skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right. This has been known for a long time. It's why rockets aren't much better than they were 40 years ago. Chemical fuels are as good as they can get. Space travel with chemical fuels is just barely feasible.

In the 1960s, it was assumed that nuclear power would be necessary for space flight. Everybody involved knew the rocket equation. The original plan for Apollo included a nuclear upper stage. The engine (NERVA) was built and tested. A Nuclear Assembly Building at Canaveral was planned. But, because the goal was so narrow ("man, moon, decade"), the solution chosen was a disposable rocket the size of a 50-story building to send an RV-sized payload to the moon.

The crash of a nuclear rocket would produce a radioactive mess. Not Chernobyl or Fukishima sized, but at least small-town sized. Launching from an isolated island would help.

Various schemes have been tried or proposed to beat the rocket equation. Launching from a balloon was tried early. Launching from an aircraft is still used by Virgin Aerospace. It helps a little.

A space vehicle that's an air-breather while it's in the atmosphere and transitions to rocket mode once out has been proposed many times, but making something that's both a rocket and an airplane is hard and adds a lot of weight. As an airplane, it has to go hypersonic to get up enough speed that it's worth doing this. Building a hypersonic aircraft is very hard; so far, only a few small demo craft have done it. The National Space Plane (hypersonic single-stage-to-orbit) was proposed in the 1980s. Ben Rich, head of the Lockheed Skunk Works and the designer of the SR-71's propulsion system, declined to let Lockheed bid on it. (His comment: "We used titanium (on the SR-71). You know anything stronger?") Remember, it has to be strong at a few thousand degrees.

The same problems apply to launch track systems. Going hypersonic near the ground is possible; the Holloman AFB test track, 50,000 feet of very straight railroad track, has been used to reach Mach 8.6. The required acceleration is about 14g. Far too much for humans.

The "space elevator" requires not only unreasonable strong materials but the ability to put so much mass in space that you wouldn't need a space elevator if you had that kind of launch capacity.
Does anyone know what they're using Twisted for?
I'm happy to elaborate on nearly any aspect of Hacker News, but this is one area (maybe the only area?) where I resist the impulse to explain. We're in something of an arms race against a lot of people who try to get their content on the front page through non-organic means. Accidentally helping them do so would be a genuine shot in the foot.

But let's say what good voting means to HN. It means voting for something that you personally find intellectually interesting, regardless of who posted it and regardless of what you or your friends are hoping to promote.
What really helped me understand why you do not want to go up is the following thought experiment:

Imagine you are standing on Mt Everest (and the atmosphere has magically disappeared), and you would like to shoot a bullet once all the way around the earth, how would you have to fire it? It seems pretty intuitive that shooting it up into the air won't do the trick. If you want to shoot around the earth, you need to fire in parallel to the earths surface, with a sufficiently high muzzle velocity. And really an orbit is nothing else than a shot around the earth.
This is hardly the place for bug reports
> This is hilarious in retrospect

I know what you mean. Lots of childhood things are silly to look back on. But "hilarious" is just not a word I'd use about a child terrified of her future, even if it was exaggerated.
Then you clearly have something to hide, and Oh! I pity you, fool!
Considering how basic this is you wouldn't even really need a standard.

jQuery basically already has support for this exact thing, and it's only a few lines of pure JS.

$.extend({a:'b', b:2, c: [1,2]}, { a: null, b: 0})
To me, Nintendo is the Apple of the Gaming world. They want to control the experience and the hardware it runs on. They are also very secretive and try to control what information reaches the press (for example how cautios Reggie Fils-Aime answers questions or how they controlled what Dan Adelman, their indie spokesperson, tweeted). But above all, they seem very conservative, technically as well as policy wise. They were late to acknowledge indies, their digital distribution seems old fashioned and the hardware usually follows the "withered technology" paradigm.

So, do I think we will ever see Nintendo games on Smartphones? In my opionion not unless they build their own smartphone. Personally I'm happy about it, because Apple does not seem to really acknowledge gaming. They are still "apps" after all, and they don't really improve their gaming services. Their controller API seems like a second thought. Android's hardware fragmentation will make it virtually impossible to keep the quality you are used from Nintendo games (Even though I think Google takes gaming much more serious than Apple).
https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/#pfsense-store
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Of course it'd be hard to insert an item into that array...
Google led me to Samsung. Under the "Voice Recognition" section [1]

Voice Recognition

You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands.

