skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This plan is so unlikely that I wonder if the company is a scam. The company website has more details at http://www.interorbital.com.

They will send a crew on the first test flight of their new launcher. They are reckless. You test a new launch system in steps instead of trying to integrate everything on the first try. The launcher only takes 1000 kg to LEO. How will that accomodate an (also untested) crew capsule?

They are selling moon rocks too--from their upcoming lunar sample return mission.
I don't use .NET because -- honestly -- I'm not quite sure what .NET means.

Does it mean the Visual Studio IDE and tools? I'm not a fan of those. They're good at what they do, but I prefer tools like TextMate, Emacs, or Vim.

Does it mean VB.NET or C#, the two languages I immediately associate with the term .NET? Does it mean the CLR and any/all languages built on it? Either way, I'm a web developer, and it takes me all of two seconds to do:

rails -d mysql project_name
script/server

and setting that up took about fifteen minutes of compiling and installing things for free. I could switch to IronRuby, but I don't see the upside.

Does it mean the ASP.NET web stack? I (and my company) deploy to *nix servers, and switching to Windows servers isn't in the cards.

The biggest problem, in my case, is I don't care about .NET -- the term to me implies "the Microsoft way", a catchall term for using MS technologies, which I'm not interested in. I can become interested in an IDE that runs on my platform of choice, and I can become interested in a language runtime that's faster than, say, MRI; but only if these things don't also imply switching to an all-MS stack.

(edit: formatting)
I was thinking of making something similar, but just with an API that you could POST to. Perhaps you could consider adding an API?
Apprenticeships would work great. Some colleges have co-op in their engineering collages. Those are great. They put you behind one year, but at the end of 5 years, you end up with 1 year of professional experience under your belt. That makes you much more hirable.

Or you can have oral exams and make the student travel once at the end of each quarter to be examined by a panel of professors.

Or assign open-ended problems to each individual student. Or have more project assignments that would illustrate or require understanding the theory.
"So much worry" != "a few people close to the software wrote some blog posts at each other".

In fact almost nothing of what I've seen qualifies as "worry". "Hey, my stuff performs better than you said it did" isn't worrying, and neither is "Hey, I can graft your stuff onto that other stuff and maybe get the best of both worlds."

All in all, it seems more like a "productive conversation" than some sort of worrisome flame war.
Aaron Patzer also gave a talk at Duke that has some good advice for startup founders:

http://media.fuqua.duke.edu/Content/Groups/EES/2008/Patzer_3...
I place a high value on the immersive interaction with other students that come even outside the classroom with campus life. A few years ago I even chided some incoming students for considering cell phones a necessity for keeping in touch with people at home and friends who had gone to other schools, since I think that separation was an important part of going away to school.

Having established my bonafides as a crusty traditionalist, I need to point out that the very fact that we are all discussing this issue is evidence that technology may provide reasonable substitutes for the interactions you speak of. They may be a weak substitute for the premium product, but that doesn't mean that they don't have huge benefits to those who can't afford the premium product, whose only options are either nothing at all, or whatever is offered at the nearest community college (not to knock community colleges). Is there any reason we don't think the virtual offerings will improve in the future?
It's very slow, or possibly just overloaded. Does turn up some nice domains, though.
Who said "Hey, let's do away with higher education entirely, such that doctors won't have an education?"

Total strawman. Thinking there's too many people going to college is not the same as thinking nobody should go to college, and you're not helping anybody with anything by conflating the two.
Desire for experience. while there are those developers brazen enough to think their first project will change the world, personally i knew my jr. high coding skills weren't exactly enterprise level. i was more interested in playing with different platforms and exploring their limits / figuring out what works. back then i was playing with ASP (haneng & 4guysfromrolla tutorials) and PHP. ASP seemed more expensive (have to pay for a windows server) and there weren't nearly as many places i could use the code (unless i wanted to do something with a DSN or ActiveX / some other piece of windows infrastructure a kid has little incentive to learn) so eventually i stopped paying attention of ASP. now, years later, seeing what the .NET professional developers at my office fill their days with - i'm glad i didn't learn more of it, lest i'd be doing what they do. no sane person should ever be confronted with DotNetNuke.
This is fantastic feedback, and not too dissimilar to the drum beat I have been banging internally. Visit a bookstore recently? Find me the book that helps you build a ".NET" app. Good luck with that. Want to build a Rails app? The books are right there, and my choice is easy.
Hmmm... what about tooling in the IDE which will push for MVC-type of development?
I'm not talking about "sunk cost", but developer productivity. He doesn't care about it, but most people should.
Look, all I'm saying is it happened before, Amazon makes absolutely no guarantees and it could very well happen again.

