skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, curiosity and the need for understanding the universe and our place in it are real human needs. I agree they do not have the short-term urgency and fulfilling them is a long-term objective.

Second, having all of humanity live on a single speck of rock puts us in a very precarious position as a species and introduces a single-point of failure to our civilization. Therefore, the development of technical capabilities to move freely around the solar system and eventually beyond is also an objective for humanity. Again, I admit, it is a long-term one without short-term urgency of say, getting rid of Ebola.

So the whole issue is essentially a question of the right balance of the amount of effort we invest in working on our short-term urgent objectives and the long-term ones.

With world GDP in excess of $70 trillion per year [1], spending 1 billion EUR ($1.25 billion) for a decade-long mission does not seem like extravagance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

EDIT: To further put the cost of the mission into perspective: assuming the contributions for the mission came from about half a billion people (EU population) over a decade this translates into about 20 euro-cents per year. Seriously, this is not extravagance. In fact, given that the mission cost is over 20% of ESA's yearly budget it makes me think Europe is under-investing in its space capabilities and scientific research. Nitpick: ESA member states don't overlap with the EU exactly, but it is a good enough proxy. More accurate figure would allow for American and other contributions to the on-board instruments so would be even less than 20 euro-cents/year/person.
> So they would work on systemd then? Since it is set to have a far larger customer base in the near and long term than most independent cache resolvers (just see the list of distro's who have taken it up).

Is the systemd project passionate about DNS? Is the curl team passionate about protocols and files? Is the opensmtpd team passionate about e-mail?

I think two of the three are yes answers. The great strength of UNIX has always been people's ability to flock to places where their passion is shared and improve and learn (institutional knowledge) about their passions.

I don't think systemd will have passionate people for these extra services and it seems they don't have the institutional knowledge that others have gained since this is not a new kind of bug.
And migueldeicaza commented on another post here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596226
One thing the other (very good) replies miss: Never underestimate the power of 'gee whiz' technology has on children. This is cool, exciting engineering. Even if the scientific results are "boring", that is to say we don't get any unexpected data, the act of pushing the boundaries of what humans have been able to do is inspirational. There are kids who will learn about this in school the next few days, and see it on the news, and hear grown ups talking about how neat it is, and decide "I want to be an engineer", or "I want to be a scientist". It doesn't take many of them making this decision to have a big, long term impact (which provides a great societal ROI on the mission).
What Percentage of State Lottery Money Goes to the State?
It did land, here's the next tweet:

> It looks like @Philae2014 made a fairly gentle touch down on #67P based on amount of landing gear damping #CometLanding

but the harpoons may have failed to fire.
I am using Mitro, it has all of the features you wanted except the Dead Man's switch, but you could probably overcome that with shared accounts.

https://www.mitro.co
As far as I can tell, nothing is going on, except the typical OSS drama.

Frankly, I don't care who "owns" an OSS project, just as long as the thing works (and node does). I leave dumb politics for people with too much idle time on their hands; I recommend you save your time and do likewise.
That's pretty informative.
Resumable Functions (Async/Await/Coroutines) in Visual C++ 2015
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html here is what Miguel of Xamarin has to say
You joke, but FTP has indeed actually been used to communicate between Earth and a probe. A team at NASA's JPL , led by Vinton Cerf, completed a study of what would be needed for an Interplanetary Internet [1]. There are already IETF RFCs for delay-tolerant networking [2], which include mechanisms for store-and-forward communications (e.g. each transceiver is a relay).

Science fiction has some great depictions of interstellar communications, such as my favorite by Vernor Vinge, the Hugo award-winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. It is a most excellent space opera that prominently features an interstellar system like Usenet as part of the plot [3], as well as superhuman intelligence, physics, and all sorts of other wonderful bits.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-tolerant_networking

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
Anything even remotely new is usually not a candidate for these types of long duration missions. Part of it is institutional inertia, but also partly a desire to use a technology stack that will still be in use decades from now. Even for missions that only take a few years, some of the same people will work on those missions as well as decade plus missions, so you have to hire people who are experts in mature technologies. Institutions like NASA and ESA want to work with a technology stack that will remain stable and which they know will be maintainable by people in the future.

C and languages that compile to C (Fortran is used as well) are often employed since you have powerful control over memory usage.

Source: I work in the aviation industry, where the technologies are different but the lifecycle concerns are very similar.
In this case the analogy is: You can ride around on a motorcycle with a helmet that has a "certified" sticker, or no sticker. Same helmet.
That passage also raised the hair on the back of my neck ... I was trying to ignore it when I came across this phrase: "Our restoration process is indeed tamper-proof." (and another fragment from their user documentation).

