skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Telemetry isn't as easy as one might think. Airbus, AFAIK, is one of the pioneering manufacturers in this regard, as we witness in the crash of AF447, but given the amount of data that FDRs record, I'd imagine it wouldn't be a simple feat.

And in part, the reliability of FDRs and CVRs has been such that a comparatively small number of those recovered were void of retrievable information. So my guess is that replacing them would require satellite links (which obviously exist) but 1) have complete coverage of the globe (remember, aircraft like the 777 have a huge range) and 2) would be recording real time flight data for every single aircraft in the air. Then you have the issues of costs, approval from the various industry regulators (FAA, etc), and probably no less than 5-10 years before acceptance. And that's being hugely optimistic. In many ways, there's a point where carting around your telemetry-recording device is actually the cheapest and most effective method. It's counter-intuitive to some, but again: Telemetry isn't easy. Or cheap. And it needs to be reliable.

It does appear that Iridium Satellite is proposing something of the sort [1]. And trawling the Interwebs yields some [2] interesting [3] discussions [4].

But chiefly, I think the limitation is mostly cost, and as objclxt points out, reliability is another issue that would need to be addressed. There are a lot of planes in the sky. [5]

[1] http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=6174

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/business/global/22blackbox...

[3] http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110620151102AA...

[4] http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/58733-Why-plane-...

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NFGD9cglb4&t=43s
Here's the library they use for panorama rendering: http://krpano.com/

More demos: http://krpano.com/html5multires/

Apparently uses CSS3D and WebGL.
Airplane does have redundant parts, you know?
No, not yet. I was exploring this indeed with outlet but discovered that wasn't the right way to do it. My technique came together very recently and I plan on releasing it soon.
Neckbeard Republic is Now Completely Free
This is sad, but kind of strange with all the fear and media publicity of an airplane crash. For example, 1.2million people lost their life in road traffic in 2010 alone... We rarely read or fear about this fact.
For the record, I also found the tone of your post inappropriate.
Could you post an example of the "I'm learning and journaling my progress" writing style? I'd like to start doing this and I don't want to come off as an expert on things I'm just learning.
> There's no benefit. You are going to be sending people out to the plane anyway.

This is a fantastic point. I can't think of many accidents that were resolved by the FDR alone. The FDR tells a substantial part of the story, obviously (flight control positions, instrumentation data, etc), but the wreckage suggests where potential points of failure occurred. The importance of this cannot be understated, and I'd highly recommend watching (albeit rather dramatized) Crash of the Comet [1] and related videos for how important wreckage and metallurgical analysis has been in resolving otherwise difficult accidents.

To add to your comment, the FDR and CVR have demonstrated that they can function up to the point of impact (with some exceptions, such as a few accidents caused by severe in flight fires), which yields some very important telemetry as to the attitude of the aircraft, state of the engines, etc.

So really, if it's not broke...

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws-GAiQKsBs
"It's like doin' it in the butt for prostitutes"

Not the most innovative idea.
In my previous job where we developped our own PDF interpreter (neither based on Adobe owns PDF lib or Print Engine) we only needed InDesign in short occasional burst, mainly to produce test files when new PDF features were introduced, or to check some issues reported by customers. Switching to the CC model for us made sense as it saved us money.

And in my current job we only need to use Adobe applications to generate demo files for tradeshows and sometimes private demos. So, we never require a full-time license. And we can use it as an alternative to a floating license as any of us can log in to use one of the application before logging out once finished. However now that I think about it I am not sure whether our marketing team switched to the CC model or have been using CS 5 or 5.5 the whole time. Considering they use it much more often than us it would make sense if they did not use CC.
Don't be silly. Airplanes are the safest form of travel with the lowest fatality rate. Safer than cars, buses, trains, or walking.
> Thousands of screws and if one goes missing the aircraft could fall apart at critical moment

This is not true. Sometimes aircraft have mechanical problems - pitot tubes icing over, for example. There

An aircraft is severely over engineered for its job. Commercial aircraft have landed with gaping holes in the fuselages, engines on fire, landing gear stuck shut. There are very, very few parts of the plane that are single points of failure.

Some people are understandably nervous flyers. People do get scared when an aircraft starts shaking, and that's natural, but what you should remember is that the aircraft is designed to shake. Pilot error is a far more common cause of accidents than mechanical failure.

