skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
100 years is not an exaggeration.

It took approximately 100 years after Darwin for all relevant fields of science to come to a more or less consistent understanding of the history of this planet.

That's how long it took for (1) paleontologists to dig up enough fossils, sort them, categorize them, and determine the relationships between them; (2) geologists to figure out how plate tectonics have shaped Earth over long periods of time; (3) physicists to discover and refine radioisotope dating methods; and (4) astronomers to place all of that in the context of the evolution of the universe as a whole. If any of these pieces didn't come together at the right time, we might still be teaching young-Earth creationism in schools.

Contrary to popular perception, science moves rather slowly. We who work in the fast-moving subfield of computer science and information technology often forget that.
How Cotap Is Building a HIPAA-Compliant Messaging Service on AWS
I know a lot of programmers who shiver at the thought of managing their own servers...

I used to be a sysadmin; now I'm a programmer. I love to host my own webservers and the like. But email? That's just a never-ending uphill battle. Between spam, and whitelists, and botnets constantly port-scanning your server (hope I've got all the latest patches, etc..).

For me, GMail solved this. GMail solved spam, and hassle. (At the cost of all my privacy being in the hands of a for-profit corporation.)
No, but fortunately that's not at all what the parent poster said either.
quads props spin at 20k-40k speed. it was pure luck that quad crashed into building first, which probably shut it down, before crashing into woman. otherwise she could have very bad cuts too.

flying quads above people is big no-no. they can loose control for many different reasons.
The philosophical interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is a very hard, unsolved problem. There are many reasons why quantum mechanics is theoretically good and philosophically terrible, and not just in a subtle, esoteric way. The reason is that in Quantum Mechanics there are 2 main types of entities: particles, "things" that evolve according to the Schrodinger equation, and "observers". Observers are what deliver to us the results of randomly sampling from the probability distribution defined by the squared amplitude of the wave function by "collapsing" it, according to the Copenhagen interpretation. However, there is no particle that acts as an observer, they all just follow the Schrodinger equation, but nothing that exists isn't a particle. How could "observers" exist and interact with particles then? The Copenhagen interpretation is philosophically terrible. And it really pisses me off that this article title seems to hint that they've really confirmed it. In a lab, an experimenter can just point to his apparatus and say, "that's the observer". Or, being more formal, they can say a thermodynamically irreversible process plays the role of an observer. But this is not really a satisfying explanation because how could it be possible to generate these large, discontinuous motions we call "collapse" on the macroscale if it is impossible on the microscale? There are the multiverse theories that you seem to describe, but they have their own problems. Rae's Quantum Physics: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Physics-Illusion-Reality-Class...

goes over a lot of them without getting to messy in the math. Other interpretations of QM are in the book as well. There are many:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...
> These "MOND" gravity theories purport to explain observations better than the theory of dark matter, but they don't.

MOND consistently fits the rotational velocity profile of galaxies better than dark matter. This isn't too surprising as MOND originated as an ad-hoc formula derived from observations of said rotational profiles, however MOND works very well over a very wide range of galactic profiles. The mass deficit observed in tidal dwarf galaxies is also quite strong evidence against just dark matter. I don't think anybody is seriously claiming that MOND is a complete theory, though of course there have been attempts by theorists at creating complete models, but they've failed to explain large-scale structural observation and the cosmic microwave background. This just means these attempts at creating a complete theory are probably wrong, not that there isn't something funky going on with galaxies that isn't completely accounted for by dark matter.

> They explain some things and leave gaping holes elsewhere.

This is a false dichotomy. MOND is not incompatible with dark matter. This "us vs them" mentality is really quite harmful. A combination of MOND and dark matter matches most observations very well, far better than dark matter in isolation.

> Their only advantage is that they lack the existence of massive, weakly interacting particles, which a lot of people seem to have strong objections to despite the fact that several types of such particles are already known to exist.

While I'm sure there are quite a few people for whom this is the case, you shouldn't dismiss the possiblity there are people who take MOND seriously because it legitimately fits the data better in some circumstances.
ScienceScape Interview
"Beyond" in The Animatrix.
"There were people before there was money, and there wasn't a monetary paradox that killed them all."

I agree, of course. Most exchange was gift or reciprocity-oriented. I'm just saying that money emerged for a variety of reasons, one of which (probably the biggest) was to clear accounts as communities grew to a scale where reciprocity can't scale. Barter as Adam Smith describes it never really existed in ancient societies.

"Also, people did use hard money at the past. No we should not go back there, but it did exist..."

Again, also agree.

", and people didn't starve because of that."

But they did! Numerous economic crises, whether depressions or hyperinflation can be traced through ancient times - the 3rd century fall of the Roman empire (hyperinflation), the various Italian banking crises in the 14th and 15th centuries, Tulip mania, panics and depressions through the 1700s and 1800s, leading to the failure of the Gold standard (the ultimate hard money backstop) in the Great Depression....

