smhinsey

48 ms·

451.
by smhinsey 17y ago
One of the cornerstones of the Mars Direct approach is that it takes advantage of the solar system's orbital mechanics such that the actual trip is relatively short in comparison with the duration humans have spent in space so far. I think
452.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I think the most interesting aspect of the Mars Direct-style plans is that they can potentially be one-way. The largest expense with a trip to Mars in terms of technology and resources is getting back out of the Martian gravity well and bac
453.
by smhinsey 17y ago
It seems that a somewhat flippant comment has ended up with us talking around one another and me appearing pro-war in some weird way, which honestly couldn't be further from the truth. I'm not sure what is to be gained by continuing this di
454.
by smhinsey 17y ago
You also would have to imagine that most major sites are using some form of edge caching like Akamai already. My guess is that their service would replace it and maybe transparently add asset aggregation and/or compression or something alon
455.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I am certainly not saying that with approval, but I think it is undeniable that war has served, intentionally or otherwise, throughout history as a way of getting out from under economic crises of various forms. We can see examples of this
456.
by smhinsey 17y ago
Historically the way out of these sorts of downward trends has been war of some sort. It would be interesting to see if a "science" war such as a renewed space race without the militaristic/jingoistic overtones of the moon race would serve
457.
by smhinsey 17y ago
Nice tip, thanks. You'll probably want to also do this for the "All items" section as well, that'll take care of the unread count in the page's title.
458.
by smhinsey 17y ago
That's a pretty interesting point. I used to use Yahoo Pipes to make my own DIY feeds from sites that didn't have them but it ultimately ended up being too much of a hassle so I stopped. I would definitely be interested in something that so
459.
by smhinsey 17y ago
If it hadn't been Silverlight, someone would be saying "see, even Bill Gates doesn't think it's good!" Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I find this a really frustrating critique.
460.
by smhinsey 17y ago
It's a term that originated out of something of a malapropism by Gore Vidal at a Democratic National Convention, made speaking of William F Buckley Jr., meant to imply that he was a secret fascist. If only cryptozoologists were secret zoolo
461.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I couldn't find any info on the site, is the name an allusion to the Brady Bunch?
462.
by smhinsey 17y ago
Wow, I can see the shopping complex where this happened from my window, and I'd noticed the helicopters circling earlier. It sounds like a straightforward robbery gone wrong so far, but I don't think there is any concrete info yet.
463.
by smhinsey 17y ago
No problem. I am not too familiar with Hadoop, but those speculative reduce tasks sound like a real blast to debug. I can see why the approach in your blog would have a lot appeal in that environment. It sounds like some sort of error flagg
464.
by smhinsey 17y ago
You are of course correct, I have been working in a multi-threaded environment for long enough to have let that slip my mind.
465.
by smhinsey 17y ago
In my mind, reentrancy is associated with threading, and implies that the code could be executing in multiple locations simultaneously, whereas an idempotent operation is one that can be repeated multiple times without negative side effects
466.
by smhinsey 17y ago
Interesting. I think where the author writes "reentrancy" they may mean idempotency instead. I haven't thought about the "kill the whole pipeline" approach before, but it doesn't really seem that different from one of my standard techniques
467.
by smhinsey 17y ago
The author seems to have boldly gone straight into a tortured metaphor, but the topic is interesting. If you're interested in reading more about hardening software for production, I highly recommend checking out Release It! by Michael Nygar
468.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I can't really disagree with any of the specific claims here, but at the same time, the whole argument seems to be constructed on the basis of a hasty generalization. This situation is not reflective of OSS, developers, hacker news, hackers
469.
by smhinsey 17y ago
It wasn't awful, but they did exaggerate on the warehouse. Instead of calling it what it was (again, as far as I can tell - I haven't been there or anything) they made it out like the DC version of Groom Lake, a "heavily guarded government
470.
by smhinsey 17y ago
Every time I read one of these posts, which admittedly is only via HN lately, the suspicion that I am being trolled grows. This almost seems to be borne out by the numerous corrections that are almost always to be found in the comments. Mor
471.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I concede it's not a great example, but the larger point was that the V2 is related in type to the Saturn V in the same way that the Ho-299 is related to the B-2. In other words, I don't think there was much to discover about the 299 aside
472.
by smhinsey 17y ago
It's unlikely that this is the case. There were flying wing designs on the drawing board in the US in the WW2 era, and it appears that the stealth characteristics of the plane itself are due primarily to its construction out of wood. The si
473.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I wonder how different this would be, in practice, to the typical on demand service. My take on it, being familiar with Verizon's fios on demand service, which has no excuses for bandwidth, is that it would be kind of a hassle to deal with
474.
by smhinsey 17y ago
You can see this sort of thing starting to creep into NFL coverage, I think mostly FOX Sports. They have a number of robotic cameras strung across the field on wires, and they use them to put together some fairly impressive replay scenes, t
475.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I happen to have read both that book along with several on programming in cocoa (never done either professionally, I was just curious, so I claim no authority) and I thought that the systems (both what you can do with ironpython and wpf in
476.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I don't necessarily disagree with your assessment of our Congress, but at the same time, surely there is more to be gained here than simply getting our money back. Isn't the potential for technological advancement worthwhile? Even if they n
477.
by smhinsey 17y ago
Why is the password necessary? That's what I don't get. I totally understand why a government agency would want to be able to see public information, but this implies that they want to see what isn't public as well.
478.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I'll be interested to see how this plays with the carriers (t-mobile in my case). If I want to transfer my number to Voice, I'll need a new one for my phone. Does this result in a new contract or termination fees?
479.
by smhinsey 17y ago
I actually watched that exchange live on CNN and was really confused by it. Have you come across any good accounts of what was really going on there? I'm particularly curious about what was going on while she restated her question, it seeme
480.
by smhinsey 17y ago
You might be on to something here. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a boot flag (PAE is a common troublemaker) that causes some sort of problem for IE's new process isolation feature, which I understand to be a real rabbit hole.

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