skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In addition to what bronson already said:

Once upon a time I did production support for a military radar power supply. One of my tasks is something we called Diminishing Material Sources (DMS). Basically, we had a system that would be produced over the course of 10 years and would need to be supported for a minimum 20 years after it was produced. The design, of course, had to be complete before production started, so tack 7 years on to the front. Not every supplier would want to keep producing specific parts long enough to support our needs, so if something was going to drop out of production I had to perform a DMS analysis to find a substitute. That involved either finding a drop-in replacement or redesigning part of the circuit. The former was sometimes painful, because a new supplier would need to have its parts evaluated for compatibility, which meant dozens of hours of testing parts and testing boards with parts installed.

The latter was an order of magnitude more painful. Any change to the design meant a partial or full re-qualification, and the cost could be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars. Anything that involved changing the circuit board automatically went to the right side of that scale. The "simple certification process" involves intensive environmental stress and screening testing: thermal shock on assembled boards (-40C to 70C transition in 30s); operational thermal cycling (repeated cycles of -40C to 70C with the hardware operating); and operational vibration testing (several tens of minutes operating while attached to a table shaking violently enough to liquefy your internal organs). There is also accelerated life testing, which determines if the modified design will meet the system longevity requirements. Depending on what changed and the system complexity, this may have to be repeated at multiple subsystem levels above the affected board.

For this reason we bent over backwards not to change the design unless we had no other choice. Design changes brought too much risk for us, our customers, and our end users. For this reason the military much prefers the spiral upgrade process for maintaining long-lived systems: once you get some practical experience with the current version, start work on an upgrade package that contains multiple fixes and enhancements at once and switch to that when it is ready. Sometimes it is even possible to retrofit existing systems with the spiral upgrades.
Absolutely. And Apple, and Dell, and anyone else that uses rechargeable batteries that degrade over time. This solves the degradation aspect of batteries, so it would improve the longevity of devices.
What makes you think this? Portable batteries like this are dime a dozen (maybe not for macs, I don't own one). Or the real play is licensing the battery tech which doesn't really seem Microsoft like at all since the company would likely fade into the background as the big battery companies use the technology.

I don't mean to be offensive, just curious why you are so confident this company or product is a industry game changer.
There used to be some kind of implementation (a mock-up, really) on-line with a text one could zoom out and in and surf from "things" to "things" but I can't find it anymore.
Netflix shares slump on talk of Apple service
Bullshit. Glad to see you lump people who don't want government in the marriage business at all with homophobics. Believe it or not, these people exist.
I think you'd have to be at least somewhat anti-gay to go out of your way to fund an anti-gay marriage measure specifically. Most people, even those who take a more traditional view on marriage, don't concern themselves with such things to that extent.

However, it is not as bigoted as say, funding a measure against protecting gays from workplace discrimination. Marriage has a long history in our society as being between a man and a woman to provide a legal and social framework for raising biological children (generally speaking). They receive privileges in return for doing something socially beneficial. You could argue that gay marriages generally don't do the same and that it's not worth re-engineering society to make that change. Marriage is also heavily intertwined with our Judeo-Christian background as a country, so people feel as if changing the term violates their religious rights. The government really shouldn't be involved with religion, but people still feel this way nonetheless.

Personally I see no trouble in letting two people who love one another and want to form a family unit from marrying. It's their own business.

I do see a problem with trying to blacklist or shout down people who have political views that aren't socially acceptable. People who are against things like unchecked immigration or affirmative action are often tarred as bigots. Abortion is considered a human rights issue by people on both sides of the debate. As long as someone doesn't act in a discriminatory fashion at work, I'm not concerned with their personal political views so much.
Banning interracial marriage is ludicrous and bigoted. Also, it's not the same thing at all.
The original title was linkbait.
Thanks for checking out my profile. If you'd dug a bit further you'd have found [1] that I am indeed a transgender [2] bisexual male.

That means that unless I closet myself for YC, which I'm getting a bit old for, I'm likely to have a significantly worse experience than the average woman would.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7098056 [2] Gender-dysphoric to be precise, but that isn't meaningful to most.
I see, but what I found interesting was that the price/performance ratio of this solution proved better than getting, say, four HDs in each machine or an extra machine, which is far more common in today's clusters (e.g.: Hadoop/Vertica clusters uses
I guess the profile of the IO (as you said, lots of random IO) contributed a lot for this. Could you elaborate on the decision process that lead to this
Please re-title this as "Mozilla News" as per the guidelines, thanks.
Yes but there's less of a guarantee that people will continue working on it should google decide to abandon it (which isn't impossible). I have nothing against Chromium though, but it's not very convenient for people stuck on Windows based OSes for example.
Electric Imp's BlinkUp tech [1] just flashes the whole screen. It's used for sending WiFi settings to the Lockitron.

