skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For non-musicians, here's some terminology behind this:

There are 7 natural notes in (western) music: A, B, C, D, E, F, G (the white keys on a piano keyboard)

... plus 5 accidental notes that half-way between: A#, C#, D#, F#, G# also known as Bb, Db, Eb, Gb, Ab ... the black keys on a piano keyboard.

# means sharp (go up in pitch one-half step)

b means flat (go down in pitch one-half step)

7 naturals + 5 accidentals = 12 notes in the chromatic scale. These are the primary colors in music.

Chords are like secondary colors. Chords are combinations notes that harmonize well when played together. Typically chords are 3 or more notes spaced at one note or one-and-half notes apart. So the C Major chord is C + E + G played together.

Minor chords, noted with the lowercase "m" are made by dropping the "third" note down a half-step, so "C minor" or "Cm" is C + Eb + G, can also be expressed as C + D# + G

So put it all together, F#m means "F sharp minor" so the root note of the chord is "F sharp" and the next note from the F major chord, A#, is dropped down a half step from its major position to A natural, so the notes are F# + A + C#

Fortunately when playing an actual instrument you only memorize your finger positions to make the entire common chord shapes rather than thinking about the individual note under each finger.

The hook melody of song, the chord sequence that is repeated throughout the verse or chorus, is expressed as chord progression in Roman numeral 1 to 7:

I II III IV V VI VII

Why did we switch from letters to numerals now? Because lettered notes A, B, C, D, E, F, G are fixed positions (ie. hard-coded) and the numerals are relative positions (ie. abstracted) So the Roman numeral expression is a more general form of the melody structure. This lets you takes a progression like

C–G–Am–F (repeated over and over until you get a Grammy)

and expressed it as

I–V–vi–IV

.. which you can just shift up or down to another key and everybody loves your new hit song, you win another Grammy, and few people realize it's same damn song as before with new tempo and new lyrics!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%E2%80%93V%E2%80%93vi%E2%80%93...

...
To boil down why her clothing was considered "unprofessional", it should be safe to say that clothing that reveals the pectoralis major muscle is not considered professional.
Uh, the risk of life-threatening head trauma is significantly lower in a car. Cars are the safest form of personal travel.
Here is OP's TekpubTV video on RethinkDB (2 years old):
https://vimeo.com/60697270
Bitcoin.org in 2009
Realistically, any form of power generation could be used in space. It's really only a question of whether it's financially and practically feasible.
I've been interested to see if Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) ever become a thing.

From what I've read about LFTRs, they can produce a whole lot of power- the most efficient system produces 1000-MW(e) from 700kg of fuel.
That lasts approximately 12.5 years, give or take.

Obviously, thats on an Earth-based system and most spacecraft probably don't need anywhere close to 1GW.
92% Off for Online Coding Bootcamp with Coder Manual
Writing to memory before writing to disk can be safe if you do it right. You need to deploy multiple instances in a replica set with a quorum threshold to guarantee safety. This is what Cassandra provides off the box. I don't think MongoDB made it clear at the start to its users that you should never work with a single database instance if you don't want to lose data.
My favorite twist of this case were the people who tattooed encryption code on themselves so that they technically became munitions.

See http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/ for details.
At the end of ten years, you have to start over, since what you learned ten years ago is obsolete. Worse, the programmer boom that impelled you to get into programming is now over.
Orion is a really cool concept and it's a lot of fun to think about, but realistically any space propulsion system that horribly contaminates the atmosphere and fries every satellite anywhere near Earth is not an option.
The Drone Unicorn: DJI Seeking to Raise at $10B Valuation
Not at the moment, no. Although, if there is enough demand, it could certainly be done, sure!
OP here - many NoSQL/document DBs will trade off write acks for eventual consistency. I really liked their approach to pushing toward durability by default - that in particular was the thing that impressed me, which I should have been more clear about.
it's not a linkbait title, it's a really weird one (mixing registers/i.e. level of formality.) It sounds like someone setting their foot down, informally.
> It's cool if someone can do this, but who can afford to, especially in their 20s?

I spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina and repeatedly had people ask "Who has the time and money for that".

It's a myth that travel is expensive.

I managed a hostel in Ecuador for 5 months, and I would say the average backpacker was spending $10,000 USD / year to travel the world. And I mean the entire world. The vast majority of backpackers are somewhere in the 19-35 year old range. Though there is a good smattering of > 55 too.

$15,000 USD / year and you travel WELL - i.e. no shared rooms, lots of alcohol, 'fancy' restaurants etc. etc.

I know hostels are not popular in North America, trust me though, once you get out of there you'll catch on quickly.

For reference, I spent $13,000 USD / year TOTAL on my drive, which includes all expenses for the Jeep. Gas, parking, shipping from Panama->Colombia, insurance, etc. etc. Driving gets much cheaper per person when there are two of you (though to be clear, I was solo).

http://theroadchoseme.com is my blog of the drive, if you're interested.

I'm about to set off on a 2 year drive around Africa in my Jeep, I'm aiming to spend less than $20k / year. (Africa is more expensive to drive due to visas, price of gas, paying for secure camping, etc.)
'When you query with ReQL you tack on functions and “compose” your data, with SQL you tell the query engine the steps necessary (aka prescribe) to return your data:'

... what? ReQL and SQL are both declarative query languages: I don't really see the author is getting at. Is there an implication that SQL isn't declarative?

The only real difference is that the API is based around chaining function calls rather than expressing what is needed as a string - there are many SQL query builder APIs that will let you build SQL queries by chaining together function calls.
Understandably, most comments are gonna focus on App Store discovery, etc.

But one thing that stands out for me is a reliance on 3rd party frameworks and a lack of desire to learn new technology.

The problem with a framework is that when things break they can be a nightmare to fix. Work closer to the system frameworks and you face a steeper learning curve, but you gain confidence for when things go wrong.

As far as ever-evolving technology -- well, maybe it can feel daunting, but it's also exciting and fun.
https://github.com/djburdick/la-street-sweeping-maps
The reason for the link is _right_ there in the intro, assuming you clicked the link.

Sony has been engaged in some questionable activity with questionable organizations making questionable deals. The reason is transparency so illegal activity can be exposed.
Sleuth (1972), The Lion in Winter, Slaughterhouse Five, Field of Dreams, Princess Bride, Amadeus, To Kill a Mockingbird, Doctor Zhivago, The Third Man, The Ghost and Mrs Muir
No More Referrals: FB Friends API Shutting Down April 30
> - The Spacemacs doc is on their repo, not in Emacs! (except if you manually fire a buffer with SPC f f ~/.emacs.d/doc/DOCUMENTATION.md)

You can explore the doc for each layer by "SPC f e h". You can even jump to source from there.

> - Emacs has an interactive interface for editing configuration variables. You will arrive to this interface from the Emacs doc, but it does not have Spacemacs-like keybindings and I'm not even sure it's supposed to work with Spacemacs

Everything that works in stock Emacs should work in Spacemacs. Stock Emacs key bindings are always there. Spacemacs stuff, as its name implies, is in the SPC key.

> - I could not find the doc for ex/vim commands. I suspect there is no equivalent to ":h :foo"

I think it should exist. Maybe you need to ask the gitter chatroom. Stuffs like s/foo/bar works for me. However, even NeoVim wants to remove it: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/1089

> - In vim, it is possible from any mode to get back to the normal mode by typing 'ESC'. In Emacs, C-g aborts a keybinding. However those two are not unified by Spacemacs.

You do it with evil-escape: https://github.com/syl20bnr/evil-escape, which is built-in Spacemacs by default and press "fd to escape everything. You can change it to anything you want.

> - I use vim with several buffers. However launching "emacsclient -t foo.txt bar.txt" will open them sequentially, and I can not use :n / :N to go back and forth.

