skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software developers and entrepreneurs like problem solving and advanced technologies. Stories about aviation and other seemingly unrelated topics could spark ideas as to how to improve something or inspire a different way to solve a problem.

Nothing wrong with day-dreaming. Many of us aspire to be like Elon Musk or Richard Branson, and they certainly spent their fair share dreaming about what's possible with the latest technologies.

It's also interesting to get different groups of peoples perspective on different subjects. If you posted this question on multiple sites dedicated to a subset of the population (developers, entrepreneurs, moms, croquet enthusiasts, stock-car racing enthusiasts, sales-people, 5th graders) it would be interesting to see the different responses, and to see how much group-think there would be depending on how the first few comments sounded.

Some news topics are inappropriate for HN in my opinion. The current news topic about the missing airplane doesn't really need to be here unless there are people whose only source of news is HN.
Julia Evans at http://jvns.ca has a distinctive style that I enjoy.
Hello! I've been sitting on this for awhile. I mostly built it so my cousin and I could play against each other (both long time fans of the classic variant). The source is here: https://github.com/binarymax/kriegspiel
you made some very interesting posts. what I'm missing from this is 0mq. I believe it introduces layering mechanisms, so that one can re-use patterns to build cool stuff (anything really), without knowing specific details. do you have a email where I can reach you?
All modern aircraft are equipped with Mode-S transponders [1] which broadcast several parameters such as altitude, lat/longitude and aicraft ID info. There are also specific messages that signal "emergency status"[2].

You can 'listen' to these messages yourself with very basic radio equipment tuned to 1090 MHz[3].

Even though these signals can reach long distances (I remember getting ~300 Km with my home made antenna) it's possible that the plane was going through an area where no base stations exist.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_transponder_interrogat...

[2]: http://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim/aim04...

[3]: http://www.rtl-sdr.com/adsb-aircraft-radar-with-rtl-sdr/
Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians
The thrust of my comment was that the data indicates a very rapid breakup of the plane (explosion), and I indeed said that there are other possible causes of mid-air explosions besides terrorism. My mention of explosive cargo wasn't intended to be an exhaustive list of alternative causes. I just think that terrorism is certainly within the realm of possibility given the totality of the circumstances.
How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotatio...
The end of another to be startup – we failed
Pandoc Markdown and ReST Compared (2013)
Amazon has VPCs which are virtual private clouds. They let you configure networks with specific requirements, such as being closed off from the outside world.

Once closed off from the world, only your servers within the public subnets can access those in the private subnet. By default, the private subnet can't talk to the outside world. You'd typically setup a NAT instance in your public subnet that tunnels your private subnet's internet to the outside world (because the NAT is in a public subnet, it can access the outside world).

That's just an example setup. It's a very powerful tool for securing your infrastructure. For example, you should typically put your databases, and anything that isn't password protected that stores information or something (except web servers) in a private network so that only your public servers have access to them.

User -> Public Network -> Public Server -> Private Network -> Private Server -> NAT (Tunnel) -> Public Network -> Internet

VPC does take quite a bit of effort to setup, but after that, it's pretty straightforward.
Nice idea. You have to work on your github connection though. I logged in finally through first making a github connection, then it said my email address was already taken, so I got it to work through a password reset. Just so you know!
( I'm not johnminter btw. :) )

It is not a direct reply to what timr wrote, but to where his/her sentiment leads with lectures that are densely packed with information. I've had quite a few classes where the lecturer "didn't believe in lecture notes" because "you will be so much more attentive" and "learn so much more when you write stuff down". As I still needed all the precise definitions and wordings of the theorems I did end up frantically copying the lecture.
Yes but planes are pretty long. It would work underwater, in fact it would be nothing ordinary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines
Those signals are very much dependant on direct line-of-sight. Transmitted from the ground or on the ocean the range would be very low.
Your comment demonstrates how monumentally "The War on Terror" has failed, now that people have been so thoroughly terrorized that the most available explanation for a plane disappearing has become "terrorism".
On HN, general news and human interest stories get buried(usually) and rightly so, as this is not the place for them.

Bitcoin gets treated faily on HN as long as the discussion has some technical merit.

For example posting comparing coding styles of Dorian and BTC Satoshi, that shouldn't get buried.

Similarly, there has been almost nothing about Ukraine on top of HN, because nothing too hacky has been posted just general news.
5 reasons why not to buy a high end GPU
Well, according to the authorities at slate.com, there is a
distinct possibility that I might have invented bitcoin.

