skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if the ISS is around 420km up, and Mars is on average 225 million km away, and all other parameters of the laser are identical, then the laser would need to be around 700GW.

However, you could probably get away with a slightly less powerful laser if you decrease the bit-rate a little, improve the sensitivity of the receiver, and tighten the beam (which wouldn't be a problem if the laser is bigger). I got the impression that the 2.5W laser was way more powerful than necessary for basic communication.

Let's face it - Mars Explorer has a total power availability of around 450W, and it aims its dish at the earth with an accuracy of 0.04 degrees, and it manages to communicate. Replacing the radio with a laser may improve matters, but it may also require too much power.
Great, thanks. Hadn't seen that.
I used it a month or two ago and found it unusably slow but recently gave it another shot after they released an update and now it's pretty much on par with Sublime on my system. It might be worth you giving it another go.
Here is a global version that also shows intensity: http://earth.nullschool.net/
We are speculating about something that does not even work in theory. We have no idea what "it" would be like.
Great ideas--making a list works really well for me, although I'm guilty of still loving the pen and paper list!
It's crazy how history repeats itself ... This reminds me of Mozilla Composer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Composer) back when the Mozilla Suite was still a thing and Firefox was in its infancy!
I clip mine onto the cover, the same way I used to clip regular pens onto the cover of my notebooks.
Ugh. This proposal also suggests using "magic comments" in scripts, which needs to die. They will get stripped by things like pagespeed and various acceleration proxies, completely outside the developers control.
I've always wondered why developer tools are bundled with browsers. Shouldn't they be available as separate downloads as:

1. Most people use browsers compared to working with them for development, and

2. The additional tools just add to the package size and possibly increased resource usage (if they are running with the rest of the browser)?

Thanks in advance for the replies.
If you're talking lasers though, don't forget to factor in the time needed to reacquire a new satellite in once the existing one goes over the horizon. The shorter the orbit, the more often you'd have to do this.
I take it you don't believe that all utility curves are ultimately arbitrary.
At the multiple seconds travel time level, gravitational lensing is completely insignificant. Come back when you have a round trip time of a million years past a massive galactic supercluster.
This.

For better or worse, Second Life is a 3D chat/world-building program, not a game, so there is no actual need for much of the Maslow Need Hierarchy.
The original question was: "If you traveled back in time to 1975 equipped with a modern laptop loaded with a development environment of your choice, what's the first thing you'd do?"

There's a big difference between accidentally traveling back in time with only your laptop + dev environment while you're typing at Starbucks and intentionally doing it.

If accidental, I don't think the cached text or HTML contents of my MacBook's filesystem would be that terribly helpful in predicting the future (though having modern source code would be interesting, and of course there's the hardware itself). My own knowledge of the last few decades would likely be more useful.

If intentional and I have some time to prepare, then I can show up with Wikipedia, stock prices, racing results (Back to the Future got this right), scientific papers, etc. Wikipedia compressed is only ~9GB as of Feb 2014. Perhaps then find some relatives and convince them I'm legit.

To offer proof of time travel, describe future events and publish the uuencoded checksums-with-nonce in an NYT classified ad in advance. Both checksums and uuencoding existed in the 1980s and they certainly could have existed on the Unix boxes of the 1970s (maybe they did). Signing with a private key would work after 1976 in the public literature, or 1973 for GCHQ, but would probably be a bit too obscure for easy verification for another decade or so, barring disruption of the timestream.
This seems like it gets posted weekly to HN
This is about a revolution level event, not whether you think the process is working.

It provides enough of an escape valve that if enough people who want to revolt feel that way, things would chance before violence started.

You can also renounce your US citizenship which is what truly leaving permanently entails.
I can understand Opera not wanting to maintain their own rendering engine, except that I though that was their main source of income. What I can't understand is why they release the WebKit/Blink based Opera when they did.

They shipped a version of "Opera" without the stuff that people loved and bet that it was the brand that people loved. I used very few of the features in Opera 12, but I switched to Firefox when the new version shipped because they made it harder to get the privacy settings I want and I can't make DuckDuckGo the default search engine (honestly: Is that really so hard to do?)

Dragonfly, the Opera web developer tool is another thing I would have loved to be able to use, but I will accept that it's a bit harder to port and wouldn't be a day one feature.

What they done in the past 12 version is beyond me, I don't see that adding anything important or bringing back anything that people actually want.

Dear Opera please fix:

- Customizable DEFAULT search engines.

- Bring back Opera Link.

- Bring back DragonFly (When you have the time).

If it saves time you can drop:

- Speed Dial

- Stash ( Serious question: Who needs that? )

- Discover, see question regarding Stash.

