skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Musk actually design his rockets? I thought he was in charge of funding them.
Yeah, I agree. I'll update to include just top-level comments.
Code::Blocks is precisely what I get all newbies to download for exactly this reason. It's just download and run. It is as close to what I refer to as "just download C++". And it's a decent minimal IDE to boot.
http://www.meredithtax.org/taxonomyblog/gita-sahgal-feminist...

Here's another interesting story I came across - basically, Amnesty sacked one of their staff because she, an outspoken feminist, criticised their cosy relationship with radical Islamists. If anyone reading this has time, follow some of the names in that article - you might discover, like I did, that the world is far more fucked up than you had previously imagined.
Thought provoking article, we all want a better world. Seems arrogant to think that most people believe their jobs are meaningless, I get no sense of that here in Indianapolis. The last sentence really turned me off, "We’re an anti-profit, radical publisher."
Again, this is a standard trope at HN,but is wrong - they are not primarily financial it goes like hedge fund or PE guys. Most top tier firms are made up of former entrepreneur types. And the idea that they all don't invest in groundbreaking technology is because quite frankly a perception issue here - is the average YC company a groundbreaking tech or closer to an Instagram? A lot of the clean tech investing was disastrous, but that is an example where a lot of interesting tech was backed, some of which has hit the market. Jut because it doesn't reach the front page here does not mean it doesn't happen.
But look at what happened when MD5 was broken.

Did everyone move swiftly away from MD5? Well no, it still turns up daily even in new developments[1]. Library maintainers value compatibility over security, so would rather continue to include a broken hash function than remove it and break applications.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=md5
Moreover, there are "accents." Some people's morse is very distinctive in terms of how they space the characters of some letters or the inter-letter spacing in some words.

My experience with Morse over flashing light was limited to Merchant Marine training, but before that I was a ham and spent lots of time listening to Morse code (CW) on radio. Patterns emerge and you start hearing common words more easily than their individual letters especially once you get above 15 wpm or so.

Even though after all this time I can barely remember actual letters to dot-dash conversions, I can immediately pick up the pattern of "CQ CQ CQ de XXX" (XXX is sending a request to converse out to anyone listening) and other common idioms.
You'd be surprised; that's how most games server software works actually. For example, running a Source Dedicated Server works in exactly the same way (as does pretty much everything else). After years of dealing with that I did in fact eventually write a Web app that wraps servers like that and makes them Internet accessible. You can check it out here:https://github.com/lelandbatey/veiled
In short it was easy to misuse global v8::Persistent<T>`handles leading to memory corruptions and such. Unfortunately making them safe to use also means making them hard to use directly. Previously they were just interchangeable with normal v8::Local<T> handles for things like calls.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/v8-users/6kSAbnUb-rQ/e-GI0b1...
This is a pretty fucking funny and ironic comment.
Greenwald's response:

"Reuters is the absolute worst at tearing comments out of context for sensationalizing headlines. The paraphrase:

Q: Will the UK's detention of your partner deter your future reporting?

A: Absolutely not. If anything, it will do the opposite. It will embolden me: I have many more documents to report on, including ones about the UK, where I'll now focus more. I will be more aggressive, not less, in reporting.

Q: What effect do you think they'll be of the UK's detention of your partner?

A: When they do things like this, they show the world their real character. It'll backfire. I think they'll come to regret it.

REUTERS: HE VOWS TO PUBLISH DOCUMENTS ABOUT UK AFTER DETENTION, SAYS THEY WILL BE SORRY!!!"

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1rm09tf
This seems to be the biggest issue:

Changing all callbacks that return Handle<Value> to return void and instead pass the return value in as a parameter.
Reader clones are the new Todos.
Exactly. Is the author surprised that there ARE rich kids in Delhi and hence wrote this?
RINGS propels satellites without propellants
Coursera has a class as well. Martin Odersky tweeted a while ago about a possible advanced course in the fall but it doesn't look like it's happening yet.

http://www.coursera.org/course/progfun
> Civil engineering isn't mechanical engineering isn't chemical engineering isn't aerospace engineering.

That's true, but all of them derive from the same set of first principles, those defined by physics.

> Being a talented industrialist in one (or more) of these do not imply capability in any of the others.

Not true -- expertise is not implied, but capability certainly is. In this specific case, to predict the behavior of an evacuated transport tube, and given that the project doesn't resemble any existing projects, one could hardly do better than have a background in spacecraft booster design.
How is this same fucking absurd statement written in EVERY SINGLE THREAD HERE about Go? And disproven everytime?
That's a particularly pessimistic view of the authorities' grasp of media relations: the British mainstream public are far more likely to be interested in "how's the journalist the government tried to silence going to respond" than "what's that occasional contributor to a newspaper far too left-wing and longwinded for me to actually read got to say for himself"

If the UK government wanted the right wing media to smear GG they were best off letting them get on with it

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2350153/Journalist-h...

rather than encouraging them to change their tune

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2396745/Edward-Snowd...
To be more precise, the Firefox addon that does this lets you select a specific function and view the assembly on demand, instead of getting a multi-gigabyte IR/assembly dump from a debug build of the browser. That's what makes it useful.

