skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It has many differences as well but the shocking thing about the similarities is that they don't make any sense except in regards to attempting to copy the Shuttle.

The major similarity is the physical configuration of the orbiter, no? This was, indeed, a deliberate copy; cut down on the aerodynamic testing required. Most other details of the system were really quite different (particularly the engines; outboard solid fuel and internal reusable hydrogen for the shuttle, with a separate tank, outboard kerosene and external expendable (though with reusable designs studied for a future upgrade) hydrogen for Buran).

> Regardless of the capabilities of their scientists and engineers we know that the Soviets were obsessed with copying as much western technology as possible.

There isn't really that much of that going on in Buran. Again, the booster engines are an obvious example; the US had largely abandoned building efficient kerosene engines (they're very expensive to develop) by the time of the shuttle programme.
The Structure Sensor is the first 3D sensor for mobile devices
I'd like to correct - Energia didn't have solid boosters; the four strap-ons were considered the first stage and burned LOX/kerosene in RD-170. RD-170 has 2 axis of thrust vectoring for each chamber, and RD-171 - the variant used in Zenit rockets - has 1 axis of thrust vectoring (the tangential one).
@krapp thanks for asking. I have no real evidence, except that he worked closely with military and you cannot be against your feeding hand. See interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF6hOMY2vxA So obviously he is pro USAF, but that didn't mean he needed to portray the US Government in a good light in StarGate SG-1. He showed the USAF in a very good light though. He also supports the Greenpeace (Sea Shepard) and Charity.
It was never stated that the first comment was only about the United States.
You probably mean contributing in the dollar amount, but that's hardly the scale I'd choose to measure it by.
It is obvious that smartphones will break the 4GB limit fairly soon (< 5 years), though I think right now the 5S has 1GB.

They added more registers and cleaned up some cruft in the 64-bit ISA, so that is where the speed is coming from. You also get some speed from the extra bits even if you aren't addressing 4+ GB of memory (e.g. 64 bit longs are native).

It doesn't make much sense to clean up the architecture without adding 64-bit at the same time. X86 -> X64 followed the same path.
Absolutely horrendous post that uses the trope of presenting a wide array of opinions as if they all come from a singular. ARMv8 is pretty cool, which is why the entire industry is moving to it, and were before this.
I'm sure bullying is still a relevant and worthwhile topic to discuss, but this article is from May 29, 2012. I can't help but think it'd be better to post more recent material on the matter.
F.A.A. Nears New Rules on Devices
pbm

P1
# feep.pbm
24 7
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0
0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0
0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0
0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
The top comments here are well correlated to the current state of privacy in the US :)
Tizen can run android apps. So they have the largest ecosystem.

No they don't. Android has the largest ecosystem. They're riding on Android's train - they don't have their own train. And they're on the Android train with Huawei. And if they're dumb enough to jump off the train, then they're in the bushes.

Samsung has a huge brand, they could easily make Tizen a competitor by deploying it on Galaxy Phone in the future. Consumers wouldn't know (or care)

No they couldn't. Brand doesn't count for anything if you're selling the same stuff your competitor is. Substitutability. The top phones from Apple, Samsung, and HTC offer more for more money than what Huawei can offer right now because there's room for mobile hardware innovation, and that's what they do best. Once they hit a ceiling - no more pixels to add to the screen, no more transistors on the CPU without exceeding a reasonable thermal envelope - then its all Huawei's game. The only one of those three that stands a chance is Apple because they have their own ecosystem.

Samsung has more brand recognition than Huawei. And it doesn't matter a whit. They'll still get steam-rolled once the ppi wars are over and we're buying based on price. This is the grim reality that Samsung shareholders have been realizing.

Not sure how you can judge a whole companies software engineers, based on one project (Touchwiz).

I've owned many Samsung products and have had no good experiences with their software or drivers. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but so far they seem to fit the stereotype of the hardware-company-that-doesn't-get-and-can't do-software.
I prefer to have no input from that site whatsoever. Particularly after I read them and their commenters celebrating an actual assault on someone who made a tasteless comment. They only care about victim blaming in specific circumstances, it seems.

They are not for equality but are instead for gossip-mongering and creating false controversy; just like the entire rest of the Gawker network.
"It is obvious that smartphones will break the 4GB limit fairly soon (< 5 years), though I think right now the 5S has 1GB."

The new Samsung Galaxy Note 3 has 3GB.
Innovative/funny tool to get privacy on the subway
> Touch ID is going to massively reduce the number of totally unsecured iPhones that require zero effort to access.