The next version you can use "SPC b n" and "SPC b p" to go back and forth. However, you can use "SPC b s" to switch between buffers and press "C-c o" to open another window side by side. To split window, use "SPC b -" to create a window below and "SCP b /" to create a window right. Jump to each window based on the number on its modeline, i.e. "SPC 1" jumps to window 1, "SPC 2" to jump to window 2.

> - The fact that there are several interactive interfaces for switching buffers and/or opening files is confusing. Typing a file-name in helm-mini creates a "fundamental" buffer that is not a file. I lost some work because of this.

It's a feature. It means that when you switch to a non-existent buffer, you can press RET to create it. It's quite handy to create a scartch buffer of a specific major mode. If you want to open a file, don't use a command that open buffer but a command that open files. I believe in Vim I can create empty buffers.
How will Java support work? I can only assume it will start a JVM for each lambda event.
I tend to be my own worst enemy when it comes to these things. I hit a roadblock, feel like an idiot, then beat myself up over it. What helps me is looking back at the kind of developer I was a year, 2 years, 5 years ago. It has been long, and sometimes incredibly slow and stagnant couple of years for me, but damn if I'm not twice the developer I was a year or two ago.
Poaching is a commonly used term to describe this. It's been used for a long time.
If you were a musician you'd know that in popular music the vast majority start on the 1 chord. Classical music probably does this less frequently, but it's nowhere around 1/5 of the time.
I've consistently heard the following two claims about thorium reactors:

1. They offer a number of advantages in safety, efficiency, input materials, byproducts. No comparative disadvantages.

2. The United States is not actively pursuing any plans to implement thorium reactors.

Is the above really true, or are there some comparative disadvantages to a Thorium reactor vs a traditional nuclear reactor? If the above is true, there must be some conflict of interest (imagine that, a conflict of interest in the domain of energy!) causing #2. Is there a legal issue?
>It is never too late to do something new.

Absolutely. Our individual lives aren't even a blip on the radar of life as a whole on our planet, let alone our universe. We get a very short amount of time to live, even shorter to live well (health, mobility, etc.). The idea of going to do something you dislike every day for 30-40 years of that very short time is just about the anti-thesis of what we should be doing with our time here.
> Not earth-shattering, but with ReQL all I need to do is attach a function

Thing is, some SQL databases have columnar storage, and in there selecting everything, then filtering with an attached function would eliminate the performance benefit of not selecting all of the fields.

This is why SELECT looks like it does. Not to mention it's much shorter than attaching a function for the purpose.

The author also himself acknowledges that:

> The downside is that your queries end up quite long and, for some, rather intimidating.

Ok so they're "quite long" and have less potential for optimizing the performance of. Amazing?

His example of creating specific indexes and views is also not new to SQL.

> There are 3 official drivers: Python, Ruby and Node.

Amazing?

> The query itself didn’t change at all – I could copy and paste it right in. I had to wrap it with connection info and a run() function, but that’s it.

So just like an SQL query, except I can connect to an SQL RDBMS from virtually any language I can think of, and not just a narrow selection of 3 script languages.

I sympathize with author's excitement, but from all his examples SQL feels like it has quite an edge both in availability and in terms of design and fit for the domain than a bunch of JS functions composed together (as much as I like composing functions together in JS).

I realize how much hard work the folks at RethinkDB have put into creating their product. But technology adoption is not driven by pity, it's driven by benefits. For a new type of DB to not be a flash in the pan it needs a lot more than being "stable and fast". It needs to offer significant additional benefits when compared to existing DBs. And I ain't seeing it.
OP here - I wanted to offer a comparison of the SQL vs. the ReQL query. Indeed if ACID is something you need, then yes a horizontally-scaling DB is probably something that deserves longer thought.

This is a broader discussion to be sure, and it's been had. Given that PG now supports jsonb, it does mean that yes, we get to have these discussions more.
Mastering any skill takes close to lifetime, but for "Why is everyone in such a rush?" there are a few main points:

- because one needs to pay one's bills,

- because using technology is cool; and waiting 10 years is not cool.

It is easy to say in retrospect that it was worth spending 10 years of learning something. But it is hard to make such commitment in advance (especially as most of such commitments are misses, by opportunity cost).

