skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Water has a mass of 1 g/cm^3, or 1 kg/L, or 1 Mg/m^3.

Covering a 440-acre farm (about the median farm size in the US) to a depth of one inch requires over 44000 metric tons of water.

Oil pipelines have a transport capacity of millions of metric tons per year. A water pipeline of the same order of magnitude in capacity could give 227 farms the irrigation water equivalent of just one extra inch of rain per year.

The energy cost of moving that water downhill is actually negative. But rivers already do that. So your pipeline is probably moving that water uphill. Using the approximation that lifting 1 kg to a height of 1 meter is about 10 joules, lifting 10 million metric tons 100 meters is 10 Tj, or about the output of a tractor-trailer engine, running continuously, all year long.

Pumping it up from the elevation of St. Louis to the elevation of Denver is about 1500m vertically, and costs about the output of a diesel locomotive, running continuously, all year long.

That commodity typically costs $0.40 per ton in the US, only after it is completely processed for potability and delivered to the customer. Agricultural users expect to pay less.

This is probably well within the realm of our current technological possibilities, and may even be profitable economically, but you cannot even approach this politically. The cheapest way to move water is therefore to foment an armed rebellion with water rights as the casus belli. Then you can install an all new regime which likewise cannot be changed because too many millions of people depend on it remaining the same.
> However, many scientists believe Mars was much warmer and wetter billions of years ago, when it may have had a thicker atmosphere to help trap heat.

This is both fascinating and horrifying. Given the timeline of the solar system thus far, it would seem plausible that an entire evolution of species, including the rise and demise of intelligent life, could have already started and finished on Mars.
Of course it is math.

Is it abstract (can be retold about other unrelated objects without changing solution)? Yes.

Does it have a definite answer? Yes.

Do you use reason to get from A to B in simple concrete steps? Yes.

It's math then.
Isn't Dropbox or similar programs a solution for this issue? You don't have to do anything after installation, it works cross-device, and you have the history.

It doesn't have the "my phone is the server" feature, but neither does it have the never-requested "I just dropped my server in the toilet" feature.
This is most definitely math, it is more related to logic than geometry / calculus though so the mathematics behind it might be somewhat unfamiliar to you if you haven't followed any logic oriented courses.
Sure. However, there are two things that seem to support this:

1. Social networks seem to decline over time as newer alternatives or substitutes arise. Specifically, it seems LinkedIn is not as strong as it once was, and growth can no longer be sustained on the percentage basis.

2. Generally, a company that has amazing product market fit and strong growth in an offering would reinvest the lion-share of capital back into the business.

I don't purport to know what is the case here, just providing the counterpoint.
I was amazingly surprised by Google Compute Engine. I've never used such a simple IaaS provider. Especially compared to the direction Azure's new portal is taking, GCE is refreshingly simple. EC2 is alright but still feels a lot more complicated than GCE. The UI is simpler, too.
I always thought the biggest reason was that if a rocket carrying nuclear waste exploded in our atmosphere, it would be catastrophic. It's a lot less risky to just bury it underground and pray it never leaks.
No, he's focusing on the politics in that paragraph... extroverted people tend to be better at politics than the introverted.
I think this hits a snag (as do many income-based schemes) when you consider the effect of region. This results in lots of H1-Bs going to San Francisco, and almost none to Atlanta, because salaries for the same position are twice as high in San Francisco.
So, getting to the sun is actually really hard, the earth is moving around the sun at ~30km/sec. For comparison, a satelite in low earth orbit is only moving about 8km sec.

30km/sec is a LOT of velocity change, and you'd need to cancel practically all of it to actually fall into the Sun.

Way harder than getting to any of the planets.
I'm a citizen of the US and I care. Especially about the abuses inherent in the system.
Anybody who's tried doing that in KSP knows how hard it is.
I wonder.. would the spent rocket fuel generate more power in (an appropriate) power station than the original nuclear material?

(Assuming gravity assist is used)
I'd be interested in knowing what you think are good indicators that someone will be a good client instead of being a bad client.
If they get 98% of the flavor profile right and bring costs down substantially, they'd open up their products to a ton of people who can't currently afford to drink "40 year Scotch" but still want to try it/enjoy it. That's huge.

It won't kill the craft whiskey industry. If anything, it would make the "truly aged" whiskies even more niche and a higher luxury.
That doesn't create a lower limit, just a life expectancy. And the life expectancy is still very long — "within the lifespan of the universe" http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole
C hasn't decreased in popularity, but there are some indications that C++ has been losing popularity in the last ten years (e.g. tiobe).

With GoLang and Rust coming on tap for real, the next ten years will be very interesting as far as C++ goes (they really have the potential of "eating" C++ more than C in my opinion).