To categorically deny this because you think the cases are not 'good enough' is arguing that only when there is specific documentation about S3 losing data in the last couple of months or a year will convince you that Amazon S3 can indeed lose data. Even if Amazon S3 had never lost data before then there still would be no reason to assume that it could not happen.

S3 is made up from hardware and built by people. It can - and most likely will - fail again, it has already done so in the past. When the last case was is not really relevant, just like when the last earthquake was is not really relevant when you're living on a fault line.

Earthquakes - and data loss - are a fact of life in the IT business, you plan for them, or you weigh the economics of the risk and you decide that you can re-create your data at a lower cost than it will cost you to back it up over the average time to failure.

Amazon will not be able to magically recreate your data so if you have a business incentive to keep your data (such as a responsibility to third parties) then you should back it up.

It's that simple.

Oh, and regarding amazon customer service, note that it took them 11 days to pinpoint the fault, and customer data actually was lost.

Check Allans post at Jun 23, 2008 6:28 AM for a pretty good insight into how easy it is for S3 to break.

What also bothers me is that apparently all traffic for these customers was passing the same SPOF, a single load balancer.

Another thing to take home from this is to ALWAYS supply an MD5 of your data and keep an MD5 of what you sent.

Gmail, another example of a large body of data that end users have some attachement to has also occasionally lost data, see:

http://www.thebitguru.com/blog/view/252-Have you lost email on gmail

Sure, you could argue, gmail is not S3, but that is not relevant, the things they have in common (type of architecture, kind of hardware, run by very fallible people) are what matter.
I see no reason whatsoever for this article to be on Hacker News.
Most of the points are valid and it is always very important to get quality people for a seed start up more then any other stage because people is the most important part of the business where none can be wasted vs. corporate world. However getting T-shaped people who can carry many hats might not solve the problems. Most of the time is is hard to find specialist who can do something else without compromising on what they are expert in(if you do find one - they tend to be expensive) so I would rather go for specialist especially if it is tech star up and hire another general; person who can ware many hats.
In my case, it was MUCH worse. I have a BSME and worked as a Product Engineer for 2 years at a spark plug company. I hated it so much, I worked like a dog to get into IT. (There really wasn't much of an IT program at my school when I started and computer engineering was basically mechanical engineering with a computer...sigh) Most engineering work, especially automotive, is extremely boring. I'm sure an M.E. at Nasa is considerably happier, but these types of jobs are extremely rare. Moving to IT was one the of all time best decisions of my life, but it wasn't easy to make the transition.
But you don't have to download Eclipse to write Python code. That's one of the things about open-source style projects.

(granted that PyDev with Eclipse is the number one choice)

But look at this list
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81584

Many of the top ten are just simple text editors (maybe with dedicated plugins)

This flexibility of choice is a huge distinction of most non-MS products. Even if you choose Eclipse, it makes for a single dedicated IDE for most open source languages and platforms out there. When I swtiched from Java to RoR dev I simply loaded the RadRails plugin (since switch to TextMate) and instantly knew my way around the IDE. Even for a company the size of Microsoft, building in that much support for alternatives will likely never match Eclipse in the IDE space.
When I think of solving "real problems", I think of:

- curing cancer

- cheap water purification

- vaccines for tropical diseases (the U.S. / European pharma companies have very little incentive to work on them)

- energy-efficient desalination

- energy-efficient computing systems

- efficient solar panels and cheap fuel cells

- easy access to high-quality learning materials (MIT OCW rocks)

and you think of YouTube, Facebook. Do you want to include Twitter, too? For Christ's sake, the "social media" virus has infected a lot of minds here on HN. Let's put things this way: 5,000 people die everyday all over the world of preventable water diseases, and you're talking of social media as a real problem?
Absoutely. No one can work all the time. If I go for a walk after a few hours in the studio, I see the world as a source to draw from, a fountain of ideas. The world inspires because the work is an inspiration-tinted lens.

Going for a walk after a few hours of chatting online after a few hours of cleaning the bathroom after a few days of not working --- then I rarely find myself inspired; what feels like inspiration is mundane once realized, like the violent discovery that milk's gone sour. The only benefit gained is that I'm working again.
IRC Channel is chat1.ustream.tv #techcrunch-50
wow the site looks like its straight out of 1996
Embarcadero actual plans: - (theoretically) you can find on their site at embarcadero.com - but a better place to start is http://wings-of-wind.com

I do think that RTL is close if isn't already due of Kylix which you mentioned to cross-platform.

The new solution will be very different compared with Kylix. How do you envisage it?
Fantastic take on procrastination and how we may organize our schedule to manipulate ourselves into getting more done.

Cognitive biases are something I'm worried about, because by definition they're something I can't recognize (I blogged about it a short time ago). Procrastination is a form of trick our mind plays on us, funny how we can turn the table.

