skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"NASA conducted five manned spaceflight programs: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Shuttle. The latter four programs produced spacecraft that had on-board digital computers"

Wow, how did they launch something to the orbit without any computer on-board? Was it just like a "dumb slingshot projectile"?
I learnt this the hard way. Initially, I designed the API with bigints for ids and found some older versions of PHP didn't support bigints. I had to switch to using strings.
What you're missing is that there is no need to do that. Using JavaScript as an intermediary representation for other languages on a permanent basis is kind of ridiculous. Improving browser support for JavaScript-as-IR provides no benefit over adding support for a "real" IR and introduces superfluous complexity which is the enemy of both performance and security.

Compiling other languages to JavaScript is a tolerable transition mechanism while browsers that don't support something better are still popular, but trying to improve the ability of browsers to interpret compiled-to-JavaScript code from other languages is farcical -- if you're going to update the browser then update it to support something better than JavaScript, not to improve the performance of the horrible legacy transition kludge.
Ask HN:FEM solver
Some time back here was a link for how to write 2d fem solver in python, can somebody point me to that or any other similar link
It's my recollection that seL4 was proven correct at the binary level.
bwethington, thanks for your kind words. Didn't find your email address in your profile. Drop me a line. My email address is in my profile.
Being a biotech is not a fundamental constraint unless you approach healthcare orthogonally. We already know that the BIG Pharma R&D model is broken and irrational. Actually words expressed by Merk late last year, as Well as Voltaire in the 1700s! To hack healthcare you must, at least initially, by-pass the gate-keepers, the incumbents, and they're lobbyists by targeting unregulated markets, ideally Golidlocks markets. That's my strategy anyhow.Regarding multi-million dollar costs, people must strain their brains some by doing design-arounds and using surrogate markers and collaborating, i.e., perspective shifting by questions fundamental assumptions. In fact, it is possible to run experiments at 2 orders of magnitude less than what establishment-heavies are doing theirs (speaking from experience).
I only use in-ear earphones, and my go-to earphone shootout lists are these:

http://www.inearmatters.net/2009/01/list_01.html

http://www.head-fi.org/t/478568/multi-iem-review-314-iems-co...

I agree with the conclusions in general, but it always makes sense to judge headphones by model than brand. My fav earphone is Sony MH1C. It used to be available in eBay for $30 and was the best you could buy the sub $100 category.
Logic programming, the third programming paradigm, will come to the rescue...
Perhaps they used "analog computers"? One example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELWAT
paulus [at] paulusschoutsen nl
Darn, missed this thread yesterday. Here is mine. It's gone through some changes...it's never perfect.

http://imgur.com/a/3R5kP
Few things are more valuable in war than the secrecy of long distance communications. Though we haven't been at a conflict which posed any credible threat for the better part of a century, holding on to technological advantages when they're fresh is in our best interest and in the best interest of the American Peace we have going.
I have a good friend whose wife works for 3D systems. I asked about their 20% employee discount, but he cautioned me against getting one at this point in time because they were not consumer-ready yet. He said they work but they're not really that easy to use, not super reliable, etc, and he recommended that I not get one yet.
Yeah, feels like snapchat + wordpress for locations. If the code is released open source, or their RasPi hardware goes on sale, it would be nice to install data bubble servers in areas with low bandwidth (festivals) or no internet (subways).
Here's my favorite headphone model: the Bose QC20. The noise cancelation is unreal – when friends try them on for the first time the consistent reaction has to be to smile and laugh. The earbud that just rests in your ear instead of drilling into the center of your head only makes the experience better.

No I'm not a shill I'm just in love with these headphones.
"may include as many as 52 million face images by 2015"

Huh? If you've had a drivers license or passport photo taken then it's in a federal database. Maybe they aren't shared well across all federal organizations yet but that's only a brief matter of time.
For those of us who don't know who Seth Roberts is, who is Seth Roberts?
scendr.com

Makes sending hand written cards easy. Drop an email to note@scendr.com. Writers take care transcribing and sending.

Churns out a good chunk each month. Could definitely scale further if you had the time and energy.
One can't help but wonder if a man so dedicated to self-experimentation was a victim of his own studies. Beware extremes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Roberts

He was well known for self experimentation and writing the book, "The Shangri-La Diet".
This is incredibly sad. Such a curious and bright mind.
Thanks. I have heard of that in passing.
You could do this (although it is likely to be impractical): avoid writing java code altogether.
Use a language with better abstraction features like Scala or Clojure. Those two compile
to JVM bytecode so you could still use them in your java project.
Inventor of the "Shanghai-la" diet, among other things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Roberts
Built a Prusa i2 from a kit with a colleage at work. It took us a while but we have it printing beautifully and consistently. The problems we had building it had to do mainly with the hot-end that came with the kit, which eventually we switched out for a new one we got cheap off ebay. I'd say the build phase was at times frustrating, but you start to build up experience and after a while you can diagnose a problem almost intuitively.

