skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "normal" method of radiation shielding is almost none.

All of our manned spaceflights except for Apollo have been in low Earth orbit. Nestled deep down inside of Earth's magnetosphere protects you from a lot of radiation. Being above the ozone layer means that you are exposed to more ultraviolet light, but this isn't a big deal because it's not like you "go outside" much, you'll always have a window or a helmet between you and the Sun and those will always have a UV filter. The real issue is particle radiation, which comes from the Sun, the galaxy, and from parts of Earth's magnetosphere (the van allen belts). In low Earth orbit a lot of the solar and cosmic particle radiation is blocked, and as long as you steer clear of the van allen belts at high altitudes you'll be alright. The aluminum skin of spacecraft will protect you from some radiation, and you can add additional mass, especially water, to add more radiation protection. Overall in Earth orbit the radiation environment is fairly mild though a bit on the concerning side if you were to live there for decades.

If you have to travel through the van allen belts or outside Earth's protective magnetospheric bubble then things get much more difficult. In the case of the Apollo program they were careful to ensure that the thickness of the spacecraft's skin was enough to block a goodly amount of particle radiation and they designed the mission profile such that the spacecraft passed through the van allen belts as quickly as possible (spending as little time exposed to their radiation as could be managed). And in terms of operations in orbit around or on the Moon the main advantages was again one of time. Astronauts only spent at most a few days up there, limiting their radiation doses. However, they were extremely vulnerable to solar flares, which could have subjected them to extremely high doses of radiation that they had no way to protect against. In that they just got lucky.

A Mars mission, however, will spend months in interplanetary space and the chance of the crew being subjected to the radiation from a solar flare are very much higher. Additionally, they'll be subjected to much higher accumulated doses of radiation just by being in interplanetary space for so long. The thin aluminum skin of a spacecraft won't be sufficient protection for these conditions, so they'll need both a greater level of day to day protection and also an area of heavy protection that they can use to ride out solar flares and CMEs. Generally large masses of water or organic material work the best in protecting from the high energy protons that are the most concerning source of radiation in interplanetary space.

P.S. There's another option for shielding which is to generate a miniature magnetosphere around a spacecraft. This has a lot of advantages but the biggest disadvantage is that it would require additional equipment (weight is the biggest constraint on any Mars mission) as well as a significant amount of power and the technology hasn't been proven yet. Here's a neat paper on the subject: http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/M2P2/rad.shielding.pdf
It's a giant, gaping security hole that most operating system architects are desperately trying to get rid of -- at least, that's the way I view it.

Any software that uses it should be exposed to extra scrutiny and must judiciously leverage whatever privilege mechanisms an OS provides to mitigate damage.

There should be a better way to accomplish what xorg needs on *NIX systems.
Good God that first graph is so misleading.
Yes, but the general perception of bitcoin is that it is completely anonymous. Where it in practice probably is, if you don't take any precautions, the least anonymous currency in the world, where everyone can inspect the transaction history of coins and anyone with decent turn-over can map out a lot. Trivially (these databases will, of course, be sold and leaked). And since most services at some point require you to reveal yourself mapping out individuals from bitcoin transactions isn't exactly difficult.

The sad part is that since the history is public, if you goof up and reveal your identity sometime in 2015 your actions of today might also get revealed. To any third party. Potentially way worse than any sort of currency ever used; but the only thing people talk about is how bitcoin is this anonymous currency...
In my case, I've been working through the problems at Project Euler, specifically solving the problems in python as a means to learn.
http://projecteuler.net/

One of the cool things is that after you solve a problem you can review how others attacked the problem (people use almost any language you can think of), and seek continual improvements for greater efficiency. Python is a popular choice there.
How hard would it be for HN to filter posts like this? There are only so many permutations of "Why is this here? / What does this have to do with HN?" possible...
It's also easier to stay away from troubles when you have a natural geographic barrier that limits the number of competitors in your region.
Well, this article gives yet another reason to stay away from sodas.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/rosenwald-md/post/who-is...
Brand Searches drive a lot of traffic to major sites people are lazy and use Google instead of bookmarks
Times change.
Interestingly enough, "fringe" languages were breathed new life with introduction of LLVM, and Haskell is no longer research project, so there are industry job offers there too.

And we know what happened with "winners" within a wave of dynamic languages: JavaScript, Python and Ruby developers are quite often paid higher wages, than old-style C programmers.
"particularly the sheer disregard of energy related problems"

Did you actually read this?

We have enough fissile material to last billions of years. "Billions". With a B.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html
Google’s Red Guide to the Android App Store
I'm still waiting for the day when I can readily recommend OCaml to people. It's a very nice language, supports functional, imperative and OO programming, has all the nice goodies that PL people want (sum types, parametric polymorphism, GADTs), while not being completely alien as Haskell can sometimes be to people coming from a more traditional background.