Given the current climate in computer security, I think we should be much more careful about how we phrase our guarantees and more specifically how secure each service is. These statements imply guarantees that are simply impossible to make ... and we've seen flaws in our crypto tools change the security landscape overnight.
yeah, exactly. Just like in the carbon emissions example, let the people vote with their dollars only makes sense if there is governmental regulation ensuring the people both get accurate information to make decisions, are educated to understand the decision, and that the people's market decisions will be large enough to steer the market. All three of these points are regularly ignored, however, while the first "let the people vote with their dollars", will be loudly trumpeted by whatever industry is being discussed. Over time, you get a "libertarian" population that isn't even aware that their position requires the regulations I just mentioned, but have been taught that regulations are "bad" by industry.

Its a bit like watching a group petition Ford motors to make an electric car, but one without any batteries because batteries are dangerous and expensive, and then get confused and upset with Ford's "corruption" and the "inability of corporations to do anything right" when Ford makes them an "electric" car with a gasoline engine.
To me it seems just survival evolution. I can assure that if your ancestors and my ancestors had not killed and raped lots of people, it would be very unlikely that both of us would be here today discussing this.
> They're still doing bad stuff today, just on different fronts.

I mean no disrespect, but what's the bad stuff being done my Microsoft today?
I believe they mean you write code in VS and target Android/iOS/etc for builds. It sounds like it's moving more towards a regular IDE than very .NET specific.

It does not sound like you can run VS on different devices.
And by "different interests", you mean that women are singularly disinterested in computer science, despite strong representation in other STEM fields and other professional fields with analytical components, including such extremely demanding fields as medicine and corporate law?

Some rando upthread accused me of violating Occam's Razor.
Leaving New York
Why does it need to anchor itself? It's not like it will blow away?
So I should "update" my old laptop to Vista?
This is going to be a huge boost to ClojureCLR, IronPython, and F#. I think F# especially is going to take off in popularity now that its best VM target is going to run on Linux and Mac.
> Isn't that sort of obsolete thinking? We don't have any skilled jobs for our current crop of college graduates. Why train more, just so they can drive busses?

A few thoughts on that argument:

Unemployment now is moderate and dropping, especially for college graduates. The lifetime income of college graduates is significantly higher than others.

Also, your argument (which I realize is widespread) look only at graduates' initial jobs. College education is not initial job training; it benefits people in many ways, as individuals, as citizens, as community members, as family members, and as workers; it benefits them over a lifetime. To evaluate it based only on one part of life (work), and only on a short period that also is the least significant (their first job) doesn't make sense.

Also, looking at careers: Note that most of the world is run by people with college educations. Future jobs will become more and more intellectually demanding. What is our message to 18 year olds: Abandon your dreams, just give up and drive a bus? From people like Santorum, the message is: Your kids should give up and drive a bus while mine go to college.
Superfeedr redesigned
Rosetta's comet sings a mysterious 'song'
Got to wonder where it will be when Maxwell goes 20nm and maybe others got new architectures soon..Sure they can afford to use much bigger SoCs than others since they make their own but it doesn't seem all that efficient.
In the end we measure mobile GPUs by perf in synthetic benchmarks and that has no real relevance since all wee need is for games to run well.Wish mobile benchmarking would get better tools already since GPU testing is rather misleading and we all look for best perf not good enough perf.
Read the hier man page of your chosen BSD, first. It is a great eye opener. From there OpenBSD and FreeBSD have some great documentation (not sure / no slight intended to NetBSD or Dragon Fly BSD as I have not used them much).
Good luck. I blew off a lot of college lectures with plain old dead trees--reading unrelated books, writing letters. I did get called on the letter by one of my worse professors, and put the letter away. I don't remember paying closer attention after I did that.
The Dreadful Inconvenience of Salad
Unfortunatly, the harpoons did not. But the lander seems ok. The mission control is trying to find a way to fire the harpoons.
Sometimes is justified, never say never, but it will take short of a miracle for me to trust Internet Explorer in any way, shape or form after setting back the Open Web for years (I know that IE 11 is way better, but to little, to late)

Now saying that, I think that an Open Source .NET stack is a wonderful thing! I like C# a lot.
Tracing the history of a word as 'gentrification' turns 50
Inventions wouldn't, but perhaps some kinds of basic research would stop. I don't see this happening in software, but perhaps in Pharma. It's so easy to create a generic, that there wouldn't be any incentive to create something new. At this point we would need the government to fund, and decide what gets funded.
Here's the announcement from Microsoft:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/11/12/opening...
After recently using Microsoft's online tools (OWA, web-based office, etc.) and the IOS version of OWA, I'm shocked at how bad the UX has become.

