skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Making a low cost interplanetary "weather balloon"?
A childish indulgence, but something I have thought about over and over again and wondered, it's hard, sure, but really, how hard?

Putting stuff in orbit and maintaining it there obviously needs a lot of precision, resources, hard work. But what about 'weather-balloon' like bare minimum project whose goals could be something like:

1. Have goals that do not require a ton of precision, for example go as far as possible, take as high resolution pictures as possible etc.

2. Not worry about losing the craft, perhaps eventually just crashing into the planet and sending that information back. 'Do one thing and do it well' goals of all sorts.

3. Be cheap enough that multiple of them could be sent to account for failure, so more of a spray-and-pray approach as opposed to making one single craft that is absolutely bullet proof.

Required stuff that comes to mind:

1. A rocket with tons of fuel to leave earth.

2. A very very tough ball/craft to reduce drag while dropping onto various "space rocks" and weather small impacts.

3. Shielding from known interference/damage causing factors.

4. A propulsion system for the craft in space - Solar/Nuclear/Magic?

5. Tons of redundant sensors/cameras depending on what the minimal set of goals for the project are.

6. A rock solid high power communication/relay mechanism.

7. A bare minimum navigation system. Perhaps a self destruct mechanism to not fuck up other big missions (NASA/SpaceX) etc?

Sounds pretty damned childish and perhaps like every kid's fantasy, I know, but would love to hear any thoughts on how outlandish it really is.
How An App Gets Made
Our company made a kick ass video about the design process of a mobile app. We even recorded the screens of our designers in high speed.

Check it out!
From the wikipedia page; "The Qilin... is said to appear with the imminent arrival or passing of a wise sage or an illustrious ruler."
and by doing this, Canicol is bringing Linux to the masses of a country. Ironic.
Speaking of migrations, I just got a super-simple migration system merged into Chicago Boss!

https://github.com/evanmiller/ChicagoBoss/blob/master/README...

Well, almost...it's still missing one pull. Even if it's very, very basic, I'm pretty happy to have something rather than nothing, though.
Yeah but. I somehow doubt that people leave a service over a single explainable outage. From my personal experience, I move when the outage is the straw that broke the camel's back - when I have been unhappy with the service but have lacked the time and urgency to do something about it, and then they are down and I'm thinking "Well, time I moved off here anyway".

So in that respect, I think I am fair game to a "Switch to our service!" email and I don't see how that is unethical - happy customers don't move just because they get an email during an untypical service interruption. Dropbox could go down for the rest of the day, and I could get all the competitor emails they want to send me, and I am not going to switch. I did switch registrars during an outage, but that is because I had been less than ecstatic about them and just needed a kick.
I will not review the legal literature because nowhere in my original comment was their mention of the law. I simply stated that this company did the right thing. I attempted to explain to you what I meant by this, but for some reason you insist upon throwing legal documentation and precedents at me. In my second comment I attempted to describe to you the law as I have observed it, but as I said my knowledge of specific laws and precedents is limited. Just because you use these in an argument does not make you right. The simple fact that I do not have time to research and make this my life is the problem here. I am certain that I could find a dozen cases in support of this company's actions. The law is never applied consistently, thus there must be at least one legal precedent in support of my view. I do admit that I will not waste my time to find it. I am both a student and employed. Additionally, you probably live in a large city that follows these rules. The place where I live is not quite as pretty and perfect. People here get fired for looking at there boss incorrectly. I'm not sure my boss's view of reality is even influenced by the EEOC compliance manual.

I do also acknowledge that I have not answered your questions. This is simply, as stated before, because I did not make this a legal statement and do not intend for it to be interpreted as such.

I am not sure why you feel that you need laws to tell you what is right and wrong. Personally, I have internalized my beliefs on morality. What this woman did, even if it wasn't legal justification for termination of employment, was not morally correct. If the laws told me I had to support bullying and public humiliation, I would not be a law abiding citizen.