Remember, you're far, far more likely to be injured or killed driving a car than taking a plane. It's one of - if not the - safest form of transport out there.
This is really disgusting indeed. But journalists also do that the whole time
You realize that once you are dead it makes no difference how long you were alive right? When you are dead there is no inherent regret that you didn't live longer. Whether you were 67 or 3, you're still dead--the end result is the same. No one life is more valuable than the next. Think about that before you make any more short sighted comments.
What do you think of Dina?

https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/
being the person that gets to put out fires is in no way a certain path to a promotion

Especially because you become too valuable where you already are given they'd need to find someone else capable of putting out fires if you were promoted.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/15/us/screws-missing-on-tail-...

Sure a missing screw on a passenger seat is unlikely to cause the airplane to crash. Any redundancy can fail at critical moment.
Ask HN: Three choices – who do you hire?
So your boss offers you a choice of which prospective employee to hire. He and HR have narrowed the pile down to just three choices. Only one can be hired, the rest become homeless, contract TB, infect people go ride the bus, and die.

1: A white woman, fresh out of college with a bachelors in CompSci and a masters in Gender Studies. She won the Leah Culver Award for being a strong programmer woman who don't need no code three years in a row.

2: A fresh off the boat Indian. Claims proficiency in Python 4, Windows 9, C++15, and Verilog. Resume shows he has twelve degrees from a university whose name you can't pronounce.

3: The Brogrammer. He's worked at 23 failed startups and is an expert in Ruby on Rails. He works 80+ hours a week, but is still not very productive, due to fucking around most of the time.

Which do you choose, and why?
Warmongering hackers.
Yeah. Every day, more than ten times as many people die in traffic accidents than in this single plane crash.
Build a promo plan for your online store
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I think you're absolutely right on the emotional front. And it's curious in a sense, because I think it's partially our "technology bias." We see aircraft as these complex machines, almost like black boxes in a sense: People in, plane up, plane down, people out. In spite of the aircraft having existed in parallel with much of modern society, we still see them as a pinnacle of human achievement (ignoring international space programs for a moment). Which is probably why the disaster of such a beast crashing seems so jarring, in spite of it happening so infrequently.

Of course, if you're lucky enough to survive the impact when one does crash, the smoke and fire from burning fuel is usually what kills...
also http://tinysubversions.com/startups
The standard Gambit distribution actually comes with an example iOS project. It also has a script for building the Gambit runtime for ARM (the phone) and x86.

It's definitely not a 10 minute process, but shouldn't be too hard.

I think I also remember some projects popping up the Gambit mailing list to make all of this easier. It might be worth searching the archives.
Dependent Types (Intro to Idris)
I think what it comes down to is that most of the HN community are engineers who can appreciate the low-fault tolerance nature of aviation and understanding how failures occur. Additionally, there are so many systems involved in a safe flight that there is something for everyone.
Ask HN: student, first time taking on a paid side project, advices?
Hi HN!
I'm a college student, recently a friend of a friend came across one of the personal projects I built (a web app), and asked me to design/build a website for his business. The project will be mostly front-end work, and the client is not from a technical background.

Since I have no previous experience doing paid side project, here are a few things I'd like to ask freelancers on HN for some advices
1. How to properly communicate with the client, so that I can deliver what he really needs for his business? Especially with a non-technical client, they seem to tend to throw around websites that they think are cool (often with some flashy designs), and ask if you can do the same thing, but such designs might not be suitable for their business image/brand.
2. Technologies to use - is this something I should discuss with the client? Eg. he mentioned he "might" need a small database in the future, but it's an unknown variable as of now.
3. Rates, estimated time, and agreement on the project. Previously I've had internships with hourly wage around $17~$19, but what is the appropriate rate to charge for a side project? What are some agreements I should establish with the client before the project, so that he won't end up feeling like he's being over charged, or the project took too long?

Any other experience/advices/things to watch out for, please do share! It will be much appreciated :)
For the vast majority of cases, urandom is fine. I am glad random exists though.
IPhone 5S Tracks your Every Physical Movements
Does it still work when inherited from the master slide so it doesn't have to be copied? DRY and such..
I think that is what haberman meant.

Back on topic: The reason for PDF's existence is to be a non-turing complete subset of postscript. Features like direct indexing to a page are why Linux has switched to PDF as the primary interchange format.
Controls work great on a touch screen.
A great sport: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq3pg0JcJSI
Malware designed to take over cameras and record audio enters Google Play
so who does the fraud detection? knoxpayments?
I think there are arguments for both sides - if you do know something very well, you might overlook pitfalls when explaining it to someone who doesn't have your background, for example, while someone who has only just got the grasp of it might be well aware of what might confuse a newbie, so I think there is some value in unexperienced people writing about what they learn and how they learn it, with appropriate disclaimers, and assuming that they still try to not state as fact anything they aren't actually sure about.