I agree that in general users should not need to care about IR or disassembly. Unfortunately, I'm not sure we'll ever end up in that world.
I disagree. I think "fixed" means the tube attached to the pillar to prevent it from jumping out of it. See rings in figure 3 (page 11):

http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-201...
I would be the first to say his style can be bombastic and he can be overly aggressive. But nobody denies that he’s very smart, and among liberal bloggers at least, very moderate and rational in his view, and unusually willing to engage debate. So it is hard to figure out what there could be about the guy that generates such strong emotions.
So that’s what I’m going to do
Good point.

Lesson learned: Find a security hole, report it to Facebook, and they don't respond after two attempts? Sell it as a zero day.

Incentives matter. And there is always money to be had somewhere else.
Nicer Segue Preparation With Storyboards
And as a teenager with almost no money this was important to me. I built the classic "Tuna-tin Two" transmitter from the schematic I found in the high school library and most of my money went to buying the $15 brass and plastic transmitter key from some (probably long defunct) store in downtown Brooklyn, NY.
Yahoo’s email service is now closed in China
OctoTales: Balanced [video]
I apologize if you got the impression I was claiming you don't document your public-facing APIs. I'm talking about V8 as a system; intended behaviors and recommended usage patterns and strategies, documentation of downsides and weaknesses and such. The debug-related parts of the 'public' (? not sure if they're actually public) API were very poorly documented when last I checked, though - some of the debug flags you can pass to d8 were only documented in old obscure blog posts.
With Braintree's interchange+ pricing, they actually state themselves that "Total costs are typically 1.8% to 2.6% of the transaction. There is a minimum cost of €100 per month"

And that means it can't be as low as 1.8% of your transaction unless you're consistently taking in the region of €5,500+ per month -- low revenues for an established business, but not a trivial amount for a bootstrapped start-up looking for a payment service to launch with.

I've wondered whether this is a deliberate business decision by Braintree to discourage applications from brand new (and I assume on average more risky) start-ups. Then again, established businesses with serious revenues would presumably be considering a more traditional set-up where they can negotiate much lower rates with heavyweight payment services, and would perhaps care less about the hassle of setting those things up compared to the ease-of-use for developers of modern payment services. I'm not sure which part of the market Braintree are really trying to own at the moment: they do seem to have a USP among the "developer-friendly services" in the number of different payment methods they support through a common API, but this doesn't even seem to merit a mention on the front page of their site.
Tesla's A round was just 7MM, and it's B less than 15MM.
Ok, but the leadership class is usually in a foreign country. Historically, hostile foreign countries or ones where you can't trust the local government. So to get people in those countries, you need a militarized police force. We could have sent in police to arrest OBL in Pakistan, but they would have looked a lot like seal team 6 ( or maybe we could have had the Pakistanis do it, but that doesn't work in all cases. For example, the Taliban in 2001 would not have helped us)

Also, the leadership may not care about their consequences too much either, other than preferably living to fight another day.
I love that the first bit of advice was

"consider NOT fundraising"

This mirrors my own thinking... delay fund-raising as long as possible, and bootstrap as far as you can. Best case: You never raise at all, and find that you achieve your goals based solely on organic growth. Less ideal case: You have to raise outside money eventually, but you have more leverage and therefore more favorable terms.
This is a subtle example of the advantages of the Internet. When people made things like this in 1980, you'd never even hear about it.
Here's Ken Robinson making speeder's point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

I was gobsmacked when I saw a teacher "diagnose" ADHD in one of her students. The fact that this is done regularly is flabbergasting.
You don't have to get into thermal expansion and FEA to know that the Hyperloop proposal is back-of-the-napkin quality. As to why Musk did this -- dropped this hand-wavy shell of a proposal -- I don't know.
It really depends on the real stats though. Because if only 1 out of 100 20% projects is worth anything, maybe it's just not a good use of your engineers. Like a VC fund with too low a success rate just goes out of business.
> the truth is that it's just boys being boys.

Jasonjei may well have a more subtle point in mind that agrees with what you wrote. It's not what was written.
>First world problems...

Depression is an every world problem.
Meet the NASA scientist devising a starship warp drive
How do Rogue and Casbah stack up against each other?
Thanks for that post. Now almost a year later, is your medication/dosage/enthusiasm the same?

(Looking to see if you'd written a followup, I instead found your 2006 post about Adderall. Of course that's a different drug, but the older post is interesting for both the contrasts and similarities to your later Ritalin assessment.)
I would having a job is only a subset of what not being idle means.