Going back to your first response, "If you want to claim that monetary phenomena cause real problems, well, you must claim a link between them", but that's what Keynes (and others) spent a lot of time actually doing in the 1920-40's. The world got complicated and the gold standard broke down. The rise of shadow banking makes things even more complicated in this age.
I don't really disagree with you but there are probably certain activities that we can generalize to a pretty wide of drones as being unsafe such as flying over a crowd of people. Just as we tend to have (albeit often informal and not always followed) rules around bicycles, skateboard, and baseballs. Those are all probably fine in most empty parking lots. Probably less so on a crowded city sidewalk.
Show HN: ES-Checker, a feature detection library for ECMAScript
I'd settle for https://www.livecoding.tv/livestreams/ actually having, well, livestreams. Nothing more frustrating when trying to watch a live stream on the live stream page and finding one that looks interesting, only to find it's not actually live.
Not really. London shrank until 1988 and only this year passed the previous historical population peak of 1939 as the UK economy has become completely concentrated in the city.

The problem is exacerbated by the UK's lack of building. Thatcher stopped local authorities constructing homes (then half the total) and even private building has declined as its so hard to build. The result has been a huge wealth transfer to those who owned property.
BRExit is the most likely scenario as if the UK leaves the EU then any advantage of being in London disappears and so the money will leave.

This of course assumes the EU economy survives GRExit in any fit state to continue to attract investment.
On a positive note: While I have major questions/concerns about distributing poorly secured fast reactors and toxic waste sites all over the planet, if this tech really does turn out to be a practical way to reduce the half life of waste...

Why not just turn the waste storage sites into reactor farms?

That would sidestep the problems stemming from decentralization and probably achieve some economies of scale too. Maybe smelt some aluminum with the energy. But even if you essentially threw the energy away, it might be useful as purely a waste cleanup solution.
They're not saying "nothing exists without being perceived", because the probabilities of things at the quantum level all do exist.

It seems sort of unfortunate that physicists would call these quantum probabilistic behaviors "not reality", because they are just as real as anything else.
5% of purchase is a perfectly cromulent rent. Outside cities, that number goes up, not down.
You expect neither a baseball nor a copter. Either hitting you is offensive.
hhaha:)
There's a decent amount of documentation as to the role of the Kremlin in RT's editorial process.

I don't have any examples in mind but I feel like the BBC has never held back on criticizing the government/people in power, and doing reports on gov't scandals and the like.
Nitpick: I don't believe neutrinos are classified as WIMPs, since they are either massless, or have an incredibly small mass.
For more examples of people who should not be piloting drones: http://faildrone.com/
Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
reddit dot com? Can't you try a little harder to find good sources?
The F-35 Can't Beat the Plane It's Replacing in a Dogfight
Found it, it was back at 2010 it seems:

http://chrisdone.com:10001/browse/lisp?events_per_page=50&ev...

The "helper"'s screen name was "nixeagle" and his emacs mirror was at http://i.nixeagle.net:8080/t
A technical user could reasonably be expected to look for https before downloading 'preview build' or something equally payload-ey.

Then sigh and download PuTTY anyway...
Just like python generators.
For the same resaon you can prboably read this sennetce wiothut much trobule, desipte its mupltile typos.
I think he means Aquinas' Quinque Viae
And that kept my interest for about 140 seconds. Pretty damn good character:fun ratio. Bravo!
That's a really enlightening video but I don't think it really makes any relevant argument other than "thank god we haven't had another world war."

Maybe you feel that NSA and similar organizations are responsible for keeping another world war from errupting by making smaller conflicts happen, or by helping unexpected regime changes occur... That still doesn't explain all the mass surveillance of it's own people, or this economic espionage of supposed allies.
True Object-Oriented and Immutable Java Web Framework (takes.org)
Not nervous at all.

This takes me back ten years ago when "SOA" was the buzzword with companies like IBM selling complex GUIs that allowed you to drag and drop business nodes around on a page to generate a business workflow: FTP upload here, send a web service there, connect to legacy system over there, etc.

Sure it looked impressive to managers, but all I could see was clever marketing that would eventually force customers to hire "SOA consultants" whenever any of that complex generated Java/XML/etc fell over. So much for no more developers.

This looks very much like the same thing.
Do you think it will be OK given this law to automatically generate FFI bindings by parsing protectable POSIX C headers? In this instance a human will have invoked a program that literally copied the source in to ram, bit by bit, and then copied certain bits of it (eg symbol names). Is that materially different to invoking 'cp' (a traditional copy command)?
what is B?
Cute; I didn't realize that the element's ID implicitly mapped it to a javascript variable in Chrome.
Who are you arguing with? The author of the article agrees with you. And has some neat pictures. You should check it out.
Holy crap this is cool. Ironman-style computer UI incoming!!!
This websit is helpful,I learn something from it.
If you could change how you measure it, could you change your reality?
Was curious to see if HN was interested in FPV Racing, seemingly so!

