skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is an absurd level of improvement for an already mature, commercially successful rocket.

What are you basing that on? And an absurd level of improvement can just as easily mean that V1 was just really bad, not that V2 is just that good.

I mean, the Merlin-1D has really good thrust to weight ratio, but the actual amount of thrust and the ISP at sea level is lacking compared to, say, the space shuttle's main engines (even with +30% the 1D is going to come short of 1,000 kN thurst, whereas the RS-25 on the shuttle was 1,860 kN).

It also runs on RP-1 which is a supply-constrained fuel choice that also has a max theoretical ISP that's lower than the ISP that the space shuttle's main engine actually achieved at sea level. And the RS-25's vacuum ISP is so far out of the 1D's reach it's not even funny. Not saying the RS-25 is particularly unique here, there are 17 liquid-fueled rocket engines that have an ISP over 400 in a vacuum, 9 of which also have more thrust than the 1D. The 1D by contrast has an ISP of 340 in a vacuum. 9 engines that have more thrust and more efficiency than the 1D. 9. But somehow Space-X is the one that blows you away?

So sure, it has good thrust to weight - at the cost of using a limited fuel, with low efficiency, and low total thrust. Wow that sure is worthy of just being blown away by absurd level of improvement

The one thing Space-X and Elon Musk do deserve credit on is they sure know how to market effectively. He is really, really good at making mundane tech sound amazing.
So now you DDoS the captcha system. For companies not operating with massive bandwidth and computing power, you can just overwhelm their defenses. Cloudflare can get away with it, because they explicitly set out to be able to "service" those super huge number of requests.

I was working on an anti DDoS system for SIP, a UDP-based protocol. Basically the options were: 1. lockdown, just whitelist known good customers, and break many scenarios. 2. Attempt some kind of analysis, like sending out probes to determine good/bad IPs. 3. Scale the hell up. Write L7 stuff that can go at wire speed, and get lots of wires.

Needless to say, #1 is the easiest to implement, but allows you to get your pipe saturated. #2 requires compute + pipe, and #3 is the only thing that'll really work.

This matters because DDoS'ing a telecom can be very lucrative. I can say with good confidence that demonstrating DDoS capabilities are probably worth 5-6 digits in blackmail against many companies.
Two points in the article bring up an interesting thought- Will autonomous highway driving make the recharging stops more or less annoying? If you're not actively driving the car, will you have less fatigue and so less need or desire for a 30 minute recharging break every few hundred miles?
California and Nevada have already created legal scaffolding for operating autonomous cars. Certainly the legal issues will get very interesting, but I don't think they'll get in the way of the autonomous cars. Just look at how well Uber is doing! Get a product people want, and sometimes the law will bend pretty far.
> Every single Model S now rolling out of the factory includes a forward radar, 12 long range ultrasonic sensors positioned to sense 16 feet around the car in every direction at all speeds, a forward looking camera, and a high precision, digitally controlled electric assist braking system.

Does anyone know how their system might compare to the spinning Lidar thingamajigs Google uses on their cars?
If you get past the tremendously misleading headline, you'd see that his statement isn't so crazy. All this article is about is Musk saying that Tesla Model S firmware version 7, out within a few months, will include full "autopilot" functionality, which means traffic-aware cruise control and automatic lane keeping. The former is already enabled (I just used it half an hour ago) and the latter has been demoed extensively and there's no reason to doubt it will ship when claimed.
That's a fair response to that case.

Still curious about this quote:
“We don’t do anything to thwart the content restrictions in China or other countries,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare. “We’re a tech company and we comply with the law.”"

So if Lantern were a customer, would the outcome still have been the same?
That's funny, cloudflare has a project to "Protect Free Expression Online"[1].
It even states:

"Often these attacks appear politically motivated — going after, for instance, citizen journalists reporting on government corruption. The promise of the Internet is that it is a great leveler — that anyone with an idea can reach a global audience. These attacks threaten that promise."

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/protecting-free-expression-onlin...
If you think Musk hasn't done anything then you haven't been paying attention.
> it's "soshoku KEI danshi". Just sayin'.

You are correct. The calligraphist got the inclusion of the "kei" right, just not the article text. I don't think that "soushoku danshi" is wrong, though. Also, sometimes just "soushoku doubutsu" is used (literally, "herbivore").
Maybe this will help - I just wrote a "Meteor vs. the MEAN stack" article: http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_s...
That is too bad since the point of the article is actually in favor of the Musk, the Model S and innovators like Musk. The introductory example is a beginning of a very same "context" you speak of intended to set the stage for the point of the comparison.

You are correct that without the rest of the context of the article, no reasonable person would have cause to think about those things. Hence the writing of the article.

