skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Emily Lakdawalla tweets from the control center:

Ulamec: signal kept coming and going "but we always got it back." Possibly indicates unstable, or tilted.

Ulamec confirms the harpoons did NOT fire. There is much they currently do not know.

Ulamec: a central rod was pushed into lander 4 cm by landing. Indicates soft rather than hard surface (rod would've pushed more into lander)

Just had a chat with Mark McCaughrean and I feel a bit calmer....

McCaughrean: @Philae2014 is down on the surface of the comet and it is transmitting signals. Science instruments are getting data.

Yes, McCaughrean confirmed this. RT @JPMajor: @elakdawalla So the ice screws on the lander's feet have at least dug in I assume?

https://twitter.com/elakdawalla/status/532578862086250497

------------------------------------------

And overview of the German DLR stream's briefing (via reddit live stream):

Good news:

--- Touchdown, all the signals that trigger on touchdown worked.

--- Still communication, which means the lander did not tilt or topple.

Bad news:

--- ADS thruster did not fire, that is the issue was already known beforehand.

--- The anchors did not fire, this confusion was due to the rewind motors for the anchors going into action, but the harpoon wasn't actually fired.

--- Team doesn't know if it rebounded or not / if it's on the surface. Thus they don't dare issuing a re-firing signal for the harpoons, because they don't know in what position the lander is. Current Situation:

--- The arm that damped the landing force only moved very little, which indicates a very soft surface. Which might mean if it rebound the rebound was very soft as well and in this case might settle down again.

--- On board computer is waiting for new commands.

--- There will be more telemetry in 30 minutes, but contact lost in 120 minutes, so the final verdict could be known only tomorrow.

http://www.reddit.com/live/tw0cnch7nxjx/
C# is the most modern, and one of the best languages we have in the market. Linux is the best platform. Hope to see them truly together. Thank you MS guys for the contributing into world industry.
land =/= secure.

those harpoons are what is supposed to anchor Philae to the comet. the problem is the reaction thruster, the thruster that counteracts the force generated by the harpoon shot, (to satisfy Newton's 3rd law) is faulty.

So they're hoping that when they reshoot the harpoon, the foot screws will be anchored enough to hold it in place. If not, theyre hoping that Philae won't launch too far off the surface so that they can just "reel" Philae back in.
I'm not that into games specifically, but I'll give it a try.

I prefer programming and learning programming to relate to a certain project (website, app, etc) because I can apply what I have learned in something I enjoy.
Good story! No one asks about my lack of degree. I don't have an education section on my resume. If they did ask, I'd ask in return how exactly it would matter to getting the work done. I'd expect silence.
You really need to step back and look at how much Microsoft has already changed under the leadership of Satya Nadella.

It does appear that he has a completely different vision of what Microsoft will be in the future compared to what Ballmer had.
This reminds me of Derren Brown's awesome "The System" special:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4

More info for anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of knowing who Derren Brown is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derren_Brown

Derren Brown is a British illusionist, mentalist, trickster, hypnotist, painter, writer, and sceptic. He is known for his appearances in television specials, stage productions, and British television series such as Trick of the Mind and Trick or Treat. Since the first broadcast of his show Derren Brown: Mind Control in 2000, Brown has become increasingly well known for his mind-reading act. He has written books for magicians as well as the general public.

Though his performances of mind-reading and other feats of mentalism may appear to be the result of psychic or paranormal practices, he claims no such abilities and frequently denounces those who do. Brown states at the beginning of his Trick of the Mind programmes that he achieves his results using a combination of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship".
Rosetta’s parting image of Philae
This Is Why Apple Did Not Want Its GTAT Contracts Made Public
I'd say it's the .NET analogue to Scala with added elegance.
Much like countries, it doesn't necessarily make sense to treat companies like people when it comes to reputation. You shouldn't hold a grudge against a country forever, many of the people inside of it may have disagreed with its actions and more importantly the leadership could be completely different now. Similalrly, if most of the employees at Microsoft today are different than in the 90s and the leadership is completely different, then what really has the reputation, their article of incorporation? Mind you, for all I know most of Microsoft is still "old Microsoft", I'm just saying it can't really be as simple as attributing actions of the past to whatever happens to be there today.
Ask HN: How many of you are transhumanists?
And what would happen if we took those same actions today? Cultural notions about what is acceptable behavior have also evolved. Microsoft's behavior may have been accepted 100 years ago, but not today when there is more freedom of choice.
> The current options are below par, hopefully jetbrains will step up and fill the void.