As for getting good prints, the trick is to keep fiddling with Slic3r settings until you get it just right for the filament you are using, and then just keep using those settings. Also, make sure you calibrate your z-axis properly, this will get rid of a lot of problems.

Currently printing parts for a second one because I want to have one at home. I use it mainly for prototyping parts/enclosures when building things like small plotters or other robotics. I strongly recommend learning openscad or another modelling tool. Printing is fun, but designing a part and then seeing it turn into reality before your eyes is just magical :)
+1 I've had my HD25s for 8 years. They don't just sound good but are monitoring phones with a virtually flat frequency response. I ran the cable over hundreds of times with my chair as well - just eats it up.
Canalphones beat active noise cancellation (ANC) every time. ANC doesn't attenuate all frequencies as evenly as passive protection does and it sounds very strange to me. To rub salt into the wound, passives don't need batteries and they pack into a tiny pouch that takes almost no space in carry-on bags.
Sounds like a broscientist.
Renaissance means resurgence, not dominance. Re = again, naissance = birth.

10 years ago I would see the very occasional article about Lisp. Now FP discussion is everywhere. Whether it's being used in prod systems or not, FP is certainly gaining attention.
The problem is that indigenous populations are sustainable only while they are very sparse. There is no way current 7 bln people could live on earth without GMO tech progress.
Caching, throttling, timeouts, gzip, error handling.

This all seems like something any serious user of a REST API should know how to handle very well. If not otherwise, then by use of a standard library.

Why does every API owner have to write basically identical clients in every language out there?
You can't mock out your dependencies as easily in Go as you can monkey patch them in Ruby.

However I've found the explicit error handling in Go to be more valuable in making reliable software than a torrent of test in Ruby, or Java.
RadiumOne CEO Fired for Domestic Violence, Calls Victim a Whore
Sennheiser HD25. Either the cheap version or the full ones. Cans are the same.
I have the M4U1 model after owning Sennheiser Momentum for six months - they are obviously better in side-by-side tests and they have larger ear cups that I can wear all day with comfort in a noisy office. Definitely my closed-headphone favourite. Too bad they aren't pretty stitched leather like the Sennehisers!

I don't believe ANC is worth the $100 - as you say, same headphones minus ANC.
Beyerdynamics is in the full list of models.

But in general, anyone who owned few > $100 headphones can see that this rating is a joke.
I'm shocked to see Plantronics at the bottom of the list; I've found them to be quite excellent, and they seem well regarded in terms of features and reliability.
Ben Horowitz on Charlie Rose
I have a side project that I'm done with: www.movietempest.com. It's been allowed to languish for a while though, so would need a bit work to be functional again. (Also the tech isn't the most modern anymore. Python/django on the back end, with mootools and custom js on the front end.)

Might as well post in case it's of interest to someone though!
In my experience that makes it a better place to live -- but not necessarily a better place to try to build a (very large) technology company.

The difference between NYC and the Valley was unclear to me when I lived in New York, but after spending just a few months out west, it became very apparent to me that there is an order of magnitude difference between the two -- and I believe that will translate into an increased chance of success.

There are lots of reasons that New York just doesn't compete with SV, mostly to do with people and networking, but the difference that really struck me was the openness and positivity in the Valley. Yes there's an echo chamber, and yes you need to keep your BS detector on at all times, but when you are just 3 or 4 people trying to crack into a behemoth of an industry you need all the help you can get. I felt lots of people in New York were looking for weaknesses in what we were doing or trying to figure out who would acquire us, whereas people in the Valley were looking for ways to help us really succeed.

The combined operating experience is not only greater in the Valley, but much more accessible too. I felt like larger companies like Tumblr and Foursquare were silo'd off from everyone else, whereas you can barely shake a stick in Mountain View without hitting someone at Google.

Personally, I believe New York is the greatest city in the world and due to it's culture and array of experiences, a great place to start a company -- but if you want to build a big tech company, you should move out west. In fact, it's one of YC's indicators of success after going through the program.

As a side note, the closest thing I've seen on the east coast with a similar vibe to the valley is Waterloo, Ontario. Although very, very small, they've somehow captured that same feeling.
Not so much. For Mercury, they used two IBM 7090's on a ground station. So the majority of calculations was done on the ground, with the vessel sending telemetry data.
Would that be the mosquito laser?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYXPqrXZ1eU
Absolutely - Grado is fine if you really like supra-aural open headphones, but you can pretty much rule them out if you sit anywhere near another person who doesn't care to hear your music. Another problem with Grado is they "protect" international distributors who are free to add any ridiculous markup they like to arrive at a local price. There can be no competition because headphone vendors like Headroom and Amazon just aren't allowed to ship Grado products internationally under threat of no supply.
Very clear. The reduction based scheduling certainly looks interesting. Thanks for your explanation!
If anyone is looking for portable headphones, Beyerdynamics DTX 501p are brilliant (and great value at that). Comfortable, good isolation, no music leaking out bothering others, surprisingly nice sound for their price and size. These days I tend to pick them up more often than my Grado SR-80 (which I also recommend).
Here's a updated version with pictures and colour!
http://www.amazon.com/Computers-Space-Journeys-With-NASA/dp/...