The "made up bullshit" you're referring to is actually a concept studied by man since 600 b.c. This article is merely an examination of its principles as applied to inventors such as Galileo and the like using Tesla as the present example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox)

While it still may be of no interest to you, I would venture to guess that perhaps the philosophy is of little interest to you; not so much the state of blogs whose topics may vary.

The author is me if that was not already evident, and I appreciate your criticisms regardless of their polarity.
I am not sure that I am arguing for large-scale, planned mixing and assimilation.

Rather I am proposing that native Japanese and resident visitors could each benefit from co-habitation of the physical space, despite having very divergent social and economic models.
I freelanced for years before starting my current venture and this approach NEVER worked. I know lots of other freelancers and it has not worked for them either, as far as I know.

Once you establish a rate with a client, even if you make it plain to them that they are getting an "introductory discount", it is very difficult to get them to pay more next time.

Many clients will move on to another contractor, who may charge as much or more than you are seeking, rather than agree to pay you more than what they paid you the first time around.
I'd also like to add that it's a free platform for health systems :).

To clarify a bit, a hospital or clinic wouldn't really "hire" us -- Akido is software that's implemented on-site or in the cloud, and is supported remotely.
I think that the FAA will demand that Amazon runs the test program without hiccups for a while before considering a more realistic test, such as one with the drone outside of the pilot's line of sight, or a flight with bad weather conditions. All in all, it will likely be at least three years before this is rolled out to any actual customers.
'"Do rich societies really need to get richer and richer indefinitely?" he asks.'

They do if they are going to pay off their mega-debt. The real fear is when the GDP drops below the yearly interest payments.

I feel the same when I go to nice European countries. "Wow everything is so nice" and then I remind myself that Germany is paying for it all. It's not sustainable. Look at some of the Scandinavian countries for nice mass public transit in a more sustainable setting.
How Google's Partnership with Intel, TAG Heuer Could Fight Off Apple Watch
"self-driving car" and "car capable driving itself on highway under optimal conditions" are 2 totally different things. The real excitement comes when I can tell my car to go pick up the kids from school or drop me off at the airport and then drive itself back home. Anyways this is a great step in the right direction but its not the game changing tech we're all waiting for.
I worked with a DDoS protection provider briefly. Suffice to say, it's quite possible that being public with identity can bring a significant chance of physical harm. Dunno about this particular case, or China, but for other people offering services to that continent-area, they had real concerns.
It's let down by being more of a ”throw it over the wall” project than an open and transparent one. (There is no public bug tracker, road map, etc.)
"To all the Obama naysayers--he tried. By the time Republicans got through scaring people, he needed to include private insurance companies, just to get something passed. And something is still better than what we had before--Nothing!"

That's an...interesting...spin.

The Democrats had the votes to pass any bill they wanted.

They passed that one.

Sorry, you don't get to blame it on "Republicans".
On long trips now, is it the driver or the passengers who are more interested in rest stops?
Continue involvement with open source projects in a way that shows good will toward the larger community. Stay on the course it's on at the moment---it will pay off.
The private property restriction is only for Batmobile mode where you summon the car and it drives to you all by itself.

The autopilot / cruise control 2.0 / lean back mode where it handles all the driving on the highway, but you're still behind the wheel.. That's the main thing. I'm also curious whether there are state law issues.
In a few weeks, we will be able to visit the ancient Rome through VR
OMG these kids are the real deal for hip-hop
Conflict over a code (re: Linux kernel code of conflict)
If you're looking for a monolithic solution, Meteor may not be for you. Check out Wakanda and Servoy.

Delegating quasi-core parts of the platform to 3rd party libraries is quite common. For example, the preferred routing package for Angular, ui-router (https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router) was born four years after the release of Angular, and for DOM state preservation, the ui-router-extras (https://github.com/christopherthielen/ui-router-extras) addon is required.
I feel it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect AWS/Cloudflare/Akamai to have policy-based routing to blackhole a lot of these source subnets. Of course it's complex, but these are some of the largest hosting providers in the world.
Economic rent is the amount above the COSTs, not the just above a competitive market, unless you're considering that all competitive markets drive profits to zero. (Which a lot of people argue is one issue with perfect markets)

It turns out, that they're both immoral and awesome. we have to find a way to have our cake and eat it too.

-@hypercapital
Yes, this is an excellent point which has application in many contexts. We simply don't know how rare the skills are, because the positions are so rare. There might be 100 million people who could do the job at Walmart, but there are not 100 million Walmarts. There aren't even 100 million paths to get to the CEO position, and while there is certainly some economic Darwinism at play in determining who gets on those paths, I suspect that it's overwhelmed by noise as people carom around the socio-economic network like the balls in a lottery machine.
"Mr. Musk said in a conference call that the self-driving technology was “technically capable of going from parking lot to parking lot,” meaning through cities as well. But, he said, Tesla will disable the autopilot when cars are not on highways or major roads, citing safety concerns."

