skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plutonium cannot be used in gun-type bombs because of P-240 contamination, but the basics are still the same. If you do not get the U-235 into the correct configuration quickly enough you will have a fizzle. The difference between plutonium and uranium in a gun type bomb is that there really isn't a practical "quickly enough" with plutonium.

The more pure you get your U-235 the more you can reduce the amount of time that you have to get it into a proper configuration. Pure enough to just drop together though? I find that incredibly unlikely. Keep in mind that even with incredibly pure U-235 your fuel is going to start to become critical when the two halves are still a few inches apart. Once that happens you have a very short period of time to close the gap and 9.8m/s^2 is pretty shoddy. The two halves are also quite massive, so being strong enough to slam them together by hand fast enough is not really reasonable either, they have too much inertia.

Maybe you could make a gun-type bomb using gravity if you dropped one half down a long evacuated tube... easier just to make it properly though. Of course refining pure enough U-235 that "simpler" gun designs become possible would be more difficult than actually just building the rest of the bomb correctly anyway.

I think Luis Alvarez was exaggerating "high yield" (you could certainly create a very damaging fizzle), or more likely "dropping", since constructing the gun is rather trivial with highly pure U-235.
An excellent sentiment, but it must be noted that this is a very transient time, both technologically and socioeconomically. The current situation in Europe is a canary in the coal mine for the developed world, as technology fiercely marches on and makes plebs of the middle class and rulers of the lucky few who can capitalize on this technological upheaval.

I'm far more interested in conversations regarding where we are headed, rather than from whence we've came [1].

1. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robo...
This is the most illuminating reply in the subthread for me. Very good point, thanks for the clear explanation.
Probably not yet reviewed
If K&R is the most important programming you've read, you have many more books to read methinks :)
U.S. Dept of Transportation Policy on Automated Vehicle Development
Yes, please do.

I'm a homebrewer, but have never gotten into soda. I would be very interested in your results.
pretty nifty. thinks "humble" is a negative word:

http://ireadless.com/PUMA-Men-s-V5-11-I-FG-Soccer-Cleat/?act...
Haha why people like me piss you off? Interested in knowing :p
AFAIK with the exception of iOS devices, using the Tor Browser Bundle is just as easy, if not more so than installing a vpn client. I realize that Tor can't be used on iOS without jailbreaking it, and that iOS comes with a vpn client, but for PCs Tor doesn't even require an install to use, while a vpn client does, and for android it only requires installation of two apps. While your effort is commendable, seems well intentioned, and is more than anything I have ever done, it just seems like this is a dangerous step down from the recommended use of TOR.
GoDaddy Down again
and for GTA V, pretty please?
Why is it so easy to dislike popular music?
Muhaha, patent all you like, it won't protect you from the intelligence explosion (you know, that AI that turns itself into Skynet before the Patent Office can strike it down).

On a more serious note, I'm glad I'm living in a country where there's no such thing as infringing software patents.
Can you recommend any resources with more discussion about game server sharding? I worked at a defunct MMO game company and crossing shard tiles was an endless source of bugs for asset loading and server- side combat simulations.
I've failed with computer organization a couple of times, so for capturing ideas and compiling them, here is the paper-based method I use (updating an earlier comment).

(And yes, the main caveat is that you do pretty much need a single-desk setup for this. Then again, I would argue that having a single workspace might be better for performance anyhow.)

---

A lot of people just keep thick journals, but I like A6 cards that I compile into slim exercise books. I just capture anything that comes to mind on a card[0] and let them sit on a pile. Then, after some time, enough stuff has accumulated and I review the cards and compile them.[1]

It has the sweet spot of not having to commit to something big (meaning it circumvents the urge to make it perfect, usually preventing you from writing it down in the first place), is reasonably flexible if you use masking tape to glue in the cards (there are some books that I could take apart completely and reuse) and can be stashed and sorted easily.[2]

An even lower bar (in terms of commitment) than the cards are whiteboards, but I lack the nerve of putting one up. I also think that I'd hardly maintain them properly, so they'd end up crammed with stuff that I never really finish. The sweet spot that I've found for that is laminating balsa wood. You can get a 10 pack of balsa wood sheets (about .5cm thick) cheaply and just wrap them with clear adhesive film so you can write on them with a non-permanent marker. Bit of water and a tissue and they're good as new.[3][4]

[0] https://plus.google.com/photos/111011776153281260419/albums/...

[1] https://plus.google.com/photos/111011776153281260419/albums/...

[2] https://plus.google.com/photos/111011776153281260419/albums/...

[3] https://plus.google.com/photos/111011776153281260419/albums/...

[4] https://plus.google.com/photos/111011776153281260419/albums/...

(In 3&4, you can see how I'm copying and updating an existing concept to a new whiteboard, which is pretty simple if you can hold your whiteboard in your hand...)

