skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tango Raises $280M from Alibaba to compete with WhatsApp
> Fortunately, Gabe [Newell, Valve's managing director] just let us have it all. It wasn’t exactly easy to get it past the lawyers, but we were able to negotiate, free and clear, all the technology

That was really nice. Not many companies would do that.
Unix ``man'' pages tricks and tips
Investigation of a possible "southern arc" contrail from Malaysia Flight 370
I was just wondering last night if it might be possible to spot the contrail from MH370 in weather satellite photos. I mostly just wanted to know if it was even possible. Even if this particular instance turns out to be a false positive, the technical write up nicely-answers my question: it might be possible, but it's right at the limits of resolution.
> Per the Wikipedia article, the term "waterfall" has always been pejorative.

That overstates what the Wikipedia article claims, which itself misrepresents the sources the article cites (e.g., the article it cites as the first use of "waterfall" does not use it in negative sense; it uses it descriptively -- while it does discuss the existence of a quality-of-requirements problem in software development (investigation of whether that perceived problem was real is the point of the paper), it doesn't place the blame for it on the waterfall model.

Anyhow, my point upthread was that the sources cited in the article themselves are good if you want to understand the model of the time. (From those, it also looks like another good source would be MIL-STD 490 and/or MIL-STD 483, but I haven't had any luck finding them, the closest I've been able to find is MIL-STD 490A, which replaced 490 in 1985.)
Just to be clear, I mean an actual aero-space chip specifically made for this application. Here is a cost estimate. Its $8K/per, but honestly that's a just a single pair of first class tickets...

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has asked for the installation of cockpit image recorders in large transport aircraft to provide information that would supplement existing CVR and FDR data in accident investigations. They also recommended image recorders be placed into smaller aircraft that are not required to have a CVR or FDR.[4]

Such systems, estimated to cost less than $8,000 installed, typically consist of a camera and microphone located in the cockpit to continuously record cockpit instrumentation, the outside viewing area, engine sounds, radio communications, and ambient cockpit sounds. As with conventional CVRs and FDRs, data from such a system is stored in a crash-protected unit to ensure survivability.[4]
Reddit for redactors that don't want to sort through the garbage.
Actually, joking around is accepted just fine on HN--as long as you say something thoughtful in the same post. It's fluff that gets downvoted.
You're right of course on this being a legislatively driven requirement.

This presents an interesting case study on how the sclerotic nature of a legislative (or bureaucratic) process sometimes restricts adoption of beneficial technology.
New theory #239858935: The copilot killed the pilot with an axe, set the plane onto auto pilot towards the southern seas, then cut his own throat and let the rest of the passengers die helplessly.
Ever get a feature request from someone who, in a single sentence, describes months or quarters of development time and introduces all kinds of risks and dependencies, but thinks it can be done by next Tuesday?

I have, but I don't think that's relevant here. This isn't a "next Tuesday" issue. Planes have been flying over oceans for decades, and these issues have been contemplated and examined by allegedly bright people for at least that long. Yet, somehow, here we are in 2014 searching for a jet with 230 people aboard and are clueless as to where it is or how it "vanished".

I can assure you that whatever happened, it didn't vanish, and that those people likely suffered horrible, violent deaths. It is frustrating that we wouldn't apply modern technology to learn about and potentially prevent such tragedies. Even if seeing what happened in real-time couldn't have stopped this incident, knowing what happened could prevent similar incidents in the future.
[EDIT] Adding a couple of more recent tweets from Micah Grimes indicating this may be the end of the search for MH370:

> JUST IN: @WrightUps from above Indian Ocean says US P-8 crew "getting radar hits of significant size;" trying to get visuals on hits.

> Australian maritime authority official calls objects credible and of "reasonable" size; largest object about 24 meters.

======================

ABC journalist David Wright [[0] is currently on the P8 plane that is searching for the debris.