I always divide my time into two basic phases: productive and consumptive. Either you are creating something or you are consuming something. Sitting around watching TV is consuming; creating a tv show would be producing.

I think both activities are valuable and have their place. Sometimes you need to relax and enjoy a passive activity, but what makes society great is the production of new things; be they art, science, entertainment, goods..

I tend not to judge the WHAT of the creative side. It doesn't matter what you create, but the creation of new ideas and things is what makes us human.
This is great! A few years ago, I did something similar for my son and 3 of the neighbor kids. It was a very minimalized D&D type of game where they each picked from a stack of predefined player charts, then played a simple but thrilling campaign to rescue the kidnapped king. There were a few routes they could take, each with different hints and warnings from villagers along the way. In the end, 4 boys from ages 4-7 sat at the table, engrossed and attentive, for over 3 hours. They've since made their own maps and stories, though I think the making has been more fun for them than actually playing.

I love this approach, though, as it is almost something a kid could play by themselves or more easily create for one another and play together. It could even be played in the car on trips, reducing whining about playing with the ipad. (I didn't have ipads when I was your age!!)
> I don't care about their depression problems, a good ass whooping can fix that

While I agree that the behaviour you wrote about is reprehensible, please do not trivialize depression. Perhaps if their mental health issues were easier to treat, their impact on the society would be more positive, dont you think so?
Wow, what a poor choice on the part of the mod who decided to change this headline.
The difficulties of the route did seem to be ignored in general. The environmental constraints are not some minor triviality. Even if the tracks are in the air and have a small footprint you still need to get access for large vehicles in potentially sensitive areas. Getting into dense cities tends to depend on very expensive tunnels, highly contained pinch points, or tight corners. Ultimately you have thousands of interest groups who will treat Hyperloop with the exactly the same skepticism as rail and solving those problems will cost just as much.
Is the cryptopocalypse nigh?
The partner newspaper was in fact The Guardian.
Show HN: Hire a dude to bring you to Congress and argue to defund the NSA
You could also cut the gameboard into tiles and flip them over as the players approach an area.
Yes, Apple Will Sell a Gold-Tone iPhone
13 Growth Hackers: Martell, Patel, Ellis, + Steve Blank on Customers Dev. [Free]
And written in Go? HN catnip.
My point was that it doesn't much matter what the VC partners think, because they're simply not in a position to fund massive civil infrastructure projects. Even the former- entrepreneur- types; they're getting their money from the same places.
1 foot ~= 1 nano-light-second
As an aside:

I was (sorta still am) a pretty active member of the TI community over at http://cemetech.net/ (probably the biggest community since unitedti shut down). That on calc assembler you linked to was what I used, and it was made by my friend Brendan Fletcher (calc84maniac is his TI community handle) when he was 13 or 14. He went on to make various gameboy emulators for TI calcs. He's a year or two younger than I am, and I remember when he joined the community about a year after I did. He was slightly below my level at TIBASIC (neither of us did ASM yet) but very quickly soared past me in skill and made his on calc assembler (I started ASM with that). I just remember being blown away by how bright he was. Probably one of the more gifted programmers I've personally known. I think he's a sophomore in Uni now.

Not terribly related, but a TI anecdote nonetheless.
There is no content here..
It would be a good idea to get some more robust logging into Rails 4.1. Rails has grown up, and so have many of the applications using it. Rails logging starts to brake down when you need to track down the specific server and PID that is associated with an error. If you use a log aggregator, without information on PID and server, log messages interleave, and become hard to visually associate when you have 100 rails processes distributed across 10 servers.
The problem I'd personally have with Paymill is that they are part of the Samwers' game. And they like to copy businesses that work well (financial numbers being probably the best way to find out about it).
> That's true, but all of them derive from the same set of first principles, those defined by physics.

More is different (PDF link: http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo... ).

Much like a knowledge of physics is insufficient to draw conclusions about biochemistry, knowledge of basic physical laws tells you very little about the fundamentals of a practical engineering field. The theory and laws of e.g. civil engineering are typically traceable back to abstract physical principles, but are not strictly derivable from them.
Top 3D Printing News Last Week: MakerBot Digitizer, Fuel3D 3D Scanner
I have a 5-year old too, and he loves LEGO and Video Games too. What video games do you two like? He LOVES the LEGO Batman game, but my wife is concerned about the LEGO guns.

The other day we played Minecraft on the iPad together and he built a house, two beds, and put two signs over the beds. One for himself (he typed his name all by himself) and one for me (he needed help to find the "p" in "Papa.")
I can't disagree more. I'm a mechanical engineering by schooling (what am I doing writing code?!) and it still routinely shocks me the sort of intriguing misconceptions I hear coming out of the mouths of very smart, very technical people.

