skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a former NASA design engineer. Reaction wheels are a real weak point in spacecraft design. They basically allow one to accurately point an observing spacecraft, but without using propellant.

If you use propellant, you eventually run out and the mission is over. With electric-motor reaction wheels (a minimum of three), you can keep them going with solar energy. So in principle, they're a big improvement over the alternatives.

The problem is that they're constantly in motion -- constantly. If you turn a spacecraft and bring it to a new stable position, that new position must be maintained by constant reaction wheel motion. So they're essentially running all the time, there's constant friction, and their parts and bearings eventually wear out.

> Seems like either a more durable item or some sort of cartridge system where you can have like 20 spares ready to go, eject one and slot in a new one or something.

You're overlooking something. To turn a spacecraft like Hubble or Kepler in a reasonable time, you must either have a massive reaction wheel, or you need to make it spin fast (it's all about momentum). Typical reaction wheels represent a compromise between mass and rotational speed. If you want to reduce frictional wear, you make them bigger, more massive, which increases the mission cost. If you need to reduce the size and mass of the spacecraft, you make the wheels spin faster, and they wear out sooner.

So solving the problem by adding more reaction wheels is a non-starter -- they're too physically large and massive to just add a lot of spares.
No one else has brought up that another Kepler wouldn't necessarily be as impactful as the original. True, it would probably discover another couple thousand planets, but Kepler has already done that once. What's another factor of two in the number of known planets?

Kepler looks off the plane of the Galaxy at stars that are typically several kiloparsecs away. In other words, we are never going to visit these worlds. Now that Kepler has revealed that planets are common, it will be much more interesting to find nearby planets that we have a better chance of characterizing, seding probes to, or even visiting one day.

This is what TESS will do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transiting_Exoplanet_Survey_Sat...
well in a light water reactor some of thr fuel can be Pu, but you really can't go beyond 30%. With that said, if you build a reactor that doesn't need to moderate the neutrons and slow them down you could use nothing but plutonium as a fuel. But why bother, LEU is just fine and you cant make a bomb with it. Whereas plutonium is a proliferation hazard and much more expensive.
How is the camera panning done? It works on Windows Chrome but not Ubuntu or Mint Chromium.
I guess I'm uncomfortable using taxes to pay for stuff (especially overfunding) that will be mostly crap. Taxes, because if you don't pay for them, you go to jail, should be subject to a particularly strong level of accountability[0], and "we don't know what is going to be useful" is just really a recipe for spending abuse.

Peer review is one thing (and it looks like it's going to be getting better)... But reviews for funding - that's really tricky. How do you select whom to review science? In our current system, you wind up with program administrators (people who advocate and shepherd funding projects) who are mostly[1] people who 'couldn't make it in science'. So you get effectively second-rate-intelligence fanboys and fangirls who get paid six figures to fawn over the scientists with the biggest mouths and most outlandish claims. To actually conduct the reviews, typically PIs are hired (in a secreted process[2]), so there's of course a level of cronyism involved - not to mention how PIs are generally clueless for other structural reasons. It is hard to believe that this system is efficient or effective at being a good steward of the public trust.

[0] Science is not by far the worst area where government excels at failing to be accountable, but I also see no reason to increase our investment in a system that isn't working.

[1] I know one program administrator who isn't incomptent, she's my ex-boss; the reasons why she wound up as a program administrator are rather complicated and everyone hates her because she isn't interested in doing things the usual way. My neighbor growing up - who introduced me to science - was a physics administrator was probably also not incompetent, but I don't really know.

[2] by which I mean the process is not secret, but the actual goings on are, i.e. you don't know who reviewed you etc.
The Tech Behind the Award-Winning "Artifacts" demo (2013)
After reading that article, you still want a citation showing that someone could be homeless and happier than those kids? ReallY? Maybe re-read the article?
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/08/22/1206820109.abst...
Not Ford Prefect? ;-) (I suppose Art Dent is close enough...)
The twins' father, Walker Inman, 57, lumbered from the
mansion, his tattooed sleeves visible under a black T-
shirt, drinking his morning rum ... He'd been full of
dangerous mischief since he was a child. As a 13-year-old
orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker –
then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish
14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for
property or propriety

That single word "orphan" is the most important part of this article. The reason this piece is so bizarre is that the sorts of traits that allow you to build great fortunes in business[1] are anti-correlated with those that result in becoming a tattooed, drunk, abusive, morbidly obese, criminally-inclined drug addict. Put another way, the kind of guy who would build up a fortune like that would be unlikely to have a biological son like this. In America we're supposed to pretend that DNA doesn't matter, and that you can only pass down looks/height and not brains/behavior, but reality doesn't work like that [2,3,4]. Babies put up for adoption at birth in particular tend to disproportionately be children of parents with low impulse control and mental disorders, and at least some of that appears to be due to the genetics of the parents above and beyond the orphanage conditions [5]. Sounds harsh, but good to know if you're considering adopting.