Maybe I should finally write that blog post I've been thinking about for years now...
I suppose it's because functional programming isn't a one-trick shop. There is a paradigm that comes out of lisp macros that can't be accomplished within a language like Scala or Haskell, even though those languages are superior in many other respects.
I just wish those kind of mods worked more "nicely" with multiplayer... Although I still think with all the GTA4 graphics mods there are, I still think it should quality for one of the current most realistic looking games (definitely not with the default settings, however).

However... Regarding the OP, a Google Maps of Liberty City is really awesome though. Imagine if someone hacked the cellphone in the game to run off an Android emulator rendered to a screen overlay, and link it with the Google Navigator app (that's a significant modification to the engine though so I don't know if that would be possible, and especially not on multiplayer LOL).
We really need to stop with all these "X is down" posts.
Which is great, except for the fact that Tor itself is fraught with a whole load of issues and at the end of the day you can still incriminate yourself.

Lahana doesn't implement secrecy because it wasn't a design requirement. It solves a different problem and uses Tor to do that, albeit in a manner associated with 24 hours and some ductape rather than years of NSA and DARPA funding. If you have any suggestions for implementing secrecy while maintaining the ease of use aspect I'd love to hear them. Heck, even documenting all the risks you see with it at the moment would be useful as it would help people make more informed decisions.

I've seen mixed reports about tor being blocked or possibly not, which is part of the reason for the VPN. Thanks for the feedback though and I agree that for many cases Tor is a better solution while it remains directly accessible, especially if secrecy is a requirement.
The thing is, someone is exercising political freedom in even the most repressive governments: the person (or people) at the top who make all the decisions.

Now it's possible that they will make some good decisions, and create wealth and raise living standards for a while.

But eventually, they will either make some bad decisions, or die. And when that happens...then what? Often the answer (as we have seen recently) is violent chaos.

Political freedoms allow a society to reinvent itself without chaotic bloodshed. When leaders make bad decisions, everyone else can talk about it, figure out a better way to go, and vote that into effect.

The power of this approach is ably demonstrated by the U.S., which is the richest, and one of the most stable, nations on Earth, despite having among the strongest protections for free expression.
I don't mean to be negative, it's probably the material as much as you but as I read the article, I find a voice repeating "what is the point, where is this leading, why, why?". I mean, as I read the article, my impression is "here's verbose syntax that does describe types but whose relation to the tasks of an ordinary programming language, to getting things done is left unexplained for too long for attention span, if it is explained at all".

And I'm fairly mathematically sophisticated (MA a while back with some effort to keep current).

It seems like the constructions "thrown on the floor" everything that happens in the creation of a type. But I can't understand what that does except make simple operations look like a giant mess.

I would add that the stack overflow mentions that the construction is a way to construct an algebraic with "polymorphic parameterization". IE, Haskel uses the laws of algebra and some supplied primitives (AddL AddR, which you mention but don't define!)to calculate A + B. Perhaps if you make that explicit, the article wouldn't have the "floating in the clouds and never coming down" quality that it has for me now.
IMessages for OS X sucks
Am I the only one who is really disappointed with iMessages on my Mac? For a start, it seems to like to reorder the conversations I have with people (meaning I can't see what they have just sent me). Then often I have to hit 'resend' because it fails sending a message the first time. I hope Apple get round to fixing this soon!
Eve Online down due to DDoS
Software patents are utter garbage. We all know that. Most software patent attorneys know that. The system has evolved to keep lawyers employed. It is a way of taxing engineers to support lawyers. The plaintiffs need lawyers. The defendants need lawyers. There must be judges. The entire system gets weighted down with this huge load of unproductive individuals. Think of how many engineers become patent attorneys because law is so lucrative. Entry level patent attorneys in firms make $160K a year. Think of how little an engineer makes even four or five years out of college. Its more lucrative to patent and sue, than to build. These are the little things that are going to erode America's competitiveness.
Thanks. I never understand why websites don't do this automatically - especially big ones like Amazon and YouTube.

When visiting a URL and they detect that you are on mobile, they send you over to the mobile URL. Why not do the opposite when they detect you aren't?

In fact, why have a separate URL at all? They should be able to serve up the same content from the same URL for web or mobile or whatever device.
John Zubrzycki at the BBC was responsible for the 8K broadcasts during the London summer olympics in 2012. He has both written about his experience and held a presentation where he explains how the BBC did recording, post-processing and transmission of the TV signals. They used equipment from NHK that is also being used in this new upcoming trial.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2012/08/th...
http://www.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-167-cvmp-hi-visio...
Pull requests welcome!