Here's a tweet [1] from ABC's social media editor who (apparently) must have spoken to him over voice comms:

>.@WrightUps from Navy P-8 search plane: "We are just descending through clouds right now ... about 1,300 miles southwest of Australia."

[0] https://twitter.com/WrightUps

[1] https://twitter.com/MicahGrimes/status/446501269155618816
Big tip: Ask to start remotely BEFORE you move so you can verify it works out for both you and them (assuming they are agreeable). That way, if it's not going to work out, you can reconsider your options before paying a new rent etc.
Largest piece is 24 meters, location in the zone identified by the NTSB.
One could imagine a company building high-altitude autonomous drones and/or non-orbital rocketry as a step towards full orbital capacity like SpaceX.

ScaledComposites followed a somewhat similar model: it took them 3 years to build SpaceShipOne[1] and win the X-Prize. That attracted enough investment for them to begin work on the VirginGalactic stuff.

3 years may be a lot longer than the typical 3 months YC development cycle, but it's easy to imagine building a scaled down drone version in 3 months (After all: "it's just a remote control plane").

SpaceShipOne took 18 months to get to first (unmanned) flight.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_SpaceShipOne
Fitness, and the problem with 'fuck it, ship it'
you guys really suck at this game.
Certainly Excel works for many people, but there was a significant number of users who wanted a vertically integrated presentation/reporting platform. I think there is still room for innovation in this area.
I'll bite.

> Why does my iPhone - $850 retail - have capabilities that far surpass those of a $250 million modern passenger jet?

It is not unheard of, or unknown, for iPhones to crash, have unrecoverable data loss, or suffer from hardware issues like defective flash. A CVR needs to work all the time, without fail. People will excuse their iPhone crashing out from time to time. This is inexcusable on a CVR. You're talking about planes that run flight computers with three different CPUs and instruction sets to prevent bugs in the underlying silicon from manifesting.

> fire alarm went off or any other irregularity occurred, a Malaysian Airlines control center should have been alerted and been able to bring up video of the cockpit

Even without the technical constraints it's simply not worth it. Why would a control centre need live video of the cockpit in the case of a fire alarm going off? If there's a fire the crew are not phoning home. Communication with people outside the plane is a low priority. The 'Malaysian Airlines control center' is not going to be getting in touch with the pilots. That's not how it works.

> Hopefully after this incident, public outrage over these ridiculous technological shortcomings will be the catalyst for legislation

I have worked on hardware that goes into commercial jets. These rules may seem silly to outside observers, but those observers frequently don't realise exactly how harsh the environment is, and the constraints you're dealing with. What they are not are 'ridiculous technological shortcomings'. Commercial airline safety is already one of the most highly regulated forms of travel out there.

We don't use 'domestic' components for the same reason they don't use them for satellites: failure is not an option. The 'live video feeds' and 'constant satellite links' people keep bringing up are only of use in relatively minor emergencies. They serve no purpose during things like catastrophic mechanical failure, because you've already lost the satellite link at that point. The plane is going to go down. We will find the plane. We will find the CVR.
15-20 seconds seems like it might be too much, at least with the number of users online now...
Alibaba invests $280 million in messaging app Tango
The more secure place to store notes is in a notebook you carry around with you all the time.
I really love these technical blog posts (and the designs, of course). Did you ever calculate something like mean-failure rate for pods? Such data might be helpful when evaluating if the architecture is viable for a certain use-case. I'm thinking both disk-loss (which you've blogged about before), but also aggregate failure rates (psu, controller cards etc)?

I'm thinking that for small-medium deployments, (with archiving in mind) three pods would be a reasonable minimum, possibly starting them out sparse (single radi6 to each pod, say)?