[1] Celebrities and athletes are of course excluded from this sentence. They don't become wealthy through scaling businesses/managing people, and as such have a much higher incidence of behavioral issues. Many NBA and NFL athletes are bankrupt after a few years out of the league, in fact.

[2] http://www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf

[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420...

[4] http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/kalthoff/bio346/PDF/PowerPo...

[5] http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1737667,00.ht...

The Minnesota psychologist and her colleagues found that
disparity could be due as often to innate factors such as
perinatal care or his birth parents' genes. "The
deleterious effects may quite possibly have come before the
adoption ever took place," Keyes, the study's lead
researcher, says.
Server is too slow to respond -> hit reload?
I thought that as well about the leaving Google post. Sometimes it can be helpful in life to experience a financial non-abundance (I would hesitate at least in my case to call it a lack) so that if you then do really well financially you are able to properly appreciate the flexibility it allows. Money won't solve your problems... it definitely can "grease the wheels" to get thing done more quickly and efficiently in your life, though. I don't find my identity or my happiness in the amount of money that I have... I can be happy earning $20k a year or less. But I do aspire to do cool, helpful, and meaningful things for others and for my family. Money can be an asset in getting things DONE.
Microsoft apologizes for three-day Outlook.com outage
For the good of the world, let us pray this woman never has any real problems. Let's examine her "problems" thus far:

-- Left her wonderful boyfriend. Boo hoo hoo

-- Left her wonderful job Boo hoo hoo

Jesus Christ. The insulation is a thousand miles thick around this person. Is she really not aware that the universe is full of genuine horrors that don't involve her silly quest towards self-actualization or what-the-fuck-ever she's trying to express? Absolutely pathetic.
So he's a misogynist for having expectations about the opposite sex? By that standard, all women are misandrists. Not putting women on a pedestal =/= misogyny.
There's a big difference between dox'ing and re-sharing information that Andy Johnston posted publicly using his real identity.

I haven't seen anybody posting his home address, identifying his relatives, harassing his friends, revealing private nicks, or really anything else that I'd associate with a 4chan style doxing.
Now up at http://enwp.org/John_Herschel and http://enwp.org/Copernicus_(lunar crater)
HORROR MOVIE CONJOURING SIDE EFFECTS
Damn, what do you do after you watched any horror movies
"It also meant making a physical move to Venice (the one in CA, not Italy) so that I could fulfill my dreams of a spacious 1br apartment to myself (which I couldn’t shell out $3k for in SF),"

are you fucking kidding me? rich princess complaining about something most people would kill to have - a comfortable life.
The excerpt you cite is from the first 5% of the article. Have you read the whole thing? There is more than enough evidence in this piece to show that nurture was very much a factor here, regardless of whether nature was or not.
That's interesting, it should work! What browser are you using?
Also see http://samy.pl/evercookie/
Given that Mozilla's budget is over $10M per year and Firefox has been under development for over 10 years, saying a browser costs $1B is off by less than one order of magnitude. Considering that the author is complaining about confusion of 5-6 orders of magnitude, I find this simplification excusable.
It's interesting how books have this almost religious aura to them, that it's morally wrong to throw them out. Like discarding a book on Windows 95 will somehow lead to book-burning and totalitarianism.

Is this a universal view, or are there people who have no trouble discarding unwanted books?
Ever since watching a few episodes of Hoarders, I've become acutely aware of all the clutter and crap I own, and the line from Fight Club ("The stuff you own begins to own you") resonates with me quite well.

I'm also given a regular reminder by my parents who have a nice plot of land in the suburbs, a pool, hot tub, and whatnot, and all the time that's spent keeping up their impeccable lawn, keeping their pool and hot tub clean, frankly, I'd rather just pay my $14/mo for a gym membership to have that pool and hot tub when I want without having to dick around with maintenance.

That said, I still have a stack of old decommissioned servers that I just can't bring myself to throw away despite the fact that a cluster of a few Raspberry Pis will be just as powerful for significantly less power. I need to just bite the bullet and scrap them.
What a terrible way to report a vulnerability. In no emails did Khalil clearly demonstrate how to reproduce it despite giving "repro steps" which weren't reproduction steps at all. I understand there is a language barrier but that's just pathetic.
Came to the comment thread to see if anyone made that joke. Was not disappointed.
Didn't Google recently roll out what they called conversational search which did the pronoun resolution thing?

The example I recall they were able to answer correctly was 'Who's the president of the USA?' And then 'How tall is he?'
I just recommended someone on HN a book by Camus. The First Man.