What OCaml lacks, is a more modern implementation; I hear that the company OCamlPro are currently implementing a per-task GC strategy to allow for better multi-programming, there are alternatives to the rather minimalist standard library (Jane Street Core and Batteries Included), OPAM is poised to become the de factor OCaml package manager. I'm still hoping that built-in Unicode support will become a reality as well.
There is truth to it... A good chunk.

There is not much movement visible to actually progress and develop data science as a science - and it's application as engineering.

Some steps are needed - yet it is unclear if there is even an entity to take on those steps...

http://blog.didenko.com/2013/02/data-science-as-science.html
Documentation problem? I thought vim solved that?
Interesting fellow. Earlier in his life he was a heavy-metal guitarist: in 1979 he sent a demo tape to the group Iron Maiden. (He wasn't hired...) Later he wrote a history book fortelling the decline of the West and the rise of the East, and the CIA asked him to conduct a seminar on his studies.
What are you growing?
My Life As A Professional Cannabis Baker
I used that plugin too. It's still missing the debugging support.
I couldn't agree more, like I said, I was in a position where I was already capable on the day I walked in the door (I sat down on day one and head my first website live by day 6) - I dread to think how it would have turned out if I hadn't have been.

For a start, the college taught the most irrelevant of things - how to use Microsoft word, how to set up a router, what an email was - I mean, in what world should you seriously consider jumping in to the deep end of web development in a paid job if you don't even know what a fucking email is?

Then there was the poor time management, I was given only one afternoon a week for my coursework which I was to complete in work and not at home - I was royally screwed the first time I got behind and playing catch up after that, I could not be given more time, couldn't do any at home and no one really seemed to care.

I was on of only 2 technical people, and the other one was my boss, who almost never had time for my training from day one, in 9 months there, I had 3 lessons from him, one of them a one on one on how Joomla components worked, another a 15 minute tutorial on the class structure used in CodeIgniter and the third (and this was the only truly useful one) was a 2 hour lesson on Database design, not just "Well, that should use an ID and be an int(6)" but actual useful theory, not just how two tables interact, but why they interact, and what joins do. In 9 months, I only had one lesson where I walked away knowing more than when it started.

In a way I feel sorry for the person they replace me with, but in another way, having to do all the work on my own, to deadline and design was probably the best training I could have had.
My parents are trying to compare me to all the stupid kids that usually drop out, and I cannot comprehend their close-mindedness and ignorance.

Until you _can_ comprehend them, you should not assume they are idiots.
I'm glad I produce a lot of my own food, but happy I don't rely on it for my sustenance, because I've had some serious failures.
Have you ever seriously considered PhD programs? No one that I've ever heard of has ever had to pay tuition to attend college for their PhD (myself included). It is usually a "work exchange for education"; a research or teaching assistantship while taking classes and writing a dissertation.

And to say that the learner does not get to decide what they will research for their dissertation is just flat-out wrong. It is assumed that the student will pick what to write their dissertation on - they need to study it in-depth for 2-4 years and picking something that they do not find interesting will most likely lead to dissatisfaction (but it is still a choice).

Granted, a PhD program requires a prerequisite BS degree or equivalent which is generally not paid for and follows a typical regime. However, not all knowledge is the same - highly specialized "brink of human understanding" type learning is paid, unstructured and definitely has no exercises to complete (since the one learning them has the most understanding of the topic).
interesting as this again was done by a deeply disturbed individual, a paranoid schizophrenic.

society since then has not gotten better at identifying threats coming from sick people. down to sandy hook, the completely insane individual is left alone until he/she commits an atrocity.
I'm not sure how the HTML5 wrapper can communicate with the java runtime in a performant way. That has been the major issue with similar ideas as no mobile platform allows direct dom access to its webview widget.

Unless I'm missing something the java ME runtime has very poor performance compared to other smartphone vms and doesn't have a JIT at all. I don't think this will fly...
I got in the zone and learned Python, Javascript, HTML, CSS, jQuery and a few APIs in a single weekend on codecademy. The secret is large amounts of caffeine.
What do you guys do on weekends?

I used to fiddle with some robotics (Lego Mindstorms and my Roomba) until I started InstantCab. A bunch of my smarter friends seem to be working on applying machine learning to firehoses (http://www.maaya.com/ and http://technicalelvis.com/blog/category/twitter_mining/), or on hardware projects.
What is VSP? Made it very hard to understand what this is talking about.
The problem isn't even serial-to-parallel - HDMI is serial based - the problem is that Apple apparently designed Lightning with insufficient bandwidth for uncompressed video, then kludged around it. Then Apple fanboys went on and on about how much more elegant it is than MHL, which has much cheaper HDMI adapters and better video quality because all the MHL adapters have to do is convert one uncompressed serial video data format to another.