There's a third-party plugin that's come a long way (https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin).

You can vote on having an official plugin here: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-5938
There is a high chance that it will crash your system.

- Unlocked access to ->comm

- What if buf is less than 6 bytes or not NULL terminated?

- Only searching for sys_close() is not enough, it will also find any function pointer to sys_close() and then return a false syscall table.

Anyway, a nice hack. :-)
Interactive Excel. Only formulas, cells and hardcore
Not really we... Just very few people, most of us have no idea how they've done it.
I think it's much more of a "I already write C#, so now I can write apps for other platforms without needing to learn their language!"

That leads to further evangelism at conferences, more talk about how C# is great and the platform is excellent, etc. I think they hope to persuade entire dev shops to switch over, rather than single devs, in a very long-term sort of way -- even if it's just a small percentage that change, the press is potentially worth it. MS has an image problem, and this would help mobilize their core to speak to more of the good parts.
Perhaps one real world benefit from better understanding the composition of comets would be an improved ability to destroy one that is on a collision course with Earth.
The page is broken on HTTPS: it tries to load http://angular-ui.github.io/bootstrap/ui-bootstrap-tpls-0.2.... (does Github even allow hotlinking these days?) and Chrome doesn't let it.
Moments of history as never seen before
How Wikipedia's reaction to sudden popularity is causing its decline
I installed the new Community Edition this morning and do not see any codelens features...so I guess it is still Ultimate only
I'm an EE, had a defense job, went to grad school, tried some project ideas. Basically, the same situation as you, lived out.

If I were graduating again in the same circumstances, I would stay at my defense job. I had all the time in the world to dabble in projects, with great pay and job security. I didn't appreciate the gift of time and youth, and neither will you.

It will be an immensely restless and boring path as you figure out what to do, but resist to temptation to jump without knowing what you are getting into. My future jobs did not improve the situation, nor did I complete anything substantial when I quit.

The crux of the problem is that you haven't developed skill, work-ethic, and business knowledge. All the kids you hear with successful startups either have been dabbling from a young age or have certain advantages like family connections and wealth.

My advice would be to take a defense job, build side projects, and if nothing works out go to grad school once you've narrowed your interests. I went to grad school early and now it's not helping me go where I want to.

Try to enjoy your life by allowing yourself to go out, meet some girls, and otherwise take advantage of your youth and free time. This will be a long haul, so might as well enjoy the ride. When you get to my age you will be more focused but also have little free time.
Yes, it makes perfect sense. Maybe not to you but it does to me. See, if in the future some other CEO sees an opportunity to screw over a competitor, to try to destroy a viable eco-system based on open source tech or to destroy a company just because they can they may remember the case of Microsoft, and maybe that will steer them in the right direction.

I wish Microsoft the very best but I want no part of it and I'm totally free in making that decision based on their past behavior. Microsoft has had their chance with me, I probably developed as much or more code for the windows platform as I did for other platforms but right now I would consider myself pretty silly if I switched back to MS just because they may have changed their ways and deserve another chance. Those are not lightly made decisions, there is a huge amount of time and effort invested and I already switched once because of their behavior.

That said there is enough going on in the present that makes me wonder just how much they have really changed, they're still dragging their heels post judgement in several court cases where they have been ordered to start cooperating and have pulled a substantial number of annoying tricks in the recent past.

Never mind the 'microsoft tax' (which I paid on this machine even though it never ran MS software for even a single cycle) and so on. So yes, it makes perfect sense.
AWS re:invent livestream
Laziness. And your graphic designer can use it.
As a lot of engine, it's nice when you want something simple very quick. But when you want to tweak it or make it things more specific it's a lot of time a pain in the *.

It can save time in the beginning and you will prototype early.

Easy to use and easy to access.
> Can it stay on the surface without the harpoons?

technically yes. Philae has harpoons along with foot screws to secure it to the comet, but if harpoons are super glue, foot screws are tape.
To keep you from denying internet (i.e, email) access to everyone else, they should block the port by default, then unblock it if you demonstrate that you know what you're doing by calling them up and asking them to unblock it.

Seems harmless enough. Agreed?
Apples and Oranges, my friend.
How to Study the Brain
The Founder Spectrum
Age of the digital nomad: Plan to abandon cities in favour of freelance freedom
As someone who has written applications in C#, Java and Scala (amongst others). I'd be curious as what makes you think Scala is a winner relative to C#?
It's called Xamarin.
Skysense Launches Charging Pad for Drones
World's First Smart Earplug next big thing?
I hope so. F# is a really nice language. Microsoft Research is an amazing lab with some very bright minds working there.