I feel like we just went through this very same drill with the Chrome team refusing to hide web site passwords behind a master password, something that all browsers, except Chrome, support. Given how stubborn the Chrome team has been in its handling of this situation, I think fighting that TouchId battle is going to be equally challenging.

Common sense is, sadly, not very common, not even among the security circles.
The one thing I hate is when people post duplicate questions on HN.
dBase III is the program that taught me as a 10-year-old not to just flick the switch on my IBM XT like it was a light when it was no longer needed, but to save and exit gracefully first.
I love how certain people try to use complicated words and yet don't know how to spell them.
Basics of OpenGL
It doesn't mater if it has over 4GB of physical memory. What matters is that it has 64bit address space. Memory is abstracted away from the app by the OS and for many applications 32bits is too small. Example of such apps include A) Games that use a lot of textures (compressed textures) B) Image editing C) Video editing D) other more demanding applications.

Even back in 2009 the guys at ID software were running into this due to the low limits how much you could memory map. There's a short blurb about it here: http://www.bethblog.com/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-ra...

Between already mapped in shared libraries, files, VMA fragmentation 32bit address space is crowded.
Interesting, so pretty much like POP App[1] except it also does OCR to understand the sketches to speed up the process.

[1] https://popapp.in
Well, aside from pre-ordering my book and telling everyone you meet about it.... heh, you should come to one of our events! The tour list is up to 150 stops (!) http://withouttheirpermission.com/tour-dates and hopefully you can meet some like-minded folks with whom you'll go on to make something amazing that I'll later take credit for.
He is still using his finger behind the tape....
It would be much sooner than 5 years. And it's not about smartphones but tablets.
To choose the shape, the easier path was taken: this one works, so let's safely do the same.

That doesn't mean that the choice wasn't analyzed and justified, not that aerodynamic testing wasn't done - for examples, picture here - http://buran.ru/htm/history.htm - show the evolution of the overall architecture, where the Shuttle scheme was just one of the considered factors.
The RAGE approach to textures is an interesting point here, I suppose. I can see how 64-bit address space is a big improvement there.

EDIT: However, RAGE style textures do not really benefit in any way from the CPU being 64-bit. They benefit from virtualization of textures, which is usually done on the GPU - and in fact I believe there are OpenGL extensions that offer the ability to create a large 'virtual' texture that is not resident in video memory. So I don't actually believe that 64-bit address space is any better for RAGE (especially because random stalls from disk paging of textures are not something a game developer would tolerate).

However, I should note that compressed textures don't really come into the picture. You're not going to map a compressed texture into memory such that you access uncompressed pixels by reading/writing at a given address with compression happening behind the scenes - at least, I've never seen a real world shipped scheme for that in graphics. (I think the XBox 360's memory controller might have done something like that for compressed audio, though...)

EDIT 2: See this talk by id and nvidia that explains how virtual textures in RAGE are applied:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/GTC-2010/pdfs/2152_GTC2010.pdf
Note that instead of the kind of stall you'd get when paging data from disk to memory, the optimal behavior is that it uses blurry 'low resolution' data until high resolution pages are available. Totally different than 64-bit virtual memory you use on a CPU.

My main question is whether it would actually be realistic to do that kind of demand paging in most use cases. Do you really have the ability to create your own fault handlers in user mode? Otherwise, all you can do is page data in from disk, which is just that 'map storage into memory' use case I mentioned earlier.

Reduced fragmentation is a plus but getting it at the cost of doubling every pointer's size is not necessarily a huge win.
I loved Minefold. Sadly, I never got to fully use it. It was a great way to play with some friends though. It sucks they shut it down.
It is amusing to see thousands of unpaid apple PR workers spring into action, making sure no critical comment exists without a defence. Perhaps they feel their credibility is on the line, given how often they have sermonised on the genius/quality/beauty of their electronic device manufacturer of choice.
That's the same with all planes, ships and cars in general. At a glance they all look the same.
>>In addition, the SSMEs were only reusable in principle; in practice, they were rarely reused, and unit cost was very high.

They were reused and were extremely efficient with a much higher unit cost than the equivalent energia stack main engine. The Soviets intended to design a carrier shuttle with reusable engines just like the US Shuttle but abandoned the effort due to reliability concerns.

That is the whole point of the space shuttle design in any case. If you can't reuse very powerful main engines that can be made to be very efficient there is no point in using a shuttle-truck design in the first place.

> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).