- Theme support, see question regarding Stash.
Fear Of Getting Fired
hahah, that's pretty funny. I've done some blogging myself and had no traction. The main reason i did it was to document progress of the startup I was building. Would be investors could check out the blog and get a high level view of my thinking and my output. I guess it isn't a terrible idea, if my startup had interest from investors, I think it would have been useful. It was just a wordpress blog, so it didn't take tons of time to maintain. But, I feel like the heart of the matter is, my startup didn't have much traction. And if it did, I don't believe this blog would have been a make or break factor in an investor deciding to invest. In my current venture, I just tweet and send emails when a new feature is released. It basically serves the same purpose and takes mere minutes to produce.
A more appropriate use for "Hello, world!" than I have ever written in a new programming language.
History theft with CSS Boolean algebra
yes this is exactly how it starts.

ive found getting out with the team for lunches regularly ..like alomost every day helps a lot . this is where the boss can strike up conversation and set the tone.

the boss can also reward folks for having focus and disipline during the work day.

one counter argument that will occur is that people want to work/code on the weekend or late at night "because they like to". My response is: "i would love it if you had non-work hobbies on the nights and weekends - learning those skills can be fun :)"

i dunno, no doubt its hard, but its shit to be burned out.
A beginner's guide to become inert and lazy
Ha, i´m afraid i WON´T be fired anytime soon.
Yeah, this is a guy who says reality is she wasn't a she, which sounds pretty much like transphobia to me.

So, he doesn't get to set protocol.
Larger than the power issue, it seems like latency would be a big challenge that would need to be solved to achieve Mars <=> Earth communication. There's already a very high latency (about a day) with this proof-of-concept while waiting for the ISS to pass over the same station in California again.

The latency would be significantly longer than a day for two single transceivers, one on Earth/ISS, and one on Mars, to align again once they've broken alignment—Earth-Mars oppositions happen about every two years.

A solution to both problems would be more transceivers: the Earth to ISS station problem could be addressed by setting up more transceivers on earth underneath the ISS's ground tracks, enabling more frequent transmissions. The Mars solution would probably require a lot more cost/effort/creativity, but a mesh of transceivers, all in concentric orbit around the Sun between the Earth and Mars, should be able to relay data between the two points with a best-case 4- to 30-minute latency (bounded by speed of light, distance varies between Mars and Earth on a two-year period)
> I never did before either, but something did change. It may be just the sunshine, it maybe the location (very close to the sea) or just the job, but I can say that now when I don't have the sunshine, I miss it, which was something I never did before.

I lived in Madrid for almost 5 months, but I don't quite long back to the sun and warmth. It's nice, certainly nicer than where I am most of the time. But I don't pine for it.

> I guess it may also depend on the difference between your winter and summer. I'm assuming a New York or London summer wouldn't be the same as a Florida/California/South of Spain summer.

I live in coastal (more or less) Norway, so while the temperature differences aren't that great, there is of course a marked difference in the amount of sunlight. Also less rain in the summer, I think.
If we're talking about bad AI, shouldn't we ask why it would want to kill us? Pretty much all of our human conflicts are over resources - land, water, energy, etc. Unlike us meatbags, an AI would not be confined to the thin layer of the troposphere - it could grow and harness energy and material pretty much anywhere - the Moon, Mars, Mercury, a Dyson sphere etc. My question is, why fight over this particular rock, when there's essentially an infinite amount energy-matter out there?

The other thing is, it's hard to imagine something qualifying as AI without it understanding things like ethics, morals, humility, aesthetics etc. At our best, our species worries about preserving our natural world, extending our care to other species, etc. Can something supposedly smarter than us be completely lacking in principles which are at the core of our "smartness"?
Would be interested in notlisted's take on this - but apparently you can configure mouseflow to distinguish responsive designs by setting `window.mouseflowPath`:

https://mouseflow.zendesk.com/entries/28120533-Tracking-resp...
Other more obscure methods of communicating with the ISS include the Russian Lira and Regul systems as well as the Japanese Ka-band dish on the external lab.
Square's Machine Learning Infrastructure and Applications
Love the links, ty!
Redacted memo justifying drone strikes on US citizens [pdf]
Why wouldn't YouTube be meaningful? It would make sense for the video to be stored and transmitted as h264 and then uploaded as is to YouTube. I doubt YouTube recompresses h264.
I browse without javascript and most sites are crippled this way. I think you can't post here on hacker news without javascript on.