I read your other comment about your having a troubled childhood. I can relate.

When I was 14 I started reading everything Camus ever published. I became very withdrawn. My family became very concerned. I wrote important phrases by Camus and stuck them on my wall. Pretty soon my entire wall had Camus phrases. My dad's psychologist (and my family) recommended I should 'explore' other types of literature. It was a very tough time. Except for me, I viewed my depression as crippling.

Yes, I was a very logical child, as yourself, but, as Camus suggests, viewing life as absurd leads to a very morose nihilism. I skipped school and was about to fail secondary school. I didn't care. I didn't excel at school, I excelled at philosophy, but that didn't really matter in secondary.

Every single book I read by Camus influenced me and was a stab to the heart. He sometimes wrote on the troubling matter of adults not willing to understand adolescents, and I felt very much misunderstood. Plus, I was also torn between two cultures; one rooted in tradition and another which was very progressive.

The Myth of Sisyphus has references which might help to know or understand before jumping into it. The Stranger is definitely more accessible and, for obvious reasons, it is his most widely read book. But the protagonist in that book is a bit of a character study. I think at one point I related to him, but stopped saying so, because a lot of people interpret Meursault as a sociopath. I don't think I was a sociopath, but was deeply confused about the world in which I lived and distanced/detached myself from everything to understand my world better. It's hard to explain, especially here.

The First Man was the first book that ever made me cry. I never really knew my mother, and this book is about a boy named Jacques, and his relationship with his mother. It is also about a boy's reservations about living in poverty, and living with a poor family (and everything that entails), which I got to experience very early in my life. But it is also a metaphor for cultures colliding: Spanish (which also happens to be my grandparents' culture) and a more 'modern' one, French (in my case, English-speaking North American). Of course, it has Algerian references, as well.

I highly recommend Camus. For those who've never read him, I would recommend these, in this order:

A Happy Death

The Stranger

The First Man

Exile and the Kingdom

Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

I would place The First Man first, but it is a very different book from everything else Camus has written (except his diaries, I guess). My favourite Camus book is definitely The First Man.
Both tattoos and obesity are inextricably tied in with social class; as a general rule, the very wealthy are far less likely to become obese or get tattoos, for a variety of reasons. That leaves "drunk" and "drug addict"; what's your basis for claiming that the children of wealthy businessmen are unlikely to have substance abuse problems?
Wonderful link! Off-topic, but I was particularly enthralled with the ads. Many of them are great, but my favorite was for "The Last One"[1]. "Say goodbye to the frustrations of computer programming. The Last One will be available very soon...The Last One is a computer program that writes computer programs. Programs that work the first time. Every time."

And for only $600.

I was surprised to see that this software actually shipped, according to Wikipedia. [2] Alas, it was not the last piece of software that people ever needed to use, apparently.

[1] http://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1981-08/1981_08_BYTE...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
I agree that using taxes to pay for stuff that isn't going to be used is wasteful, however there is waste in all activities and at least science funding has a good economic return on the whole, even when there is a lot of waste. Besides, I don't see stuff like CERN happening privately.

Also, to avoid confusion, I was meaning tightening up the peer review process and loosening the funding review. The biggest problem I see in poor science is not in the fact it was funded in the first place, but that it is difficult to filter out later. Like you said, funding decisions are tricky, but I think the trick would be to fund even more things and concentrate on excellence in peer review. This would, I think, increase the overall benefit to society, which is the only thing that justifies paying for it with tax in the first place.
Hosted bitcoin mining: $65k/TH/year
Well, considering that you can easily identify every person on the planet uniquely with 5 bytes (256^5=1 000 000 000 000), I'd say these 200 byte+ cookies are much longer than needed. It suddenly starts making good sense that Google's spdy protocol compresses headers...
Dan Gilbert's "Stumbling on happiness", along with his works. Basically, since you don't have a comparison point between the stuff that you have, and they stuff that you don't have - it won't affect you.

In fact, there are a quick Ted talk about that, you can search for his name.
A huge thank-you to all the teams involved with Kepler. It's a very fine experiment that's taught us a ton. Hit the lifetime goal too.

Great job!
(html (head (title "Hi there"))
(body (h1 "Hi there")
(p "S-expressions are "
(b "a lot nicer")
" than HTML/XML/etc.")))
Actually, mature people think about bringing themselves into harmony with their situation. That usually involves both changing yourself and your situation. And I think that's what she's doing here.

Simply changing yourself is a stop-gap measure: most people find out that it doesn't actually work long-term, because you can't actually change your true self. You can change your surface behavior, but if those conflict with your deeply-held values, those are going to leak through in times of stress, and you won't be able to do your job effectively. It's better to put yourself in a position where your values and your actions are in harmony: that's why they call it living with "integrity".
Not sure what you mean by "again".