I'm aware there aren't any silver bullets :-)
I was just wondering last night if it might be possible to spot the contrail from MH370 in weather satellite photos. I mostly just wanted to know if it was even possible. Even if this particular instance turns out to be a false positive, the technical write-up nicely answers my question: it might be possible, but it's right at the limits of resolution.
The sudden stop at the end of a fall is routinely that high. If you look at warranties for spinning disc hard drives, they'll be rated for several hundred G during transit. Sounds silly, but it's the difference between landing on a surface with give, like carpet, or landing on an unforgiving surface like concrete.
The airlines can, but they don't because if its not mandated they aren't likely to do it unless it is advantageous for them.

There is an additional data recorder that operates like this the "Quick Data Recorder" designed to be able to be removed and read regularly by the ground crew to better diagnose and fix the plane.

Unfortunately the voice recorders are really only used when the plane crashes, so the airlines aren't going to pay to put them in.

Add to this the fact that anything being hooked into critical plane systems (and a lot of them are considered critical) needs to go through hundreds of hours of testing means your not talking a cheap option.
A lot of games use the delay to cause frustration on purpose. Kinda like the old arcade games that didn't have continues.
Well, that's part of the reason. Another part is that since the debut of the PlayStation, possibly a bit earlier, video games are marketed to a wider audience, and the emphasis has been shifted away from challenge and fun towards audiovisual razzle-dazzle. In order to sell to this new audience, the games had to be easy so that the average new player had a chance of beating them; and they had to make a visual impact. Sony set developer guidelines to make the graphical capabilities of the PlayStation a selling point and enforced them on third parties; in North America, for instance, sprite-based games were highly discouraged in favor of polygon games and also severely restricted. This restriction did not hold in Japan due to peculiarities of the Japanese market in which certain genres with recognizable tropes (shooters, 2D fighters, JRPGs, "visual novels") predominate.

I used to joke that the camera spin effect prominent in early PlayStation titles like Final Fantasy VII was mandated by Sony's PlayStation developer license. I still have my doubts as to whether that was entirely a joke.

Anyway, combine this massive shift in marketing emphasis with typical 90s xtr33m to the max attitude and the passel of limitations imposed by an asset pipeline that overwhelms the developers' technical capability to keep up, and you have a recipe for trivializing the medium to the point where the damage is still strongly felt today.
This sounds more likely the real answer.
Yep, and you won't be stuck in a remote unworkable location whilst looking for more remote work.
I feel like this undermines the true spirit of HN Plays 2048
I feel like I'm failing at R if I'm using a for loop typically.
What Shark Tank can Teach you About Negotiations
Again, I didn't suggest that plugging an iPhone in is the answer. It was a comparison to the capabilities of consumer electronics vs. those in cockpits of supposedly advanced aircraft. We can, and we should, install more memory into CVR's if they can only record two hours of an international flight.

In your example of a catastrophic mechanical failure, a battery powered satellite link wouldn't necessarily lose touch until impact. At the very least, the plane's position would be known and rescuers dispatched. Critical evidence in this incident is likely long gone because of the time that has passed - even if we find it today. Video feeds etc. would at the very least assist in preventing future tragedies and help us understand exactly what happened. We would know, for example, the specific tactics of hijackers (if that was indeed the case) or that the pilot just went nuts, or if there was a mechanical or fire risk issue that must be addressed on other planes. We would know answers to questions we would likely never otherwise be able to answer.
You should just move Oakland
Might as well just let people put in their own hex value.
I deployed many apps on Heroku including but not limited to: Ruby/Rails, Python/Flask&Django, Ring/Clojure, Node.js/vanilla without framework&Express(I haven't tried Hapi there, but yes Heroku support it), PHP/vanilla without framework.. I want to say they are so good at letting you deploying all different kinds of languages/framework at ease.

One caveat is that Heroku is a ephemeral filesystem on each Dyno. So if you want to save the file content on the fly, you probably also need to use services like AWS S3. One time in a hackathon I tried to deployed a shared proxy for letting different users share the same html DOMs, and I need to save all the resources user requested from remote server. Since the time limit I just completely switch the site to be hosted on elastic beanstalk (because I never tried Heroku with S3 before). Using Heroku + S3 is actually easy, later I found out. But having to use another storage host might be something you want to know ahead before you try heroku.