And I also think, to a degree, it actually is the responsibility of the reader to judge what to use that supposed new knowledge for. Trying to make sense of tcpdump output when debugging some application software bug? Why not? Writing an IP stack? I hope any sensible person would pick up a book and some RFCs first. Unreliable knowledge can still be useful and harmless in figuring things out, you just shouldn't use it to try and build things.

Then again, practically, we can observe that people do build systems without ever having looked into the relevant standards, and I would actually argue the effects are worse than one superficially might think. I mean, if you look at how ridiculously insecure the web/web browsers are, for example - how did that come to be? I would think one major factor is exactly that people didn't (and often still don't) read the relevant standards, something as apparently uncritical as the HTML spec or the HTTP spec, but instead just wrote what they thought was HTML, and wrote books about what they thought was HTML, and so on - resulting in a need for browser vendors to accomodate all this crap out there that isn't HTML or HTTP but that people still expect to be rendered by their browser in some way or another, and so, due to end-user market share pressure, we now have security vulnerabilities in browsers that are there only because fixing them would break stuff that noone really ever had any right to expect to work, but they thought they were just creating some totally uncritical website using the "knowledge" they learned from some other clueless person, and those security problems can have quite serious consequences.
This is very unfortunate, but why is it on Hacker News?
WTB: Obama O's and Cap'n McCains cereal boxes
I want to buy the airBNB cereal boxes. Does anyone have any of the original 500 that they'd be willing to sell? If not, does airBNB sell any more now?
Me too! That would be amazing!
Without disrespecting victims (RIP), can someone briefly explain how and why people die during plane crash? Is it lack of oxygen, or cold temperature or actually a hard landing on the water surface? AFAIK most studies conclude there is no good place on the plane to be safer than other, whether its front, back, left side or right. Any ideas how to expand ones survival chances? Will TSA let you in with parachute -- is it even worth carrying one??
Understanding Quaternions (2012)
TCP/IP Illustrated has a new edition (volume 1 only for now, AFAICT) which has been updated with much more modern content, including lots of info about IPv6: http://www.informit.com/store/tcp-ip-illustrated-volume-1-th...
Lordy. Hyperbole much? There are cases where I am sure having access to a blocking source of entropy is interesting. Perhaps it has nothing to do with crypto. Maybe it's mathematical or scientific in nature. Who knows. But it's good to give developers an option and not cut off access to useful tools because you think they can't handle it.
Zlib.js: zlib, deflate, inflate, zip library
That was part of my motivation for using Scheme, yes. Many indie developers are using the Unity engine which can compile to many different targets. (But that uses C# as far as I know.)
Malaysia Airlines plane crashes in South China Sea with 239 people aboard
Fireeye
Did the FirefoxOS Persona stack move away from having an iframe point at a remote location at some point? I mean, the API was still in flux, as far as I know (last thing I heard was lloyd's blog post in January; it seems to be mostly FxA since). If the core transport can't get narrowed down, people can't actually federate with it.
The critical data for accident investigation is acquired during and after an incident of some kind, which by definition precipitated or was precipitated by system failures. The failsafe data store in a failure condition is by necessity local.
This makes me worry. I have signed an NDA in a heated interview scenario before. It was many pages long too.

WTF did I just sign?
> Right, in ideal hardware. The problem is that in order to transmit an ideal square wave, you need infinite bandwidth.

On the contrary. An ideal square wave's higher harmonics decline rather quickly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_wave#Examining_the_squar...

In other words, there's enough energy to cause problems at 2, 6, 10 ... times f, but at rapidly declining levels.

> It will filter the components of the wave that are outside of its bandwidth, leading to 'ringing' artifacts ...

Ringing artifacts are present in a system whose bandwidth rolls off abruptly. It's less significant in a system with a gradual drop-off in response, like a piece of wire acting as a broadband antenna.
VMWare could do well to remember this now they have killed VMware Service Manager.
> A true square wave would require an infinite series of discrete sine components, wouldn't it?

Yes, in principle, it represents an infinite series:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_wave#Examining_the_squar...

But as you can see, the higher harmonics decline quickly in energy.
Are these characters exactly 1/2 em wide? For Chinese and Japanese users we need them to mix with 漢字(which are 1em wide).
Sure, but it's hardly a reason to write unit tests.