If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands. While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.

You may disable Voice Recognition data collection at any time by visiting the “settings” menu. However, this may prevent you from using all of the Voice Recognition features."

1: http://www.samsung.com/hk_en/info/privacy-SmartTV.html
Turning requires acceleration, but you can convert velocity direction with reasonable efficiency by pushing on something (like rails or magnetic field in a tube or just road).
Fusion devices aren't rockets and are thus, not subject to the Tyranny of the rocket equation.
Eich shares the same moral ground with gay marriage supporters. Anyone supporting government-issued marriage licenses with associated privileges and entitlements is hateful and bigoted toward individuals who aren't marriage material for various reasons beyond their control.
In the same vein it's worth knowing the privacy policy of providers such as BSkyB

https://accessibility.sky.com/privacy-cookie-notice

Not many people know that an entire profile about what program's you watch on your sky box are linked with the websites you browse through their broadband service to build a profile about you. It's one of the reasons their tv + broadband deal here in the uk is so competitive. Personalised tv ads are then served.
That's beside the point, and of no comfort to the sheep that get eaten.
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Where are you getting "There are undoubtedly many people who will no longer purchase Apple products because of this, and I don't know society can fix this with anything but time." from ?
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This demonstrates the need for router firmware to be designed so that it keeps your private data in as well as keeping nasty people oit.!
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There's a nice easy to read primer on nuclear rocketry here: http://www.lanl.gov/science/NSS/issue1_2011/story5full.shtml
I'd love to support you in some way if you decide to open source this.

I'm otherwise a bit paranoid to let all the text of every homepage I visit be captured by a closed source plug in. Still - amazing job, and technically very, very impressive.
I would posit that engineers are human creatures rather than robots, and basing decisions on social factors is a natural part of being human.

For my anecdotal experience, apart from JS libs (where style over substance is frequently the norm) I find a well-designed website is usually a sign the project cares about its users, and is more likely to provide good documentation & a space to ask questions.
Rulers monitor us to cement their power over us, but in a free society without political power, with free-flowing information available to all, companies would have to be careful about what they do, lest they lose their customers, ie. their income.
Normally at least the first stage of the rocket will still be chemical, so the risk of explosion is still there. Fortunately the risk of spreading radioactive material appears limited regardless.
Disclaimer: I just posted the link. I'm not the author.
You still can put one on top of that, like this:

#if 20141031 // Date as a valid number != 0
// Active code
#else
// Inactive code
#endif

Helps documenting experimental alternatives, even without SCM.
In a would where companies just release their old (very successful) games on mobile devices with awful touch screen controls hacked in I am so glad Nintendo do not do that. Sure it would make them some money to sell Mario on the iPhone but god damn is it a horrible experience IMHO.

Nintendo have good years and bad years. The Wii U wasn't the success they hoped it would be. But they took a chance with the Gamepad. That is what I like about Nintendo, they do things differently. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.

Now give me a 1080p60 F-Zero game on the Wii U please :)
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> From what I've gleaned, the earth-like planets we know of seem to be a big bigger than Earth.

This is entirely a selection effect. Big planets are easier to find, that's why we have mostly found big planets.
> but also the most admirable company,

Really ? Did you have to say that to make your point ? What's so admirable about Apple ? Jobs has been lying constantly about competition, lied about being the first innovators in so many of their products, has pressured other companies to prevent poaching Apple employees to keep salaries as low as he could, and the list does not end there.

Fine, you can love Apple as much as you want, but calling it the "most admirable company" out there is rubber-breaking stretch.
If a large enough percentage of people decide to disregard govts and forcefully defend themselves against their enforcers if necessary, then govts just cease to function and exist. I'm not saying we're there now, or even near a point where that's feasible, but it is one way out.
Zero feelings involved, just analysis before numerical computation. The concepts need to make sense first.
Great idea, so please you added a host-it-yourself / non-cloud option!

Can't wait for firefox support, then I can start using it.
This is a similar to an idea that David Schnepper talked about at Velocity Ignite this year.

