skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Until a few years ago, almost nobody did things this way (the tools just weren't there); and even now, there are plenty of people who don't. It's too much overhead to deal with if you're spinning servers up and down only infrequently.
Were this universally the case, creationism would have ceased to have adherents several generations ago. Therefore, I submit that your position is only true for rational positions reached and held by rational people who are willing to be convinced by rational discourse.
Why is that so? It's not a particularly dumb question for many people that don't know anything about launch costs or the massive amount of energy. I'd bet many people think if you can get it out past the moon's orbit it should start to fall into the sun.

And even if it was a flippant question, showing exactly how wrong it is through an in-depth analysis is a great way to refute such positions.
Yup! It depends on whether you pass behind of or in front of the planet you're using to gravity assist. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:_Gravity_As...
Find your Parse.com slow queries
I've toyed with the idea of having separate titles & job descriptions for "Software Features Engineer" (those responsible for pumping out user-visible features) and "Software Infrastructure Engineer" (those responsible for the long-term health of the code). In my experience, they really are completely different roles, down to the languages used (features engineers tend to use Python, Ruby, JS, and other dynamic languages, while infrastructure engineers tend to use C++ or Java), attitudes, personality types (infrastructure engineers tend to be much more attentive to detail), priorities, and points in the lifespan of the product when they are most useful. There's already precedent for creating a new job title to solve an organizational problem, eg. Site Reliability Engineer.

Many big companies have such a split in their org chart, with separate "infrastructure" and "features" teams reporting up to different managers, but IMHO that's the wrong split. Very frequently you want a cross-functional team with both infrastructure & features engineers on it, but they remain different roles, just like you might embed a UX designer and UX researcher on a product team even though their job descriptions are very different.
Just out of curiosity, how did you end up with options (not straight equity) if you founded the company?
Ask HN: Long time iOS developers, are you using storyboards?
I've been at this for a couple years, and I'm finding that storyboards appear to be more restrictive than useful when creating dynamic and animated UI elements, considering you need to manage not only the views, but the associated constraints as well.

From the last blog post I read a year ago, Google's iOS developers are designing UIs in code. Given how Google's Inbox app looks, I totally believe it.

Is UI-in-code considered the standard for everyone else designing complex UIs?
Isn't another perfectly plausible explanation that the revenue from the main product is so robust it is fueling an expansion into related markets?
Not true - sometimes a dumb question exposes confusion which when corrected reveals a smarter answer. Same reason testing works: if you're worried that your implementation (understanding) is wrong, put in malformed data (ask a dumb question) and see what you get out.
And how would any of these 10x engineers feel about doing javascript a/b tests all day
Most people don't have such ... strongly-held ... beliefs about rocket science as they do their origin.
Calamari – core deployment scripts and tools used by Octopus Deploy
How to fix rootpipe in Mavericks and call Apple’s bluff about rootpipe fixes
Is it investors that attracts startups to a city, or startups that attract investors to a city, or something else?

Everyone I've heard talking about transforming cities into startup hubs, always frames it as "make some good startups and everything else will come."
> Whether confirmations happen instantly (violating physical speed of light constraints imposed by reality) or take minutes or even months (ahem, Visa etc)

Visa payment confirmations take a second. Until settlements are final it takes 6 months because of chargebacks. However that's because of the Chargebacks and not because the system is incapable of settling quickly on the side of Visa.

The Bitcoin design does not permit that, because you cannot forcefully charge a user later or reimburse them. The protocol has no support for that.

> Please, tell me the "correct" number of transactions for a civilization such as ours would create daily during normal activity. What is the "right" number and how should it be decided?

The correct number is infinite. Whatever the amount of transactions is, the system needs to scale to that level. Banks have found various ways to achieve that by layering different systems together, Bitcoin however has no solution for this issue.

> As for Stellar and Ripple I would encourage you to read the recent discussion on HN where critical ledger vulnerabilities were enumerated quite thoroughly again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687

Those are only vulnerabilities if you already find the current banking system vulnerable. Fundamentally banks that exchange payments need to trust each other today. Ripple or Stellar just accept this and accept that as part of their designs. Within that frame of thought, the system is secure.

> "Does not scale"... well, to be fair, Visa also can't handle 100 quadrillion transactions per second.

It does not have to, because the system for the most part is a black box. How it works internally is irrelevant for the operation. If the Visa network would hit a technological stumble stone, they can replace parts of it or rewrite individual transactions. You cannot do that with Bitcoin.

> 51% attacks don't do what you think they do. Having lots of hashrate does not mean that consensus rules get thrown out the window. If that was true then the bitcoin network wouldn't have survived its first 12 months.

