skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There seems to be a bug with the heat shields – they don't have mass, so with some capsules the centre of mass is too high and they flip during re-entry. This kills the crew.

But otherwise, yeah, you're not supposed to bring back more than crew and the experiment results, unless you build a space plane.
He could have been a complete nut, or...

I have tried dowsing for water and found it very accurate.

We had a problem with the water supply to a house. There was a spring that fed a collection tank through some pipes under agricultural land, we guessed that a tractor had squashed the pipes somewhere along their length. A backhoe was booked for the following day so it didn't really matter whether we got any results or not but we decided to try dowsing to see if we could work out the path of the pipes, just for a bit of fun more than expecting it to really work.

We used some bent aluminium rods and walked about a bit in the field sticking twigs into the ground wherever the rods moved. This worked for some family members, not for others. The next day the backhoe dug out the old wooden pipes and they were exactly underneath where we had placed the twigs on the surface but several feet down.
Tell us something we don't know: Kevin Rudd's site classified as a weapon
And the French equivalent: https://nos-oignons.net
COM is indeed an interesting beast and very useful. Being able to integrate other programs into yours, relying on COM to do so is very helpful. I don't know of a way on Linux or OSX to embed a word processor to work on documents but never show the user (but this might be due to my lack of knowledge about those systems - I would welcome being enlightened). I once wrote something that processed a plethora of Word documents using Word via COM to extract data from them and shove it into a database.

I can't fully remember how I did it but I recall type libraries, including generated headers etc. but I remember being impressed by it.

And as you state, all calls within Windows rely on COM. Stop the RPC service and observe as your system becomes unusable.
I had read Sam Altman's blog on postheaven, I really liked that blogging platform, it is clean with more focus on the text content rather than the pictures.
Unfortunately, this attitude is unjustified. Gladwell does research, but he'd be basically as reliable if he didn't bother. He doesn't use or understand the research he does.
Google offers cash support to Europe's news groups
The Linus' explanation is here:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1930358/focus=193...

"Just to make sure, I did a system-wide profile (so that you can
actually see the overhead of context switching better), and that
didn't change the picture."

"The real problems seem to be in dbus memory management (suggestion:
keep a small per-thread cache of those message allocations) and to a
smaller degree in the crazy utf8 validation (why the f*ck does it do
that anyway?), with some locking problems thrown in for good measure.
"
Show HN: A tool to audit your Google Analytics implementation
> DBUS seems like a solution looking for a problem: The majority of the time there is no real reason to have such a complex layer of abstraction for IPC, when the system already provides much simpler alternatives.

Indeed. I just use shm_open()+mmap(MAP_SHARED) and go about sharing my data between processes, and have had no problems whatsoever. Then throw in sem_open() so only one process is locking the data at a time. Wrap all that in a 2KB header and it's trivial to use in any project.

It would seem that modern computing is all about building abstractions on top of abstractions, to solve 'problems' nobody ever had. Nobody ever seems to consider the costs of such complexity (in terms of maintenance, understanding the system as a whole, attack vectors, etc.)

By all means, if you need a super complex system with tons of features like D-bus, great! But I am pretty confident that Mousepad (Xfce text editor) doesn't need D-bus just to open a text file in a new tab of an existing window.
I would prefer to just make it illegal to hold private ownership of intellectual property for an unreasonable length of time (eg: longer than 28 years after publication).
> Does it reflect badly to leave my role before a year is out?

No. I think 4 months is long enough to know whether a position is a poor fit. Resign with this reason, work your notice and move on.

The problem here I think isn't the fact that you are leaving within 12 months, this happens all the time, the problem is that your next position is likely to be the same.

There's no perfect software job. Poor practices and technical debt is everywhere. Even these big name startups will have to grapple with these problems. Most people are not motivated enough to go above and beyond to fix these problems, because it's not their company. Why would I reduce the test suite runtime to below the current 90 minutes? Why would I refactor or pay off technical debt? After all the features have been shipped. The boss is happy.

I've often felt as you do, wanting to start my own business to implement what I see is the best practices I've come across. The only thing stopping me is a lack of a good idea and that I need to make rent and take care of my wife which is making me very risk adverse.
TSA Warns of Possible ISIS Attack on U.S. Soil
Yes, of course, I mean all the waves on the infrared side of the light (those that we call "radio waves") not on the ultraviolet one. And I mean not including heating effects, which are already measured.
Doesn't mention Fitts's law[0] at all, which is what matters here. Having a visual gap doesn't matter as long as the area is reactive: see how you can click the top left/right corners on OS X, yet the highlighted target is clearly not extending there. Same for the Dock icons, where the icons are visually perceived as being within a square, yet moving the pointer along the bottom edge still registers: although it is visually perceived as being outside the square (below the glowing dot even!), there is a logical shadow of interactivity hanging below, introducing a slight cognitive dissonance in exchange for a huge boost in usability.