The worst is hitting a site that's blank. I hit those every now and then. Instagram is that way.
Usually, "decent AI" is defined as "stuff that humans can do that computers can't currently do". This list is updated as and when computers become capable of doing something, sometimes just to add "Computers can't do X the way a human does X".
Not really comparable. Composer was a WYSIWYG editor for web pages; the WebIDE is an editor, but more importantly it manages the packaging and creation of manifest files of apps for you. I started with Composer and the output was so awful that I learned HTML instead. This doesn't hide any code from you or generates things you don't want. The templates of the apps are maintained by the community on GitHub.
I didn't downvote you, but your argument is terribly flawed, and has been answered thousands of times.

* You give no justification for rejecting powerful AI

* Many AI projects use robots in development

* An intelligent agent does not need a robot to get things done.

* Many AI projects supply Internet access to the AI.

* A sufficiently intelligent agent might circumvent protections you think are adequate, or manipulate you into doing so.
ConstraintJS
I would recommend you check out http://hackdaymanifesto.org which I and other hackday organisers wrote a little while back.
lol...well said
One of the side effects of the laser is that only the receiving station it is pointed to can receive it. That is both good and bad, if you're partners running the ISS don't trust you, they might worry about what you're sending on the communication channel that they cannot hear.
While I would love just to have Opera 12 with the Blink rendering engine, I was rather baffled by Operas decision to drop Presto. I though that their core business was: "Making a small, good and fast rendering engine".

That are they suppose to be selling now?
Ask HN: How would you improve this product page?
looking for the day when Office will as well run on the cloud.
I actually have zero idea how such a thing could work, which is why I'm asking here. :)
Regarding #2: The developer tools don't run unless they're opened, so that shouldn't affect any normal users.
> If we're talking about bad AI, shouldn't we ask why it would want to kill us? Pretty much all of our human conflicts are over resources - land, water, energy, etc. Unlike us meatbags, an AI would not be confined to the thin layer of the troposphere - it could grow and harness energy and material pretty much anywhere - the Moon, Mars, Mercury, a Dyson sphere etc. My question is, why fight over this particular rock, when there's essentially an infinite amount energy-matter out there?

1) Because it needs some amount of resources to get off this rock.

2) So if the AI builds a Dyson Sphere, aren't all our crops going to die?

>The other thing is, it's hard to imagine something qualifying as AI without it understanding things like ethics, morals, humility, aesthetics etc.

Yes, and I understand why dogs sniff each-other's butts. That doesn't mean I particularly care. Ditto applies to AIs and human beings, by default.
Or you keep interviews in a professional setting so as not to discriminate against either. That's the whole point of being professional.

I'm a Christian, but I have no problem working for or with practising Muslims, as long as regular attendance at the Mosque is not a job requirement. I don't drink, but I have no problem working for or with people who like to drink, as long as regular attendance at the bar is not a job requirement.

Edit To speak to your examples: the religious person should have the professionalism to keep their views of homosexuality out of their attitude at work. Similarly, the homosexual should keep their views of religion out of work. Tolerance does not mean agreement. It means we agree to disagree and get along with each other despite the disagreements.
I think it's worth repeating a point from earlier. Yes, there are many people doing science and avowing belief in a god. However, none of them are involving any god in the science that they do. Their gods are tightly restricted to areas of the universe that they don't practice in. This isn't a coincidence -- as I said in the quote you object to, allowing the possibility of a god means you're not doing science. But there are lots of scientists (really, this is the group of all scientists) who don't practice in every area at once.
For the industries you pitch question, definitely take off what you currently have and put more difficult industries. Restaurants are ok, but dog groomers? No. I'm looking for someone who can pitch heavy machinery dealers and large international brokers, not a dog groomer or hairstylist.
Well that depends. HTML + JS need a lot of boilerplate by definition, so generators are OK.
Well, at some point we have to consider Humans will longer be at the top of the food chain. It's natural to think something like AI would supplant us for many reasons.

Like Hawking has stated many times, when you have one technologically advanced society coming in contact with one less advanced, the less advanced society is the one who always is enslaved and overrun.
I read it as for $1000 they will pitch to 100 potential customers. They say on their site that they provide value if the lifetime value of your customers is over $100, which implies they expect a success rate of at least 1/10.
The issue is partially that pregnant women don't drink (and disclosing pregnancy shouldn't be part of the job interview), and partially that bars can be uncomfortable places for women. A woman should not have to worry about the guy one table over eying her up while she's trying to land a job. Bars are casual places, and it's not wrong to check someone out or hit on them. Indeed, that's one of the reasons people go to bars: to find a date. But these characteristics also make them inappropriate settings for a job interview.

Personal aside: my daughter isn't job searching any time soon (she's a toddler), but the idea of her having to do a job interview at a bar makes me want to sue someone. "Scorched earth" wouldn't even begin to describe it.
I agree. I feel like mozilla is going back to it's roots of a multifaceted beast.

