skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've thought for 30 years that the shuttle design was terribly misguided.

The terrible problem with space flight is weight. Weight, weight, weight. It takes an enormous amount of fuel and rocket to push any kind of weight into orbit.

But the shuttle is not optimized for getting useful weight into orbit (i.e. payload, with the emphasis on pay). It's optimized for returning the rocket to earth. I.e. it has landing gear, wings, rudder, etc. All this is heavy, and therefore terribly expensive.

Step back a moment, and look at what we really need to bring back from orbit - it's the astronauts. Nothing else. All we actually need is a tiny capsule to bring the astronauts back, i.e. a heat shield and parachute. The rest can just be left in orbit.

Getting rid of all that weight then means the rocket can either be far cheaper, or it can launch much bigger PAY loads.

As for reliability, likely the most cost effective solution is to build a smaller, highly reliable rocket just for pushing astronauts up into orbit. Use another rocket, a big, heavy, unmanned one, and one that needn't be so reliable, to push up the stuff the astronauts need to do their mission.
In most corporations you can't use your home computer to connect to your work VPN or other resources, this is mainly a security issue. Your work IT department has no control over the security of your home systems.
I wonder if EU countries would ever pull a referendum on whether they should impose quotas on their nationals who keep their savings in swiss banks.
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood what you meant there ;)
Why should "Switzerland" care about how rich it is if it's not Swiss?

Wealth is not the measure of all things and it's definitely not something that gets spread around evenly. There are winners and losers to mass immigration. Mass immigration also reduces the notion of there being a common culture and destiny which reduces the social capital and civic mindedness required for public programs to work.
There is nothing inherently wrong about tightening immigration policy. I don't know the details but there are couple of perfectly understandable reasons why people oppose immigration (note that they overlap a bit):

1. Immigrants are disproportionally responsible for criminality.

2. Switzerland is a rich country and the Swiss want to keep the wealth for themselves. But of course, many immigrants have a net positive effect on the country's wealth.

3. Many immigrants come from a very different culture and don't want to adjust to the mainstream culture.

4. Immigrants may form groups isolated from the rest of the society.

5. The Swiss culture is different than the American one. They're not that welcoming to immigrants. They want to keep their culture. I personally understand why they voted not to allow mosques in their towns.
If the GPL was, as you claim, meant to keep that from happening, why is it totally permissible by the GPL?
I've written a system that allows condorcet voting with small numbers of voters (we used it to decide a HackDay winner recently), and with small numbers of voters you have to allow ties. None of the discussions of condorcet methods on wikipedia seem to talk much about allowing ties.

The other thing is, that I sometimes want to allow people not to rank an option at all (e.g. if they participated in a HackDay team, they shouldn't rank their own team), once you allow options to be unranked, you open up the possibility of multiple roots to the graph (e.g. one person votes that A > C and leaves B unranked, and another person votes that B > C and leaves A unranked), so you need to do something reasonable in that case too.

In my first implementation of ranked pairs, I would lock in results based on their victory margin, but if a number of results had the same victory margin, they would be locked in based on their order in the system - clearly wrong.

My favourite theory now is just to find all strongly connected components and collapse them into a group which is equally tied (not just the Schwartz set either - cycles can occur further down the graph and relative rankings are still interesting to competitors). The joint winners are all options in all groups that have no losses. http://kybernetikos.github.io/graff/demo/ was me playing around with the ranked pairs way of removing cycles compared to just grouping them.
>Young women don't magically become technologists at 22

I did exactly that. I have a degree in the arts, but always loved physics and pursued that secondarily. I failed physics because I had taken arts instead of mathematics but found that that didn't stop me learning C and building all the arts programs I ever wanted. Quite some years ago now and I was an outlier but it's not too uncommon.

Good schools are now getting girls into robotics and coding before puberty. That's when you get exited. I loved messing with radios and old VHS players when I was a kid, and probably MOST importantly my father was a technologist: exposure at a young age is everything.
Cruelty#2... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204184

This kind of attitude is why articles like this get written: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230366140...
Not quite. The prevailing view among pro-European Brits, which has been the dominant political force in the UK of the last 40 years or so, was to create a very large trade bloc across a wider Europe, including freedom of movement of labour, but without things like the single currency. This differs from especially the classic French view, which was to create a Franco-German superstate which would be structurally incapable of having a war with itself through almost complete unification of a relatively small group of countries.