I'm under the impression that making a non-sucky AI for nontrivial board sizes (say 10x10 and up) is an unsolved problem... much like no one had a Go AI that could beat even a skilled beginner until quite recently. And I couldn't find an example of any Hex-playing AI, even a crap one, that was open source.
> don't really have any idea

First try and figure out what will motivate you enough to keep working on the app, and then pick an idea that fits with your motivation.

For example, I'm very motivated by user feedback, and I'm just not as interested in coding things that are just for myself or are hidden away on a server. So I tend to enjoy working on things that others will use, like user interfaces or APIs.

Things that I've seen motivate others are:

* optimizing performance
* making money
* solving their own problems
* working with large data sets
* graphics and games
* working with hardware
* working with real-time data

You definitely don't need to come up with an original idea.
I've been working on a tool for making PERT estimates easier and, consequently, done a bunch of reading about PERT, wherein lots of the work is of a statistical or mathematical nature. But I also ducked across to the psychological research to get a feel for the human factors. Psychologists consider estimation problems under the heading of "the planning fallacy". I intended to write a series of articles for SEO purposes but so far I only have two fairly light-weight ones done[0].

Most PERT method research is out of the Operations Research community. There's some interesting stuff there about how estimates can be wrong. For example, if you accept that there's a range of probabilities on every node in a PERT graph, then managing the "critical path" by itself is very risky. There's a whole bunch of what you might call subcritical paths lurking, and one step in risk management is to find the parts of your project where they might be lurking[1].

Another thing that pops up. In the classic PERT formula, the divisor is 6. Why 6? It turns out that nobody is quite sure, but it roughly assumes that events follow a double-triangular distribution[2]. This is a heroic assumption, to say the least, but how do you best account for it? In my prototype code I've made the distribution configurable with the idea that advanced customers could change it; or perhaps some regression across all customer data could provide a better fit.

But then comes a bit of a bombshell from the psychologists, who operate in a carefree world, innocent of project management problems. They've found that decomposing a task improves estimation performance. It's called the "unpacking effect".

In a series of experiments Kruger & Evans established that you can improve estimation performance on a main task simply by asking people to list the subtasks required to achieve it. How long will it take to get ready for a date? If you ask this question by itself, the answer will be wrong. If you first ask "What do you need to do to prepare for a date?" and then ask how long, the answer is still wrong, but it is less wrong. Read their paper, it's absolutely fascinating [3].

To me this raises the fascinating possibility that the improved performance of PERT estimates over expert judgement derives mostly or wholly from the enumeration of subtasks rather than the statistical stuff that comes along for the ride.

[0] http://confidest.com/ (I know it looks very ordinary, my CSS chops are very ordinary).

[1] Richard J. Schonberger, "Why Projects Are 'Always' Late: A Rationale Based on Manual Simulation of a PERT/CPM Network", Journal of the Operational Research Society

[2] T. M. Williams, "What Are PERT Estimates?", Journal of the Operational Research Society

[3] Justing Kruger and Matt Evens, "If you don't want to be late, enumerate: Unpacking reduces the planning fallacy", Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Actually the title of the article is "Friction: why you can't build software as fast as you think you can" (emphasis here only).

Some admin was obviously in an editorial mood and has updated it to confuse everyone.
The article is extremely poorly translated, and many of the sentences don't make sense. This makes it hard for me to figure out if something was lost in translation or if the author is as ignorant as the translation makes him out to be.

I won't go through the post line by line; I think this paragraph sufficiently establishes that the author is ignorant.

> The virtue of Unix convention of making a big thing by combining small things is inherited in Emacs. This virtue itself is the reason why I am using Emacs. However, this may be becoming history. What is the meaning of the world without the virtue or philosophy, but with only benefit? I’d be disappointed if Emacs become so.

The precursors of Emacs were written at the AI lab at MIT, which at the time ran the ITS operating system. ITS had values that were pretty much orthogonal to Unix, which makes the statement especially ignorant. GNU Emacs's first public release in the 80s had to be ported to Unix to make it work.

Emacs is famous for being very extensible and can be used as a web browser, newsreader, spreadsheet, etc. You can do almost anything and never leave the Emacs environment. This is the opposite of combining many small programs to create something big.

Emacs also has a clear and logical design, and allows you redefine almost anything you don't like. Unix is famous for having a horrendous, incoherent design that is so poor that many of its commands are digestive noises (nroff, fsck, awk, grep). Its other commands are cryptically named and for years and years the documentation was nonexistent or terrible.
You want to pay for One Direction and Taylor Swift by force of law?
Some awesome Emacs Lisp programs that relies on external programs:

mu4e: http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

not much: http://notmuchmail.org/

EDBI: https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-edbi

ropemacs: http://rope.sourceforge.net/ropemacs.html

RSense: http://cx4a.org/software/rsense/index.html

GCCSense: http://cx4a.org/software/gccsense/index.html

emacs-ipython-notebook: http://tkf.github.io/emacs-ipython-notebook

emacs-jedi: http://tkf.github.io/emacs-jedi

request.el: http://tkf.github.io/emacs-request/

Well, the last three is my projects so you could exclude that :)

Also, we could add version conrolling interfaces such as magit and VC (relying on git/svn/hg/...) and advanced interpreter such as SLIME/nrepl.el/geiser.