Edited -To apply final statement.
Interview with Git Maintainer Junio C Hamano (2011)
Except that most of the high paying jobs aren't physically discomforting (e.g. sitting in a nice office all day), and there are loads of jobs that are poorly paying that are very uncomfortable (prostitution, cleaning toilets, etc.).

So your theory doesn't match reality.
I disagree strongly with the ultimate basis of this: it is a dog eat dog world. There is a finite pool of customers. I don't mean to say you should do what the other company did (email bashing while others are down) but you shouldn't be afraid to talk about your other strengths.
have you heard of http://rhodecode.org/ ?
It supports both HG and git.
There is also http://rhodecode.org/ which i highly recommend
Photo Sharing Service For Families, Famil.io, Is A Dropbox For Memories
They didn't communicate tastes. They communicated using tastes.
I am extremely small potatoes compared to some of the people who occasionally post here. Jason Fried, for instance, posts on stories about 37s.

If we're talking the Larry Page scale, well, Marc Andreessen posts here often enough to have noticed Maciej Ceglowski's Co-Prosperity Cloud; he saw a comment I left about a $50 follow-on investment and matched it.
I am planning to put one together in the southeast! Hoping to find sponsors and interested hackers!
For me at least, notes only make up part of the colour/feel. The tone, texture etc., of the notes makes more difference. Also notes change depending on context. A note out of no where on it's own will be a lot different if sounded next to other notes.
It depends. Rinkydink startups may not, but if a down service resulted in a nasty conversation with your biggest customer, then you probably should consider switching or diversifying
Yea I appreciate the concerns I have may be total nonsense too! I see from your point of view its a great way to work on something cool/interesting/career boosting and also be payed for it.

Heck I've got a list of about 13 projects that are roughly affiliated with my day job but because of whom i work for and the time I have free being used up for other much more frivolous things I havn't had a chance in a year.

Perhaps it is just jealousy on my part :)
It wasn't an oppressive culture

Not offering someone a potential carrer path just because of their gender seems a bit opressive to me.

Sexualised content at tech events just reenforced the idea that "programming isn't for women". Imagine a woman at a tech event where ther'es a lot of straight male locaker room jokes, and the organisers do nothing ans say there's nothing wrong going on, she'll come out of it thinking tech is for men.
Great concept. Keep up the good work.
"We shake hands with guys at conferences"

Only the guys? ducks
Renting infinitely copyable goods doesn't make sense.

Subscriptions to channels containing them does.

DRM doesn't increase the convenience of those channels. It reduces them.
It's also possible that your perspective on feminist issues is distorted enough that while you're interpreting this as smarmy and self-congratulatory, it is in fact reasonable and well-argued. Right? That sort of argument by its nature swings both ways.

Clearly a lot of people here find something worthwhile in how Scalzi writes about this, and some of the literally hundreds of commenters on that blog post are at least finding it worth discussing. Perhaps you'll get something out of them, if not out of Mr. Scalzi's post itself. I do hope so, because from where I'm sitting you're the one being intolerant and not even wrong, and I'd love if this could at least make you pause and reconsider your perspective.
The Indian govt. introduced BOSS Linux [1] many years ago as the "official" Linux distro, based on Debian. Alas, no one has even heard of it, let alone use it.

[1]: http://bosslinux.in/
Yes. http://gcc.gnu.org/
News

GCC 4.8.0 released [2013-03-22]
GCC internals documentation [2013-01-23]
The GCC Resource Center at IITB is providing documentation, tutorials and videos about GCC internals with support from the Government of India.
ARM AArch64 support [2012-10-24]
A port for AArch64, the 64-bit execution state in the ARMv8 architecture, has been contributed by ARM Ltd.
IBM zEnterprise EC12 support [2012-10-10]
Support for the latest release of the System z mainframe zEC12 has been added to the architecture back end. This work was contributed by Andreas Krebbel of IBM.
The quest for the $1000 genome
Unlikely. Most people in China use pirated versions of Windows, so they'll keep doing that.