[1] - http://electricimp.com/docs/gettingstarted/1-blinkup/
... where the metric for contributions and better is filtered through the idea that web apps should only run on Javascript
Again, IANAL, but my understanding is that the concept of self-defense is specific to the use of force, rather than broadly applicable. You'll find it difficult to prove an immediate thread of physical harm from a DDoS.

And even if it were legal, you'd still have to deal with all of the "$SELF_DEFENDER broke my web site" PR unpleasantness from the innocent bystanders.
...consuming goods which would increase prices. prices would go up because they would need paid more to do their jobs(think service industry cause they ain't doin' it cause they like it).
wow. thanks for sharing this. It's an awesome presentation.
Introducing Lynxus: News without a Filter
Maybe switch your glass to an ice cube tray. because you do know where it will go when it overflows- to the next memory address. you just don't know what side effects that may cause.
This is straight up not possible. Lithium-ion batteries degrade irreversibly as they're used - the only way to reduce capacity loss is to reduce the depth-of-discharge: add more cells, and discharge them less per cycle.

Unless they're fiddling with the actual chemistry of the cells, it's unlikely they've changed anything.
And I didn't want to take that Numerical Methods course...
The touted 95% accuracy was the primary reason US expats would sometimes leave their houses when the sirens sounded with their home cams to try to catch the Patriots intercepting incoming Scud missiles during the Gulf War.

I lived on the civilian airport during my youth in Riyadh during the Gulf War. The other expats thought the Americans were crazy no matter what the supposed accuracy.

It wasn't until after the war that we all realized the interception rates in the field were so much lower.

Pretty surreal.
Clash of the Giants
I'm curious. What's the website? How'd you reach that audience? Short story?
>but I had to mess around to get WiFi working: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=835277#c33

hardware

>and the touchpad still has issues: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=869722

hardware

>and there is other weird behavior, like the laptop screen not turning off when the laptop is in a docking station with the lid closed

hardware

>(did not have this problem with OpenSUSE 10.2), and the encrypted partition password prompt being off the screen if an external monitor is plugged in

hardware (questionable: more like how KDE deals with hardware. I don't know KDE, I's suggest switching to something that doesn't do what KDE did.)

I can't see anything that you mentioned what wasn't hardware related. Also, I don't actually know what Ubuntu certification entails, but I agree with you that it isn't meant to guarantee that OpenSUSE and Mint run perfectly.
Having been a "young developer" and now an "old developer" (mid-50s) here is how I see the pros and cons of older developers:

Pros of being older:
1. Wisdom from having written a million lines of code and having run into all the bugs before.
2. Can more capably see the pros and cons of the latest fads.
3. Not as distracted by the need to play.
4. Don't drink as much (the younger generation drinks a LOT!
5. Capable of providing adult leadership.

Cons:
1. Even those of us in excellent shape just don't have the energy we used to.
2. Family distractions lead to lack of free time to keep up with new developments.
3. Family distractions lead to more errors.
4. We are sure we've seen everything already. (And boy are we wrong!).

All in all, my next startup is definitely going to have a mixture of wise, seasoned hands and energetic young devs.
AltDrag - (Windows) Easily drag windows when pressing the alt key
Mentioned in passing in child comments below, but worth highlighting - the HyperJuice Battery range of products (eg http://amzn.to/1mqK9ap) already does this, at a similar price point, and is available for purchase today.

In fact they're already onto the second generation of the product, with minor bugs and issues with the first gen already ironed out. I get this GBattery has a new "BatteryOS" management feature but right now that's vaporware and unproven, and unavailable for purchase - thus I don't really understand the excitement vs what you could already buy today.
Target Breach Shows the Importance of Protecting Critical Information Systems
Thanks for the response. I'll make sure to ask you after your first semester how the class went.
Think of the power supplies as battery chargers.

The 13" MBA has a 54Wh battery, and Apple claims it get 12 hours of "wireless web" use. The 13" MBP has a 72Wh battery and claims 9 hours of "wireless web" or "iTunes movie playback". In practice, people find the Apple claims fairly reasonable.

While that does not prove how precise or accurate their projections are, I don't think they are absurd. Software-based monitors of power consumption on MacBooks show variation between low single digits and low teens under light use, and shoot up dramatically if you are doing something intensive.
> I believe that treating people as equals and granting everyone basic human rights is one of the most fundamental goals we should have as a society

I agree, which is why I want people to have control over how they do their computing, which, by the way does affect LGBT issues: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/digital-freedom-lgbt-i...
I recently got a new work laptop. I've used a Lenovo X200 for a few years and been immensely happy with it, but it was starting to show its age and the display was becoming less and less bright. The recent Thinkpads are utter crap, IMHO. Give me some fucking mouse buttons instead of going the Apple route and hiding them underneath the touchpad. The 'clit' is still there, but it's almost unusable. The resolution is too low.