(Full disclosure: There's no way I invented bitcoin.)
I'm reading from my mobile so I didn't check the tool yet, but I was surprised that nobody was thinking about this. I must agree.
What come across particularly well to me in this piece has nothing to do with aviation but job satisfaction. This guy got to do an amazing job, one he had dreamed since childhood. It was intense and took astonishing levels focus, effort and a dedication to be the best he could. His reward for this was the flying, the very job itself. Best of all when it was over he was ready for it to end. I hope I can look back on my career so beautifully.
If you write anything that communicates over a network (e.g. anything using HTTP), you need to know at least some of this stuff, otherwise you're not going to be able to explain why (for example) your service call latencies have a big spike around 200ms.
Here is the flight path of MH370, before it ceased responding to tracking stations:

http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/mh370/#2d81a27

35kft altitude.
All those kind of systems can fail or give inconclusive data. What you need to know is the crash site, not the last GPS trace. It would be better to include substances in aircraft that would be released in the event of breakup and be easily visible to remote sensing and radar satellites.
Building robust web apps with React
>XSLT is not a programming language, it is a data transformation language. Furthermore, it is a data transformation language written as a valid and well formed XML document.

The hazard of Turing completeness is that once you have it, you will have to use it.

We have long learnt this at work. (Our attitude is that "XML is like violence, when in doubt do more of it.") If the transformation step looks like the appropriate place for the complexity required, some poor bugger will be tasked with implementing Towers of Hanoi or whatever in it.

XSLT is a programming language. It's just an unspeakably horrible one.
This is funny, but it doesn't accurately represent the unique investigative journalism of Newsweek's Leah Mcgrath Goodman.

Her approach, which she describes as 'forensic', was to select a group of possible suspects, and then eliminate them one by one. When she only had one suspect left, then that person was clearly the Satoshi Nakamoto who created Bitcoin.

No, I am not being sarcastic. She's proudly explained her methodology in several TV interviews.

The possibility that her initial group of suspects may never have included Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto seems to have evaded her...
Can machine learning perfectly emulate recursive functions?
Sure. I find that I easily lose track of planes if they are below a certain altitude. Still, it is very strange that the last recorded altitude is 35000 ft [1].

[1]: http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/mh370/#2d81a27
Many modern planes do have satellite uplinks, but they're mostly used for sending short text messages. Primary voice communications are still over VHF or HF radio. If you're having a mechanical problem, the pilot is going to be more focused on not crashing than composing an email.

(There are some automated logs that are sent too -- and these were actually used as part of the Air France investigation -- but this is primarily for maintenance rather than real-time tracking.)

Even ignoring fancy telemetry systems, planes are normally equipped with an emergency transponder (ELT) which activates if there's a sudden impact.

That signal would normally be detected by a Cospas-Sarsat satellite within 1-2 hours. In this case, it's possible that the transponder didn't activate, or the signal is too weak to be detected due to being underwater.
"Huh, they protest capitalism but they, like, use money! Hurr hurr."
If you mean the story about the real Satoshi Nakamoto's comment on the situation, then it was already posted, got lots of upvotes, and that's probably why your post are being killed

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358150
When sunrise is 8:30 and sunset is 16:45 it's rather hard to work a full time job and a side project simultaneously in daylight hours.

I too found flux unusable.
>(Full disclosure: There's no way I invented bitcoin.)

That's exactly what Dorian S. Nakamoto said. Gotcha
I just tried both of those. 3 minutes sounds about right to me, if you don't bother with any of the customisations.
Show HN: Storytales, create textual stories with your friends
You're right: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/08/malaysia-airlines-c...
I'm not sure if we are on the same page here.

What I am saying is that:

- most (all?) topics are not 1-dimensional: they deal with multiple issues with many complicated interrelations and interactions. Let's call them multi-dimensional.

- many people build 1-dimensional presentations using PowerPoint (and related tools).

- treating a multi-dimensional topic as 1-dimensional makes for a poor, confusing presentation.

To connect this with your point: the hard part of building a presentation is mapping an n-dimensional topic onto a 1-dimensional medium (time), while sacrificing the minimum amount of accuracy. Based on personal experience, many people don't spend much time on this part; they just throw a bunch of information onto slides in an arbitrary order. And so this smacks of circular reasoning to me:

> If you are going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2, and B.1 before point B.2, but you will speak about point B.1 before point A.2, then just put them in that order. Problem solved.

But how do you know you're going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2? Figuring that out is the hard part!

-----

All this is just my subjective opinion, of course. :)
How many aircraft are in the air at any one time? Or over a span of 24 hours?

How much bandwidth and storage would it take to collect information about where an airplane is at any point in time?
Kobo May Stop selling eBooks in Canada
Dude, not cool.
Pallgrave Mcmillan free access to papers (in March)
Look at sibling comment and decide if you really need an interactive whiteboard or if simply using a normal dry wipe and taking photos and then tagging those in a photo gallery program systematically somewhere will be good enough storage/retrieval. My students still take photos of key screens even though I email out a pdf of the IW screens after the lesson.