It's only a five minute presentation but it blew me away and I'm keen to give it a try for real at some point. Video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29UXzfQWOhQ
To some extent I think it’s ”wired in”. Individuals vary a lot when it comes to risk awareness and risk tolerance. Take drugs for example. Some people will order new synthetic drugs from shady webshops without without batting an eye. Others will never touch anything else than alcohol.
Ironically, "Why I’m Scared to Turn This Thing On" should be "Why I’m Scared to Connect This Thing to AC", really.

Samsung Smart TV's have this feature, so you can turn them on by voice. My wife's parents, sister and brother each have one.
Anything that pushes stuff out from a small hole in order to accelerate in the opposite direction is a rocket, by definition, and subject to the rocket equation. If a chemical reaction is used to create the energy to push the stuff out, it's a chemical rocket. If a nuclear reactor is used to heat the stuff so it's pushed out, it's a nuclear thermal rocket. If a nuclear reactor or solar panels are used to generate electricity that's used to push the stuff out, it's a nuclear electric or solar electric rocket respectively.
How to cold call when you're a startup?
As if England is much better? Ask Theirry Henry how he feels about bananas being thrown at him in Western Europe.
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> they do things differently

Only the Nintendo of recent years. They were famous for NOT innovating much before. The SNES was just another 16 bits console (albeit quite powerful), the N64 did not even ride on the CD technology, and the Gamecube did not have much points of differentiation versus the Xbox 1 or PS2.
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Strings are sequences and functions that work on sequences work on strings as well. So getting substrings etc. is all possible.

I've had very little problems operating on strings in Common Lisp (all I missed was starts-with and ends-with functions), could you give some concrete examples so that I might help you?
I suppose the reason for sending all audio to a server could be that the TV is not powerful enough for voice recognition, it needs the cloud for that?
I still haven't got a clue what needs to be done if I used a component with, say MIT license which in turn uses a dependency lib that is LGPL licensed.

That components vendor of course then has to make the source of the LGPL dependency available on request. But what about me?

What would I need to do if I wanted to sell a closed source product that uses this MIT licensed component which is of course totally permitted my the MIT license.
Would I have to stop using this MIT licensed component unless I also want to provide the source code of a dependency lib that I might not even be aware of?
I use Little Snitch for OSX: http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
Sorry about your phone. Yeah I'm aware, the signs of this trend are all around. Interesting how hangouts has become a unified communication hub. Close to hitting mainstream IMO.
You can still have a rocket on your vehicle to accelerate further after take-off, but you certainly need to accelerate less if you already at a certain velocity than if you are stationary. Since the “certain velocity” is free by assumption (i.e. supplied by ground-based electricty generators or something similar), I don’t see how you could be off worse. But I still didn’t do the maths fully.
Coming from Common Lisp and having tried out Haskell recently I can ask the same about the latter while I find Lisp to be one of the most readable languages out there.

It's basically what you're used to and for Lisp it does not take long to get used to.
"The declining price of big screen TVs cannot offset the above" = lol
The moto looks pretty good on the thin wrist of a girl though.
Name one city in Texas that is more dangerous for blacks than Detroit, Philadelphia, Oakland, or Chicago. You seem extremely ignorant about Texas.
I wouldn't dismiss the space elevator out of hand. It requires carbon nanotubes of a few meters length to achieve the required strength, and you wouldn't need to lift it pre-built - you could build it with a guideline and cable laying cars traveling up and down, adding to the cable, much like they do with suspension bridges. Long term, it seems like far and away the best approach if we can solve the materials science problem.

EDIT: I found this book to be a pretty great primer on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Space-Elevator-Earth-Space-Transportat...
Be careful of plagarism when using freelancers. I crowdsourced a logo along with its incorporation in various essential designs, which ended up with components of the logo having been ripped off of a company well known to people in Europe, but not USA where I am.

The startup the designs were originally for closed, but I found out years later when trying to reuse them in a similarly names new startup. It was an 'SSS' logo.

I wasn't able to trademark my designs, & am out $5k, being that it's not worth hiring an attorney to chase basically just enough to pay the attorney.

The NY attorney general couldn't help since it was a contract with designers rather than a company.
And, how would we make that happen? How, once you remove the rulers, do you prevent new ones from rising up? How do you prevent companies from flooding customer under a wealth of irrelevant information? How do you prevent things like cartels, now that there is no regulator?