I initially bought a T440, but it died in BIOS on second boot, and after 2 motherboard changes and 1.5 months in Lenovo's own lab they were still unable to even put in the serial numbers (needed for the Windows license that came with it). In the end, and after much delay, the gave me a new one. I promptly gave it to an employee running Windows instead of even trying.

For my new, new laptop I chose a Dell XPS 13 (9333) Developer Edition. No Microsoft tax! I'm not an Ubuntu person, so I ditched the pre-installed (though not after booting it up and noticing that Dell wanted me to sign some EULA before continuing on to the desktop).

Instead I went with Debian. The monitor shows up as "Synaptics Large Touch Screen". Bluetooth and wireless works after installing non-free drivers. Suspend and resume works. It's fast.

There are only two problems. One is the irritating coil whine that the series exhibit. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Usually I can remove it by toggling the keyboard backlight, but it doesn't seem to matter if it's from on to off or the other way around. The second, and somewhat worse, is that keys seem to get stuck. Sometimes, and I haven't actually found out the cause, the keys seem to get stuck and repeat until another key is pressed. It happened in emacs a few days ago and was almost catastrophic (I do keep my backups, but still..).

The last issue is with Dell rather than the computer. It seems weird to offer a Developer Edition with decent drivers and a pre-installed Ubuntu, and then only offer their BIOS upgrades as a Windows and a DOS executable. I used a USB stick with FreeDOS to apply the update, but seriously, why couldn't they just give me a utility that works? My little sister, my wife and my mother-in-law all run Linux, and they'd probably be able to work a simple program that had a one-click BIOS upgrade button. Boot FreeDOS with Grub, apply the update, reboot. Why do I have to do this by myself?
Your notion of "treated the same" matches approximately nobody's, aside from a handful of wordy bigots. More importantly, it doesn't qualify under the 14th amendment, which is the standard that matters here: http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C4220110321.PDF
Here's another one: let's say 10 men and 10 women want to get married, as a group, but there's a law forbidding that. Would you say that's an anti-human law?

And another: a man and a simulated anime character want to get married, but there's a law forbidding it. Would you say that's against artificial intelligence, japanese animation or both?
> Unless this is a dictionary attack where you're over-parsing "homophobic" as something other than "anti-gay"

well first of all, it's not pedantic to point out that that word is being abused. second, we're not dealing with "anti-gay", but with "anti-gay marriage" - which, as has been pointed out, was the mainstream position for most of America until just a few years ago, and the mainstream position for both Democratic and Republican candidates until even more recently.
Microsoft Word 0Day Used in Targeted Attacks
> Ironically, the fact that the bad time calculation had been improved in some parts of the code, but not all, contributed to the problem, since it meant that the inaccuracies did not cancel.

-----------

I wonder what trade-off informed their decision not to have the time code in one place and pass it around as they needed it. Or at least defined in one place and then inserted where they needed it if there was some requirement that it be right there in the functions that wanted to know about time.

:/

Just seems a danged odd thing to do.
> Software engineering in life-critical applications is serious business.

Probably one of the most tragic cases of a SW bug:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Why is no one asking how Brendan Eich feels about climate change, health care and marijuana before deciding if he is fit for the job?

It's because (correct me if I'm wrong) he hasn't spoken publicly about those causes, nor funded them.

Also, many wrongs don't make a right. It's a large and common fallacy to suggest there's anything incorrect about questioning his views on human rights simply because his views on (for example) the environment haven't been questioned.
As long as married != single, we have an inequality of rights. The only question is whether gays get to join the favored class.

As one of the single people that gay activists are willing to throw under the bus as long as they get what they want, I don't see any reason to support them.
When you say this is misleading, are you denying that Eich donated money to anti-gay laws?
Would love to see a battery built in to my MBP's power brick. Charge, and provide power, when it's plugged in. Run off the battery when it's not.
It's important to get your facts right before you leap to someone's defense, or castigate others for withholding judgement. If you look at vadsye's link[1] to the Nov 2011 investment announcement, you'll see that Sarveet is given equal billing as the then tech leader.

Something - I don't know what, but she's certainly not being forthright about it - must have happened between then and the new "this is what a real CTO looks like" guy took over.

So there's enough there that merits hesitating before making a woman-in-tech hero of her. It's not misogynistic to say so either.

[1] http://tmtinvestments.com/i/pdf/Wanelo%20RNS%20(22%20Nov%201...
How to design a mobile-first responsive blog
They need to tax capital gains similar to income. and tax corporations on world wide income like they do individuals.
> After all, there are parts of JavaScript that can be found to be pretty gay, in any particular meaning of the word you choose.

How about in the preferring-the-sexual-and-romantic-company-of-the-same-sex sense?