Bonus video from the international time trial competition we run -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQVD-n2bWM
It's "dark", in that it doesn't interact with electromagnetic forces (photons and electrons). Neutrinos are one example of this kind of matter, so it seems reasonable that there are other kinds that are even more difficult to observe.
Uber Bonds Term Sheet Reveals $470M in Operating Losses
Indeed, the VT fuze. It worked by using a tiny radio transmitter and receiver to detect proximity to the target. This was hugely effective both for anti-aircraft use and when attacking ground targets. WWII AA techniques had a hard time hitting aircraft. If you use bullets you can spray a lot of them near the aircraft but they have fairly limited range, and you use up a ton of ammo. With something like an artillery shell you can get the range to hit a distant aircraft but a solid shell would be useless as it would likely miss the aircraft, so you need to explode into a bunch of fragments. But even if you have good aim if the shell explodes only a little bit too early or too late then you won't hit anything, since the fragments have a short range. With the VT fuze you guarantee that the shell will explode near the aircraft if it's headed in the right direction. With ground targets there's the opposite problem. You can hit very close to a target, but if the shell explodes on the ground then most of the blast will be directed upward, and the only way you'd be able to hit the target is if it was sitting out in the open. If it's dug into even a shallow fox hole or depression then you'd have to get a direct hit. But if you can ensure the shell explodes at a specific height over the target then the fragmentation can fly downward, which can hit targets in a bigger radius than just near a surface blast.
I think Charlie Stross did a particularly interesting one that happened within a simulation where the characters ultimately discover the enemy they were fighting already won and their simulation ran under a larger simulation. Can't remember the name...
My university does something similar with its Digital Library and its related projects. The main repository hosts around 140,000 objects which can be accessed alongside metadata and in multiple formats here:

http://digital.library.unt.edu/

The Django app and libraries running the site are built and maintained in-house, and are open source:

https://github.com/unt-libraries (the Django project/app itself is 'coda')
To some degree, thorium is snake oil. They have some interesting properties and there are designs proposed that feature passive safety systems, but they remain largely unproven and they aren't the magic that people seem to often claim.

When it comes down to it, power generation is always risky. Reasonable efficiency demands that any power plant tries to maximize energy density, which is fundamentally in conflict with safety. Even solar and wind have risks, though obviously they are smaller than nuclear, coal or natural gas (though wind and solar are a different class of power generation and don't necessarily compete with those).

The main risks in nuclear power are loss of coolant, containment breach or a prompt criticality event. Thorium reactors are vulnerable to all of the above, but of course designs exploit various properties to mitigate the risk. The most famous thorium design is the liquid salt design, which is not as susceptible to loss of coolant flow accidents due to a reactivity feedback mechanism (it's subcritical if the liquid fuel stops being circulated), but it isn't inherently superior to other modern passively safe designs.

The real reason to be interested in thorium is that it has reduced proliferation concern and also thorium is available in places where uranium is rare (India). But it isn't fundamentally safer.
Hi all,

Product designer here. My project is Bicycl. I'm reimagining the calendar app for freelancers and people who don't need to schedule every hour of every day.

Bicycl gives people a way to track their progress over time, starting with ideas and to-dos (future), to what you accomplish and learn (past).

http://bicycl.co

On a meta level, I'm fascinated by our perception of time--how we learn from our past, our personal cycles, how we expect things and believe in the future--and ultimately, how that impacts the rate at which we grow, progress, and create meaningful work.

On a practical level, there are gazillions of apps for managing future work, and only a small handful for retrospectives, but none that put it all together in a useful daily calendar, especially for the vast majority of people who don't use or need a schedule to micro-manage their time.

Over the past year, I've launched 2 mvp iterations to test different aspects of the concept (social, retrospective), and am now starting to build the next iteration. I'm open to receiving help in many forms. I'm a jack-of-all-trades (master of none), currently making a living as a designer based in Boulder, CO.

I'm mostly looking to join forces with an iOS developer. Though, a cofounder who can take a technical lead on all aspects of a consumer app's growth (eg Evernote) would be ideal. Local's great, but I've also been working successfully with people remotely forever. Talent and heart foremost.

So if you're interested, or have questions or inquiries, give me a shout at peter@bicycl.co or http://twitter.com/@crackedboulder.

PS. Long time lurker, first time poster. Thanks HN.
Thought experiment: replace "drone" with "gun" in your theoretical. I'm not saying you're wrong or right, though.