I mean, technically speaking Samsung or any of the other manufacturers could've done the same trick as Apple using plain old micro-USB OTG 2.0 with no special hardware support in their phones, no special connectors... but the reviewer community would call them out on it because it's ugly and user hostile, if their engineers even let them get that far.
> I can eat whatever I want, however much I want, and not gain weight.

According to my subjective observations, people who claim to have this mystical property are very hyperactive or very good at (involuntarily) skipping meals.
You reminded me of Bill Gates, who said that in his youth, he never took a day off, ever.
The tea party uses this to great effect. At one point they had training sessions where they would encourage people to go online and post canned comments in an attempt to discredit and delegitimize their political opponents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGB8Uuffi4M
Too Many Axioms?
There are two kinds of radiation in space: cosmic rays, and solar flares.

The water and food, and "the stuff water and food turns into over the course of a trip" as the joke goes, are very useful as a "storm shelter" against a solar flare. If one comes up and the crew is not shielded like this against the solar flare, they will die within a day or two.

Cosmic rays are very hard to effectively shield against. They don't stop for much, including people, but there are so many of them that you are bound to take a dose. Right now the best way to deal with it, for temporary trips in space, is probably just to deal with it: accept the 1% or 2% rise in cancer risk, and make up for it with superior health care once they are back on Earth.
I will gladly give up C for systems programming for new projects. Go would have made an interesting choice over Python for the non-performance-critical parts of BIND10; I would certainly have studied the source closely. I can see myself writing things like Postfix policy daemons in Go. Heck, if I had a side project named "write a SMTP/IMAP server", Go would be my first choice.

I do have a side project of writing a DNS server, and my scribbled notes for it say to use Erlang for the protocol speaker and Go for the control plane.

I suggest that what Go needs is some kind of killer project that everyone can learn from. C had UNIX.
Related thoughts on education...
from CGP Grey:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_830833...

Also watch Greys favorites vol 4 (playlist on CGP Grey channel).
These thoughts from Salman Khan are most relevant here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiKrFcgVSIU&list=PLgE-9Sx...
Ok, that's what I meant, I wasn't 100% sure you could lose more, thanks for explaining
The Monthly Fonts Roundup, February 2013
It’s the last week of February at Designmodo, which means it’s time to round up the best fonts that were released this month. This time, we’re separating them by category.
This is sort of like pointing out the obvious, but that's just a change in the market, and has comparatively little to do with the languages themselves.

There's no reason C programmers can't easily transition into web development. The inverse, assuming that the market for C development will remain static is just illogical (likewise for the current in-demand languages).

Developers are developers IMHO. Languages are tools. What tool a developer uses is incidental and inevitably subject to change.
I think there should be more of these stories. Many people starting companies learn much from success stories through books and blogs but I think there may be more lessons to learn about how not to fail from people that have.
This sounds like me when I was still in college trying to hack out a 100 line of code for a small programming assignment... But this approach does not scale with a million line of code project. Anyone with real programming experience can tell you this. Corporates don't just shell out thousand of dollars for an IDE license for no reason. :)
There are a few bumps and warts. The server close issue was one that made wonder if they ever tested, but I eventually discovered you can close down a server:

lis, err := net.Listen("tcp","127.0.0.1:80")

go http.Serve(lis, router)

lis.Close()
> Thats why software defined networking, Openflow etc, are going to take off

I've been hearing this for a decade. It's still not true. I'm not sure why, either.
> Authorization is a function of whether you paid for it.

No it isn't. Authorisation is a function of whatever rights you're given, normally at the point of purchase but not necessarily.

> 2) There are actually Linux DVD players which have paid for their Fraunhofer license; I don't know why you keep claiming otherwise

I have never said that there are no Linux distributions that do not have a valid Fraunhofer licence. This is not about patent restrictions. We agreed that earlier in the thread, and I thought that you understood that point, but perhaps I was mistaken.

Taking just one example from your list: Boxee uses libdvdcss to circumvent the CSS encryption on DVDs and thus it's possibly breaking the DMCA. Again, just because no-one is going to prosecute doesn't make it lawful.

> someone citing the

None of the cites you've made have supported your various changing positions.
Frankly, it depends on the reddits. The quality of the comments on the bigger reddits (say, r/worldnews) is often not much above Youtube level.
Yeah I too went to ag school and then got into coding.

It's pretty hard to be a farmer coming out of ag school unless your family has a farm already for you to run since the entry costs are so high. I still produce a lot of my own food via a family farm, but god I'm glad it's not my main job. I make a mistake when coding and things can be bad, but usually they are OK especially if you have revision control and a good workflow.