I write unit tests for every one of my core algorithms. I have also seen a massive amount of dumb tests written by TDD people who strive for 100% code coverage. Ridiculous. It takes as much time to maintain the (often useless) tests as it does the code. Where they make sense they're indispensable.
Persona was launched in July 2011. It's been two and a half years, and they still haven't declared it safe to actually verify anything locally; you're still supposed to load a random Javascript file from their domain that will spawn a window with their contents.

I'd have thought the whole point was to target people who didn't want a centralized system.
The aviation website Leeham news has posted a list of the standard possible causes that will be investigated in an incident of this nature. They stress that these are not specific to this case, but include:

• Catastrophic structural failure

• Dual engine flame-out

• Clear air turbulence

• Human intervention, such as penetration of the cockpit or a bomb

• Accidental shooting-down

• Suicide of the pilot
No, it's at the Université de Montréal.
Especially considering that human beings can, very easily, become totally divorced from healthy, "normal" human values.

It's not enough to merely keep humans in the picture, but to keep healthy, undamaged humans in the picture.

Let's say, perhaps, that after a particularly costly war, the only humans left are a mixture of mentally unstable, angry, ambitious, victory-driven amputees, with intense biases imbued upon them by surviving particularly horrific and violent combat. These people, in a warped attempt to say "never again", optimize an artificially intelligent, fully automated child-rearing skinner box [1] to mold children into their own image, as the natural and perfect outcome which produces a society averse to violent warfare. The result is that every child that emerges from the skinner box is an angry, warped sociopath, missing limbs, who rationalizes even trivial behavior with an arbitrary moral high ground of extreme polar ideology.

But wait... aren't humans... technically classifiable as self-assembling intelligent constructs, spewed forth from the bald nothingness of space and time by mere coincidence? What if WE are the beast we fear?

Oh... oh god.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
It appears no less than 43 screws went missing in your link.
Perhaps I have miscommunicated.

I was asking why there is not (or at least not that I've found) a summary of the state of play in a prominent place.

I could have read through several hundred issues to determine that I'd run into some rough edges with these bridges and that perhaps I should come back later. Instead I find these rough edges when I dive-in, and now I wonder what other shortcomings are not being mentioned with the same gusto as the projects wins.

I hope that clarifies my prior post.
I remove any description that is not specifically related to the job.

You're left with

1. Fresh out of college bachelor in compSci and masters in Gender Studies. Won the Leah Culver award for being a strong programmer (no idea what "don't need no code" means).

2. A person who has 12 University degrees, and is proficient in languages and software which is yet to be released, suspect.

3. An expert Rails developer who has been through the ringer with multiple start-ups and knows what start-ups are all about. (You likely have no way of knowing he works 80+ hours per week, unless he said so, and is very unproductive due to fucking around most of the time).

Now, clearly, you've loaded this question so much to the point that there is only one choice, and that is the 'white woman'. But if she were a 'black woman', an Indian man, a house cat, make any difference to your question? She is the ONLY choice of the choices you provided because based on the information you've given, she is the only one who can apparently code.

Now, give the Indian person proficiency in actual languages and apps, and remove the fact that the brogrammer is unproductive, and see where you go with that?

Now you've got a decision to make. What is it? Well, you can't know, which is why you have to interview them, see who's the best fit for the culture, etc. etc.

If this is an actual situation, and your boss picked anybody other than the first choice, and you're wondering why, stop wondering why, and maybe start making a move to a better place to work.
I have to be clear that one screw could lead to a fatal crash. Mechanical failure and pilot errors are more common and I agree with you on that.

http://www.thelocal.fr/20111125/1869

This plane took off with 30 screws missing. But if it was under critical moment (extreme weather or mechanical failure), going with 30 screws could have a chain impact and eventually lead to a fatal crash.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/13/door-falls-off-plan...

This is another lucky incident at 1000 feet. Imagine this at critical moment and at 20k, 30k altitude! I would suppose some passengers would die if that happened.

Remember, you're far, far more likely to be injured or killed driving a car than taking a plane. It's one of - if not the - safest form of transport out there.

I think that's up to argument and depends on how one look at the issue. Is plan safer? There are more corners, more cars, more trains than aircraft combined at any given time. And the most important thing to consider is getting help. I have to press hard on this: if you are in the air, the chance of you surviving is low. Even on the ground after a serious car accident at a reasonable location, most patients could receive proper medical treatment within minutes. But when you are in the air? In the case of gunman I could try to escape on the ground but not really in the air.