Maybe the governments will require the use of this brand of Ubuntu, but that's it.
Well, the Wikipedia article's history shows that she edited her own article quite a few times, so that doesn't seem to be the problem.

I don't see how the error detracted her in any way, and, as I highlighted it, it was a quick 2-minute fix.

I also don't think the Google algorithm is to blame. If her Wikipedia entry had followed the style guidelines ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biogr... ), her birth date would have been parsed correctly.

For the record, I didn't find her post funny or even particularly well-written.

I guess if there's something that can be taken from this article it's "Program or be Programmed". The author didn't understand the inner workings of the Google Factbox data, so she assumed computers control her identity and her online information. However, with a little more computer knowledge, you can figure out how to control this data yourself.

Humans control the computers; it's not the other way around.
Good lord this would be hilarious, I can see it now --

First time coding in [P]ython, be gentle ;)
Why wouldn't they go with Red Flag Linux[1]?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux
Honestly, we haven't quite figured out a good way to do a "beta" or partial roll-out for this without breaking other users. Yaaaay decentralization! Instead, we'll be extensively QA'ing it in testing environments, and then we'll flip a big switch to enable it for everyone.
Agreed :)
This one has them
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/gnu/gcc/releases/gcc-4.8.0/
You mean like Synthesia? http://www.synthesiagame.com/
It depends on the outage. But any service provider can tell you there's always an increase of cancellations around any outage.
1) Don’t install anything other than via official channels/Ubuntu store or whatever else you trust, like Steam. More importantly, don’t add random PPAs from some guy on the Internet.

2) Boycott Firefox until they get their sandboxing act together. Use Chromium/Webkit2 browsers. Disable Java applets/WS.

Alternatively, go full Stallman[1].

[1] http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
Is 'markdown hinting' just 'markdown' or is it something new markdown related that I might enjoy?
Anyone know the promo code for the free ticket to NYC?
I think they're referring to potential backdoors installed by the US to spy on China in Microsoft software. (Shocker: the US engages in cyber espionage too).
Can anyone who's ever worked on a FOSS hobby project honestly say that they wouldn't prioritize differently, if anyone offered them money to work on it?
This makes me wonder what the process would be in a large company (Google?) when it comes to introducing changes like this. I'd assume it'd either be agreed upon in company policy, or a lot of really smart engineers just keep trying to outdo each other.
Not doubting you at all, but can you link to the evidence that criminals are using it? Other than Silk Road, which I'm already aware of.

Curious to read about the evidence, is all.
Scary because it takes a cry to the internet to get it corrected. While the issue of being declared dead is somewhat innocuous, it could've been much worse -- what if her dad was a convicted sexual offender, and Google chose to associate that with her bio? What do you think that'd do for any job prospects, especially if she wasn't aware that it was present? It could be downright devastating.

Since it is not opt-in (nor is it opt-out), YOU have no control of it. As the author stated, she requested many times, over several months, to have it reviewed and it wasn't until she clamored about it publicly that it was addressed. What if Google never did correct it?
Yes, very! But do you really want to emulate a guy whose whole shtick is being wrong and unlikable every time he does anything?

I mean, literally the point of The Office is that Michael Scott is a racist, sexist bigot. And when you ironically emulate him, the result is that you kind of come off that way yourself. It's not especially pointed irony, either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scalzi
I'm happy you did something different, even though your reasons are of course all wrong. I do wish it had been Node and not Ruby - JavaScript fits most of your reasons for going with an open source stack a lot better than Ruby does. Why not Node was the post I was hoping to read.

But back to why you're wrong on the internet:

1. .NET licensing isn't complicated, SQL Server is. There's an easy fix for that.

2. I don't think StackOverflow really participates in the best that the .NET open source world has to offer. From the information I can read, you (and team) published a lot of the code you wrote under open source licenses, but as far as I know the StackOverflow stack didn't really interact with many (any?) open source .NET projects that weren't run by StackOverflow - e.g. writing MiniProfiler instead of working with Glimpse, working with Mono, etc.

