. No reason you need to believe him, but it's worth listening to.
This looks pretty neat! I like it very much. It integrates a bit of electronics with some good old infrastructure design. Gotta say, I love it!

Great work, man.
Absolutely not. RPython is a language to write dynamic languages virtual machines. That's a much less broad scope than C aims at (and achieves).
You're the second person to mention this (the first was my dad), so we'll definitely look into it.. :-)
I am sitting here typing with my Lenovo x220 Tablet Laptop - a laptop with a touch screen and stylus.

I hate it. HATE it. the touch screen on a laptop is out of place without any way to disable the touch when I want, it overlays the touch technology on the screen which is visible to me in the sun - as well as the screen medium makes the screen more dim than I would like. Especially in the sun/brightly lit areas.

It really needs to be done right in order to make a great experience. Thus far I haven't seen one.

One of the frustrating things about a touch-screen laptop is that I have a very curious toddler. She likes to touch what daddy is touching, so she will come and grab the screen to bend it down so she can see what I am doing and in doing so clicks on things, scrolls and closes windows.

I never use the touch screen on this machine for anything and so it is simply an annoyance.
Yes, because acquiring one person with a PhD for your team is easy. Difficulty in adding 3 more is probably like finding the resistance of resistors in parallel...
Well, so you're right and you're wrong.

You're right that the analogy doesn't quite capture everything here. On the other hand the analogy gets across most of the point.

I would have said "That's mostly right, but the interesting thing about sharing code on a VM is access to VM features and code shared on the platform, not just that it's possible to decouple a front end from a VM."

or something to that effect.
Thanks Fil!
I read the first 5 words and got excited!!!
"At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects."

That assumes the Hogwarts Hat of random allocation doesn't land you with a stinker from the get-go. And I speak from personal experience that it occasionally does. If I had been able to change projects to something more relevant to my skills, I would still be there.

There have been far too many stories of arbitrary google managers both here and elsewhere to keep putting forth the story that if one goes to google, one can simply change projects if one doesn't like what they're doing.

Just one example from http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Google-Reviews-E9079.htm

"For the most part, Google is held together by duct tape. Management quality is clearly below what's required for a company of this size. In a lot of cases managers are simply too junior and lack people skills."
Interesting, but not as new as they'd like you to think (article below from 2004, and the article mentions organ printing first being mentioned in 1999).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12679063

Tissue engineering has been the "next big thing" in biotech for a while, and 3D printing-style techniques have been a part of it for some time. It seems that its only recently been picked up by mainstream media.
Without further details from Coke, I believe you are absolutely correct. Oranges do not have constant flavor throughout the year, and the various species of oranges which mature at different points in the season have quite different flavors. For example, in Florida, Valencia oranges rippen after decemeber for a few months, and are probably the most delicious orange you will eat. This supply of oranges is not enough to last the whole year, so most of these oranges are squeezed, pasteurized and stored for later use. The rest of the year, you might squeeze naval orange (kinda shitty orange), early-mids, or other oranges. Even worse, oranges have varying flavor throughout the season. When Valencias first come into season, most are half ripe, or half green. Maybe only for a few weeks out of the year will you get that perfect tasting orange. And god help you if those oranges are oragnic, and half of them are covered in mold.

Rather than sell you an orange juice with varying flavor throughout the year, or even throughout the season, it is much less wasteful and much higher yield to blend the oranges together to produce some rather fine tasting juice. All of the companies receive these blends (and essentially the same blends), the only difference between the companies is in what they do with these blends. Some choose to produce a less bitter juice, or sweeter, or more pulp. etc.

Anyways, it's not clear how their algorithm is different from this advertisement.
> the 64 GB has only 23 GB available and the 128 GB model has only 83 GB available.

How does Windows 8 take up 41GB? Is it purely the OS? Bloatware?
This looks fantastic.

Just one bit. Are you proudly developing this only for Chrome, or is that just a support limitation right now?

I ask this because you didn't write something along the lines of expecting it to be released elsewhere soon - you wrote "exclusively" for Chrome.

I ask this because I currently use Firefox most frequently (although I installed Chime on my Chrome installation to test it). It might be a bit of a market limitation later when you try to monetize this if you only develop on Chrome.

And also, do you have any plans to allow independent hackers to write in their own notifications? Will I be able to write in notifications for platforms too obscure or unpopular to make a mainstream update for?

EDIT: I forgot one thing. Would you consider doing this for desktop applications as well, like Growl on Mac?
This definitely looks like a great piece of software.

However, I believe different services, hence different types of information, should have their own way of being displayed.

For example, seeing a one-line summary of an email doesn't appeal to me that much.

That's why I always prefer using the web app itself (or a dedicated extension in the case of Gmail).
The Four Numbers Evenness Puzzle
This is precisely the reason why I submitted the link once more. This project expressed a lot of potential when it was submitted some 6 months.

This is the first thing that came to my mind when project Discourse was announced. But unfortunately the project owner chesirecat lost interest and it’s more or less abandoned.
I'm not the biggest fan of that term myself, but it's just something known in the web world.