The energia was suboptimal for launching very large items due to its requirement that payloads have to carried on the side. This increases the weight due to atmospheric shielding that cannot be jettisoned and, more importantly, means a third stage cannot be used for efficiency. Every payload also has to be able to deploy itself into the correct orbit which requires custom development for each launch payload. So while energia was powerful it was very expensive as a standalone launch platform and never would have seen much use and consequently was never seriously considered as a future development platform.

The soviets would have done better just to develop a lh2/lox successor to the failed n1 rocket in the first place; especially if they didn't think the shuttle was going to be economical. Instead, they developed a sub-optimal launch vehicle that was itself based on a flawed concept and they had every intention of running the program out to the year 2000 even with a handful of launches scheduled and development costs that were already higher than the US shuttle.
Yeah, I agree that it made sense to introduce 64-bit support when updating the architecture, it's just crazy seeing people argue that the 64-bitness is what made things faster.

Do 64-bit machine words actually speed things up on average? I would really assume that if an application is designed around 32-bit integers, doubling the size of every register is just going to waste resources.
Actually if you go to Reddit you'll see that support for Assange is not universal, even on subreddits like /r/worldnews.

The day used to be that being negative of Assange at all got you "downvoted into oblivion", but that's no longer the case. People are even able to mention the idea that Assange might have actually did it without having their comment necessarily achieve negative karma.

For example, go read the /r/movies link talking about Benedict Cumberbatch's comments from Fifth Estate about the topics. Assange was certainly positively mentioned, but he had a lot of opposition as well, along with people simply keeping their minds open.
that's actually kind of ironic...

...the people closest to you in your environment ( kids, parents, spouse, boss, co-workers) are the ones who can most easily obtain your fingerprints...
I recommend to use a set of toy programs like those from the Benchmarks Game. Some nested loops with a little bit of string concatenation won't really tell you anything useful.
Apple’s iPhone 5 Has Better Touch Screen Features Than Android
Alien-Level Tech Required To Crack New VPN Encryption Setup, Makers Say
> the USA seems to have much more opportunity for the 'I have experience, but no degree' type than the rest of the world does

Are you referring to formal immigration requirements, or the job market? I definitely agree on formal immigration requirements. But if you're an EU citizen (and therefore have freedom of movement), experience without a degree becomes pretty sellable again, at least in tech (less so in traditional industry, but that's also true in the US).

In the current market here, anyone who can program an iPhone app can get a job, or start a freelance business. Degrees are good, but not critical. They're seen as good in part because there's no tuition, and in fact you get paid a stipend while you attend school to cover living expenses. So there's kind of a view that there's no excuse for not having one: unlike in the U.S., it couldn't be that you couldn't afford to go to school, so there must be some other reason, and employers want to probe if it's a reason they should be worried about.
Sounds interesting, I am current looking for an android project to hack on just for the heck of it. It would be awesome if I could scratch someone’s itch as well. So I am going to do some research to see how much work it would take to make a better one. If I think I can do it in a reasonable time frame I will contact you.
I'm very curious about how you're tackling this problem. It's no longer a secret that insects could provide a rich and abundant source or protein, the biggest problem I've seen this far is how to farm them, in other words what is the sustainable input into these farms?

As the other commenter pointed out, black soldier flies are a wonderful output, but from my research I've seen that they need meat for to grow and their larva to hatch.
I would agree that the Blackberry experience for app developers is indeed inferior to that of Android and iOS.

Here are my observations:

The Blackberry Vendor Portal.

1. App submission
An absolutely dated interface for submitting applications. One thing that really upsets me is that Blackberry did not segregate the interface for pre-BB10 applications and BB10 applications. Throughout the submission process, I was constantly given the option to submit my Cascades/BB10 application as a pre-BB10 bundle. Even after I submitted my application as a BB10 application, I was given reports that someone had downloaded my application on their pre-BB10 device. How could this happen?

2. Viewing reports
Again, a dated interface for viewing reports. Reports are only produced on-demand either as a ZIP file of CSVs or a static GIF that looks like it was exported with excel. I could imagine those who rely on BB apps as a source of income have written excel applications to process this data into a user-friendly format. Both iOS and Android have reports in beautiful charted format directly in their app portal.

3. Responding to users
I had a review on my applications in which the reviewer was requesting a feature. I did have this feature in my application, but due to a ux flaw, it was not easily recognizable. I would have loved to drop the user a comment notifying them of this feature. Regardless of denying/approving the review, I think this is a fantastic feature in the Android (Google Play) model.

iOS and Android app portals are built for the common developer. As they are built for the common consumer. Blackberry vendor portal is built for the enterprise, very much like their original phones.