The collapse of the Berlin wall certainly played into the British vision for a while, then the Euro initially did well causing the federal contingent to be excited, but the structural weaknesses from the Eurozone members not having gone all in on unification, especially for budgetary policy, have swung it temporarily back to the large but loose collective. The split between the French and German experience of the Euro problem is going to prevent any real progress on this point at all since increasingly those two parties are going to disagree on their visions of the future.
thanks for the tip about safari. I just assumed safari would follow the convention, but nope. Should be fixed now :)
Preventing it by disorganising the EU from the inside, maybe.
What I want to know is what was AOL doing with the money that it was supposedly buying insurance with was it not actually buying insurance but trying to self insure? and using the "insurance monney" to boost its books?

The next Question is are the employees 401k's safe and accounted for or is Aol like Maxwell?
Yup, Lisp will definitely be around long after most of the technologies we read about today :)

I have yet to do much with Clojure, mainly because I'm not really in the JVM ecosystem. But I think its focus on immutability is a great contribution to Lisp and will last a long time. It's an idea that transcends a particular implementation.
I agree, this was more about problems with fingerprint technology.
No time to set up a form, just include your questions in the js call.
I bought one last week in Thailand to go to the beach. And I still copped a lot of crap from the mates I was with. Enjoy carrying your plastic bag guys, and no, I will not put your phone in my most convenient of packs.
The people who voted against such immigration probably suspect that benefits to the Swiss economy probably doesn't necessarily mean benefits to them, it might mean increased competition, which in effect nullifies that one argument commonly put forward.
If the card could not overdrive the speakers (i.e., if the system were designed properly) it could not be a problem.
I think you underestimate the intellect of younger people. Teach them that there is shady stuff on the internet and to avoid it rather than restricting them. Restricting them will just make them more curious anyway.
"This article has a good premise, but poor execution."

Makes sense, but I take the view the premise is flawed. Its one of those "oh, that seems so obvious" type premises that describe the skin of the onion but fails on pulling back the layers. It seems to happen a lot while dealing with complex systems. The fun part of this one is that it seems like they don't realize they are dealing with a complex system. The illustrating pictures even show some cracks and the author skims over them.
All the parking lots on that SF map are slated for construction.

http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/12/mission_rock_gets_r...
Why I Don’t Believe in Smart Watches--Thoughts About Wearable Computing
There's a response from Dianne Hackborn (hackbod) of Android.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neithe...
yes you should never never call out individual emploees in this way WHY the Senior Non exec has not told the Chairman that Mr Armstrong has to go
That's the reason why classes for girls (not necessarily primarily but directed towards) work so well. Being in a room full of men with few or no women in ANY circumstance is awkward unless you are top of your game.
Is this a joke or did I completely miss the point?
> Frankly, posting and upvoting that sort of comment is the behavior of a lynch mob.

Posting a photograph of a victim of a lynch mob
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Lynching2...

I think Armstrong might be discomfited by the well deserved online education in social etiquette and the priority of life (of poorer people) over money. He sorely needs it and he will be the better for it, though a complete cure for him seems impossible.

> Did he say that?

Did I call you an ignorant money peddler, who thinks he is very smart because he can micro analyze statements and completely ignore the context in which the statement was made, as per his convenience?

Of course, I did not!

I call you no such thing.
That still doesn't maximize overall benefit. What if the money were instead spent on 10 individuals that needed 1/10 the money to save their lives? The cost benefit analysis to determine what medical issues make most sense should try to maximize the number of person-years-lived across the entire population.
Gmal gets Rsvp Action
Why the World Will Run Out of Helium
I've owned two. Both "died" shortly (very shortly) after the warranty expired. On both, the connector from the mobo to the power input cracked right off (I never yanked, dropped, or otherwise abused them. Just normal use.) I could fix it, but it was a pain, and the stress points didn't change, so it just happened again.

On the second, the screen began to go at 14 months. I would never by consumer electronics from Dell again.
thanks for clarifying !

well I guess their support people are not engineers, only technicians, hope this blows back into DELL PR instead...
> Just remember where the bread is buttered, pedestrians = homeless panhandler but car = customer.

Hah. What? Driving consumes a tremendous amount of most people's disposable income. I know people who spend $5-10k a year on transportation.
> At least in Germany it's like that. I am not sure of it's different in other countries.

I get the impression it is the same situation in the UK. It's nice knowing I can do a dozen rounds with a CS graduate.
"How come UK wants to stop paying immigrants from poor countries unemployement benefits?"

EU migrants entering the UK cannot claim unemployment benefit for the first three months of their stay (but they can after that time). The debate is around "benefit tourism" - people travelling to other countries to claim welfare benefits. Whether this is an actual problem or something whipped up by our toxic British press is hard to say (facts rarely come into the discussion as far as the press are concerned).

The debate about "benefit tourism" isn't unique to Britain (perhaps the hysterical tone is though). It's a political issue in other European countries too.
Shouldn't it be possible to remove the Schwartz Set candidates and then re-run the count to find out the remaining relative rankings?
Thats for Uber Black and SUV not UberX. They only check for proof of personal auto insurance on UberX. And they know that does not cover the driver in most instances. They knowingly send people out to do work on their system knowing they are committing insurance fraud.