Ah, and don't forget dired!
So the key part of the update I was referring to was the following:

Because of course that's not how it really works. Instead, it makes
a local copy of that external library. And if you have a local copy,
you can edit it. And meanwhile, that person you copied the OpenGL code
from? They are also changing their version (fixing bugs, adding features,
adding bugs).

In short, original developer has the clone of the OpenGL library in their 'src' directory. While working on Haunts his making changes to it and not pulling updates from upstream. All is well, things will always build on his machine because as you say, it won't update unless he does 'go get -u'.

Fast forward to when the community takes over, they clone the Haunts project and attempt to build it. Now they are using the HEAD of the 'github.com/go-gl/opengl/gl' repository, as specified by the imports path and they find that it no longer compiles.

This is where the problem exists.

The simplest way around this problem is to simply fork the OpenGL Go library (like they have), and reference the fork in the import path. That way no matter what happens in the upstream repository, the Haunts project will continue to compile. The original developer could of then just pushed the changes he was making in his local 'src' directory back to the fork and everything would be fine. When they are ready to take updates from upstream, they simply update their fork and then 'go get -u' on all developer machines.

By forking, or maintaining your own copy of library, you get a level of isolation from the upstream developers.

What you are saying is 100% correct, the Go tools automatically give you this when running 'go get', it clones the library into your 'src' directory. What I am saying is that when working in a team/community environment, you need an additional level of isolation (the fork), so that the entire team can be using the exact same version of the library.

> I feel like one of us is bat shit insane, and at this point, I am just hoping it isn't me.

I don't think (hope) either of us are, just not thinking on the same track :) I hope what I've written is clear enough that you can see what I was saying.
I think that what is needed first and foremost is a system for being able to more quickly challenge and invalidate patents above and beyond relying on a lawsuit first approach.
One data point: my mom (in Minnesota) has repeatedly tried to get me to use Twist when I head home to visit her and my dad. I had never heard of the app, and I live in San Francisco.
The LAPD has (rightfully) gotten a bad rap lately, but what do you expect when you have a realistic, armed, life-size military figure facing outward toward the street...
Forbes article with some background, http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2012/07/09/riding...

The incredibly banal Kato Kaelin interviews Leslie Spring and Mimi Chen (at about 7:30 minutes) http://www.tubeguru.com/video/9311 Are these two musicians, vocalists, or founders of cutting edge AI Cognitive Code Corporation? Or ALL of the ABOVE??
Hell yeah, learning how to make compilers should be what a BS in CS is all about. Pretty much everything in computer science can be turned into a language and compilers have almost all of the major topics in CS as one easily explainable thing. It's also one of the few parts of CS that stands on a solid logical proof filled footing and is still insanely practical.

I basically teach baby compiler theory at the end of my Python book without people even noticing because I think parsing at a minimum is so important.
Can a team discover patterns in the things they underestimate?

I think good project managers can do this. There are tools like evidence based scheduling that attempt to formalise this through a statistical model but in my experience of trying it this only works where the work being done is the same every time (ie. the main premise of EBS is that someone doesn't need to be good or bad at estimating, they only need to be consistently one or the other - but that consistency is notably absent on smaller teams where you are faced with a wider variety of types of work).

I think that, as a project manager, I have developed a reasonable intuition for how reliable each member of my team's estimates for different types of work will be and it gives me some reasonable sense of when I should schedule in meetings with clients, whether or not we should remove features etc. but it's total voodoo and I get it wrong quite a bit :)
Will you post links to some of these packages? I'm building up my Emacs Python toolkit after many years of being a Vim user (with liberal use of Evil mode of course! :-)
Can somebody please explain to me what is the point of the overlay header in some websites (like OP's)? Do people really want to reduce the content's available screen real state because of the header? I really don't see the point of it and it's one of the main reasons I love readability. Do people really want the header present at all times while you are reading the page's content? It's not inconvenient to just go to the top of the page in case you need a link from there but maybe I missed the usability tests proving otherwise. This is a genuine question btw, so if anyone could inform me I would really appreciate it.
http://theoldreader.com/ worked fine for me.
I love the postscript of this:

"It is nonetheless supremely ironic that the demise of Lisp at JPL was ultimately due in no small measure to the unreliability of a C program."
Very cool! I wonder if everything holds about the same way for the new 'L-shaped' connectors?