It'd be nice to be able to use some of the fruits of their labor without having a steep entry fee to evaluate it.

Thanks MS, this is a good move.
Show HN: Chrome extension using Imgur's API for epic tab fun
I highly doubt Microsoft will release and support Linux/OSX/iOS/Android API bindings.

What will likely happen is Microsoft will :

* open source the core libs

* open source the JIT

* make sure it works on all platforms

* open source the ASP.NET and port it to Linux/Mac so they can separate Azure from being a Windows only cloud service

Xamarin then packages these in to Mono and Xamarin.iOS/Android providing a layer on top of MS core stuff. Microsoft will then be able to sell .NET as a truly cross-platform solution and make VS/Azure more popular where it's probably losing to other OSS ATM.
Node.js has had a concept of API stability for at least a couple years; you can see it listed in all the docs. If you want something to work nigh indefinitely, stick to Stable or Frozen.

Unless something radically changes, node is just as good as any other popular dynamically-typed language implementation out there. Probably better than most.
What is a tech accelerator – and which are the best in Europe?
If you don't particularly care WHEN you are getting to destination, it's reasonably cheap.

A bus is a terribly ineffective way to move around London, especially for commuting to/from the center.

A single fare tube ride is 2.20 in Zone 1, escalating quickly with distance.
AWS re:Invent 2014 live stream
No announcement yet, but just now in the ESA webcast of the control room everyone stopped, gathered around a guy that I assume is the team lead, and are now going home. I have a bad feeling about this.
Using Pattern Matching in F# – if/else on steroids
Show HN: Tagtile: take a pix, tag it, that's it
Looks sort of unfinished on my end.

https://i.imgur.com/CFN8bsq.png
I don't know why you are being down voted. Erik Meijer, a huge .NET contributor who worked at Microsoft (on C# among other things), and was behind the reactive .NET extensions (and also a big Haskell contributor) - he was saying exactly the same thing about Scala vs C# - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/covariance-contravariance...

I can also testify as someone who uses Scala on a day to day basis and used C# at work as well - I completely understand your statement, although it's very subjective.
It could actually, since there's already outgassing on the comet.
"The acceleration due to gravity on the surface of Churyumov–Gerasimenko has been estimated for simulation purposes at 10^(−3) m/s^2, or about one ten-thousandth of that on Earth."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimen...
+1 as a Scala fanatic :) It's all about what works for you though.
Gravity there is so low that something like a light push may be enough to launch. If anything used to examine the surface makes contact and presses (drill, digger), good-bye lander.

Firing the harpoon would also be enough to launch, but at least the hook would grab the surface and pull the lander back down, giving enough pull to drill viable long-term anchors.
This matches some of the concepts I've got from the book "The 4-Hour Body" from Tim Ferriss. The fast-exercise stimulation also tells your body not to store energy into fat, which is one of the principles of the Slow Carb Diet.
I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape.

Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset.

It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your choice.
It will dig into the surface anyway so it will anchor itself even without the harpoon, if it's on the surface of course.

See this video that explains how Philae foots work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-77-Z_DHTlY#t=84

ESA says it landed gently on the surface: https://twitter.com/esaoperations/status/532575615527170048
>Taylor Swift's agent (I think it was the agent) described it this way - a fan pays $15 for the album, and her friend says "why did you pay for that? you could have just gotten it off <pirate site>." Contrast that with "why did you pay for that? you could have gotten it legally for free off <legitimate site>."

That's not how it works for many. I have friends who pay for Spotify and download (illegally) any content not available on the service. Ultimately, this move will not only harm her discoverability but will also harm her reputation by withholding her music (from fans) for greater profit.
But it was already opensource more than 10 years ago.
I remember compiling the ms .NET runtime on FreeBSD.
That's going to be quite a list. The highlights:

Abusing their patent portfolio directly, ditto through proxies, continued attempts to subvert open standards, bribery to use Microsoft software in various third world countries (and in Romania too, and Germany for that matter) and many others besides but those alone would be enough to not make me go back to using their development platform.
Modern architectures really necessitate a good understanding of the instruction pipeline and caches to squeeze out the best performance.

If I remember correctly, Python's hashtables are initialized with 8 buckets that are linearly searched and then switched to a real hashtable implementation when grown past that size.

I have worked with the L4 microkernel where sooo much emphasis was put on keeping instruction and data footprints as small as possible every time the kernel is entered in order not to dirty i- and d-caches.