And actually I think that the biggest mistake in traditional teaching of school subjects is that they teach many years, but don't make you use it. (Compare to playing with a ball, when you do it before learning about classical mechanics.)

BTW: See "A Mathematician’s Lament"by Paul Lockhart http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsL...
"Why is everyone in such a rush?"

I don't think Mattan & the guys at one month rails are gona like this.
I seriously wonder what possessed him to tweet that, especially given that he already knew he was under scrutiny.

It strikes me as the tech equivalent of joking about bombs in the security line--yes, technically free speech, but pretty guaranteed to have some unfortunate results.
The problem is that the production methodologies for Pu-238 are ridiculous and have a ridiculous number of volatile critical dependencies in both the creation and harvesting process.

"This has been the method of choice at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site (SRS) production reactors. However, there are several shortcomings with this method of production. First, the production efficiency is quite limited, i.e., to approximately 13% efficiency. This is seen from the fact that the Pu-238 produced in the target after only 2.12 day's half-life decay, itself becomes a target for production of higher isotopes of plutonium, thus reducing the Pu-238 purity by producing Pu-239 and Pu-240. Second, this process produce a hazardous Pu-236 by-product. As noted on the decay chain, above, there is a η→2η or γ→η reaction that results in the production of Uranium-236 (U-236) and Pu-236. These reactions increase with exposure to fast neutron flux. Pu-236 decays to U-232, which has a hazardous gamma-ray energy emitting daughter product. Even a few parts per million U-232 increase the radiation exposure hazard to personnel dramatically. Lastly, Np-237 must be chemically purified before target fabrication. This is seen from the fact that Np-237 decays to Protactinium-233 (Pa-233), which in turn has a strong gamma-ray emission with its beta decay to U-233 (half-life 27 days). Therefore, the Np-237 was stored in solution at SRS and chemically processed immediately before fabricating targets. Solution storage of Np-237 may not be practical at an alternate production site."

Source: http://www.google.com/patents/US6896716

The extent to which this should worry our interstellar concerns is huge. The voyager 1 went several billion kilometers away from the Sun. You know it's crazy, it's so far away that it takes 15-20 hours for the signal to reach us.

The voyager 1 is probably going to go out in like 2020, but that's because of the Plutonium- 238.

There's 2 sites in the USA that can produce it.

Hanford in Washington State and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The Russians have Mayak, and thank goodness they kept making the stuff.

Hopefully we can pump some steroidal funding into High Flux Isotope Reactors.

I've been watching this issue since 2006. In 2009, someone finally spoke up about it and published some papers on it.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12653

Any NRE's or Particle Accelerator Designers on HN?
Does it write to a disk or to a log? If it writes to disk, it may still not be completely fail-safe unless it also writes to a log before writing to disk. Postgres for example has a write ahead log and it writes to disk before acknowledging the write.
Pu-238 has the highest energy density which is why its so useful (both as a weapon and an energy source). Its the cheapest to use because it adds the least amount of weight to the launch vehicle.
Typically because the hardware delivers audio in blocks. I know mostly about how USB works, but I imagine it applies to other hardware types as well.

USB has several transfer types: interrupt, bunk and isochronous.

Interrupt is initiated by the device so it wouldn't help you read variable amounts.

Bulk is good for mass data transfers, but has guaranteed access to the bus, so you'd possible get audio dropouts when accessing another USB device.

Isochronous can reserve bus bandwidth and have latency guarantees, but must occur on a fixed schedule. Since they are on a fixed schedule, they always have the same amount of data, hence a fixed block size.

Since data is arriving at the OS in fixed blocks, the lowest latency way to handle the data is deal with the blocks when the arrive. If you wanted to read variable amounts of data, you'd need to add a buffer on top that could hold a variable amount of data which would add latency.

Copying variable amounts of data isn't slow, but dealing with dynamic memory allocation is. If you needed to allocate a different sized block every few milliseconds you'd be spending the majority of your time allocating memory rather than processing audio.