I think the implication here is that the cars are capable of this but they are taking the smaller step out of legal and liability concerns.
With an early start in wearables, Google adds Intel's silicon expertise and TAG Heuer's style in a partnership announced today a Baselworld.

With an early start in wearables, Google adds Intel's silicon expertise and TAG Heuer's style in a partnership announced today a Baselworld.

Apple should take notice of the partnership announced today at the Baselworld watch and jewelry conference, because Google has put together partners that could build a watch that even iPhone customers would want
Yeah, that line is ridiculous. Tokyo is the only part of Japan that's still growing in population, and that will stall and reverse by 2020. Even in Tokyo, "new and shiny" is concentrated in a few central spots near major train stations. Population in the rest of the country is shrinking, with many places in outright collapse.

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/yubari-withering...
Every time Elon Musk makes this kind of announcement, his engineering departments groan.

As I understand, they have folks actively managing Musk trying to prevent him from promising the moon :)
Hey James, that's a great question - the answer is that in order to access data from any health system, you'll need their OK.

Akido does make it much much easier for them to say OK, though :). While the API makes it far easier on developers, the hospital/clinic gets a far more secure means of transmitting data to vendors, as well as very fine grained control over who has access to which data, and detailed logs of every request.
Netflix got sued and investigated by the FTC for the data released for the Neflix Prize contest. One the plaintiffs could be linked to their imdb account by similar reviews and there were additional reviews in the Netflix dataset to imply that they were lesbian while still in the closet.

AOL had to pay a settlement after the search data they released identified people.
You know, we could stop this nonsense in less than a year if we wanted to.

Do you know why we won't? Of course you do. You know the answers just as well as I do.

Firstly, you have to understand the role of the human ego. Some people like playing the revolutionary role, but many people don't. People who want revolution think the answer is to get other people to take up their cause, to think like they think, become committed to a just world.

Can you not see why it's ineffective? Can not see that all you end up doing is preaching to the converted?

If you want an fast, effective environmental revolution, you downplay the rhetoric. You make it mundane. You make it so people can join in without needing to act or think in a set way. You stop trying to fix everything all at once and you focus your efforts on breaking down the problems systematically.

As an example, think about how the conversations surrounding fossil fuel usage have evolved. At first the main argument was about global warming/climate change, how we must change to save the planet. It helped build awareness, debate, column inches in newspapers, etc... but the arguments were too easily swayed by climate change deniers, who could cherry pick various statistics in order to further their case. However, luckily we found a better argument... peak oil.

Peak oil is a simple concept to explain. We're using crude oil at a much faster rate than it's being produced, and there will come a tipping point after which we will have no choice to use less oil, as it'll be harder to come by and more expensive. The concept is simple, it stands up logically, you don't need to follow the latest developments in order to appreciate its validity, all positive points. But the most positive point at all, there's no cultural baggage that comes along with it. There's no lifestyle expectations that come from taking it to heart. It's a less emotionally stimulating idea, and it's all the more effective for it.

So let's look at this Amazon carbon capacity issue. Let's look at what works. Easy first focus, deforestation. People are cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest in order to make a living. So you focus on giving those people other options to make a living, options that take away the need to cut down rainforest trees. Is it as cathartic as shouting in the streets about saving the rainforest? No. Is it more effective? You know the answer.
Here's an article from The Economist (Feb 7, 2015) that usefully counterbalances the "everything is awesome!" outlook in the submitted link.

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21642216-rebuilding-north...
Transit providers do not care. They make money on it, some people are using it legitimately, and they just don't care, for the most part. It's a well known problem. It might not hurt to mention it, but they know what they're doing.
The real excitement is when I can put those requests in to a network of public infrastructure and have them executed at roughly the same cost as driving for myself.
So what if they're capable? The tech is not available, end of story.
Judging by the article, "under optimal conditions" is an exaggeration. There was no citation of problems during traffic conditions.

My father sits through 2-4 hours of Los Angeles rush hour each day, and this is absolutely a game changer for someone like him. This is stellar.
I agree that very few people can do them well.

The problem is that very few of the people who have those jobs can do them well. Most executives fall quite short in most of the necessary areas. But they manage to skate by anyway.
There are such monolithic plug&play frameworks, targeted at line-of-business apps: Wakanda and Servoy.
I agree - I understand that a key aspect of feminism is "a woman choosing to live the way she wants to live". That means women, as well as men, staying home with the kids, if that's their choice. They shouldn't be forced into traditional roles, but are perfectly welcome to choose them.
I don't think it's literal; it just uses meat eating as a metaphor for aggressivity and drive. Just like in English we have "carnal act" for sex, referring to the flesh. Or whatever.