Worst part is regulators seem to be letting them get away with it in many states, Not all.
"C++ is a grotesquerie more suitable for a carnival horror show"

eyeroll
Interesting timing, as I came up with my own implementation last week:

Code:
https://github.com/skx/e-comments/

Demo:
http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/e-comments/demo.html

This was built for my server-optimizing site, http://tweaked.io/ which is still in its infancy.
It seems to be becoming the central theme of the early 21st century. How do we keep the institutions that are supposedly created for our benefit from doing the opposite?
Why You Should Always Use === and Other Bad Practices
From the perspective of the EU, taking punitive action would make them look like Russia, eager to push their 'allies' about. It would be a gift to people who say the EU wants to take away countries' individual sovereignty.

According to those who oppose caps, instituting caps will cause a bunch of pain anyway. If the EU want to punish the swiss, the best thing to do would be to allow that pain, which the swiss have indisputably brought upon themselves.
>That said, there is plenty of learning you can do by building your own server.

I've thought about that, but it really seems to be more expensive and less useful. DigitalOcean is $60/year and already has a server-grade internet connection. I could build a $500 server and host it illegally on my Road Runner connection (256kbps upstream) but that'd be inferior service for a lot more money.

>It's a hard issue, too, because you can rack up a big bill if you think you know more than you do.

This is certainly the case with AWS and a credit card, but on (for example) Linode or DigitalOcean it's pretty hard to "accidentally" spin up a server.

Cheap VPSes are so incredibly cheap though. It'd be great if e.g. middle and high schools would buy hosting for interested students. I doubt it would cost more than a couple grand a year.

Also I really wish there was something like a debit card that kids could buy (without ID verification and all that) at retail stores and spend online. I understand the money laundering concern, but it could be limited to low dollar amounts or something.
Until the perpetual license is less than $750/dev I just don't see enough value.

They've mentioned elsewhere that they're working on updated licensing, I hope they do.
I agree with you except for your use of cryptography as an example. In anything dealing with security, unfortunately the nitty-gritty implementation details wind up mattering as much (if not more) than the theoretical portion. Most cases of crypto failing are not examples where the algorithm is flawed (or outdated), but rather where the implementation is weak.

Any course on crypto needs to address both algorithms in the abstract and the particularities of how they're implemented in the real world.
Helping others is something that we did for very long long time

"The third stage, based on findings from Europe between around 500,000 and 40,000 years ago, sees humans such as Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals developing deep-seated commitments to the welfare of others illustrated by a long adolescence and a dependence on hunting together. There is also archaeological evidence of the routine care of the injured or infirm over extended periods. These include the remains of a child with a congenital brain abnormality who was not abandoned, but lived until five or six years old. The researchers also note that there was a Neanderthal with a withered arm, deformed feet and blindness in one eye who must have been cared for, perhaps for as long as twenty years."

http://news.discovery.com/human/neanderthals-were-compassion...
There's also a nice analogy to the startup world. Heard of a culture fit? Immigration policy is similar.
I probably should have used this link. I found it on Reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1xgams/we_just_took_...
Understanding the Chrome Sync Protocol
It works nicely in Toronto, with two sports facilities (a stadium and an arena) easily accessible by transit (the SkyDome^wRoger Centre and the Air Canada Centre), and a third reasonably accessible by transit (BMO Field). Based on the concerts that I've been to at the ACC in the last few months, at least half of the people attending take transit to downtown (although some park at edge transit parking lots).
The engineers can't really do that for all cases [1]. Understanding abstractly what's going on at least a few layers up and down your stack will definitely make a front-end developer more productive, if by productive you mean able to complete a finished product rather than just a buggy first draft.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
It's not based on 'one news article', it's based on something Armstrong said (and planned to say) which is /reported/ in a news article.
We don't. We choose alternatives instead.
This vote has a classic "urban vs rural" component. Urban areas (where high population growth has the most direct impact) said "no" to the restriction of immigration. Rural areas said yes. The other component is linguistic/regional.

These two components typically summarize most Swiss votes pretty well.

(most visible on a map, see http://www.24heures.ch/suisse/tendance-initiative-udc-limmig...)
I wrote, "Fortunately I/T seems to be on it way out, though regrettably slowly." Noblethrasher and odonnellryan asked what I meant.

I am referring to "I/T" as a corporate computing function within the company, a function which often hiders rather than accelerates the business.