Having lots of hashrate can do quite a few things to your network. The reason bitcoin survived the first 12 months was a combination of many factors. If you want to bootstrap a cryptocurrency today that is bitcoin compatible you will have a problem on your hand. Miners just need to point their rig elsewhere and you're done.

> Hopefully my response has encouraged you (or someone else) to think carefully and critically.

I hope this goes both ways.
Dealing with self-modifying code must be one of the hardest tricks to pull off. Saw a notice in TODO about memory leaks, I guess that means there is actually some support for this? Even with leaks that sounds quite impressive.
Just wait until parenthood...
Hiring Lessons from the New England Patriots' Head Coach
I'm neither an immigrant nor an employer, but I care. In the comments I learned a fair bit about issues with my countries immigration policies which I did not already know.
Not sure how Ruby the language is unique here. Doesn't the rest of the statement apply when you substitute any other language?
Ask HN: What to do when you have hit the salary ceiling?
Hi, need a bit of advice here. I am a software professional with 8 years experience. I am in Europe.

I am truly a full stack developer meaning I can code in java, javascript, Python, Erlang and I am learning scala and GO. I know distributed systems very well. Maintain heavily loaded cassandra and hadoop systems on a daily basis. I setup continuous delivery for my company and I do all things devops starting from chef code to automating out 400 node AWS cluster which changes dynamically.

I can learn anything in no time. I have been a late bloomer meaning I slacked off for quite sometime. Joined a startup and rediscovered the love for technology. used Linux for the first time and now I help people in my company with all things linux. I am a computer science graduate from a very reputed university. My basics are clear, so learning something is really never hard for me.

All the above in the last 3 years.

Now here is the dilemma: I have hit the salary ceiling. I make good money but it's just impossible here to make more money as an employee. Startup in Europe don't pay much and for we don't have the US culture where better gets paid more.

What do I do? I want to make more money. I can bring a lot on the table for a company if they pay me. I don't want to just settle for whatever I get paid. I want to learn more, work more and get paid more.

I am not the startup kind of person. I just don't have it in me. However, I can join someone else's idea. But I can't go for low pay and equity. I need more salary.
This Week in HN (Apr 10th, Podcast)
You are 100% right. That suddenly make me dislike this list quite a lot, as it suggest that it is a technical achievement to not use SNI. I have seen several times how SNI has been the primary reason for not supporting https, as winxp support was seen as more important.
Simple: Just invent a rocket that runs on nuclear waste. Then you have all the fuel you need to get the rocket there.
(joking)
Agreed. I've actually been reading this recently- not quite to the end.

Also interesting is that I think King's latest movie, A Good Marriage (2014), may have been loosely based on an idea he submits as a exercise to the reader in On Writing: iirc, King describes a situation which involves a woman estranged from her abusive husband being home alone while the child is at school and the husband unexpected comes into the house.

King asks the reader to write a short story based on this situation and send him and to send him an email with the story and the readers thoughts and how they came to write it.

I've not seen the movie or read Full Dark, No Stars (2010) that contained the novella it is based on, but that situation seemed similar.
"Why can't we launch waste into the sun?" doesn't really signal irrationality. If they prefaced it with "I believe the earth is 6000 years old and I wonder..." then maybe you'd have a point.
I had to solve tests not unlike the chinese one from the article you refer (less complex, but closer to first one than to second) to get accepted into university - and never had any use for any of those skills.

This called "admission math" and despised by people who are into real math. It's all grinding values without understanding where they lead.

I had a whole class failing to apply basic logarithm2 in a bisection algorithm and they had no idea what's going on. They didn't see logarithm as a tool! They solved a lot of questions with half dozen of uneven logarithms, but they had no idea when they met one in a real life.
http://egeurok.ru/resh_mat/10_11kl_Mordkovich/5/43.22.jpg I'm talking about craziness like this.
For sub-millimeter particles, there is the Poynting-Robertson effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting–Robertson_effect
The Journalism Collective Whose Data Analysis Made 30 Fascist Politicians Resign
Can you scroll down? There's an article below the fold (which I didn't notice until investigating your comment).
I'm not rocket scientist, but it seems like the author is calculating a decreasing spiral into the sun rather than an impact. Why not slingshot around a planet and barrel into the sun with all of the orbital velocity still intact.
They need to launch when the orbital plane of the station is directly overhead. The earth rotates surprisingly quickly, so even a minute or two later the plane of Dragon's orbit would be far enough off from the plane of the station that a couple expensive inclination change maneuvers would be necessary to line them up again.
I'm really looking forward to trying a product of this system. As a fan of complex whiskies (mostly Scotch) and wild, chaotic rums, I'm wondering how close it can get to the myriad of flavors and textures those aged drinks provide. Differences in barrel types are immediately obvious in whisky - try Balvenie or other distilleries that offer different barrel-aging options.