This was indeed a huge complaint on Windows 95, that MS fixed later on without any visual change (98? 2000? I can't remember).

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law
Were you using threads? Python really should not crash, but combine it with library imports implemented in c and threads, and you get really subtle race conditions which result in segfaults. I have myself been force to debug why Python segfaulted, and it was a standard library call which internally used threading, and that caused a conflict with a c library that was not threading safe.
A CS degree won't teach you how to program computers. I realized that early in my career, when I observed that I - with a physics degree - was better than most young coders with CS degrees.

There are other kinds of degrees that are useful to programming. My Physics, EE, linguistics for AI, say.
Is there a document that explains the why's and wherefores of dbus? Aside from those posts.
A lot of the backfire could have been avoided if they they had this info prominently displayed on the homepage.

I can't tell you how many times I read about these knee jerk reactions from people with their self imposed boycotts of the entire Steam platform. The reason most given? "Because Valve takes 75% and only leaves 25 for the mod maker".

These people were so quick with their math they never even got to the fact that a) Bethesda takes a cut, the highest one at that and b) this split came from Bethesda and did not originate at Valve.

But, as these things go, have one of these people spew out this misinformation, get enough people to echo this and many others will take it as fact. You can then try to tell them as often as you like how that is wrong and they will just downvote you because "you're just a valve shill" resulting in nobody seeing the actual facts and the echo chamber happily moves down the wrong way getting more and more worked up.

In the end, it was just an option to treat mods like DLC and games. Make em either free or charge for em. Nothing more. If mod makers want to make their work free, literally nothing changed. If they want to they could have started chargin for them. And if people didn't like it, they just didn't have to buy them.
If there was a mod that was once free and was then moved to the pay side, people could have let the maker know that was a dick move. And if a paid mod breaks because of a game update, people could have let the maker know to better fix that asap or they'll demand a refund. Only with free mods you could say "yeah, it broke with the newest update. don't have time to fix. working on other stuff". If you sell it, you have to support it. But that is up to the mod maker, not the owner of the distribution platform.
Show HN: Kolor Game
I don't get the use case, why can't the programs use DBus to negotiate the streaming over some low-overhead transport? Why are people so insistent on ramming a square peg into a round hole?
Apple Watch: 25 hidden tips and tricks
Bring spreadsheet functionality without spreadsheet interface into HTML
Surely you realize that this is cultural.

In my country there is very little crime, and the police very much only exist to serve the population and they are always trying to help.

Common sense here is that it would be foolish to think that the police are not trying to help, and I am very glad that the US's relation with the police is not an entirely global problem.
There's a BBC radio programme talking about bad forensics. Only one episode so far, but it talks about some of the same cases.

"Forensics in Crisis"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05r3tf1

Edit this submission links to http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/02/18/a... which is a better read.
New Knowledge Sharing Site changing the way we connect with each other
> Magnificent link

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, may I recommend reading Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis.

> does anyone know of *nix (preferably Linux) DE that does it the OS X way?

Gnome 3 does it slightly differently (menu entries get collapsed into one) and tries hard to respect Fitts's law, to the point of being quite innovative in how submenus work (they expand instead of branching in a tree). If you approach it with an open mind, it's quite nice.

KDE used to have an option to put the menubar on top. Plasma changed a lot of things, so I don't know if this still stands.
I think IQ is probably a quality of life advantage (on the whole), but not a quantity of life (as measured in generations, not lifespan).

So, I'm agreeing with you in a strict selection sense.
I'm having trouble understanding this line of reasoning:

> purely due to the founder effect, not an effect of inbreeding per se

Genetic bottlenecks greatly amplify the effects of any genetic abnormalities for obvious reasons. It sounds like you assume inbreeding and genetic scarcity are two different things when they're not.

Yes, the founders brought these genes into the population. That is the whole point when we're making observations based on the inbreeding which caused a higher incidence of symptoms as compared to the mainland human population - exactly because there is a high chance for recessive traits to be expressed.

If you mean inbreeding does not necessarily lead to a higher mutation rate, you are correct. But that was not implied by the comment you're quoting.
All of this points to the fact that it is just so hard to find out about "reality". And when egos are involved triple that. Actually, you could probably define ego to be the denial of reality.