The fact that mechanical engineering and civil engineering and aerospace engineering all derive from basic physical laws is rather meaningless - engineering isn't about first principles, it's about the extremely complex task of putting these to use.

To make an analogy to software, that's like saying "writing code for a Martian probe isn't very different from writing code for a website, it's all the same first principles".

In this case, the author's thesis is that Musk is applying analysis methods that are wholly inapplicable to civil engineering, and fails to account to the scale of the structure, and makes faulty assumptions about the validity of simulating the structure in small segments. This is the sort of thing you see when you cross someone who is an expert in one field into another where they have no expertise - but they know just enough to get started.

I write mobile apps for a living. I can probably hold a decent conversation with a kernel hacker, but I am in no way qualified to design the next uber-kernel of the future. Traditional engineering is no different.
> However, the reality is that sales needs engineering more than engineering needs sales. Sales people come and go but engineers build what matters.

and then sales people make it possible to make money off of that thing...? I'm not seeing how engineering doesn't need sales just as much. It's as if the author just said:

>~ However, the reality is that farmers need well diggers more than well diggers need farmers. Well diggers come and go but farmers grow what matters.

No farmers: everybody starves. No well diggers: everybody dies of thirst. Acting like one is 'more essential' is the wrong distinction to make. (How about: cost to replace, return on investment, comparative advantage?)
This. And related to risk: When a website fails, it doesn't hurt anyone; if this tube were built, and then found to have a fatal design flaw, the liability would be enormous.
> If we raise enough to pay for a meeting with a Congressperson or a Staffer we're going to ask our lobbyist to bring in an iPad running a Google Hangout that all of our backers will be invited to join so you can be a part of the meeting too.

:) Good luck.
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same thing in Bombay, Bangalore, Calcutta. Essentially first world problems. Though I have to say I always felt that Delhi had a higher proportion of new rich than cities with older wealth like Bombay - and it was something very obvious when you were in the city.
I've had tons of projects that I've started working on, really prototyping, only to move on to something else once I figured out it wasn't something I want to invest time in, so I know where Notch is coming from. I couldn't imagine developing prototypes in a way that had tons of users watching me.

Notch knowing himself - knowing that he isn't the right person for the game, is great. I hope the community does pick up the game. This was a game that I was looking forward to playing (as I am sure most others were).
Tech industry slips into a surprising slump
That guy is a great father.
Ask HN: Is the PHP 5.5 password_hash() function secure enough?
Is the new PHP 5.5 password_hash function secure enough for production applications? (That is, if you follow the recommendations regarding cost and not generating your own salt)

Are the better alternatives out there for PHP?

If someone is using a different BCrypt alternative, should they implement this instead?
IPhone 5C to replace iPhone 5 as iPhone 4S to stay on?
Top Bitcoin News Last Week: New York Subpoena, Senate Inquiry, Android
I'd also like to see someone assess the economic impact of terrorism on these hyperloop proposals.

Isn't that an incredibly juicy target? Hundreds of miles of tube, but bad guys only need to blow up one piece to cripple the tube for a significant amount of time, not to mention those poor souls who are about to be fired from the tube like a bullet.

And let's not forget what a juicy target the capsules are, too. I anticipate the TSA stepping in and drastically increasing both the cost and the delays, not to mention the invasive body checks.

These kinds of attacks are a foregone conclusion, but I keep hearing people talk about how this will be "so much more convenient than an airport, and cheaper too!"

But airplanes are fungible- tubes are not.
Well, if the problem of building a hyperloop or similar system is now reduced to the more well defined problems mentioned in the post, we're still better of than before the proposal.

The OP claims that the structural analysis and graphics in the proposal are not useful and goes on "This is eyewash for the rubes, the surest sign you’re dealing with a snake oil salesman.".

I don't think that is the most likely reason for including those bits. More likely, this is the work of engineers from different fields taking a stab at something new and making mistakes. If this is the case, I applaud them for their bravery. For each point in the post, Musk can now hire a room full of experts to work on that. I'm sure anyone who has ever picked up work in a related but new field has made similar mistakes.

On a different note, I don't understand why this post is so petty and often crosses into the unconstructive... If "Dr Drang" is reading this, please consider editing your blog post and removing the parts about snake oil, other engineers being able to do these calculations in their sleep etc. You're doing a disservice to your otherwise very insightful post and the work that clearly went into it.
> any civil engineer could do the calculations in their sleep

The calculations can only be performed in Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software, doing this type of analysis (accurately) is impossible without computers.

>Its cost is probably wildly underestimated

There are also significant economic benefits to the hyperloop, in that it may be less expensive to maintain and power, while requiring much less rolling (floating?) stock. Rails are very expensive to maintain, largely because of the heavy loads they carry, and because they are entirely exposed to the elements.