>> Are page speeds okay?

It's very slow for the first request, if your site haven't been visited for a while. ("If your application is unused for a while it gets unloaded from the server memory" Quoted from Stackoverflow.) But afterwards I find it fast enough. But that also depends very much on your backend service and infrastructure, so I can't make any promise even though my guess would be it will be okay.

>> Is the uptime satisfactory?

Yes from my experience. I only had very few downtime. One experience I learnt in the hard way is at least have some mechanisms to alert yourself when the site is down. (So you can get up in 3am to fix the issue!!!)

>> Do you have personal experience with high-traffic sites running on Heroku?

How high is your traffic?

>> Heroku and the promise of no systems administration sound tempting, but...

I love their Add-ons. For example, simple things like a scheduler makes the automation so easy.
This needs a delay. That way you can follow the chaos instead of just staring at a moving screen.
Logement neuf en Ile-de-France : rétrospective de 2013 et prévisions pour 2014 
Enregistrant une hausse de 10 % des transactions sur le marché du logement neuf en Ile-de-France, le marché immobilier a connu un léger regain en 2013
It's not crazy. Living somewhere you don't love if you don't absolutely have to and commuting if you don't absolutely have to are definitely crazier :)

We're always looking for great fits and have more than one remote team member. If you think we might be a fit for each-other drop me a line. Company and contact info in my profile.
> but both will get you a very long ways..

MySQL (and MariaDB) wont let you refer to temporary tables more than once in the same query.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/temporary-table-probl...

I am not sure that was a very long way when I needed this for an app I was working on.
Ask HN: How to save an offline copy of all bookmarks?
Any known desktop apps (e.g., OSX) or browser addons, to save static copies of all bookmarks in the browser? (say Chrome)
Why your Adwords sucks #13
> Didn't get the job.

You dodged a bullet. I worked for CIQ from 2003-2007, it was not such a great time. (I recently reminisced a bit here: http://mcfunley.com/manual-delivery)

At one point I was offered a job with Bloomberg that I didn't wind up taking. In my last interview with a director, he described an experience he had rewriting quite a bit of the Bloomberg terminal as a modern (for the time anyway) Windows app as some kind of skunkworks project. He said he was nearly fired for this. His superiors explained to him very slowly that although the terminal looks like obvious insanity to a tech person, it's embedded in the culture in finance. People like it in part because it's insane. It's hard to attack this with modern methods.

One other giant stinking reason it's really hard to innovate here is data. All of these companies are vertically integrated. CIQ, for example, is (or was back then, anyway) a tiny shim of a crappy tech company in New York and thousands and thousands of people doing data collection in India. The data is the product. Initially CIQ was just the website, and they bought their data from competitors. As they became successful their competitors shut them down and they had to scramble to replicate datasets by themselves.
I agree. There are other incubators with domain expertise for hardware products (Bolt, Haxlr8r, Highway1, RGA), robotics (Grishin), biotech (Harlem Biospace). These places can also offer shared facilities and lab space, which is hugely important as YC's $20k investment would barely cover, for example, an electronics lab, which could also take months to set up.

This is a noble goal and I'm glad that YC wants to invest in these sort of companies, but they need to do a lot more work to convince startups of this sort that the value proposition makes sense for them.
Poll Everywhere looking for a Mac App developer
NSA claims that technology firms are aware of its data collection
Nice. I shall try this and never be productive for the rest of my life with all these 2048 forks.
What algorithm are they using? Is the source open?
I'm sorry, isn't this just flappy bird?
Really depends upon your employer, culture and of course your direct report manager. I don't even think that a pay cut should be necessary. You could even go in to work once a month for the monthly all-hands, etc and maybe stay in a motel for a couple of days.