I'm still waiting for particle physicists to do double-blind experiments. (Not going to happen.)
Samsung Removes “OK Google” from Galaxy S6
That title has got to be written in homage to the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain, which had to be disbanded when its founder, a Mr Stephen Pile, added an application for it in his Book of Heroic Failures and it got 60,000 applications. A true victim of its own success. As a failure, a failure.
Preventing cot death with a wi-fi router
11 Tech Tips for Teachers
Apes reveal secrets to good sleep
But do you have evidence for the assertion that there is a negative correlation between intelligence and reproductive success? I read somewhere (can't find the source) that smart guys on average actually have more children than stupid ones, and that for women fertility is about the same.
Seems like that document has been disappeared from the FCC website.
LibreOffice uses UNO, which is their own version of COM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Network_Objects
It's funny how some of the more advanced cosmological theories sound as if they came straight from the minds of stoned teenagers.
To wit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

The universe is a strange place indeed.
By moving their cheese.
because they want the square hole for a reason, the square hole being a unified in-kernel IPC system.

Greg KH has given a few talks/blogs about the design goals of kdbus. https://lwn.net/Articles/551969/
I don't know. I'm not advocating kdbus for multimedia, I'm just repeating what I've heard. I think one of the driving forces behind kdbus is Samsung who are interested in kdbus for Tizen.
Paul Allen is well known to have one of the largest super-yachts in the world. I'm not sure Ballmer even has one.
Lethal Injection Problems Lead States To Re-adopt “Gruesome” Execution Methods
Before jumping to the exercise/project/exam parts, you need to study the theory, no? Unfortunately, lecture videos are password protected - only for UNSW associated persons...
You've got it entirely backwards here - the entire article was about an island in which freedom of speech does not exist. If he'd been free to say what he wanted (and he did very, very little of that), then he wouldn't have been banned from the island.
"a bag of salt water, which is what a cell is"!!? Wow. It always amazes me how physicists manage to reduce the extremely complex and beautiful world of biology for their own computational comfort. Is your brain simply a "bag full of bags of saltwater"? The SAR test rationale assumes it is.
I would accept a compromise of some sort of compulsory licensing. You still retain ownership, but after N years you are required to license your IP to anybody who asks for a fixed, predetermined licensing fee.
Clojure Pipelines
Super good piece. Science has a real PR problem though and that will be hard to fix, the public image of scientists is one that is mostly one of fear and distrust in spite of the visible good that science has done in almost every life.

The media really aren't helping here. If 40 years ago 'being a scientist' was a great thing to aspire to as a kid nowadays you're more likely to hear the same thing about kids wanting to become lawyers or politicians.

Never mind that the lawyers and the politicians are more often than not the anti-pode of constructive contributions to society.
Two posts were merged, that comment came in from the other one
> The claim was that the population size of Tristan da Cunha is problematic. I still haven't seen any direct evidence presented of this fact.

You linked to an article about the higher incidence of asthma on that island yourself (above), and the reason why the number of individuals is so high directly traces to the islanders' gene pool.

However, I wouldn't say the population size is unsustainable. They are more likely to be decimated by a random disease or, over generations, by a shared mutation. But the population is not nonviable. The issue is more that, to the modern humanitarian mind, they will have to deal with more ill effects due to the genetic monoculture.
Large packets, I'm not sure. For a long time, you've been able to attach a file descriptor (e.g. one end of a pipe) to a message, and then send bulk data over the file descriptor.

My understanding of this whole thing was that most of the car companies thought they should try using linux for their console / entertainment / etc systems. Electrical and mechanical engineers seem to all only use windows and not know anything about linux, so they asked themselves "what's the bus on linux?" and found D-bus, the desktop bus used by desktop environments and utilities, for a handful of messages a minute.

They used it to send frequent sensor data to all sorts of services that might be interested, like digital gauges, sound distribution, etc. They didn't realize that there are lots of good low-level IPC mechanisms available on linux, and they should have probably used 0mq, or a scheme based on unix sockets with filesystem permissions based access control, etc.

Anyway, they realized that D-bus had way too much overhead, and instead of porting to some other IPC, got to work accelerating D-bus with additional kernel functionality, such as the AF_BUS which was rejected by the linux networking maintainers. (Though that was probably a better idea than kdbus.)

How exactly GregKH got into this project, I'm not entirely sure. He is relatively friendly with the systemd developers. He's paid by the Linux Foundation, and many of those car companies are members of the Linux Consortium, or something like that, I think. I dunno. Apparently a lot of people used D-bus accidentally, and now the thing to do is make the kernel make it faster.
A little but when you're screwing these people you're negotiating position is always going to be hurt. Show them the tech works without screwing them and you may get them to come around.
I can make two observations and hypotheses from the profiling results, which agree with Linus' conclusion of "bad user-level code":

- Memory allocation/deallocation are taking the most time.