I agree that the guy is at fault here, one way or another.
> I am sick to death of these people who do idiotic things like fly over a crowd of people.

> people tend to blame the drone, not the pilot.

I don't pay that much attention to drones, and to me this seems to be part of what drones are made for. Many of the popular drone videos I've seen were in situations where it could conceivably fall on someone.
Documentation is difficult, and most people hate doing it. There's a lack of people who want to do documentation in opensourceland, and when someone does want to do docs, they also have to really understand the product, or have a senior dev work with them. Copywriting is easy for people who can write copy, but it's difficult for most people.
For over ten years the US nuclear fleet has maintained an average capacity factor of about 90%, and that is nearly 1/4 of the world's nuclear plants - http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/US-Nu.... It's not "some countries" it's most plants at around 90%.
Ask HN: How to retain IP as a software contractor
I am sure a lot of folks ran into this scenario before, but searching for an answer online seemed hard due to all the noise, so hoping to see if anyone has personal experience on this

Q1.
If you were a software contractor working for a company on contract (say, to write a web site in html/js/css), by default, the IP is owned by the contractor/author unless there's a written agreement to transfer ownership. Is this correct?

Q2.
If you were the said contractor, and you wanted to retain ownership of your work after the contract is over, does that mean all you have to do is not sign any written transfer agreements? Would it be worth it to have some kind of extra written agreement to make it clear you as the contractor still retain IP after the contract ends?

Q3.
From the company's point of view, it would be preferable to own the IP of the contractor. Under what circumstances, in the usual case, do they let the software contractor retain the IP? Seems like a lot to give up, given all the time/money the company already spent to set up the contract job, look for contractors etc. Does this usually lead to a significant reduction in, say, price of the contract? What would usually convince companies to give up IP to contractors, or not care about IP after the contract ends?

Q4.
If you were the said contractor, after the contract, can you retain 100% ownership of the IP, and then provide a "for eternity" licence to the company, such that both you and the company can use the code at the end of the contract, but the company would own any modifications it makes after the contract, and you would own modifications you make. Essentially have the ownership be divided when the code gets "forked" when the contract terminates. Is this possible? Is there a canonical term for this type of arrangement?

Thanks
Maybe, but my wording is not his argument. Here is a blog version of the same idea. https://edge.org/response-detail/25450
Do any licensing fees states charge go towards bettering the industry? I always think of ridiculous cosmetology licensing fees. Maybe someone can school me, but I doubt they go towards liability insurance.
There is a reason the FAA won't issue rules about drones instead keeping them restricted.

Flying things are dangerous. You don't just 'blame the pilot' and have all small aircraft unregulated, you strictly regulate who can fly them, the training they receive, and how they act – deviations from the rules involve severe consequences.

A drone doesn't have to be very big at all to impart serious permanent damage, promises of punishment for idiots isn't enough. We will very soon get to a point that selling to an unlicensed person will result in the seller accepting all liability for the buyer's actions. That will be the _only_ way to properly regulate drone usage. Otherwise, people are going to die... they probably will before the right regulations are in place.
I wish that Samsung would either give up on software, or put significantly more effort into it. They've had two self-inflicted security catastrophes in the past month.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/24/samsung-di...

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/new-exploit-turns-sa...

Why do hardware manufacturers suck so badly at decent software?
Isn't it against site policy to make up titles for posts? I don't see that link text anywhere in the linked page's content.
Faults are not a serious issue with a fusion reactor beyond it breaking down. Neither is waste - an inert reactor is harmless unless you insist on crowbaring into the core to bathe in all those activated inner wall materials.
> Kind of like breaking out of a VM through register flaws or something

The difficulty is keeping track of the context while you attempt the exploit. You would have to be able to plant code outside the simulation without causing it to crash.

OTOH, from within, you'd only see a successful attempt to escalate privileges. Imagine being able to edit reality.
Well, the difference between chemical toxic waste is that there are accessible methods for making it non-toxic. It's just a matter of cost. For example, toxic organic and inorganic compounds can be thermally decomposed. For organics, you create elemental carbon. For inorganics (containing metal ions), you can reform the metal and collect it. Acid/base waste can be neutralized. You can't really do that for radioactive material except trying to accelerate the decay. And while chemical waste can often be handled with standard safety measures, radioactive waste is just too dangerous to work with.

I see your point. I think one needs to consider both the danger of the waste and the amount of it generated. Then try to find a good balance.
Founder Depression Research Survey
Neutrinos conclusively have mass since they experience flavor oscillations (if they were massless that would be impossible). Current estimates are that the total mass of all flavors of neutrinos is a fraction of 1 eV (less than a billionth the mass of a proton).

Anyway, neutrinos aren't generally called "WIMPs" because they already have a name, the term "WIMP" is generally reserved for new particles that have yet to be directly observed.