Because as a gay man and a programmer (admittedly one that greatly dislikes JavaScript), I'm really failing to work out the connection.
Thanks so much for the tip, you saved me some hours for sure!
That justification is what is bullshit. We're talking about support for Prop 8. If Prop 8 was about getting the government out of all marriage, you would have a point. But Prop 8 was about removing the ability for a specific group of people to marry while still keeping the government in all other marriages.
Ask HN:  What are some laws of physics inconsistent with one another?
I'd like to see a more modern version of this comparison, with more idiomatic versions of the test code. The nice thing is that this research was done in the open so we can see the code used for each language.
Sadly you're right. But my point grapples with a larger issue too: should a startup launch if they aren't confident about the safety of their product?
Wow, I almost can't tell if I'm on Hacker News or Tumblr. Brendan Eich made a mistake 6 years ago, let all of us Social Justice Warriors break out the pitchforks and show him the true meaning of tolerance!

Honestly he's never made any impassioned rants on the subject, never spoken out against gay marriage, never reportedly acted out against any homosexuals in any way. He only made one small donation to what was, at the time, a very popular political campaign.

Maybe he was misguided, or misunderstood the reality of what Proposition 8 would mean. The campaigns were certainly filled with misinformation that suckered in a huge number of Californians. I know we technophiles like to think we're cut from a better cloth than that, but there are days we're just as gullible as the next.

We're all guilty of lapses of morality at some point in our lives. Hopefully we learn from those mistakes. Hopefully Brendan will, as well.
What did I just read? I have really, really low standards for web content, but this seriously reads like a fifth grade book report. "Povio is for now 100% focused on growth. It actually sounds like Povio has some kind of shot in the space."
I'm not convinced lawmakers won't be convinced to go after individual company executives for reckless endangerment, negligence, manslaughter or whatever else they can dream up.

Especially if, Ford Pinto style, they've publicly stated that [for financial/reputational reasons] they shouldn't be as concerned about safety as another market participant, or that they should should aim to be "only just" better than fallible human drivers who frequently are held accountable for their fallibility.

I wouldn't want to be on the design team of a robotic car the first time it hits a child, even if the child acted in a reckless and unpredictable way that even a human mind would have been unlikely to anticipate and the software had demonstrated a far superior safety record to human drivers overall.
I think that is why systems try to hit the missile on the way up before RV separation. The navy has Missile Systems, such as the TBMD section of the Aegis weapons system, that uses US/ship based SM-3 missiles to hit a Ballistic missile on it's ascent. However, this means you have to detect the BM early and launch your missiles from somewhere in the ocean so that you could hit the target around it's apex. They do this by sharing radar data between land and ship based radars, getting the SM-3 close to target, and then using a kinetic warhead to make contact with the BM.

I would think that the patriot missile system uses a similar theory. It probably use a radar to detect the scud launch and then calculate the correct time to deploy a missile for intercept. The patriot would either be flown close to the scud using telemetry based systems on the patriot, or by using mid course/terminal guidance from the patriot launcher. Terminal guidance would fly the missile in front of the scud and "patriot go boom". If the terminal guidance is slightly off, you don't go boom in front of the scud and the scud hits it target.

In some fire control radars, the terminal guidance is constructed of data the radar receives from a missile downlink, where the missile reports it's position to the launcher in order to use a more precise radar on the ground to direct the missiles path towards a target. I think it's more popular to use a combination of missile communications uplink/downlink and combine it with Ground based radar data, to determine where the missile is, where the target is, and where the expected point of missile intercept should be.
I wonder if you're in a position to comment on a couple of recollections I have from the first Iraq war (which I was aware of via TV news here in the UK, no direct involvement) - things that I've wondered about over the years?

The first: I remember a report on the UK's Channel 4 News which included some footage of Patriot missiles in flight. Now this is a long time ago, and I only saw the clip once, but what I recall is that shortly after launch, rather than a clean arc, one missile seemed to describe some crazy set of mid-air loops (which I immediately interpreted as a software error) before what seemed to be a sudden dive into the ground. The voice-over didn't refer to this apparent failure directly, but you could sense a certain awkwardness. Have you ever heard of any incident matching this?

The second: as you'll know, the Patriot wasn't designed for a direct hit on incoming missiles, but was intended to get within a critical radius and then explode, triggering an explosion in the incoming missile's warhead. My friend theorised that the Iraqis exploited this by repeatedly launching missiles without payloads, so that even successfully exploding Patriots had little effect other than to deplete the military budget by X hundred thousand bucks a throw.

Do either of these sound familiar or plausible? Things that I've wondered about for years!
Courts were also in favor of putting Japanese people in internment camps at one point. It doesn't make them right.

If people don't want to work for Mozilla because of Eich, fantastic. They can form their own foundation and work on Iceweasel. Everybody gets what they want.