I/T typically picks technologies which are easier for I/T. Hence there's a corporate standardization on one mail system, one OS; very strict upgrade cycles etc. This kind of made sense in an earlier era when computing wasn't really integrated into the business processes -- people would be "on email" and if the icons changed an expensive "training program" had to be rolled out because the majority of working people had a passive aggressive learned helplessness towards computers.

What happened is that people became more savvy and worked around I/T. First it was the PC: the appeal of the Apple II was that you could buy one, add a copy of Visicalc, plunk it down on your desk, and get work done without dealing with those assholes in I/T. I/T (this is before CIOs etc) fought back (just look at magazines like Datamation from the 1980s to see; I am not exaggerating) and took control of the PC infrastructure. Around 2000 departments would start to put in wifi access points and local file servers under secretaries' desks to just get work done. I/T again was seen as a barrier.

Nowadays I/T is freaking out about "BYOD" because people wouldn't put up with the crappy company-issued blackberries etc. But it is making business more efficient and humane.

You could see the nails entering the coffin for a long time, but these things take time. When I was at MIT in the 1980s I would get a laugh when I would run across a piece of literature from MIT's I/T department about the computing crucial capabilities they provided to MIT -- because they had nothing to do with the systems we depended on in the research labs which were mature and two generations beyond what I/T offered. And even now, heavily computer-intensive businesses often have disjoint departments and technologies for their customer-facing work and their internal systems (a few huge products like Oracle are rare exceptions).
Free Speech Isn't Free
I suspect he didn't view it as being rude, he viewed it as doing the right thing. He probably truly believes what he is saying, I used to think stuff sort of like that. My guess is he is somewhere between 23-32 years old, that was my stupid range :)

I guess the point is don't assume he's being an asshole, a real asshole would troll harder. I think he believes what he is saying. Yeah, it's rude but I'm not sure I'd be willing to write the guy off.
Schengen area is about border control. There definitely is free movement between the UK and other EU states, with exception only for criminals and such IIRC.
It's slightly different:

Trade unions have to be nice to the rest of society (being its part), but Swiss citizens (both born and new) don't have to be nice to all the rest of the world. They have even greater priority of minding their own business.
Speaking as someone who is also familialy-related to a neonatologist and a cardiologist -- both of whom earn more than a few million per year, I'd say they deserve every last dollar of it. They had to go to school for some while, and work under very tiring schedules. Hell, their schedules are still to this day pretty sucky -- they often tell me how much they envy me for my startup I'll-do-whatever-I-want-whenever-I-want lifestyle.

I think they both earn somewhere between 2 to 5 mil/year, but they spend it extravagantly and handsomely -- that's a very good thing. They're spending it on boats, cars, houses, nannies, restaurants, vacations, etc. etc. They're keeping the money going, they're spreading it out. They save lives, get money, and then help the economy by spending this money.

Now, what IS shameful is what the salaries of these social-app CEOs are. Why is Zuck worth some 20 BILLION? He's just going to sit on it, unlike my uncles he's not going to spend the majority of it. Zuck isn't helping the economy, Uber isn't helping the economy (it's externalizing costs, privatizing profits -- if they didn't exist that'd be a good thing). What is shameful is the profiting from rent-seeking, from making a killing on capital gains, etc. etc. Getting a few million per year isn't that bad, because believe it or not, in the large scheme of things that's little money -- most importantly, it's money that one can realistically spend from year to year. Spending a billion -- that's a challenge.
My first comment was directly pertinent to the French model, but same for UK--US survival rates are higher for sub 37 week old babies.
That's probably a nice way of doing it - iteratively work out all schwartz sets (if there are multiple roots, there can be multiple schwartz sets) and remove them until there are none left to work out the rankings.

Now I have to go back to the code!
Range voting still has its issues - every voting methodology has some issues - but range voting pretty well dominates plurality voting IMO.

Could you kindly let participants here know why your opinion has become that support for range voting? What issues did you consider along the way that you think are worthwhile for us to consider as we ponder which voting methodology to support in the various places where we live?
No it's not. We're dealing with the scarcity of goods and services here. Healthcare needs are unlimited and supply of the goods and services is constrained. Whatever the amount of money needed to save that child's life, you need to consider how many more children, not your own, could be saved instead had the money been spent on other people's children with life-threatening issues that are cheaper to treat.

Who knows what those other children who didn't get treatment so that this one could end up being or doing as adults? Who knows what value they could end up bringing the world? What they might invent? What health issues they could solve? What priceless works of art they may create?

What if this couple had been given the choice to forgo saving their own child's life and instead donate that $1 million to saving many children's lives in some other country that don't have the resources we have here in the US. Every time society chooses to save one life at considerable cost, it is also choosing to condemn others. What if you had to make the same choice, what would you do?
>City planning like this has kept me from exploring my own downtown area.

Have you tried walking there instead?
Flappy Bird by the Numbers