I worry some, because as a musician, I'm all too familiar with the shortcomings of digital emulations of classic sounds. They can get 98%, but that last two percent is really bothersome and weak. I hope these new whiskies aren't like that!
That's engineering, not physics. There is a lot of chemistry research that goes into battery technology, but AFAIK Tesla's batteries use tried-and-proven lithium ion tech.

Also, he dropped out of his Ph.D. on the first week. So it appears that he didn't learn too much physics in academia. Rocketry and electric cars don't involve too much advanced physics and he has top notch experts working for him in all the relevant fields.
May be it's not 90% but I have a friend who experienced the same thing, she gave up after 2 weeks once she realized the lie.
I honestly think the US government is lazy in this aspect. It's not that hard to track down those consultancies. Not relevant but that reminds me of the tax case where an unemployed girl filed for $2M tax return and got the money (only got caught later when she lost her card).
> let's be real, this country doesn't have nearly enough STEM professionals to meet demand

... at current salaries.
Actually, it turns out that the headline is taken directly from the UNSW press release:

http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/breakthrough-o...

So it's not CE magazine that's lying (if they're lying), it's the University of New South Wales. And if you're going to accuse UNSW of lying you need a stronger argument.
I would argue it's a waste not because it's stupid, but because it's just extraordinarily trite:

http://www.reddit.com/search?q=nuclear+waste+sun&restrict_sr...

...variations include "why can't we put garbage in the sun", "why can we put nuclear waste in volcanoes", etc. It's a great question coming from a 6-year-old, but if an adult asks it, he's simply not the kind of person who will spend one second in critical thought, or in researching anything himself. So, yeah, not worth it.
You also learn how to infer new patterns.

When I started to learn English any non-normal form like 'ye olde' or 'lotsa' threw me into stupor. Now I can derive meaning from context while gaining better understanding.
Get married maybe
I was great at this and would have solved it before that age (not actually a brag). I would never be in that olympiad. I was not good at maths when it turned from numbers to letters.

When solving this I didn't apply any form of maths, but non-articulated abstract reasoning I would have no idea how I'd put on paper.

What I'm saying is: Is this really math? I'm great with puzzles, not math. They are not translatable for me.
Naturally, Planet is hiring: https://www.planet.com/careers/#openings
Google Fiber plans expansion, then TWC makes speeds six times faster
You're not completely powerless compared to others: you can marry your girlfriend ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...
CRAZY Little Girl Destroys Phone with Baseball Bat
it wasn't so easy

I think you meant "it wasn't so hard"
I've been curious about his last paragraph for a while - send trash out into nowhere - and unless I'm being an idiot, it looks like we'd still be paying (at the author's implied Saturn-V costs) ~48 million USD per short ton of waste.

Compare this to Yucca Mountain's current cost of $9b for ~77k short tons of storage (~$117k/sh tn) and it's still pretty awful.

We do get the ongoing benefit of no upkeep and happy NIMBYs for spacebound waste, but there are always the downsides of making a mess in our space-backyard (what will the aliens think when they come to visit? How embarrassing. Almost as bad, what if it comes back a la Futurama or gets in the way of future endeavors) and losing access to that waste if we figure out a means of making use of waste in the future.
The 3DR Solo Is One Scary-Smart Drone
“Most black holes are formed when stars collapse,” Ivy said.
“But there’s a theory that some of them were created shortly
after the Big Bang. The universe was lumpy. Some of the lumps
might have been dense enough to undergo gravitational
collapse. They could form black holes that instead of
weighing what a star weighs could be a lot smaller.”
“How small?”
“I don’t think there’s a lower limit.”

Yes there is. Black holes lose mass by Hawking radiation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

A black hole smaller than 0.8% Earth masses loses more mass than it gains from the cosmic microwave background, and will eventually evaporate.
is there any cap on how many visas one single company can apply to?
Nobody has brought this up yet:

If we deprecate HTTP, then certificates can be used as tools of censorship by governments.

We require an alternative to the current HTTPS scheme first.
Qualcomm plays down activist call to break itself up
It is really easy to install using http://brew.sh/
These are products in use by the industry for video
http://www.civolution.com/
http://www.vobileinc.com/technology/
The ~30km/s figure is what you'd need to drop it straight into the sun, no spiraling involved.

Gravitational assists can help, but they can also help you get other places. Getting to the sun would still be ridiculously hard compared to the alternatives.
While it's possible to inject the dragon capsule anywhere and get it's orbit in line with the ISS, its much more economical to inject it really close to the ISS so they dont need to do as much work to finish the trip.
It's a dumb question if you know anything about orbital mechanics, which the author purports to do.