If you look at this site:

http://langpop.com/

And turn off everything (set to 0) except Github, it is rather interesting seeing what new code is being produced today. So while I definitely think the legacy C++ code base is massive, and that jobs will exist for some time to come (40+ years), it doesn't seem like a lot of new projects are choosing C++ (I certainly wouldn't for a new project, unless it was a game, or I needed a specific library written in C++).

Security issues are a major boat anchor around C++'s neck, and while the newer standards solve a lot of those issues, if you're going to have to almost completely re-write to that, you could equally consider Rust or GoLang when they've stabilized a little.

But, right now in 2015, C++ is fine and the jobs should exist enough for it to be worthwhile. I am more just saying "keep an eye on it."
The worse part is that there are a lot of applicants filing multiple applications. They pay some agencies just to file H1B applications for them. This itself is against H1B application policy. There is an ongoing petition trying to get government's attentions:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/remove-and-ban-ch...
We exist because our ancestors fucked up our nice nitrogen only atmosphere by polluting with deadly reactive oxygen.

Damn cyanobacteria thinking unsustainably and killing the planet for everyone else...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
Show HN: Drag and drop so simple it hurts
I don't think he is seriously suggesting that we blast nuclear waste out into space, only pointing out that it would be easier to do than throwing it into the sun. This emphasizes why "throw it into the sun" isn't a very good idea.
That's not how sailing works. The only reason you can sail upwind in a sailboat on the water is because you have a keel pushing against the water to prevent you from blowing downwind. Essentially, a sailboat sits on the interface between two fluids (air and water) that are moving relative to each other, and abuses that fact to go wherever it wants to. If you couldn't push against the water, or in the extremely unlikely case that the water and wind had identical velocities, you wouldn't be able to sail upwind. (Actually, if the water and wind had identical velocities, you wouldn't be able to sail at all. It would feel like no wind.)

To tie this back to solar sailing, there's obviously no fluid interface in space, so to the extent that solar sailing is possible, solar sailing "upwind" toward the sun is not.
I would have to agree with you. The most career/salary growth that professionals see is between 25-34 years of age. Being 24 years old and make 120K a year, I'd say you're off to a great start.
not sure what you mean. Elaborate?
I love this on his page about the novel:

"The only part that gave me any trouble was calibrating an ending that would leave the reader satisfied that the story had concluded while leaving the impression of an open-ended world."

Surprise! Still can't write endings. It's okay Neal, it's what we've come to expect, and we totally love you anyway.
The fast generators as described by Matsumoto and Fog generate the numbers this way:

"If
the 52-bit fraction part is uniformly randomly chosen, then the represented
number is uniformly randomly distributed over [1, 2) with 52-bit precision."

Then for [0,1) 1 is subtracted.

I guess you can be confused because you don't understand the binary floating point? Specifically you can have wrong assumption about the numbers that are to be generated by the given algorithms. Let me explain you on the smaller example: let's generate the floats instead of doubles. If all possible input integer values were generated by Matsumoto's algorithm i e [0..8388607] and then from them generated the floats Xi in the range [0..1) then multiplying Xi with the constant 8388608f should get the results: 0f, 1f, 2f, ... 8388605f, 8388606f, 8388607f. And that's what is produced. Doubles have more bits but function the same: the constant which makes the tests easy is 4503599627370496.0 and the last number from the algorithm after the multiplication with that constant should be 4503599627370495, and the previous 4503599627370494 etc. The first three should of course be 0, 1 and 2.

What does your "better" algorithm produce under the given assumptions? Or do you actually have some other assumptions? If you do, it doesn't mean their algorithms are wrong, these do what they are designed to do and obviously correctly.

I suggest you you test your algorithm on floats, using absolutely all inputs and calculating all the outputs. Then you can write here what you achieved, that is, if you started from other goals, did you really reach them for all the inputs? Note that you don't need any random number generator to prove you reached your goal, just show that for given input of all ascending integers you get the desired output -- every result should also appear only once (I see your "tests" on github aren't made so).

But please don't write about C++ or use some notation from the latest C++ standards. Just write the inputs, outputs and describe your algorithms mathematically.
Human Rights for Robots
But that's is expending a whole lot of energy to "remove" earth's orbital velocity[1]. Why remove it when you can just deflect the rocket by the gravity of Venus and redirect the rocket directly towards the sun? Or are we missing something more fundamental?

1. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=orbital%20velocity%20of...
If you get stuck in an agile environment, here's a survival guide:

1) Attack the lowest-priority and easiest stories to shoot for quantity, not for quality. This way you'll be closing stories in no time, pleasing the scrum master and product owner during the daily standup. Leave the largest and most complex problem for last - if nothing else, you can kick the can down the road by claiming it's tougher than it seemed, requires more points and should be moved into the next scrum.