3. There's a lot that's changed in the .NET web space in the past year as they've moved from just releasing the code (see 2 above) to accepting pull requests. This has resulted in a good amount of accepted pull requests - community contributed features which ship "in the box" and are officially supported by Microsoft. Sometimes that's lines of code, but more often it's integration of popular community libraries. If anything, that trend is accelerating.

(also posted on blog comments, but nobody reads those)

Coding Horror Fan,
Jon
I don't understand. Sure, this may be a special case related to the PyCon stuff (which should be more clearly referenced in the OP imho) but I don't see how it's a general point.

What if you really do believe that you have a better service than that competitor? What if you can demonstrate better uptime/benefits/customer-service/whatever? Do you just sit around and wait until customers fall into your lap?

While I appreciate the sentiment for the current circumstances, I don't think it holds generally. It almost feels like the opposite of hustle.
Bahahaha. Jai Ho!
At least some mirrors have the tarball:

http://www.netgull.com/gcc/releases/gcc-4.8.0/

ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/sourceware.org/pub/gcc/releases/gcc-4.8.0/

ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/releases/gcc-4.8.0/

Someone on HN must really want gcc 4.8 to be released ;-)
I've often wondered how much the physicality of CCGs played into their success. Physically having a particularly rare card always felt more prestigious to me than acquiring rare digital assets like gear in WoW. When I played CCGs I really liked having the cards and the feel of shuffling them and going to actual in-person tournaments. I wonder how that will all transfer online.
I just backed this Kickstarter, good luck on hitting your stretch goals. While South is decent enough, I've always thought it needed replacement or a lot of renovation.
I submitted an app for a Toronto event - if anyone else has done so, let me know!
That's definitely on our to-do list.
Ruby isn't cool anymore? Are startups cool? I think we'd all agree startups are pretty cool.

Going through the HN job postings, my findings are:

Ruby with 6.5 jobs

Python with 4

Java and ObjC each with 2

Node.js and CoffeScript each with 1

Sorry for not sourcing anything, I don't want a massive post. Seems Ruby is still pretty cool. Anyway, this is quite the normal distribution here from my experience. And in the interest of full disclosure -- I am not a Ruby developer.
No one has argued in this thread that you and I are bad peeple because we're priviledged. What they're saying is that if we are not aware of that priviledge you are living in ignorance and should not be surprised when less priviledged people don't take us seriously.

Take Rosseau's famous example of priviledged ignorance: "If the peasants have no bread, let them eat cake." If we are not aware of our priviledge we appear just as ridiculous as that French princess.

Also, I'm pretty sure my white ancestors never turned on the tv and saw a state governor standing at the door of a university trying to block white people from getting in.
Haskell's Data.Sequence is based on finger trees. I'd be surprised if the Real World Haskell guys would recommend it so strongly if it performed "very"^N badly. They're well-known for being performance-obsessed.

"Both Haskell's built-in list type and the DList type that we defined above have poor performance characteristics under some circumstances. The Data.Sequence module defines a Seq container type that gives good performance for a wider variety of operations." -- http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/data-structures.html#d...
Realistic digital screen characters are finally here
Thanks, that's cool. I was looking at the mailing list only.
I don't disagree with you...I do prefer an open ecosystem. However, for the scope of the argument, I'm just leaving it as: "Android keyboards are far, far superior to iOS's seemingly left-behind keyboard". Whether iOS's keyboard problem stems from a closed ecosystem or not is somewhat orthogonal, because iOS has some pretty amazing features despite the closed ecosystem.