It's not even a word denoting vegetarians, but rather herbivores. A vegetarian is called 菜食主義者 (saishoku shugisha), not "soushoku" anything. "soushoku danshi" comes from "soushoku doubutsu", or "herbivore".
Here is an article comparing sensor types: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/cameras-lasers.html
You can read Excel in Pandas and in R.
Have you considered sandstorm.io?

https://sandstorm.io/

I realize this doesn't meet your requirement re hosting it yourself -- but since I don't know the full background, perhaps that doesn't matter to you.
> UDP echo: Echoes any request sent to 54.175.103.105:40000

> UDP info: Get request info at 54.175.103.105:40001

That seems a little worrying... it liiks like it could be abused as a reflector in a DDOS attack ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack#Reflec... )
According to the article, it will self-drive on "highways and major roads," and the "summon my car" is only for private property.

Maybe it's just adaptive cruise-control combined with lane keeping, and you'll still need to make turns.
Vote for funding on Blockchain support for open source platform DemocracyOS
Very few know this, but probably the largest Meteor app in existence is Knotable, http://challengepost.com/software/knotable
I don't think that's what the article says. I mean, maybe that's what it actually means, but what it says is the cars will "navigate" themselves. It uses the term a bunch of times. Nowhere does it hint that "navigation" is limited to "not rear-ending the car in front of you and staying in the lane," and I don't think that's the plain reading of "company drivers letting the car navigate the West Coast largely unassisted."

It's certainly not the plain reading of "the self-driving technology was 'technically capable of going from parking lot to parking lot,' meaning through cities as well."

If what all that actually means is "adaptive cruise control + lane keeping," then either the GP poster is right that Musk is overpromising and underdelivering, or the journalist completely misconstrued Musk.
Stanford Summer Hackers Program
"it's about having the courage to make unpopular decisions, dealing with the fallout alone, and leading by example when the going gets tough."

Most executives do none of these things.
Came here for Fastmail shoutout, was not disappointed.

When we started blogging the advent series last year (http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/01/fastmail-advent-2014/) I had a few support tickets asking "aren't you giving away all your secrets?"

We had a bit of a laugh about that, because we don't really have any secrets. The fact is, it's just a ton of hard work - new spammer tricks, new interoperability woes (ask us about SSL negotiation with other people's MXes some time, but make sure you provide the alcohol), and just trying to get the best possible performance out of the hardware and the software so we can handle both the person with 500,000 emails in their Inbox who never moves anything and the person with 10,000 folders each with 5 emails in it, and everything in between - and provide a fast loading experience for every single user when they hit the site, even though there isn't space in memory to hold that many mailboxes cached.
Taking Care with Calcium Supplements
"Soshoku danshi" is literally "grass-eating (herbivore) man". "Soshoku-kei danshi" is "grass-eating-group man". The latter is slightly more correct, but both are in common use.
Progress on Understanding Babbage's Mechanical Notation
RFC-Clueless ('abuse' and 'postmaster'). Reading over their site http://rfc-clueless.org/ again I see that there is the information to the policies for listing, but I just didn't happen to follow the correct series of links to get there.

It's really not very clear with that site, and ironic that a list apparently named after people who aren't compliant with docs has such poor presentation of information. The documentation is clear... eventually, if you pick the right path. I'll take this on the chin as my misreading, but unclear documentation isn't helpful (particularly if you're juggling a few other fires at the same time...)

Edit: Yes, I was correct. gmail does come with 'postmaster' and 'abuse' built in: https://support.google.com/a/answer/33389?hl=en

Edit 2: I forgot I removed the line where I mentioned that I thought postmaster was baked in :)

Edit 3: It looks like the domain I'm using with gmail has a screwed up abuse and postmaster. It's a domain alias, one of two. I made new mail groups for abuse/postmaster (the goog still monitors them, re: the link above) and noticed that only one domain alias was covered by them, when all other mail groups listed both. Sending test mails confirmed that setup. After a lengthy goog support chat, it seems that the way to fix it may be to remove and re-add the faulty domain alias.

I both love and hate these long chains of cause-and-effect that we get in IT...
You mean more than I already am paying them?

The two colo centers we've hosted in have always helped us with DDOS issues free of charge. Maybe that's not normal, but even a former employee telling us to GTFO looks bad on Amazon to me.
Nuclear Transmutation (turn gold to lead)
It only had a population of 5,500 people at the time. Ten years earlier there were only 1,700 people.
Hey @falsestprophet, thanks for reaching out!

I had been introduced to Apervita a little while back, and while I found it intriguing, it didn't solve the problem I was looking to solve. From my perspective, the biggest problem in healthcare right now is the lack of interoperability between systems -- data within a hospital is frankly rather locked up, inaccessible by reasonable means. This holds back a TON of much needed innovation in the space.

If Apertiva's platform is a means for spurring innovation, then I'm all for it. My prediction is that health data access will hold them back, until Akido is in every hospital across the country ;)