2) Do not worry about the quality of your work. In fact, the lower it is, the more stories you'll have to fill in the next scrum - "widget for feature X" with some effort can become "fix bug Y with feature X", "improve widget performance when more than 1 user uses the product", "improve logging and monitoring of widget X" and tons of other, lower-priority, but higher-quantity stories (see point 1 of this). You'll likely be closing a story a day, earning points way ahead of the other suckers who choose to focus on long-term critical design/architecture issues.
> So you're saying it's just here as an announcement, not for anyone to discuss?

Its here because someone posted it here; I'm saying that the page itself isn't calling for a discussion, its identifying complaints motivating action and a high-level description of the action the author(s) intend to undertake to address the situation identified in the complaints (similar to, e.g., the US Declaration of Independence.)

That it is not calling for a discussion doesn't mean that there is nothing in it to discuss, though it does mean that it is silly to criticize it for your perception that there is nothing in it to discuss. If you find nothing in it to discuss, you could simply not discuss it.
> "If it was difficult to hit things with large gravitational forces we wouldn't see very many comets in the night sky..."

The difficulty does not come from the mass of the Sun. It comes from Earth's velocity around it. The waste starts out with that velocity as well. Basically the waste is already in a stable orbit around the sun, and getting it out of that is difficult.
The future of smartphones
There are tons of things posted to HN, which inevitably some people find interesting and some people don't. The fact is, many H-1B visa beneficiaries are in the technology field. In addition, many technology companies are pushing for immigration reform and this isn't the first time I've seen the subject come up here.

Your stance could be taken on any technology-related content posted to HN. "Those who care about Linux will keep their eyes and ears open to Linux news. It doesn't have to be posted here because most OS users have Windows" sounds pretty ridiculous to me.
> To reach the Sun you need to subtract 100 percent of Earth’s orbital velocity; to reach solar escape velocity you need only add 41 percent to it.

You could send the waste with near solar escape velocity to travel on a really long ellipsis trajectory, at the furthest point you can get rid of the remaining kinetic energy with minimal fuel and let the waste fall back straight into the Sun. Subtracting Earth's orbital velocity is by far not the optimal method to reach the Sun.
Apple releases iOS 8.4 beta with revamped Music app ahead of new service at WWDC
So your beliefs/guesses/hypotheses state here are that:
1. Open plan offices are damaging to all, except those:
a. Who mistakenly believe in the collaborative nature of open plan environments. By believing they enjoy working in them.
b. Are extroverted. They gain no benefit, but are not hurt.
c. Are without sociopathic. (Stealing the corrected language choice from your comment below.)
2. Extroverts who tolerate office politics are indecent. (The inverse of the statement that starts the third paragraph.)
3. (Through inference via there connection in the third paragraph:) Politics is meaningless noise, environmental chaos, and/or a lack of privacy.
4. Sociopaths are energized by office politics.

I find most of these flawed in one way or another, but I'd like you to confirm that my reading is correct before I address each in detail.
I find your perspective judgemental, somewhat narrow and (ironically) un-empathetic and I think a debate about it could be enlightening.
Same question only a short while ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9370666
it will also open a counterfeit market, and yield countermeasures such as certification etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9370666

asked half an hour ago
The ColorHug is an open source display colorimeter
what in your opinion the current salaries are and what they must be in order to attract enough professionals? I mean do you see a lot of people who aren't STEM professionals because they feel the salaries are too low? If they aren't STEM professionals than where they are?
I should have also added a link to this pdf [1] "Security analysis of x86 Processor microcode" which uses the microcode parser.

[1] https://www.dcddcc.com/pubs/paper_microcode.pdf
Using the phone as a permanent store is an interesting concept. I'm excited to see tools like ipfs, Camlistore and others emerging in this space, because this is a problem I have too :).

Syncthing (https://syncthing.net/) is neat, but lacks support for iOS.
Good luck to him. There have been tricks to fake aged flavors wine, whiskey, and other aged alcohols for centuries. In CA mass-produced Chardonnay is aged in giant stainless steel with wood chips. Others make Bourbon with charred wood chips. There are tricks with pressure and temperature, wood, and other things that I'm sure that is secret and proprietary. It's not always clear where tradition ends and modern tricks begin because they've been doing some of these things for a long time.

But in the end these 'tricks' always produces an inferior product and are really only good for mass-produced wine/alcohol on the cheaper end.

As an aside, two things, there are some excellent aged rums out there. The complexity can be almost as good as aged whiskey and the texture/mouth-feel (don't know the proper word) can be like a 20-year+ scotch for something not aged as long.

Second, I see that he produced Absinthe in Spain which has similar thujone levels to absinthe that is legal in the u.s. USA absinthe is nothing like the real thing - it is more like drinking Pernod. In Switzerland, where Absinthe originates, the thujone level is 100x (?) what you get in the u.s. When you drink a fair amount of it it is like you have a high-contrast filter on your eyes. Further, modern absinthe is clear although I still prefer the green.
We can make it to Mercury. In fact, putting a spacecraft in orbit around Mercury is made more difficult because of the need to decelerate against the Sun's gravity.

