driggs

Are you making the argument that anyone with enough money should be able to do whatever they want on the moon?

Giant neon McDonalds billboards visible from everywhere on Earth? Mining with zero restriction on impacts to the surface of the Moon or its atmosphere?

Apparently the HN crowd doesn't stand anyone criticizing a "startup", but I'm asking a legitimate question. So far most of the junk we've launched onto the Moon has been in the name of science and operated by nations. An assault by the Free Market is unprecedented. I'm asking a legitimate question about regulation, and implying a question about whether regulation is warranted.

Is there any sort of international body with regulatory power over the moon, or is it completely lawless and unrestricted?

This startup has already crashed two pieces of space junk onto the lunar surface. Can any startup able to get there do whatever they want?

Wow, I really appreciate your fascinating reply, thanks!

Were you allowed on base? What was your experience like and your perception of what was going on?

I had the opportunity to perform a bat survey at Sugar Grove, and a poor guard had to come out to keep an eye on us until 3am because we couldn't be left alone. We noted curious wooden gazebos positioned around a featureless meadow, hinting at significant manned infrastructure underground.

Unlike the Green Bank Observatory from the above article, Sugar Grove was piggybacked on the National Radio Quiet Zone so the NSA could intercept intercontinental telecom traffic as a part of the ECHELON network. The cover story was that it was a run-of-the-mill AT&T site, but was an open secret for all the Pendleton County WV locals that it was a spy site. The base was also home to the best restaurant in the whole county, which isn't saying much for a single-traffic-light county.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Grove_Station

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

> Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows. Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind, in order that God may send us a frightening punishment on account of our ungratefulness. After all, the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there, live as his children.

That classic logic of religion... We don't understand this natural phenomenon, therefore it is clearly a message from God that we must obey our Holy Book.

> These ripples were imaged by Curiosity on Sol 3684 (Dec. 16, 2022). (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

The caption on the second image of this space.com article is misleading. This photo does not show ripples, it is showing the particular ripple-bearing thin laminations in this sedimentary rock, exposed here as "edges". The journal article shows this photo [Fig 2. C] with an annotation line identifying the particular strata containing the ripples. The ripple-bearing unit is 15cm thick and is the thinly bedded strata below the piled sand.

If you're interested, the actual paper is predictably much more informative than this shallow space.com article:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr0010

Wow, this is excellent listening, instrumental funky jazz... at least the first 20 minutes until the cheesy "Space Oddity" cover starts. No ties to Dune necessary to enjoy it.

Indeed, similar megafauna were present in North America as well. The West Virginia state fossil is Megalonyx jeffersonii, a giant ground sloth present until the end of the Pleistocene. They're estimated to have been 10 feet "tall" and to weight roughly a ton. Fossil bones were discovered in Haynes Cave, Monroe County near the present day Virginia border, and the species is named for Thomas Jefferson, who examined bones and authored the paper that identified this genus. (Though the history of exactly which bones he identified is slightly murky.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalonyx

It seems likely that they were using these limestone caves for shelter, though it is also not uncommon for other Pleistocene fossils to be found and preserved in caves after washing in as sediment. I've never seen claw marks on cave walls quite large enough to attribute it to a ground sloth, but there are occasionally very large claw marks on cave walls... and I wouldn't want to be trapped in the dark with whatever creature left them behind.

You must be really fun at parties.

An LTS server is an appliance. There is so much bedrock software out there that the younger HN crowd may have never considered, unsexy yet absolutely critical. This is targeted for those who need to prioritize longterm stability above all else.

> I've also heard of a fun database where the user "Geoffrey" was truncated to "G". I wonder why? (Hint: End of file)

Sorry, I don't buy that one. There's no way the ascii string "eof" - especially lower-cased - would be interpreted as the C macro EOF, which is typically represented as the int -1. Sounds like a tall tale unless you've got proof.

The poster you're replying to said "I never heard of NDEs" for the exact reason you are mis-correcting: to show that they were NOT simply regurgitating a cultural stereotype, but that it is in fact a real phenomenon.

Here's a tip for the Internet and for Real Life: Assume the most charitable interpretation when conversing with someone, not the least. It is more often correct, and it doesn't make you needlessly look like an asshole.

Hydrological modeling gets tricky when water flows underground, either naturally or unnaturally. A pixel surrounded entirely by higher elevation pixels is a "sink", and if you want to model the overland flow of water a preprocessing step is often to fill sinks and apply a slight gradient to them.

I believe that the NHD+ dataset uses an alternate strategy; it burns an artificial channel into a sink, connecting it to a lower-elevation outlet. The dataset includes attributes that identify these "underground flow" segments. I didn't examine ESRI's Living Atlas site closely enough to see if they've used a different symbology to represent these segments, but your comment makes it sound like they did not.

A pond often has no inlet and no outlet (as opposed to a lake), so it makes sense that some ponds may not show up in this dataset.