I really like this book, I first read it 12 years ago while still in High-School. Got me hooked on computers :)
I got paywalled at first, accidentally refreshed it, and no paywall. Well, that's odd.
> Programmers talk to other programmers in terms of functions all the time.

I seriously doubt it. In order to talk in terms of only functions, you would need to give up identity...because what is identity but not a key for encapsulated state? Without identity, you really are talking with just values, but you have problems describing things with handles. There is no single Bob, just a new Bob who is reconstituted each time you talk about him. Naming anything is weird, and the pure lambda calculus of course avoids it. Most APIs are not purely functional, but somewhat object-oriented (oriented around identity) if only in a few key aspects that are needed to do anything at all.
I own a PrintrBot, 1st generation laser cut edition. I was just reminiscing about spending most of Memorial Day Weekend in 2012 building it. But, I never got a decent print from it.

A bunch of reasons:

- When the PrintrBot first came out, despite its marketing as being newbie-friendly, it required mechanical engineering experience and familiarity with RepRaps. The build instructions weren't bad but it took about 20 hours to work through them and they assumed familiarity with tuning things like the tension on the extruder assembly that a newbie like me didn't have. Lots of terms were used ("hobbed bolt") that aren't garden variety Home Depot things.

- The kit I got had crappy parts. PrintrBot's Kickstarter was wildly successful, so much so that the strategy of printing pieces for rewards using PrintrBots took too much time. Half of the plastic pieces I received were resin-cast and not cured for long enough so they cracked. The other pieces weren't QCed - my main gear had major flaws in the teeth which several hours of shaving with an xacto haven't fixed. The control board wires were designed for the smaller all-plastic model, so my z-axis wires rub against the print bed and strain for high (x, y) coords. I've grown grey hairs leveling the print bed and calibrating the z axis but the unit jerks during operation so much that it's impossible to print anything requiring more than 4 passes of the print head before the head starts dragging through the already printed material. Some of the provided bolts weren't the right type, which I exchanged at an industrial lab where I worked but which would not have been sourcable for a hobbyist. My kit came with incorrectly sized linear bearings, too - my local maker space had just enough stashed in the back, thankfully.

Overall a negative experience for me. That being said, the PrintrBot community is supremely kind and helpful. I just don't have the time, experience or materials to replace the bad parts, calibrate the printer and keep it calibrated.

What I've seen of newer and higher end hobbyist units, even the Makerbot 2, is that you need to really grok the mechanics to keep it tuned and running. Even some of the low-mid range industrial printers require horse-whispering to keep them happy. It's nowhere near print-and-forget.

I look at what it's possible to produce on even the high-end consumer units: you can make pixelated toys, but how much will you use them?
Find an old pair of Sennheiser HD-580s. They were so good they un-discontinued them. Been using the same pair since 1999, with the same cable they came with (apparently the cable can be problematic.)
I'm biased, since I'm the founder of Mashape [1], but maybe this could be of some interest. I'd like to point out that one of the features that Mashape offers is auto-generating client libraries in 8 different languages, leveraging Unirest [2] that we open sourced last year.

[1] http://mashape.com

[2] http://unirest.io
I came here just to post that link. Cheers.
Sure, the database junkies will never give that up.
As a creator and a consumer, I think one has to not resent giving away something. Don't expect compensation, but ask for it if it's necessary to accomplish something as a stretch goal up from free. Also, there is value derived from street cred and it's better than a résumé.

https://github.com/steakknife
I'm surprised Grado is at this high position at all - their production quality is absolutely abysmal, they came apart in a year - unlike Sennheiser (using for few years), Audiotechica (using for few years) and Technics/Panasonic (these I use for 15 years!). As for the cost - for same money there is always better alternative than Grados.
Learn MEANG (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node, Grunt) stack by breaking it down and mapping each section of each technology to pomodoros.
some time ago I read about a similar approach (used for malaria, I think) basically the GM mosquitoes have a "beak" too small for the plasmodium to get through and infect people.

Once they interbreed with the anopheles the mosquitoes basically stop being transmitters of malaria.

It seems slightly less likely to be something that comes back and bite us in the ass than eradicating a species from the ecosystem.
I do like the idea of being able to endorse a comment as particularly exceptional. One special and wonderful case of this which happens pretty often is when a person with first-hand knowledge about a story shows up in a thread. (Edit: ran across an example five minutes after I wrote that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657553). It's not clear exactly how such a feature would work, though.