Recently, there was a bug that makes the IOS OWS client replace its standard icons with emoji. It's been over 90 days and the bug is still not fixed.

There have recently been a lot of bold decisions at Microsoft. If anything can turn around a dying company it's this kind of approach.
The mediocre engineer in me can't look at those photos and just appreciate them...all I can think about is...geez, the mechanical acuity to took to make sure all the moving pieces moved...from the shutter to the antenna that receives the signal and transmits the data...at the right time, 300+ million miles away. What a party those engineers must he having right now.

Came across the other NYT news article on this...this is the kind of detail that I imagine must keep those rocket engineers up for many nights during and after launch:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/science/space/european-spa...

> The operation proceeded despite a few small glitches and one potential showstopper problem: an apparent failure of a thruster that was to fire right after touchdown to press the lander against the comet’s surface. A pin was supposed to break a wax seal on the gas tank, but repeated attempts did not appear to succeed.
Why the Comet 67P/C-G, as seen by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope array ( http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/11/08/rosetta... ) is so different than close-up? Here for example, I can't see any trails or fire. Is also white instead of orange? Can be this caused by the speed? http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/11/08/rosetta...
I've had a horrible first impression of Ionic just a week or so ago.

Like Cordova, Ionic can generate a "hello world" app for you. It served just fine on the browser but would not load on neither the emulator or my phone.

It is in alpha/beta so I guess I'll cut it some slack and try it once more in the future.
You can understand and even state that these changes are a consequence of a new CEO that has different ideas and behavior compared to previous CEOs. And you even "blame" by describing the previous CEO as a "madman" but still don't want to give Microsoft a chance because at one point in time some previous higher-up made a decision with which you did not agree. Makes PERFECT SENSE!
Newton’s Second (edit: Third) Law. It wants to extend a drill bit into the surface.
So, that doesn't have to be a startup, right?

Why not ask around for other kids interested in games (for various reasons, that's like the best place to learn programming)? Why limit yourself only to fellow students--get online and ask around on indie development forums?
As non-Nativespeaker, I did not know that word before ...

Thanks!
I feel like the last couple years I've been cheerleading for MS and telling people how much they've changed, how open things are becoming, and how awesome the development experience is. It's fallen on deaf ears or met with resistance, but today's announcements are really gonna drive the point home. Developers need to start looking more seriously at C#/.Net.

The Scotts (Hanselman/Guthrie), Miguel De Icaza and so many others have worked tirelessly on this, and we (.Net Developers) owe them a ton of gratitude for helping to make sure this ecosystem doesn't wither on the vine.
There are two types of those: learners and thinkers. The latter have difficulty doing busy work at any speed.
I've been playing around with kestrel/asp.net vNext (Which I guess is now 5) on Mac, and while it's still rough, it's a good dev server.
'...show me the code.'
Sounds like "the evil empire" of old realized that releasing its platform as Open Source would revitalize its platform.

This is eventually what happens, after the first mover monopolists collect their rent for a decade. I don't mean it in a bad way, just as an observation of repeatable economic trends.

After all, now Microsoft needs more app developers to develop Windows apps and compete on the mobile front.
Ron Garrett (formerly Erann Gat) has some background on how these decisions are made. It's not pretty.

http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
I have seen the graph before, I was curious about the response on Twitter.
> Microsoft no longer sets the technology agenda, so choices like this are simply a reaction to that new reality

Also very true, the culture didn't "just" change. It's another reason why anyone hating on MS while ignoring Google, Facebook, Apple et al is living in the past.
Can you explain why you think so?
Congratulations Microsoft. Welcome to 2014! :) Although I will say, since it took so long I would still expect the community to be somewhat skeptical / cynical, and / or slow to adopt / buy in.
Normally I would've considered your comment a bit too glib...but in my total ignorance of this mission, I had assumed it was a NASA project. If the headline had mentioned "kilometers" -- and I can't imagine the metric system not being used by engineers regardless of nationality -- I don't think I would've been so quick to assume it was a NASA accomplishment.
i watched a docu on the large hadron collider and the search for the higgs boson particle where they asked one of the scientists a similar question. what do you expect to gain monitarily from that xBillion dollars we just spent on this? his reply was 'i don't know'. he went on to give the example of how when radio waves were first discovered nobody called them 'radio waves' because no one had thought to use them in that way yet. I think a lot of exploritory science can be framed this way. we do it to get a better understanding of the world we live in.
I really don't understand where you're coming from.