> They just can't pay him for having demonstrated a vulnerability by hacking someone's account.

I don't see why that is. They already provide the following caveat:

> When you are unable to reproduce a bug with a test account, it is acceptable to use a real account, except for automated testing.[1]

So I don't think there's some kind of legal issue there, if that's what you mean. And you could provide other caveats, like, "you can use a real account if no one is listening to you" (I grant that this may not have helped here either).

I'll reiterate what I said above, which is that the policy is fine, as long as everyone recognizes that it has a strong potential to reduce the security of Facebook. And that ought to raise some sort of alarm, right?

[1] https://www.facebook.com/whitehat
Or making the city a worse place to live.
I submitted a bug to Facebook's whitehat disclosure 3 or 4 months ago. Got no response whatsoever, except an automated response. The bug still exists. The bug allows users to post as though they are other users on the timeline. I think that is pretty serious, but I guess they do not.
"When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of∼$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being."

Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton
"High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being"
PNAS 2010 107: 16489-16493.
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
I don't know if this was the parent author's intent, but one could very plausibly be homeless by choice, being materially poor and living a life with intentionally few obligations, as opposed to being someone forced onto the streets because of mental illness or financial trouble.
could you just change the number of questions to scale with the number of attempts? ie. if there are more than 3 attempts at answering a question, then ask 2 questions.
God Probably, *Probably*, Doesn't Use Your App
I'm only responding to the article, and the comptroller's proposal, which is independent of actions taken in Colorado.

4th paragraph:
under my proposal, only adults age 21 and over would be allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana – which would be grown, processed, and sold by government-licensed businesses for recreational or medicinal purposes.

As written, this seems to imply those licenses won't be issue arbitrarily to individuals.
That was like a perfect storm of self-obsession, self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement and self-pity.

Then again, kudos to her for making a tough decision that made her life better. Now I sincerely hope that her increased freedom will allow her to develop a less unhealthy perspective on life than what transpires from her blog post.

(Not sure why I'm taking the time to react in what is obviously not a constructive way; maybe I'm just trying to make the nausea go away.)
Figure out another way to reward this guy (maybe tell him that it's a gesture of goodwill only) and reward him. It doesn't have to be from Facebook, Inc, but he should get something from somewhere.

Otherwise, next time him or any of his friends find a vulnerability, they'd be tempted to share it with the people who would reward them, since they've seen firsthand that their reports to facebook seem to just get ignored. When you consider that his entire region is in turmoil, and that social media is clearly playing an important role in the uprisings across that region [whether you agree with them or not], you'll understand our reasons for insisting that his efforts be rewarded somehow.

Edit 1: Not suggesting that fb intentionally ignores their reports for poor English or any other reason, but that's clearly the impression they're getting.

Edit 2: And while I have no reason to believe that this guy (Khalil) would ever report a vulnerability to some dictator's security forces, others who have seen this story might. And those who have seen this need not be his friends either, since it's on HN, /r/technology, and elsewhere.

Edit 3: As tszming suggested, if you don't want to risk setting a precedent by offering cash, you could perhaps sponsor an all-expenses-paid trip (with no implications of future employment) for him to visit Facebook HQ. Granted I don't know the legal implications of this, but it does give you a chance to buy this guy lunch and tell him in person that you do appreciate his efforts, motivate him to continue reporting any vulnerabilities he finds, and tell him to encourage his friends to do the same. Actions speak louder than words, and there's no question this would have a far bigger impact than the dismissive two-liner he received, even if the intention was the same.
> a minimum of three

Correct me if I am wrong, but don't most systems use six? It is a whole lot easier to use three pairs of wheels. Pairs can be spun up from a dead stop and in the event of reduced power can be used to turn in either direction by braking action alone.

Or does "a reaction wheel" imply two counter-rotating flywheels by definition?

For an alternative, I've heard some good things about laser ablative thrusters. Still fairly young, but they are powered by electricity and have no moving parts. They do need reaction mass, but unlike traditional engines the mass is a solid block and can't boil off, corrode, leak, freeze or whatever problems affect liquid systems.
Wasn't aware that it was a strict dichotomy. There are plenty of ways to get the point across without gendering it. And I'm not trying to bash the OP at all. It's just that I do think it's important that we all hold each other accountable. But thanks for engaging, a lot of people don't even recognize there being a problem in the first place.
This is new knowledge to me. The article is wonderful and informative. And as mentioned in the comments, incognito mode doesn't prevent it.
Why I Use SaltStack - Rackspace Developer Center
Does anybody know why they got sued? I'm curious as to why they'd get sued for Etags but not cookies. Did they just not have any opt-out measure?