Take that Mind!
Or http://www.timesnapper.com/
"I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a different level than with a debugger. I think that without a debugger, you don't get into that mindset where you
know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. Without a debugger, you tend to think about problems another way. You want to understand things on a different _level_."

This seems to be the most worthwhile part of the post. I've never gotten into the habit of using debuggers myself, so I can't say how strong his argument is.
What a silly article - after all, Gentoo is the system where tying your shoelaces involves growing your own feet from scratch.

I love desktop Linux (or wanted to) but it hasn't really happened because there's a shortage of application development that suits the needs of early adopters with deadlines. You can use Gimp, for example, but most people want Photoshop. If you're editing audio or video then your options are more constrained, and none of the market leaders have Linux editions. I'm simplifying here, of course, but the reasons have been laid out in more detail time and again.

Round 2000 or so I was sure Linux was going to take over - I was running Gnome with enlightenment as my WM and people would come up and say 'wow, what's that'. And i could run Compiz right now and throw windows around, and people would still be impressed...but once you get past the eye candy, you hit this real functionality gap and have to make a choice between becoming a dedicated Linux hacker who runs experimental software all day, or going with the industry standard and running something industry-standard that you can show to your clients.

There isn't a truly compelling reason to move from Windows or Mac unless you're building your own system for most applications. This isn't a fault of Linux: there just aren't many end-user applications of which you can say 'this is the best, and you can only take part by running Linux', nor any 'holy shit where has this been all my life' for non-programmers.
Study: The US Likes to Surf at Night
CS-Cart: PHP shopping cart software & ecommerce solutions
Is Your Life Blurred?
It's worth finishing (great excerpts from Paul Graham and John Perry)
I guess you and I have differing opinions on what "real problems" are. Personal finance, yup. Facebook feed, not so much.

Out of people who use Mint and who use YouTube, I'd bet many would pick Mint over YouTube if they had to pick one.

Honestly, if youtube or facebook vanished, and in this magical world, no one propped up a replacement. People would moan for a week, and then they'd go back to the same things they did before YouTube existed, with no change to anything practical in their life. People wouldn't go insane, they'd simple find other ways to waste time.
Religious Wars
That makes sense, actually, since I definitely reside solidly in the middle of the two. Prior to college, I was definitely in the 'what is history for' crowd, but college broadened my horizons so much, and I enjoy learning to the extent that I could easily argue the 'pursuit of knowledge' reasoning these days. I went to a liberal arts college for an applied degree, so I guess that's a little of both worlds.
Understanding what you read on the news, being able to communicate clearly and effectively, and being able to spot bullshit and faulty arguments when you see it - great reasons to go to college.

It's a pity, then, that these skills aren't very well taught in university (at least on the humanities side). Indeed, if you do a course on, say, Foucault or Derrida then you'll need to unlearn how to spot bullshit and faulty arguments if you want to pass the course since a final essay which says "Derrida in this book says a whole bunch of vague bullshit that doesn't make any real sense" will get low marks.

Interestingly, I don't think spotting bullshit or faulty arguments is that difficult a skill -- relatively uneducated people can easily spot a BS argument when it's used to argue for something they don't want to believe. The really hard part is developing the discipline to be able to spot a BS argument even when it's arguing for something you do want to believe.

I don't think this skill is very well taught, either.
That can not be said often enough. We should make a list of IT disaster stories from people that did not take that piece of advice to heart.
That to me sounds like a better model than Mint.

Mint just received $170 million. Yodlee did not.
You can actually kind of do that. There's a system intended to allow random users credential-free upload access to your buckets via POST, but you can enforce policy control like "the target has to have xyz/ as a prefix" and "the size must be fewer than 100000 bytes". Here are the S3 docs for it: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/2006-03-01/index....
I was under the impression that he used OpenMP on Linux while using low-level threading on Windows.
you mean write well, right?
Why CEOs are so stupid
"Your comment isn't really useful :/ you're obviously an outlier. Most people would go insane if they couldn't access youtube or facebook."

Facebook has 200 million users or so. The world has over 6 billion people. Hence, only 3% or so of the world's population uses Facebook. Moreover, Facebook is basically a rolodex. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, people would use email instead. They would have no other choice.

Let's talk of real problems. Over 1,000 million people live in extreme poverty. That's 5x the total number of Facebook users. So you talk of people going insane if they lost Facebook, and I find that extremely distasteful when 100s of millions of parents everyday struggle to feed their children. I am not being sensationalist, I am just putting things in perspective. Americans whine when unemployment reaches record levels and they can no longer afford Starbucks coffee everyday, but guess what, some people have real problems, like lack of food, lack of potable water, drought, disease, war, etc. I suggest you take some months off and go backpack around this world to see how fortunate we spoilt Americans / Western Europeans truly are...
Choosing Linux for stable APIs would be rather silly. X11 is evolving rapidly nowadays and audio APIs are in a state of constant flux, where the different APIs often interfere with each other and there's no obvious best solution. Linux changes ABIs all the time and is notorious for C library incompatibilities. This recent mess with filesystem write semantics (http://lwn.net/Articles/322823/ ) has proven you can't even rely on POSIX.