But the post did not "spend 95% of the time showing the other side is wrong", and it's really rich to say that at the same time as you're saying that it's seasy for readers to miss the damning sentences when they're not "dominating the whole text". Most of the post was discussing the age old problem of TCP implementations needing to be bug-compatible with each other. In addition it showed a new (to me) example of this phenomenon, and did a detour into explaining why that bug was easier to trigger with our stack than some others.

It's like tou've for some reason decided that I don't understand that there are broken implementations around, that it came as a complete surprise to me, and that the only thing that matters is that I'm right and the other guy is wrong. But the whole point of the post was exactly that it doesn't matter if you're right or not. If you want a production quality TCP implementation you need to support what's out there, not what's in the spec.
I should have read TFA before commenting :)

But that is even more puzzling. The backend space is so crowded with native, scripting and exotic languages, that I really don't see how they can attract hardcore c/c++/go/node.js/python/ruby/perl/php/erlang/haskell/lisp or Java crowds to .NET.

Maybe it's exciting for existing .net developers to be able to deploy their backend apps on linux servers.
How to Become the Go-To Freelance Musician
Trying to find answers to the most important questions is much more important than saving a few thousand people now. Plus, we'll probably need to leave Earth one day, and before that we need to know how.
Ask HN: Any good RAD tools for web development?
Hi, I am planning to create a web application. However, I absolutely abhor html + js + css. I have a firm personal philosophy that any sort of design should be done in a wysiwyg editor. I am not bad at web design per se - I have done plenty of mockups before but I just can't stand doing Css and html. I need a tool that can easily allow me to create the front end and focus on the business logic instead. I am planning a making an online apps store, but the lack of good tools has forced me to try to build it with Drupal ecommerce modules due to their powerful theme engine. Any advice?
Microsoft and Xamarin Expand Global Partnership
Dumb OSS drama in the form of systemd is affecting a lot of people. See also Gnome3, OpenSSL, and other things.

If we build our businesses on OSS, we all need to pay attention to what's going on.

Currently, we use Node and may be doing long-term embedded installs of it--I'd like to see which way the wind is blowing before committing to that path.
How come? It's just a stream of images, right? Though the power cost of transmission might be high, I guess; I don't know how these things work.
Ah my bad. Nonetheless it seems like harpoons did not fire. Tweet from just 30 secs ago: https://twitter.com/ESA_Rosetta/status/532579871202238464

Can it stay on the surface without the harpoons?
The open sourcing moves were in the works well before Nadella was CEO.
Depends on the lifestyle you're looking to lead. If a rented room in a shared house is adequate for your needs then the annual premium you're paying for that room to be in central London is probably less than the cost of an annual train ticket from outside London, or the lower salary you'd expect in a different city. If you're a young family, on the other hand then you could buy the freehold of a three bed house somewhere like Burnley for little more than the annual rental of a similarly unremarkable small house or flat in a not-especially-fashionable Zone 2 suburb. You'd just then have to cope with living in Burnley :-)

The ramen-eating room sharers in SF will probably also be better off than their London counterparts when they get funding (more likely) and can afford to pay themselves salaries linked to a much higher market rate for developers.
Not every company fits into the advice of this article. Starbucks is the exception and not the rule.
Link to source code: https://github.com/microsoft
they the text only version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
F# is more of a .NET analogue to Scala.
Instead of having each university pay millions each year to subscribe to privately owned journals, we use (a part of) this money to develop and maintain the necessary infrastructures (servers, software developers, librarians, …). The rest of the money could be used for additional research.
Most Java developers I know write code using Intellij. I used to use VIM for Ruby development and tricked it out with many features to speed up my development. Having said that, Intellij is so much easier to use for Java than tricked out VIM is for Ruby.
As has already been shown through example, having a single unified purpose does not make something immune (or even resistant) from security issues.

Tons of projects with a single focus have had countless security problems, some so bad the entire project was completely scrapped.

So the entire argument is based on a flawed premise.
In Scala, there are just too many ways to do things. It's optimized for flexibility and easy writability. C# on the other hand may be a little more verbose, but at least everyone can read everyone elses code.
Verba manent: the buried orality of digital communication