And I have also seen game engine developers do amazing things in this regard. An interesting development in the gaming space is data-oriented-design that deviates from OOP among other things for performance and parallelization. See http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/cellperformance/data-orient... (though I don't agree with the three "lies" mentionened, I do like the data-centric approach).
It's interesting that you believe that missions like this must be justified by short term benefits. These missions are very fortunately not about short term benefits.

One of the initial motivations for this mission was to learn more about our solar system's origins by studying a comet up close. Many engineering challenges were also overcome in the process, which will lead to positive side effects for future space missions and related areas, but one of the primary scientific questions this mission attempts to answer is "why is our solar system the way it is?" Answers to that question will likely help us better understand our place in the universe, and possibly shine a light on other solar systems as well. Maybe even give us a better idea how likely we are to encounter life in other solar systems, and what that life might be composed of.

Ironically, compared to questions of cosmic significance like these, short term concerns like treating present diseases or improving the current economic environment are petty and irrelevant by comparison. These are issues that science and government can tackle on earth, and issues where throwing more money at the problem doesn't always help. It is a fallacy to think that because space travel requires money, that earthly needs will go unfulfilled. It's deeply short sighted, in fact.

Your comment seems to be rooted in a deep misunderstanding of the nature of science. Science does not proceed by first devising a list of improvements to human wellbeing that will result from an experiment (though the grant application process in universities sometimes encompasses this task--with a lot of handwaving as a result). Science is about expanding our sphere of knowledge. By definition, we don't know what will result, or if it will have a positive impact. But we are trying something that has never been tried before, which is deeply interesting, and which has the potential to greatly expand our knowledge of the universe. Science is fundamentally a research activity: you can't know in advance what you will find. Asking what we will find before performing the experiment is pointless. The "might find" category for a mission like this is enormous, however.
Alex from Target: The Other Side of Fame
Anyone have pictures of this? I don't see any on the site.
Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history (2008)
I like it how .NET Core has a more permissive license (MIT) than Mono (LGPL).
I highly recommend this video that explains how Philae works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-77-Z_DHTlY
Spark Photon: a $19 open source, hackable Wi-Fi development kit
Lessons from sites that rely on user-generated content
Maybe you need first the idiots list of bad ways to spending tax money

Military: $640bn (per year)
War on drugs: $41bn (per year)
Health-care overcharging & overtesting: $1200bn (per year)

And this is just the US, now imagine those costs worldwide.

So, in contrast, this is a first-time-experiment where we get to do something never done before, using a lot of tech in brand new conditions (for us) where thousands put to test their knowledge of physics, electronics and astronomy. In such light you might understand why you are being downvoted.
How New Balance Became Fashion's No-Risk Source for Sneaker Cred
For some, there's a stronger argument against college: you mentally can't abide being taught. Those people need to learn on their own, and for software development there's little reason they shouldn't.
> Probably an artifact of the fact git was originally designed to be a kit others could use to make a DVCS with a nice interface.

as someone who's been tinkering in that space: it falls flat in that regard as well. it's hard to build on top of something lacking orthogonality.
Me too. I went from OSS stuff to .Net in 2009 and fell in love with C#, and eventually Visual Studio. It's nice to see the two worlds merging and moving forward.
This is how all science has always worked. Peasants were probably upset once that nobleman would spend their money on playing with mould in glass containers(what good could possibly come out of it????), rather than buy them food or clothing, yet that's how penicillin(and countless other drugs) came about. Do you think every inventor in history had a crystal clear idea what they were inventing and how was it going to change the world? Think about this as our R&D department - it has to get some money to keep pushing us forward.

And not everything is done as a benefit/loss game - I would personally invest significant time and money into finding out how the universe came about, even if such knowledge doesn't do anything for starving children in Nigeria. However, the beauty of it is that you on the other hand can go and spend YOUR time and YOUR money on whatever YOU please. As for public spending - if you don't like it, go and vote.
Android 5.0 Lollipop has an impact on existing apps and games
But we all paid for it. We paid tax so they could play with toys.
If MS keeps giving away its software for free, how is it going to make money?
Hopefully it won't ad advertising.
Is it because a lot of people become comfortable with the tools and companies upgrade to the paid version for a few extra features?
The sensors involved are very unlike the human eye, and unlike each other. And they aren't color, either, anything that shows color involves adding together several monochrome images taken with different filters.
The ESA has their own Flickr album of the Rosetta mission (with more pics), for anyone interested

https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/sets/72157...
Yes, that's why you would use F# in .NET if you want something like Scala. And then I heard many people say that .NET wins again.