It's all well and good to postulate a free society, but do you have any idea what a free society actually looks like? (Neither do I, by the way.)
Yeah but theoretically, you should control your own devices, and be able to decrypt what they're sending because you have access to the keys they're using. (of course I realize this is complete bs, they're black boxes). Richard Stallman is looking less crazy now with all his warnings about "tivoization"
I hate Twitter as well. It is occupying a place that could very easily be occupied by much better products. It's primary purpose is to hold back innovation.

I'm sure some people prefer Twitter as it is and it is valid for them to do so. However, the existence of Twitter is still massively harmful in terms of opportunity cost.
The fashion type ad is very good, and very different from most of the other smart watch ads that I've seen. The other ads focus on the watch and technology. The LG ad emphasizes the fashion aspect of the watch and is more consumer oriented which is probably the best thing to do when expanding the market to beyond the early adopters and techno types.
I'm happy for not being gay.

Of course, this is not politically correct (because only gays are allowed to make such a statement).

Did you note anything?
I made an app that generated reports. The queries ran quickly when I tested it directly on the database but when I ran my app it would hang on a particular query. Sometimes.

I started making some small seemingly insignificant changes to my code and suddenly my app generated all the reports quickly. All was well until the next month when I had to generate the same reports and my app failed on the same query. I solved it by reverting the small insignificant change I made the previous month. WTF.

I looked into it and there's a wealth of information on the topic[0]. Apparently, how my code passed the query to the database differed to how I tested my query directly on the database which cause the database to compile the query differently and use different execution plans.

My most recent fix was to add another index which the database suggested. Let's hope it works next month.

[0] http://www.sommarskog.se/query-plan-mysteries.html
Yep, you just need the ground to fall away from the bullet as quickly as the bullet is falling towards the ground.
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It seems those are only the free/open source components, that are used by OS X.
No, because the three cases happen with different probabilities:

(F,none): 0.5

(M,F): 0.25

(M,M): 0.25

The expected number of both F and M is 0.75
In an ideal world, the open source community would be precisely the sort of mutually-supportive group that would lead to this. Unfortunately, it can't be, in general:

- Telling someone who makes a bad or unsuitable suggestion why it's bad requires a certain amount of communication skill and desire to communicate that programmers (particularly amateur programmers) are not widely known for

- It doesn't scale: If an already busy project leader is handling some pull requests that are valid (and doing her own work at the same time), then handling random pull requests that aren't suitable for whatever reason becomes unpleasant work.

I know many people reading this already have lots of free time and lots of good communication skills, but I think it's safe to say that you couldn't say that about many unpaid open-source project leaders.
Why is this a PDF and why is this news? Even a guy like me, with the security expertise of having send about 3 gpg encrypted emails in my life, knows that you can't trust the machines you are using, while being targeted by FBI/CIA etc. It's on the first page on every book about computer security.
I live in Phnom Penh and I know some people who were acquainted with Gottfried. Without gossiping too much about him, some stories I've heard definitely characterize his behavior as "bordering on the insane".
Thanks for the heads up.

Are also there plans to expose more primitives in unsafe?

I remember seeing some posts related to possible required features as part of re-writing the whole stack in Go.
A better example of air launch is Pegasus [0]. An example of an air breather that has passed the physics plausibility test is Skylon [1].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(rocket)

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)
I simply scrolled through the whole page, didn't find any useful description and closed it. I guess a nice, short text summary at the top of the page is out of fashion now.
There is a move for better accuracy in mechanical watches. See http://quillandpad.com/2013/12/30/why-accuracy-matters-to-me...
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What the pdf says is that it actually is as safe as you thought. It's just that the computer you are using to do the encryption is not safe. If you might be targeted by capable sources, don't trust neither your phone, your PC, your tv, or your car. That's what every spy movie tells you, and it's also true.

Once you have encrypted critical data on a safe source, and are sure that the keys are safe, you can actually trust that nobody is breaking your encryption in the next few weeks. The safe source and safe keys are the problem, not the encryption.
Who said it was always on?

They can't guarantee what you or anyone in range of the microphone will say while giving the TV a command, which gets sent off to be processed.

That's enough to warrant the warning.