I was in a similar situation many years ago, working for a small firm where I had excellent rapport with the boss. I went from salary to getting paid by the hour as well. I didn't want to work 60+ hours a week. As it happened they got a client close to where I lived and I was able to service them very well, by being a "local". And after a year, I was making 50% more, before expenses, and working less hours and minimal commute time. It was a win-win-win. Happy me, happy client and happy boss.

Every situation is different, but my experience shows that it is possible to re-negotiate stuff as long as you are good at your work and can demonstrate a win-win.
#10549 (torbrowser in the apple app store is fake)
Amazing use of visual projections: Cleveland Cavs Pregame
Your app's down :(
You can just copy off Chrome's bookmarks file. It's at ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Bookmarks
Another case of "HN crashes the heroku app"
Anything to backup your claim about Socket.io?
I added democracy mode...

The pull request is here: https://github.com/grant/hnplays2048/pull/10

You can play it here:
http://hnplays2048-democracy.herokuapp.com/
Crashed!!
Look, if you use bitcoins on the internet you're basically giving them away. What you do is you keep them under your mattress and ever so often you lift up your mattress and look at them and sing a sweet little song to them. They're your friends. Your secret friends.
You're illustrating my point about how people without experience in the field are severely underestimating the harshness of the environment.

> a battery powered satellite link

Battery powered? Batteries are big fire risks (ask Boeing, they know all about it). Where are you going to put the battery? You can't put it next to the transmitter (which, needing line of sight, would go on the top of the plane), because you want the battery to be serviceable with relative ease. So now you've got a power line running from the battery to the transmitter, which is no different to a power line running from the main power feed. Let's scrap the battery.

> wouldn't necessarily lose touch until impact [...] at the very least, the plane's position would be known and rescuers dispatched

Satellite linkups are flaky, they need line of sight. Planes at cruising altitude travel extremely fast. The plane's exact position would not be known.

> Critical evidence in this incident is likely long gone because of the time that has passed - even if we find it today

If the recorders can be recovered this is unlikely. Flight recorders are designed to capture the information needed to figure out what happened. Air France 447 was lost for two years, and yet investigators were still able to establish with near certainty what happened.

> Video feeds etc. would at the very least assist in preventing future tragedies and help us understand exactly what happened.

I can see how video feeds could possibly be useful in establishing what happened in a terrorist attack or hijacking. In terms of telemetric data and establishing mechanical failure causes they are not very useful.

I get that a lot of people on HN have lots of great ideas, but this is an area where you really need to know exactly how harsh the environment is before you can start throwing suggestions around like they're basic common sense.
Got to e+99, now what. Shouldn't it just end at 2048?
Excellent suggestion! As appealing as remote working might be, it doesn't work for everybody. As a minimum you need to be more disciplined. Too many temptations in the home, fridge, snacks, TV, etc. Biggest danger are friends and family who think that you are available for chats, errands, game of golf, whatever.
It'd be really interesting to know if Australia picked up some trace of the plane on the Jindalee over the horizon radar. [0] Check the range there.

The path of the plane may just have touched the radar's range at some point or some idea of the track may have been worked out.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Netw...
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucChJITomFI
App store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/jetpack-kitty/id567551748?mt=8
I'm sure it'd be less than $15 dollars a piece. Hire someone to unpack them at $8/hr, someone to paint them at $8/hr, and someone to bag them at $8/hr, and I'd bet you could go through 30+ an hour, which would come out to $0.80/pop for labor. Plus transport and paint. Sure, it costs them, but keep in mind they don't have to make profit, they just have to make back more than the cost of a total loss for it to be worth it. Selling every single one for a few dollars loss should be better than losing them all for a more $$$ loss...
I'm not sure of your point. According to Crunchbase, Instagram took $7.5m funding at seed/A and then another $50m not long before it was acquired.

If you're taking about Instragram's exit valuation, I don't see the relevance.
I want an actual copy of the webpage to be saved offline, not just the links.