About this:

> I feel like part of the reason behind the rise of "dumb and/or mean" is that as HN has gotten larger the community has also attenuated. Commenters become a faceless crowd and the quality of our interactions degrades accordingly

... my main question is how we could test that. It might be true, it might not; hard to know.
While indicative of overall lineup, rating by brand is suboptimal in regards to picking actual headphones for use. For example Koss, while being rated bad has some pretty good performing headphones.

Anyways, here is more substantial headphone buying resource: http://www.head-fi.org/a/headphone-buying-guide
You can't rank a brand when it comes to headphones especially when the market is segmented between cheap shit, pro consumer and studio.

Universally though if its a pretty colour or a TV advert its going to be shit.
Would you say CarsDirect is an exception to their standard practices? It seems like a reasonably high maintenance venture, but likely a profitable one, since they've captured a good chunk of the market.
Fine, but you can't provide clients for all languages and frameworks, so make sure your REST API is simple enough for those who need to make do without an official client library.
Your integration tests should count as one client?
Providers should definitely provide clients. This is one of the things I worked on at Twilio and it's extremely important for onboarding new customers. Support as many languages and frameworks as you can sustain and make them first-class (just as well documented as REST, native to the language, etc).

However, I've also seen the other side of this working at IFTTT where (at the time) we had a gemfile a mile long. That got really hairy. I now try to avoid using clients. I go into it in great detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBO62A3XaSs and we've talked about this many times on trafficandweather.io if you want to learn more.
Rope memory is quite beautiful. Seems like an alien technology - almost organic.
They wouldn't be substantially identical clients.

For example, I have extensive use of Twilio and Pin Payments (among other APIs) in Appointment Reminder. My use of the Twilio API can potentially spike into the hundreds of requests a second range, but if it gets into thousands of requests a second, that needs to throw a PresidentOfMadagascarException ("Shut. Down. Everything.") Code which does not interact with the Twilio API but instead implements meta-features on top of the Twilio API comprises 80%+ of lines of code implicating the Twilio API in my application.

By comparison, querying the Pin Payments API doesn't need a rate limit at all, but does need a sane caching strategy, because it requires thousands of API calls to answer a simple, common question like "How much did we sell in 2013?" Again, meta-features for the API comprise over 80% of lines of code implicating that API, but they're totally different meta-features.

AR is doing the 90% case with both of these APIs -- sane defaults in first-party clients would have greatly eased my implementation of them, allowing me to focus on features which actually sell AR, to the benefit of both my business and those of the APIs at issue, since their monthly revenue from me scales linearly with my success.
I wish clients would write themselves based on REST APIs.
Depends on many factors, but if you want the most simple guide:

budget <= $125 -> Sony MDR7506

budget > $125 -> most expensive Sennheiser that still fits your budget
The kind of cryptography that lets people communicate securely? Belongs on the same list as physical objects that intended to pierce walls and flesh?

I'd also like a more in-depth explanation.
earplugs: a-Jays Two (good sound, flat cables -- durable and don't get tangled),

portable headphones: Beyerdynamics DTX 501p (great overall, don't leak sound),

home: Grado SR-80 (great sound, durable except for the cable; also, the cable is in Y configuration and twists a bit. I had to replace it after a couple years).

If I had to buy just one of these, DTX 501p win hands down as the most versatile.
DevOps with Ansible
> If you're lucky, they'll use a debugger if it doesn't work. If you're unlucky, they start putting in print statements.

I think you got that backwards. printf debugging is a very useful but dying skill. If you have a usable debugger and you're working on one atomic single-threaded module, great -- but if you are doing low-level, asynchronous stuff, often on disparate platforms, the ability to write a log file and debug things that way is a precious resource.
Forgive me, but I'm having trouble understanding why his death is significant for a crowd such as Hacker news? I didn't know about him, and I don't mean to talk ill of the dead, but from a quick google it would seem he's mostly just a dietary quack? Even if he wasn't a quack, I still don't really get his relevance.
Computer technology alone is extremely valuable, would you be OK with restricting the export of that?
Ten reasons to use OSGi
Cool idea, and congrats on living the "passive income" dream! ;) One quick suggestion if you're interested: I found the white text on light background on pages like this one a bit tough to read: http://www.thebigeat.com/uk. (Also reduces the professional feel.) That one change would probably take just a few minutes. That said, with $6k in annual income, if I were you I would seriously consider getting some quotes to have a professional web designer give the whole site a facelift. I'm not saying it looks bad by any means, but I wouldn't be surprised if a really polished, professional look had a noticeable impact on your bottom line, possibly paying for itself within a few years.

(If I didn't already have too many projects to work on, I would seriously consider making you an offer, but alas...)