This should be a plugin like firebug.
Elon is a very smart guy. I think he was playing a bit dumb there on purpose. Probably a pull sales tactic. The more vague he is about what Vicarious does, the more everyone is going to be talking about it. Now instead of him having to promote (push) his new investment everyone will be begging him for details (pull).
Plus there's the established hazard to wildlife getting chopped in half. A couple months back I read about some kind of passive system involving ionizing water (memory fails; I may be wrong about the method) instead of using turbines. I wonder if building that kind of structure onto a power tower would work.
Resource usage of devtools that aren't running is near zero (there's a tiny bit of overhead to manage the menu items to launch it).

Download size is affected, although for larger parts of the developer tools (things like firefox OS simulators and adb) we use addons. We think that tradeoff is worth the benefits - users can look under the hood (even if most of them won't), developers have quick and easy access to tools, and we don't have to worry about things like version mismatch/testing concerns/etc.
We use Thumbor at Yipit, and we are very happy with it. One thing that was not mentioned was extensibility... With thumbor it's easy to create new plugins and filters to extend your installation set of features.

We had detailed how we scaled thumbor at Yipit last year: http://tech.yipit.com/2013/01/03/how-yipit-scales-thumbnaili...
The blog post doesn't mention S3, but we have a storage plugin that reads from and writes to S3.
You may have, but the elders of yesteryear appear to be more wise than the path the hipsters are painting for us.
I imagine it's in the same spirit as including "View Source", so that ordinary users are empowered to figure out how a website works, should they want to.
At populr.me, we use a variation on the architecture described here. One difference is that we cache resized images to S3, rather than to on-disk cache. This enables all servers to share the cache. Otherwise, when a new server is brought online, it doesn't benefit from the cache, so for a time, every request it receives incurs the most costly path of source image retrieval and resizing.

An added benefit to caching to S3 is that since S3 won't run out of space, we can cache rendered images for longer (we use S3 lifecycle to keep cache expiration simple). The scaled images tend to be smaller than the source images, so the retrieval from S3 is pretty fast. Over the past week, retrieving scaled images from S3 has cost ~46ms versus ~84ms for the larger source images.
100% agreed. I'm heartened that lots of new development is taking a mindful approach to smarter, mixed-use design centered around mass transit. It feels like, in the U.S. at least, we're on the cusp of a major transformation in some areas.

Unfortunately, for millions and millions of people, the city is viewed as a work location, not a living location. Building bike friendly infrastructure ends at the city limits and needs inter-government coordination and cooperation to achieve door-to-door biking. If you've ever dipped your toes in cross-county or other inter-government initiatives, you'll know that this is an extremely difficult proposition.
Is this itself entirely a webapp?

As an aside, I'm amazed the way Mozilla have co-opted the term "Web" to mean whatever they want it to. The way they've branded all sorts of non-standard APIs in FFOS "Web" APIs to confuse people into thinking these are somehow more open than anything else is impressive.
big tech co?
1) The idea of the web is that the boundary between consumer and creator is very blurred. It is a world-wide, distributed environment. Making the tool you consume also the tool to create empowers a lot of people. Consider yourself a budding publisher on a very bad connection in an emerging country: you download a browser to surf the web, and that one now also enables you to create something for it. Downloading xCode or Android Studio would take ages. For developers, this is also an advantage: you use the same browser your end users have. In the past developer add-ons interfered with the rendering of the page and the performance of the browser. This gave you false results.
2) Whilst devtools make any browser bigger in initial file size (including Chrome and IE), it is not a large part of the main download (fonts are actually a huge one). The performance hit is to the overall computation (much like a standalone tool would) but isn't impeding on the browser performance itself.
Doesn't that still add to the package size?
MH370 captain plotted route to southern Indian Ocean on home simulator
Not for very long. http://xkcd.com/1377/
I mean it's fine for the contracts to be worded like that, it's spelled out and both parties understand it. It's confusing for you to come here and say that teachers make $100/hour, because people will assume that you mean for each hour worked. You should try to convert your numbers into the units that everyone else is using.
Feature announcement: submit links directly with your account.
Largest DDoS Attack of 300Gbps Hit Hong Kong's Online Democracy Voting Website
This issue has recently come up for me too.

Out of approximately 700 registrations (Specific client, specific event), 4 called in asking where to register. The problem was that those 4 users didn't realize you had to scroll past the fold to find the registration form.

We had to optimize the site (displaying animating indicators) to let that small minority of users know that there is more content past the fold.

In this situation it's hard to argue when you're dealing with a client that sells million dollar homes, because what if one of those 4 users is a potential buyer.
Less specification, more formal grammar. Foo-to-HTML converter is next to useless, especially compared to a well-formed parse tree. (In fact, there are already some PEG parsers for Markdown.)
Stop Asking Me to "Sign Up"