If you decide you really do need the IW, then try to find a local school/college that will let you play with theirs for an hour after classes. You will get a good idea of what the software can do, and you can find out about the drawbacks of various makes.

One concrete advantage of an IW might be annotating actual screens. Most IW software automatically grabs screen of driving computer then allows you to write over the static image. All the IW software I have used (smartboard, active edition, the dolphin ones) allow saving of whiteboard stacks as PDFs.
I can't believe anyone took the Newsweek article seriously for one moment. Besides all the other things that don't add up, ask yourself one question: did the real Nakamoto want to be discovered? Consider both answers:

1) Yes. Then he could have revealed himself at any time over the last 5 years. But Newsweek wants us to believe he just happens to accidentally reveal himself to a reporter after 5 years in hiding and then take it back a few hours later? Seriously?

2) No. Then why did he admit to being involved in Bitcoin to the first reporter that confronted him, even though he was able to successfully conceal his identity for 5 years with millions of people wanting to know who he was?

There's some alternatives in the middle like he's just so confused he doesn't know what to say or this is a not-very-amusing prank. None of this remotely reflects the behavior of the person who invented Bitcoin.

All I see here is a quote taken out of context and someone who had the misfortune of being born with someone else's pseudonym.
I am taking a course now after 15+years out of college and I see it differently.

The best thing is having the slides before the lesson in pdf and keeping notes on a tablet.
I take freeform notes on the slides with a pen and then I rewrite them at home in text boxes on the slides. Notes are searchable at home (Linux) and at work (windows) with DocFetcher, and the tablet sync happens with btsync.

Everything is automated, I can watch the presentation and keep complete and meaningful notes.
The professor is very good and he keeps mentioning details and intuitions that I would not have time absorb or note if I spent all my time rewriting math equations that are all over the internet.
This is for a math heavy course but I think it applies to most type of courses.
OK, I found a link on reddit[1] that seems to show something more:

http://www.flightradar24.com/2014-03-07/17:20/12x/MAS370/2d8...

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1zur6k/malaysia_a...
That's Billion with a B: Scaling to the next level at WhatsApp (slides)
I don't see how that's not cool.
"They don't do spontaneous, once-in-a-life-time lecture to you."

True, but you do vary presentation to allow for audience. I use 'room temperature' questions early on; rows of confused faces and I go into the slow siding; rapid fire answers and extensions and I shift into the express route. Mixed reactions and I have been known to split the whiteboard down the middle.

So less a linear video tape and more a series of responses deployed depending on feedback from the class

I am teaching below University level though, and smaller classes (15 to 25 people).
You can't be practically tracking every co-ordinate at every second, not yet. Once you know what to track, you can do it effectively. For airplanes, it's already late. Maybe, if they are lucky, based on satellite imagery, they can gather traces.
How many cats pictures are currently posted online? How much clouds are being deployed right now?
There is also a long stop in the flight data, is it possible this was one of the pilots trying fool a hijacker, by secretly change something so that data was sent again?
Hope they find it quickly.
Since /dev/urandom and /dev/random draw from the same pool, it should be enough to simply read and throw away some bytes from /dev/random.
Here's a direct quote from the Newsweek article:

"Of course, there is also the chance "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a pseudonym, but that raises the question why someone who wishes to remain anonymous would choose such a distinctive name."

I'd say that at least indicates the journalist admits the possibility.
Identity standards are a long and depressing history of failure and mental masturbation.

Waiting for the W3C to fix this means you'll be waiting a long while.
DÜNYA KADINLAR GÜNÜ KUTLU OLSUN
My suggestion is the same: obfuscating what's in the exam does not benefit the students but makes yourself seem more important to their success.
That depends on how you view the war on terror. If you view it as political construct of Govts. wishing to grab extraordinary amounts of power and oversight over a largely disenfranchised populace then I would say it has been remarkably successful.
Tomorrow’s Apps Will Come From Brilliant (And Risky) Bitcoin Code
Bitcoin is a member of a larger class of innovated technologies called Distributed Anonymous Corporations.
I agree with you on this point, but asking a lecturer to provide slides and notes creates a lot of work for them.

It's a difficult task to make one set to an adequate standard, so I was assuming you would use one set for both jobs (as seems to be the case in higher ed courses I'm familiar with).
Heh the initial articles probably kicked off some wikipedia crawls, and people probably unearthed other interesting aerospace articles as a result.
shrugs shoulders
beats me
+1 As someone who has used webflow, I would love this.
> ORLY? "There are reasons why people aren't paid $100 for flipping burgers."

OK. I didn't know what you were referring to. Either way, my claim was that there are (good) reasons why people aren't paid $100/h to flip burgers, and your claim is that people must be paid "enough to survive". I'm not sure there's a strawman there to begin with.