If you look at the Wikipedia page for the MESSENGER mission, you'll see they tackled that problem by using gravity assists from Earth, Venus, and Mercury to reduce MESSENGER's relative velocity with Mercury and allow it to go into orbit. These gravity assists greatly reduced the propulsion requirements.
From my understanding, solar wind can only push the payload further away from the sun and there is no noticeable drag in space or the earth wouldn't orbit for very long.

You are probably thinking that you can sail upwind on a sail boat but it isn't the same in space. The boat's keel [1] and general shape keep it going straight which is necessary to sail upwind. That doesn't work in space.

Another factor is that a sail works much like an airplane's wing and isn't really 'pushed' by the wind. This allows the force to be perpendicular to the sail in some cases. To my knowledge (take this part with a grain of salt), solar sails works by receiving momentum as the photons hit. This could only push it away from the sun.

http://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/images/physics_sa...
I read somewhere that stress before and during exams is commonly as extreme as war and near death experiences. In some cases there isn't that much of a difference biochemically, so I think there is certainly some 'social relativity' even if the first world is very privileged.
Silshack/simplehack
> "Gravitational assists can help, but they can also help you get other places."

Without gravitational assists, you need ~30km/s to drop into the sun, and far less to go other places. With gravitational assists both can be easier, but going to the sun will still be one of the harder places to go.

That aside, if you are going to loop it around Venus, why not just hit Venus? I'm sure Venus wouldn't mind.
I was responding to:

> you don't need to fight to argue that the Russians had the "best" achievement by inventing qualifiers
Why not just send it into deep space?
Sure, a GA product like App Engine often has features that are in Alpha/Beta/Experimental states. That different than the major product being in a pre-release state.
Now it makes sense why there are so many foreign Masters students.
UK opposes international ban on developing 'killer robots'
Why don't you hear more classical music? What's in the new bands that Bach doesn't have?
If any of you are in the SF Bay Area, I'm organizing a hackathon[1] on May 29~31 in SF focused exclusively on immigration. Shoot me an email at my HN username at gmail dot com and I'd be happy to give you a generous discount code.

[1] http://www.up.co/communities/usa/san-francisco/startup-weeke...
Very nice work! One suggestion for a small feature - it would be nice if the screen where you select a level showed your best (lowest) number of moves for levels you have beaten, and once you have beaten all levels, showed the total moves for all levels.

The point of this is that I could then send this to my brother/coworker/arch-nemesis and challenge them to beat my score (as with the old Flash game "Magic Pen", for example).
I looked at it before - it seemed nice, but ... in those 13 years since the release, Lua has amassed the critical support to take over the world (LuaJIT2, FFI, stuff like Terra, MoonScript, Lua-in-JS, ...).

Lua and Squirrel being so close, it makes little practical sense to use Squirrel in a new project. Maybe for fun projects.

(And for something that's a little different, I recommend a look at https://github.com/aardappel/lobster - it's a breath of fresh air among scripting languages; practically, I still recommend Lua over anything else)
Ehhh, orbit's not a great idea, especially lower-earth orbit. There's already enough space junk in our orbit right now that we're running the risk of an orbital chain-reaction. The chain reaction could take out most of our satellites. I'm sure radioactive waste in our upper atmosphere wouldn't be a good thing, either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Terminate SSL at a local 'load balancer' (nginx, haproxy, vulcand) - voila, your setup is now substantially more similar to production.
Making Games with PyGame
Something similar to the described algorithm is actually implemented in AACS as traitor tracking.
No it isn't fixed for all devices. Windows XP is one example and even though it is no longer supported by Microsoft, at least 17% of devices on the internet are still using it.
Cloudways also became Google Cloud Platform Technology partner. And the invester in more than 10 cloud companies Ben Kepes wrote about it on Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/02/04/cloudways-ad...

And that's what they have built using Google Cloud Platform: http://www.cloudways.com/en/managed-google-compute-engine.ph...
One could probably script a customizable text editor (Emacs, Sublime Text, etc) to automatically init and commit on save to a local revision control repository.

That's kind of a hack though. OS X's Time Machine feature sounds similar to what you want, if it watched for changes constantly instead of every time period (hour I think?). Does anybody know of some open source project similar to Time Machine? I imagine it could be adapted to such a task.
Can we assume that the big spirit producers would embrace this kind of process, or instead, seek to tighten laws as to what can actually be called X or Y spirits, in order to specifically exclude these new processes?
Here's another article on C# exception filters along with a small keygenme demonstrating it's use: http://lifeinhex.com/catch-me-when-you-can/