I prefer to think of it as internet marketing as far more goes into it than on page HTML optimisation and such. The real agencies will work with a company to help build and develop a brand and continue to work with that company over a long period.
> If Topaz was able to give me the ability to access NLTK

I doubt that's going to happen. Topaz is not a Ruby running on the CPython interpreter, the Topaz VM is developed in RPython. As far as I know, RPython doesn't provide that capability either (between VMs coded in RPython), which fijal seems to confirm.
Postal Service to end Saturday mail service Aug. 5
Then why was it sitting below another article that was posted around the same time but had only nearly half the points?

http://i.imgur.com/uFPTSqR.png

Edit: Even now, it ranks lower than another article with the exact same points posted a full four hours before it.

http://i.imgur.com/Yg5kXJb.png
... for a more civilized age.
What you shouldn't do as a boss: Complaints from the trenches
I rather hope that this will be one of those situations where overstepping the mark leads to their being pulled up on all of their unreasonable trademarks and copyright assertions.
Interesting title, not so interesting article :(
This may be a stretch, but do you think there is any chance that the decline of formal bug tracking may be related to the rise of automated unit and integration testing?

Obviously, they are different things - I don't think that very good test coverage eliminates the usefulness of a bug database... but maybe it does make it easier to get away without one.

Suppose you have a discussion forum, and someone sees a potential bug. In the past, they might add a bug report. Now, they go to their integration testing suite and write "URL shortener should provide valid menu links at navigation depth greater than three" (just to come up with a completely contrived example that never happens in real life, heh). This still tracks the bug, and is probably more useful, because now you can't ignore it because there's a red bar in everyone's dev environment.

I do notice a lot more unit and integration testing these days, so it is possible that some of this is standing in for what used to be a bug database. I hope nobody interprets this as a claim that it replaces everything you get from a bug database, I'm just seeing it as something that might reduce the impact of the absence of a bug database.
Well, that's how Jack Welch managed GE back in his days. He made it pretty clear that in order to move up they either became a black belt or move out.
Yes - the admins changed it. The new one does not capture the attention.
It's quite simple: believe it when you see it, no matter who it is making you promises. The bigger the promise, the more quietly skeptical you must be.

Those people filling you with hope may genuinely want to make something happen, or may be cynically telling you what you want to hear. Either way, their words don't mean a thing until they've made them fact.
Oh, it's plenty different. First off, software is not one thing. It encompasses more orders of magnitude of difference than almost any other industry. At one end you might have throwaway fart apps or single serving joke websites and at the other end you might have spacecraft avionics or industrial systems control or banking systems, and in the middle there is a multi-dimensional realm of tremendous breadth and volume. Additionally, software construction is by its nature creative. Creating a million or a billion or even a trillion copies of a piece of software is a more or less trivial and heavily automated task. Software isn't like making cars or houses or bridges. When you make a bridge there is a lot of work that goes into design but most of the work is in implementation. In software the implementation (the actual running of the software) is automated, all of the development work and all of the so-called "implementation" work is in truth just design work on finer and finer scales.

The combination of all of these factors makes software a different sort of beast than a lot of other work. Now, as I said, that doesn't mean that you can't still attack it with brute force and obtain results, but software is actually one of the realms where that is one of the least effective strategies.
Phil Zimmermann wants to save you from your phone
I know several of the staff at GWHQ in Nottingham had what was basically their own separate ruleset cobbled together from what they considered the best parts of the games over the prior 25 years. Most clubs had enough house rules that they were basically playing separate games. Although with the current player-unfriendly stance any ruleset distributed as "for GW figures" would find its self on the wrong side of a legal team.

And then a lot of players have very, very irrational attitudes towards proxy figures. I couldn't turn up with a Warmachine army sheet and my Imperial Guard army and play, or vice versa. In fact, that'd get you kicked out of a lot of hobby shops.
It takes a lot of time to build and release a new OS and then jump-start a community of developers around it. The power of the PC and the reason why we'll still be using PCs for a long time is also due to its legacy ... basically whatever tasks you need to do on a PC, there's already an app for it and most people probably know about it too.

Getting rid of this legacy would be Microsoft's poison pill. Unfortunately for them Windows is being disrupted by OS X and Linux for power-users on one hand and Android / iOS for normal users on the other hand. They are in the classic innovators dilemma.
Ah, I think I see. This would be useful for shared state that is read much more often than it is written. That seems to position it mainly as a competitor to RCU, which is likewise designed to have cheap reads and more expensive writes. But compared to RCU, both reads and writes would be faster with TSX (and in particular, uncontended writes would be especially faster).
In addition to fijal's comment: I also heard somewhere that RPython is a) not strictly specified and b) may change when needed without notice. So I would stay clear of it. :)
Thanks! We tried to cater to the way users interact with different services. We can look into adding more options to customize notifications down the road.
I've been looking for a way out of Rails. I dislike not having a compiler & analyser as I'm very comfortable with CLANG and LLVM.

Recently I've been looking at GoLang and Scala.
Not sure which to go with, but Play seems better than most web frameworks for Go.

But my concern is always ecosystem. Now before you say "You have access to Java ecosystem" please take a look on how amazing the ruby eco system is.