This system can work very well: OS X, iOS, Windows and Linux can all get very low latencies. The issues with Android has nothing to do with block sizes, but something else in it's architecture.
Well, "any" is a very broad definition

As long as it doesn't have any (constantly) moving parts, doesn't have requirements relating to pressure or radiation exposure, works in a variety of temperatures, it could be used.

Solar panels and RTGs fit the bill today. Maybe the ASRGs have moving parts, given their name?
Right, I'd be a lot more forgiving of MongoDB if they had been bringing the product to market 10-15 years earlier.
Integration and miniaturization is a standard evolutionary path for products to take, trying to fight that is pointless.

The companies involved have researched the market and the needs of the market and come out with what we have now, trying to argue the end result is wrong would need data to show otherwise.

From an engineering stand point, integrated/monolithic hardware fails less, there's a whole class of failure scenarios removed (ie connectors and interconnects, better sealing, etc).

Hardware has reached the point where it's on the same level with every-day things people throw away and buy new versions of without even thinking, like kettles or toasters, it's fine to argue that's wasteful but that doesn't stop most of the world from doing so for practical reasons.
At the very least, they'd have to quadruple both the bike lane mileage and the Citibike coverage.
These are additional grants, in addition to his existing equity.
It's a pity you're getting downvoted, I thought it was funny.

On a serious note, presuming a significant increase in trust among all parties, wouldn't this idea radically change an ominous situation (Iran having weapons-grade plutonium laying around) into one with peaceful, mutually beneficial, trust-building cooperation between formerly antagonistic nations? Have not stranger things happened?
I agree it was ridiculous, I surmise that there's nobody now using it who was refraining from using it due to the contents of the PATENTS file.
As a Canadian I just finally learned the real difference between a true Robertson and a "Square Drive". No wonder I keep stripping so many bits! Fascinating!

See: Step 6: Square Drive
Bugsy Malone,

Tron,

Drugstore Cowboy

Kiki's Delivery Service
For some reason I had it in my head that most databases don't actually block until fsync() returns- instead, the guarantee you get is that:

# if execution continues, everything agrees on the state of the transaction

# if execution halts, because of a crash or whatever, you'll come back online at a consistent state from the past
Only if you're inside one.
A very well written article.
When you're competing for the cream of the crop, yes it's hard.
Apparently, the rate of production is enough for just one deep-space mission per decade.
I bookmarked this one from Arjuna as an antidote for bouts of "woe is me, everyone has more time and does more than me than me"-itis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076143

A taste: "You have to do the work. There is no one else that can do it for you. It is entirely up to you; actually, it has only ever been you, because it is you that rolls out of bed early to bring it. No one is going to do that for you. If you want to do it, then you will figure out a way to make it happen."
I think statistics is one of the most misunderstood field of mathematics relative to how much the general person believes he or she knows about it. I know this article was about researchers and not the general public, but I can definitely sympathize with them; I have a MSc in engineering physics and I still have to think three times about a number before I know that all assumptions I have made while calculating it were correct and not biased, and three times more about what this number means and what conclusions I can actually draw from it.
> Screens with an extra sub-pixel for light collection?

Hmm, that sounds intriguing. You might be on to something.

EDIT: The screen's backlight could be used to (partially) recharge its own battery.
Eternally Confuzzled
It loaded OK for me:

http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/my-academic-book-in-plain-text.html

It's html.
One real difference is that you get most of the benefits of an ORM framework right in the driver, without depending on other packages or frameworks. And the API is very consistent across different languages.

The biggest problem with composing SQL strings is that you have to be very very careful about SQL injections, and if you deal with that in a slightly sophisticated, reusable manner you are half-way to an ORM already. As far as I can determine, the ReQL drivers make injection attacks very difficult.
Today, roughly half of all requests from Chrome to Google servers are served over QUIC and we’re continuing to ramp up QUIC traffic

Google says they will eventually submit this to IETF and produce a reference implementation, but it is interesting how a company was able to quietly move a large user base from open protocols to a proprietary protocol.