I make a mistake farming and things die and I have nothing to eat or sell. Then there are just random inexplicable things that screw you over. Yes, this happens in IT, see what happened with Cloudflare this week, but imagine if that lasted for months, even years, and you could never switch providers- that's how badly weather can screw you over.

I worked in academia IT for a bit and took archaeology classes for fun. It's no surprise that ancient farmer's bones have markers like pitting that indicate periods of severe malnutrition.
Ask HN: Why not build CRUD app generators and be done with it?
Before I start, you should probably know that I'm still a student, and hence I have fairly limited real world experience, so interpret my opinions in that context. :)

----

Ever since I was a kid, I loved making things - origami, board games, "robots", and so on. Naturally, when I first got my hands on a computer, I fell in love with it, just because I could create so many things with it. My personal interest back then, was videogames, so I started with creating simple text based games in BASIC. It wasn't the actual programming that interested me, but just the power, and the excitement of creating something new.

Now, I've picked up most of the major programming languages and I regularly hack on web dev projects. I've noticed that a large majority of websites/apps are simply CRUD apps with minor modifications here and there. Yet, we continue to create such apps manually, thus wasting hours of dev time on something that trivial. I do recognise that this is an obvious oversimplification, but why can't we just build one solid, well-engineered and well tested multiplatform solution for CRUD apps, and get done and over with it?

If I'm correct in my assumption that most developers are motivated not by the code they write, or the architectures they engineer, but the actual effect that those things have (as I mentioned earlier), then wouldn't it be much better for us to create higher level tools for working with CRUD business logic and focus our attention on the actual "hard" problems in CS, like AI, which could have a much greater impact on the world?
Duly noted and fixed. Thanks for the corrections.
When reading NYT comment sections, I always sort, but never by the editor's picks. I rely solely on reader's most recommended. This is the best bullshit filter I've found, and I can see why lazy, dishonest, poorly informed, or otherwise sub-par journalists resent it.

I do something similar when reading HN. Scrolling through the headlines, I (almost) never click on the link itself. Instead, I open the discussion tabs, make a snap judgement about the quality of the piece from there, and click through only when it's clearly worthwhile. The ease with which this filter can be applied is the most amazing thing. At this point, it feels so fluid and natural that I do it reflexively.

A few years ago news outlets were coming to terms with the idea that there was no front page online. Yes, some readers did go to the outlets home page and decide what to read from there. But more often than not, they were coming directly to a piece that would have been buried in a print edition. The social layer further diminishes editorial control, in that people can further economize their quotient of attention by finding and trusting informal social groups that reduce the megaphone effect enjoyed by the analog press even further.
The problem with this idea is that it's impossible to become a farmer unless you've already made enough money in software to quit and buy a farm.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_demos, VSP is:

"VSP (Variable Screen Positioning), also known as HSP, allows arbitrary x-placement of a bitmap, with the bitmap wrapping around at the border."
Make friends with someone who has visibility into a good market. It's much more fruitful than the other way around - you are good at writing software so solve a known problem, not at solving unknown problem with software you already wrote.
Apple never provided PS/2; their solution was the (proprietary?) Apple Desktop Bus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Desktop_Bus

You may be thinking of the licensed Mac clones of the mid-90s: some of them did include PS/2 ports.
>society since then has not gotten better at identifying threats

The other end of it is society starting to aggressively label and segregate people as "threats". Everyone would have to fit this set of behavior somebody else defined or else they get labeled as threats.
I like your observations, especially #1. May I recommend this book before you give it another shot? http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...

Related to the pivot idea, I can's seem to find an asset manager that will work for my organization. They are either tied to business processes (e.g. selling products), don't allow custom attributes, etc. I work for a non-profit tied to govt/education and we have incredibly strict rules for managing inventory. Sadly, it is all being done by Excel and is a brutal mistake prone system.
AS flies to a lot more than Alaska - it's really somewhat of a misnomer. They're hubbed out of SEA and PDX and fly nationally, though their scheduling is not as extensive as the majors[1].

I used to fly Alaska a lot when I lived in Seattle - one of the better airlines in the country to be sure. On-time performance was always excellent and the service is always no-bullshit (compare with United, an airline I have literally never had a 100%-smooth flight with).

[1] http://www.alaskaair.com/content/route-map.aspx
I'm not questioning the 'exercise makes it harder to do some tasks', as your example shows, this is pretty much a given.

But it's not so much about calories, it's about brain workload, walking requires a mental effort that subtracts from whatever else you're doing at the same time. More glucose won't help.

And if typing is difficult, what to say of activities requiring fine motor control, like drawing. They're almost impossible!

Not to mention the insulin/glucagon system controls blood sugar very precisely, you'll rarely have a lack of glucose in the sugar unless you really exercised a lot