- All the percentages for each function are very small.

The former is a characteristic of code which heavily abuses dynamic allocation. It's surprising to see how many programmers are not aware of the overhead it adds and would malloc()/free() frivolously when something simpler would suffice. This is also often accompanied by copious amounts of unnecessarily copying data around. I've worked with small embedded systems where every use of dynamic allocation would need to be justified thoroughly in code reviews; perhaps these developers would benefit from being put through the same process.

The latter is a phenomenon which arises from "excessive modularity": the functionality of the system has been split into so many little pieces that the time each function contributes to the overall total is tiny. Instead of seeing an obvious "80% of the time is being spent here" that could easily be targeted for optimisation, that 80% is scattered amongst several dozen functions each taking 1-2% each. The bottleneck isn't concentrated in one area --- the whole system is uniformly inefficient. It's extremely difficult to optimise a system like this because nothing in particular stands out as being optimisable. I've had to optimise some large Java applications that were like this, and the solution was basically to remove most of the code and rewrite it to get rid of many chains of indirection.
Whatever the origin of the brain organ in evolution, There has certainly been a lot of novel inventions after that time. A lot of interesting "design" has happened for a long time after that invention, separated by divergence.

Cephalopods are very distantly related to us. Our last common ancestor with cephalopods is also our last common ancestor with slugs and hookworms. Yet many species are obviously highly intelligent. Their intelligence seems to work very differently from vertebrate intelligence.

So, it's interesting thing that some descendant species of whoever invented brains opted out. But either way some sort of convergence did happen. Maybe brains evolved twice. Maybe they evolved many times from a common primitive nerve bundle that performed a very different function. Maybe this happened in a tangle of back and forth.

The aye-aye lemur and the striped possum both evolved a long bug catching finger. We know that it's convergent rather than common ancestry because (among lots of reasons, but this is a neat example) it's a different finger. But, they both had fingers to elongate in the first place. So, given the same machinery to evolve and the availability of similar ecological niches (no woodpeckers, lots of bugs) they came up with a smiler solution.

We know that brains, and their components are very flexible even in a mature organism. So it makes sense that evolution is wild and creative, repurposing the tool constantly. I mean the diversity in sense perception in different animals seems like evidence of radically evolving brains over relatively short periods of time. Even entirely new senses (eg echolocation) seem to evolve fairly easily and quickly.

TLDR: depending on what your precise definition of "brain" is, this seems very likely. Aye-ayes & striped possums both have elongated fingers that evolved separately from regular fingers. The fact the they both evolved from regular fingers is interesting, but neither here nor there for most interesting conclusions. Brains are probably like this, but way more interesting any mysterious.

^I feel like I have to credit Douglas Adams who wrote beautifully about these animals.
It doesn't, or at least it shouldn't. It doesn't make any difference whether it's a government, a corporation, or an individual who's stopping you speaking. The first amendment only applies to the government, but the first amendment is only one part of free speech.
Two years ago I had to use DBus to connect to a Bluetooth device from Java.

In the end, after a few minutes of good work the connection between the adapter and the peripheral would timeout (or someone would go out of range), the whole thing would stall and we'd never get another message from BlueZ, be able to connect to any device ever again. It was without doubt the worst development experience I ever had.

Worse, you couldn't reload the dbus library and start over because then Java would scream and crash. So we had to restart the JVM, and BlueZ, etc.

I'm sure I was doing something wrong, but if I can't get it to work properly in a matter of weeks then it's not just my fault.
Doesn't every university have an OS class like this? Stanford has Pintos, Purdue has Xinu, CMU has their own and so on. Infact, this seems a lot simpler (which is probably good) than Xinu.
People are good disconnecting from what they ought to do, even in the face of their religious leaders.

Made men in the Mafia don't care about the church's teachings about murder. The catholics in Northern Ireland didn't, either.

American politicians defend the death penalty against the Pope speaking out against it (although in this case you can claim that "Render unto Caesar" is a valid rebuttal).

So don't hold your breath.
> It's a moral responsibility to cooperate with law enforcement when they are trying to track criminals like pedophiles, terrorists or similarly malicious persons.

While I agree that it may be a moral responsibility to cooperate with the "good" of law enforcement, the issue is more complex.

For one, law enforcement is not always "good". Rodney King.Floyd Dent.Julian Assange.Aaron Swartz. The list is long.

Second, the moral imperative to cooperate with law enforcement is not the only moral obligation one has. An adult have a moral responsibility to his wife, children and family, as well. Even US law recognizes that the bond between husband and wife is stronger than cooperation with the law.
A theoretical CS degree is definitely not a waste of money.