Meanwhile, Win32 has been far more stable over the years and Microsoft has put a ton of effort into backwards compatibility. Don't get me wrong; I like Linux but API stability is not the reason to choose it over Windows.
Python is just JS with extra syntax? The languages have very different object and meta-object/overloading models, as well as other divergent features: JavaScript can mutate closures, for example.

I agree, though, that a stdlib should be part of the core language. Not having a serious standard library has hurt the Scheme community a great deal, I think.
I don't use .NET because it would tie me to a proprietary platform that costs money and is not much fun to use. Why would I do that, if suitable free alternatives are available?
I like the easy access to videos that Youtube provides as much as the next guy, but to think that Youtube and facebook are on the utility scale anywhere near where Mint is is also "interesting". Youtube and facebook are much closer to entertainment and time wasting, at least from the user standpoint, than they are to "real problems". Obviously, businesses can get much more "real problem solving" out of Youtube and facebook (at least in terms of marketing), but that is not a significant subset of their users.
Master gene that switches on disease-fighting cells identified
This is what Objective-C does for any message to nil (i.e. nothing). Though, if you ever need to trap this behavior, and don't know exactly which nil value you're interested in, some creativity is required. :)
I'm surprised they use Mysql, since IIRC it doesn't have transaction capability.
The reason I questioned whether they would cover this is because in the past I've seen exclusion clauses that stated an insurance company would not cover extreme sports related injuries with a standard health insurance policy. The examples I remember for extreme sports were things like base jumping and bungee jumping and parachuting.

I don't pretend to know much about this stuff. I did state that it was just a question I had. If insurance companies routinely cover people who have accidents while doing things significantly more dangerous than your typical day to day activities then that is great... I guess.

The first part of my comment still stands regardless. I wonder how much of the battle was over getting insurance money and how much of it might have been over the doctor's ego.
FYI, the full agenda can be found here:
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2009/agenda/
Bing Visual Search
Keep the standard library and continue to make improvements == good.

Remove it so users can roam the wild countryside to hunt for the bits that they want == bad.
Alas, no :-)
Pepsi or Paul Graham?
A Rails like framework for Clojure.
On second glance, it doesn't support "no overwrite".
Isn't there a Python.net or something? Is your gripe that Python should be supported by Visual Studio?

Why did nobody write a Python plugin for VS yet? I suppose if you believe in it, you could do it in your spare time, or the 20% time (I know that's Google, but surely Microsoft has copied that model?).

I think a lot of people who use Python don't even like "fat" IDEs like VS, though.
Ask HN: Would you be interested in an Etherpad-like version control system?
Hi all,

Recently Etherpad added the Timeline feature to their webapp, and while looking at it, I had thought maybe this could be applied as a version control method. There would be a timeline for each file in a project and all changes to that file would get recorded to the timeline. When you hit checkin, a bookmark appears in the timeline. This could probably only be implemented as a full fledged text editor.

The key idea behind this is that you don't really have to bother about version control at all, since the software automatically records everything to the timeline.

So would any of you be interested in such a software, if anybody were to develop it??? Depending on your answers, I may put some work into it.
Additionally, FWIW, the entire GUI is done with Interface builder rather than MonoDevelop.

MonoDevelop fires up interface builder, and then quietly rebuilds the backing code when you're done editing. So they haven't completely reinvented the wheel, it is using standard NIB files.
Cells prove Darwin's theory
The Age of Batshit Crazy Machines
"The only way the iPhone-on-Verizon scenario comes about in the near future is if Apple changes tactics and makes a second, CDMA-compatible version of the iPhone."

This is the weakness in Apple's strategy that Android can exploit, by having many models from multiple handset manufacturers. It won't last for long, though.
Being a supervillain with a 'landlord' that you are renting you lair from is would be the equivalent of Bill Gates being a billionaire living in his mother's basement.
That rogue-like cave generation algorithm isn't the kind of terrain I'm after, but is nonetheless quite awesome in its results. I'm now wondering if I can find an excuse to involve caverns in my game ;-)
What percentage of users do you suppose are doing these things? Less than 1%? Less than .5%?

As far as setting desktop backgrounds...the process is the same in KDE as it is in Windows or Gnome. (FVWM, which is actually the WM I run on most of my machines with X installed is a bit different).

As far as themes...I'm not even entirely sure that windows has themes. What do you mean by that?
Company site with the announcement:

http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog/nanosolar-completes-pa...
?innoDB?
Oooh, beautiful...
My point was that Prolog works out of the box; not so with Lisp.