> Re-read Smith's argument. The obligation is from the economy itself, in order to sustain itself. If it's not able to do so, it's on the way to inevitable decline. Though couched in moral terms, the argument's really an empirical one as I see it.

Care to make a clear claim about this? Something like "People must be paid 'enough to survive' because otherwise the economy will inevitably decline".. ? Or something? :P

That does sound like something "couched in moral terms", and I don't see how it's an "empirical" argument. Has intentionally not paying people "enough to survive" been tried somewhere, and has it then demonstrably lead to an economy's decline? :P

> And economies and labor supplies aren't bottomless extraction wells. There's a reason it's called enlightened self-interest. Which counters your "What they deem an acceptable level of profit for their own businesses is subjective, and up to them".

Nope, it doesn't. That's like saying I'm not allowed to decide what business I want to run, for how long, and under what conditions. The alternative, of course, is forcing me to keep running a business I don't want to run. Can you see a problem with that?

Not only that, but your demand for everyone being paid at least "enough to survive" amounts to demanding that people be forced to pay others salaries that someone other than the employer deems acceptable. Can you see a problem with that?

We haven't even discussed what "enough to survive" means. That sounds awfully subjective. What if I like to spend $2500 a month on hookers and cocaine, and don't have enough left over to survive? I guess I need to be paid $2500 + "enough to survive" per month, then? Does that make sense? Or perhaps you think there should be some limits to how much people are paid, regardless of how much they claim they need to survive? Who would determine what's enough though? How would he know? Why would he be in a position to decide things for other people?

Can you see a problem with that?
I am in software because aviation engineering was more than I wanted to handle at the time. I needed to be less challenge adverse in my younger days and that is one bit of advice I give to the children of friends who ask we what I do.
I think generally tracking is done with radar transponders which can be disabled from the cockpit.
Alternatively, such information is available, but the system that produces it is classified so the data is not released. The surface area of the Earth is 1.7e14 square metres, so it would be feasible to cover the earth with pixels to a resolution of a square metre. Each uncompressed whole earth image would be less than a Petabyte at 32 bits per pixel. Add compression and deep pockets and it would be possible to create and store whole Earth movies.
What we do in our group is to put all plots and images into a wiki and at the meetings each person in turn would then just tell the person behind the laptop what page to navigate to, etc.
"The contents of messages that have been delivered by the WhatsApp Service are not copied, kept or archived by WhatsApp in the normal course of business."

followed by

"If the recipient is not online, the undelivered message is held in WhatsApp’s server until it can be delivered. If the message is undelivered for thirty (30) days, the undelivered message is deleted from our servers. Once a message has been delivered, it no longer resides on our servers. The contents of any delivered messages are not kept or retained by WhatsApp — the only records of the content of any delivered messages reside directly on the sender’s and recipient’s mobile devices (and which may be deleted at the user’s option)."
in this day and age? Sure. With the technology behind the newer planes flying to day it would take an extraordinary event to down one without word.

So the thoughts that come to me are, flew into terrain (mountain), door opened causing decompression and deformation of airframe, airframe failure, bomb, or someone took over fast enough to silence communications.

What is the availability of communications to passengers in that area? Cell has to be pretty much far between?
They cannot change the ToS to sell all of your personal information as their ToS specifically states they do not store or archive that information.

Passing it to the government is another matter...
Not in a pink fit.
Think you just earned $50
Would it have hurt too much to have linked to a real civil aviation news site like the Aviation Herald for your running realtime summary of developments, rather than a generic mass media news site run by non-specialists?

(It's about as useful as linking to the BBC for news of a new OS vulnerability, rather than CERT, or even The Register.)

The (detailed) AvHerald coverage is here: http://avherald.com/h?article=4710c69b&opt=0

Personal observation: I flew through KUL on Malaysian last year, and was very unimpressed by security: it was cursory in the extreme and if I remember correctly out passports weren't electronically captured on entry or departure. Reports of someone using a stolen Italian passport being among the passenger manifest are a bit worrying (although some sort of mechanical failure is far more likely than terrorism).
Secret court judge rejects US gov’t request for longer metadata retention
Not a penny, in several years. I eventually just gave up and made it a "Donate to Wikipedia" button.
1. Someone invented Bitcoin.

2. Dorian Nakamoto is someone.

3. Therefore, Dorian Nakamoto invented Bitcoin.

I fail to see the fault in that flawless logic?
Seeing the link title I thought "nice, an HN like with focus on my domain and less bitcoins related crap". Wow, I couldn't be more wrong. "crypto, security and privacy" should not mean "bitcoin, bitcoin, and vaguely web security stuffs, and bitcoins". That plus the obviously fake upvotes… I won't even try to register, too bad.