As for the difficulty in configuring the keyboards...well, part of it is that you need to configure them all. As an experienced systems user, it didn't take me long to figure out where the config menu is and what the implications were...but that's not going to be the case for a lot of users. As for the difficulty in installing apps: well, again, it may not seem hard. But I'll point to the awkward history of the Google Play/App store as an example of how yes, even app purchasing/updating is hard, which is why Apple and Google spend a significant amount of time on the workflow of buying and installing apps.
I think DRM makes sense sadly because otherwise it'd be as simple as 'right click, save as' and you'd have the contents of a movie. There'd be little incentive to subscribe to Netflix past a month. Rdio too.

Simple anti-copying provisions that are still defeatable, though through effort, help incentivize the migration of those channels. And that's what I really want. I want Hollywood to feel comfortable using the web, because then more open alternatives will emerge when it's a level playing field. (IE watching TV is watching the web.)
"Release History

GCC 4.8.0
March 22, 2012 (changes, documentation)"

2013? Confusing...
(nesting maxed)

I mean, literally the point of The Office is that Michael Scott is a racist, sexist bigot. And when you ironically emulate him, the result is that you kind of come off that way yourself. It's not especially pointed irony, either.

I said nothing racist here, just inappropriately sexualized (as the TWSS joke is intended to do).

Just trying to bring a little levity and lulz to a world of seriousness.
HURRAH! Gitlab is an excellent product but Gitolite and Resque were making the baby Jesus cry, ran off with your girlfriend and kicked a kid over on his bicycle.

V5: Thanks very much, team Gitlab.
Yes I meant that language, glad you find it interesting
That thread was 5 days ago, at which time people agreed only a RC had been released, and that 4.8 would be released in about a week. As of now it appears 4.8 has either been released or is imminently about to be.
Clientless, solitary development equals shamelessness
What Do Angel Investors Actually Do? (Part 2)
Awesome to see a South African company on the front page of HN. Keep it up, guys! Just two questions though - how have you secured the heartbeat? An attacker could take down your servers and forge a heartbeat. How do you prevent that?
What is bizarre is I saw it, thought it was great, came to post it on this site, and boom, was far too late.
For those who don't know, it was Dyn. I personally liked the email. While sendgrid was down we were running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find a replacement. We started setting up postmark but didn't get it up before sendgrid came back up.

We've been using DynECT for DNS for a long time and it's been perfect. Having them remind us they do email (at a time when it was critically needed) was actually great. At this point I'm planning on signing up for it and using them as a failover for sendgrid.
I won't be signing up for this.

Having an operations team that can keep things going through adversity is a competitive advantage that doesn't come cheap.

Redundancy and ops talent cost money. If your competitor made a cost/benefit decision that let them down, I say tough luck.
The problem here is that Google apparently isn't aware, not her.
Don't forget to drink your 8 cups of water each day....
One reason: Another terrorist attack like 9/11 is 'immediate', that is, right in front of people, something to be afraid of right now. Shooting holes in our Constitution is a danger more abstract, more distant, less immediate, although in total more serious. So, with the usual short sightedness of people and politics, we throw away some of our liberty in hopes of some short term security. And, we are gullible, get manipulated, get sold nonsense by the MSM, etc.

In simple terms, the solution is for the voters not to fall for such nonsense.
It's interesting to think about the consequences of dissemination of wrong information about yourself online (as a "non-important" person) by a largely well-respected outlet such as Google. As a far-fetched example, it's not uncommon for identity thieves to use a dead person's identity - and if the author applied for a job and the employer Googled her name... you can see where this is heading.

I suspect there might be some liability issues about incorrect information online, perhaps as a result of other cases with more dire consequences than simply not getting a job.
Uhm... no. This is factually incorrect. If it's "pretty common knowledge in [your] left-wing political circles", that's fairly pathetic. Roe v. Wade overrode state (and occasionally local)-level laws making abortion illegal, but it did not suddenly switch abortion from "illegal" to "legal" in the entire country. (How could that even happen... from a practical perspective?)

There were 193,491 legal abortions in the US in 1970. Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state-by-state matter, and the lines were being drawn in fairly predictable ways based on the right/left state-makeup of the time.
Yeah, Britain hasn't been repressive in this sense for at least the last ~250 years.