From high resolution Digital Elevation Models. They first compute the flow direction from every pixel; from flow direction, the compute flow accumulation at every pixel. They then filter based on some threshold for catchment area, and vectorize the flow paths.

The USGS NHD+ Users Guide includes a very detailed description of the technical process:

https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/ofr20191096

I very strongly disagree. The most successful implementation of literate programming is the Jupyter Notebook, formerly called iPython Notebook. Even when you write it as raw markdown, there's no issue mixing documentation with triple-backtick code blocks.

Maybe you're thinking of mixing Python with HTML? Python based HTML templating can be ugly, and the significant indentation of Python is a very poor mix for replacing Javascript in whitespace-agnostic HTML.

Anyone who can't see past Python's indentation-based syntax is a person who doesn't understand Python.

(Both literally and figuratively!)

When "significant whitespace" is at the top of someone's complaints about Python, I'm immediately done hearing about their superficial criticism of the language.

It's no coincidence that PG published this days before Trump's inauguration.

This is yet another Silicon Valley elite kowtowing to their new GOP overlords.

The point is that if I'm writing a library and I specify `requests == 1.2.3`, then what are you going to do in your application if you need both my library and `requests == 1.2.4`?

This is why libraries should not use lockfiles, they should be written to safely use as wide a range of dependencies' versions as possible.

It's the developers of an application who should use a lockfile to lock transitive dependencies.

Yes, generally people already use an additional tool for managing their Python executables, like their operating system's package manager:

  $> sudo apt-get install python3.10 python3.11 python3.12

And then it's simple to create and use version-specific virtual environments:

  $> python3.11 -m venv .venv3.11
  $> source .venv3.11/bin/activate
  $> pip install -r requirements.txt

You are incorrect about needing to use an additional tool to install a "global" tool like `ruff`; `pip` does this by default when you're not using a virtual environment. In fact, this behavior is made more difficult by tools like `uv` if or `pipx` they're trying to manage Python executables as well as dependencies.

Just because someone has a different perspective than you doesn't mean they don't "understand".

Lockfiles are an anti-pattern if you're developing a library rather than an application, because you can't push your transitive requirements onto the users of your library.

I appreciate that the Ada language features baked-in pre- and post-condition invariants as a part of a function's signature. It goes beyond just runtime assertions by becoming a part of the function's contract with callers.

https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-ada/chapters/cont...

Did MS hire Suleyman in March 2024 because Gates liked the book?

An LLM would have written a much more convincing argument that "Lua is underrated".

This blog has just three posts, none with significant content. I was curious how this article even wound up on HN, until I realized that it was submitted by the blog's author: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nflatrea

Lightweight Java has always been a thing for those who appreciate Java-the-language but despise Java-the-ecosystem.

You don't need to fool with Gradle or Maven or Ant if you'd like to incorporate third-party or your own custom dependencies in single-file "Java scripts".

Just copy some .jar files into ~/lib, and in your `.bashrc`:

  export CLASSPATH=~/lib;$CLASSPATH

You mean a language like... Python?

  >>> 'hello world'
  'hello world'

For Python source code, where indentation is significant, I'm convinced that long lines should never be broken early. It should be the IDE's job to (optionally) fold long lines dynamically to the width of a viewer's editor.

If someone breaks a statement early at 72, or 79, or 99 characters (PEP8 recommendations), indentation no longer represents the structure of the program, it now represents the style of the author. Everyone who uses a wider screen suffers.

But if the IDE knows how to fold long lines dynamically, then any reader can use any width screen for viewing and editing. And users may choose not to enable folding at all, so that indentation exclusively represents program structure.

"Cane Toads: An Unnatural History" is an outstanding documentary film, and is worth watching even if the topic of invasive toads doesn't catch your immediate interest.

This film's approach to presenting the interaction between man and toad inspired Hamilton Morris, who used it as a conceptual guide when producing his own documentary series. Hamilton interviewed director Mark Lewis in podcast #72.

You can find a full copy of "Cane Toads" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkxwrpJg5W0

Quoth the article:

  The USGS predictive model provides the first estimate of total lithium present in Smackover Formation brines in southern Arkansas, using machine learning, which is a type of artificial intelligence.

The second paragraph of this Guardian article mentions, and links to, but doesn't expound on the biophysical pupillary response to mental visual imagery.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjbq8w/how-pupil-size-can-re...

If someone with normal mental visualization ability pictures a "bright" scene, the pupils contract just as they would in response to a bright visual stimulation. Aphants' pupils show no physical response to this test.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9018072/

But everyone knows how long a mile is, and can imagine a cube one mile long one mile wide and one mile high. Though we can't truly grasp the scale, we can at least understand the magnitude of a value of ~ten million.

But quoting a value of 4.4 x 10^19 liters is meaningless for most people.

"Of course, that's 22,000,000,000,000,000,000 two-liter soda bottles!"

So cubic miles seems like a reasonable unit for this pop-science article, despite the fact that you likely wouldn't use it in a published journal article.