4. I would consider myself a "Qt/QML expert", so from a programming standpoint, I find it much easier to convert complex UI designs into working code. This is thanks to the wonderful Cascades framework with QML syntax (originally built by The Astonishing Tribe, acquired by BB a few years ago). I think it's much easier to deploy code with BB compared to iOS/Android. This is of course dependent on the developer.

5. Blackberry, prior to releasing the Z10 in the US, released an "Application Generator". This generator converted RSS feeds into running, "native" applications for BB10. This flooded the BB10 app world with garbage applications. There are still hundreds of applications on the store that are blatant rip-offs of Android applications (search Maps on your Z10 and you will see several GMaps rebundles)

6. App services like advertisements and push notifications are still not up to par as iAd or Admob, and APNS.
Chris and Dave are a class act. Sad to see em go.
I guess that's one way to teach stats...
Show HN: PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio
Is India getting a new airline?
My iPad asks me for my iTunes password pretty much every time I update the apps. I'm assuming this is orthogonal from my having set a PIN to unlock the thing.
You act like DoD is going out into Hollywood to change the movies directors are making.

It's almost precisely the opposite: Hollywood studios are trying to enlist DoD help in making their movies.

DoD doesn't always help. They didn't help with the famous movie "Officer and a Gentleman", for instance (and not because the Class Drill Instructor was mean in the screenplay either).

Likewise, DoD did not assist with the film 'Crimson Tide' as the Navy objected to the core portions of the screenplay.

But like any other business relationship, it's not DoD's job to volunteer to help in situations where the movie itself would portray DoD in a negative light. So they do ask for changes to movies to be made if the director wants assistance sometimes, but that's always up to the studio/director to decide.
150 or 1500?
Where is Robin Hood when you need one.
The Navy actually charged Paramount Pictures for the costs of operating a carrier for the film scenes.

Paramount tried to get the Navy to agree to refund some of the cost if Paramount let the Navy run a recruiting pitch before the movie in theaters, but Naval officials concluded (correctly) that Top Gun itself was as good a recruiting film as anyone could develop, and charged full price.
There is an increasing interest in life extension, so I think we'll also see wide demand for an interim solution to the whole death thing. E.g. brain plastination, cryonics, sufficiently detailed brain scans... whoever makes one of these scalable and effective at preserving a person (information-theoretically) will rake in like $O(10^9).
> This attack showed that increasing sensor resolution only requires increasing the resolution on the fake print to match.

Just to clarify, it wasn't just the increased resolution that was required here, but "latex milk", I assume to simulate a living finger, as well. It's not as simple as print-of-print = unlock.
That "pie chart" in the middle is horribly confusing. A pie chart is to show proportions of a whole, yet the slices are an arbitrary amount of equal-sized descriptors. Even more confusing is the word "percentile" stamped on top of it, causing some confusing about the numbers, making it seem like "87th" should take up 87% of the pie.

It should be a bar graph instead.
Oops, yep, they weren't solid.
Makerbot’s New Device Makes Cloning Instantaneous
No, it takes pretty vigorous scrubbing, at least on mine.
It's 150 a year, but the post starts with 'during the last decade'
This looks great, but I couldn't get it to work. Do I need to create handlers for the notifiers?

2013/09/22 21:56:54 not suppported notifier: mail
2013/09/22 21:58:20 not suppported notifier: sms
2013/09/22 21:58:42 not suppported notifier: twitter
I have to echo this sentiment here. Every time I see a post about PyPy being fast, I think, "Hmm, perhaps I should try out this package I'm working on and see if it performs better." After getting a PyPy environment working---sometimes by installing forks that are PyPy compatible---I almost always end up with real word uses that are noticeably slower with PyPy as opposed to regular ol' CPython.

I may not be coding to PyPy's strengths, but I've gone through this process on several different packages that I've released and I tend to see similar results each time. I want to try and use PyPy to make my code faster, but it just doesn't seem to do it with real code I'm using.
Might be less obtrusive to favorite instead of retweeting.

(Edit: This assumes you can get a list of favorited tweets ordered by when they were favorited. I just noticed the web interface orders them by time posted, not time favorited.)
The fact that Bittorrent is used for distribution doesn't automatically make a file fully public. But as far as I know the file was provided to the journalist in the equivalent of an FTP /pub folder, not via Bittorrent. But Assange never removed the file afterwards and it eventually got backed up and publically-trawled afterwards somehow.
It was really confusing trying to see how you did the large letters at the start of the paragraphs because Firefox's inspector didn't show the css rules for :first-character since the DOM element selected was the <p>.