> I'd bet many people think if you can get it out past the moon's orbit it should start to fall into the sun.

This thought is actually true, to a first-order approximation. If you time it right and use gravity slingshot(s) to bleed off velocity and/or adjust the direction towards the sun. The amount of delta-V needed after the moon is basically noise compared to the amount needed just to leave the surface of the earth (which is HUGE, as the author points out).

It's still probably cost prohibitive, but the delta-V required is a lot less than the author thinks.
We are not teaching actual solving skills because it's hard to check for them.

You can't just give a new problem to a bunch of kids and expect them to yield a measurable result. Some may be already familiar with this kind of problems, other may be only able to get ideas when bouncing them against other kids. It's a mess.

Solving a hundred of similar questions? That gives you real performance score - how children concentrate under stress while doing boring repetitive tasks.

Grading is evil.
would not want to see how many batteries or other storage you would want to put in to support a hospital. without some easy power generation you could be in a lurch real quick
Even if it were actually difficult to get to the sun, there are other options that are nearly as effective.

Jupiter would be just as good of a dump or we could just launch on an extra solar trajectory. Hell, we could just put it on a large, non-equatorial orbit around the Earth and it would be effectively gone with the added benefit of being able to recover it should we find a reason to. Space is a big enough place to dump an Earth's worth of trash.

The only problems are cost and the risk of explosion during launch.
I imagine for this article the "office" was a call center bullpen type setup. It is not surprising to see increased productivity due to the reduced distractions of actually having a private personal workspace provided by the _employee_ at home.

To keep costs down it seems most companies now design for maximum bodies per square foot rather than productivity. I really wish companies, especially those with the ability to absorb some extra costs, would actually try to design for productivity and not solely cost savings.
Google Doodle Pony Express Game
> 8. Ask yourself frequently, "Am I having fun?"
> The answer needn't always be yes. But if it's always no, it's time for a new project or a new career.

Reminds me of this quote from Steve Jobs's commencement address[0]:

> When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

[0] https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
Everybody already knew about golden ratio myst. But leave us to believe in it, so beautiful, so magical, so majestical.
I feel like some of this applies to programming and creativity in general. The difference with programming, is too often they don't go back and edit the first draft.
> The Bitcoin design does not permit that, because you cannot forcefully charge a user later or reimburse them. The protocol has no support for that.

Well, yes, it's true that there's no direct "chargeback" primitive. But really giving someone back some fungible BTC is really just a matter of signing another transaction, which is already a primitive in the protocol or whatever.

> The correct number is infinite.

There are real physical limitations to information processing objects: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/The%20physics%20of%20informa...

> Whatever the amount of transactions is, the system needs to scale to that level.

.. even given the existence of physical limits? I suspect that a correct number is going to be "a system that allows any transaction to occur, but that prioritizes settlement" or something. This is the sort of problem that deserves stochastic simulation methinks.

> Banks have found various ways to achieve that

(Surely you don't mean infinite transaction volume. I'll assume for now that you don't.)

> Those are only vulnerabilities if you already find the current banking system vulnerable. Fundamentally banks that exchange payments need to trust each other today. Ripple or Stellar just accept this and accept that as part of their designs. Within that frame of thought, the system is secure.

Huh, actually I still disagree with you. So, I would argue that the current banking systems are using a different technical system for securing their accounts. They are not using decentralized consensus. They are not using "distributed systems". They are using something very different. They do not have to worry about replication failures or sybil nodes. Ripple, Stellar and Bitcoin all claim to, and I suspect only Bitcoin does based on my examination of their implementations and consensus mechanisms... [as elaborated in that link]

> they can replace parts of it or rewrite individual transactions. You cannot do that with Bitcoin.

Hmm that is an interesting claim. Do payment channels count as rewriting transactions? This is where transactions are replaced with successor transactions before they are confirmed in a block in the history. (my 2 second summary)

> Having lots of hashrate can do quite a few things to your network.

So 51% attacks (causing deep reorgs) can make their own coinbase transactions, change the order of transactions, fiddle with transaction malleability, exclude or censor transactions, include later transactions earlier in history. But they can't violate consensus rules (is not a trust issue), and I was replying to this aspect from your article text. Btw, reorgs happen quite frequently at the tip of the blockchain. Deep reorgs are exceedingly rare by comparison, but you can definitely catch a reorg of 1 to 3 blocks deep multiple times per day.

> [thinking carefully] I hope this goes both ways.

Always. It's been a pleasure. :-)
Startup Ecosystems Take Time (2009)
Future College Graduates and Unhappy Employees: Create a Personal Brand