skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The authors are not relying just on the improbability of that arrangement, but also on its stability. From one of the authors, on http://www.findplanetnine.com/:

"Mike and I were genuinely perplexed. Could the confinement of the orbits be due to an observational bias or a mere coincidence (after all, we are talking about six objects here - not exactly “big data”)? Thankfully, the probability of the observed alignment being fortuitous can be assessed in a statistically rigorous manner, and clocks in at right around 0.007%. Not a great gamble. Moreover, application of simple perturbation theory (or direct numerical integration) demonstrates that if allowed to evolve under the gravitational influence of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the orbits would become randomly oriented on timescales much shorter than than the multi-billion year lifetime of the solar system. So the dynamical origin of the peculiar structure of the Kuiper belt cannot be outsourced to the distant past - something is holding the orbits together right now."
Well, given that's it's a fork of Firefox itself, you could just un-fork it :)
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Substantive criticism is fine, but potshots—like rubbing someone's nose in a mistake—are not. The signs of a substantive criticism are that it is respectful and teaches the reader something.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937969 and marked it off-topic.
Laboring while Human
This doesn't seem like a "simple fact", rather insanity that has caused many of the economical problems we have seen recently.

I don't buy a house expecting to use it 10+ years and still make a buck selling it afterwards. The same way I don't buy a car and expect it to yield me money when it's a broken beater, in fact, the simple fact of buying it immediately devalues it (to others).

(I guess this is because (1) the market and tax situation in the US are broken and (2) it causes the land to be vastly more valuable than whatever is standing on top of it)
Want to know the most annoying thing? They can do that for free. Doesn't cost them a cent, so there is no reason NOT to. See [0] [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
I agree but find comfort in the fact that History is on our side: the devices should only get better. In 10 years, give or take 5, you're going to see this technology everywhere. The first iPhone was released in mid-2007. If you had asked me in 2000 whether such a device was possible, I'd have said yes, but not practical.

The time will come, don't worry :)
Thank you for the very thorough explanation.

I was under the impression that lisp was the mother of all functional languages, so I was surprised not to see it in your comment.
Food.

Colder climates often produce an abundance of food, relative to warmer climes, and less competition. Mammoths, specifically, are terrific targets. Bringing down just one could feed a tribe for weeks, and they had almost no other predators. And besides food, the carcass had an abundance of skin and fur, powerful tendons for "rope", ivory that could be carved into more subtle shapes than stone - all sorts of uses, relative to small game. A rabbit might feed a family one day, and you're competing with all sorts of dogs, cats, and predatory rodents for them.

The human survival advantage is primarily intelligence. Intelligence is what made it possible for a coordinated, armed group of human hunters to bring down mammoths, when even sabertooth tigers and wolf packs couldn't do it. No competition for the biggest food source on legs? That's a huge win from a survival perspective.
Evolutionary Strategies for Interstellar Colonization [pdf]
I love scraping web and produce structured data from web pages. The only downside of using XPath or similar extracting approach is necessity of constant maintenance. If I have enough knowledge about machine learning, I would like to write a framework that analysis similar pages and finds structure of data without giving which parts of page should be extracted.
200mbps UNMETERED. That is awesome. Does anyone have experience running a Tor node on free.fr?
It depends. Konrad Zuse's general purpose computer was put on hold by Germany. So were the extended range true submarines Germany was developing. A part of all that, is if your side is overextended. That can cause the top brass to start cutting things it thinks won't work or that it won't need in the near future.
Also, an independent third party can't track such ads.
Get a push notification every time the police kill someone in the US (iOS)
We launched our product (https://missiveapp.com) in closed beta last Autumn, and I can assess from our experiments that the only thing we did that gather a lot of attention was our "A Brief History of Email Apps" (http://email-apps-timeline.missiveapp.com/), a timeline of all the email clients released since the '90, a side project.

All our blog posts failed to gather eyeballs. We tried on our blog (https://missiveapp.com/blog) and on Medium (https://medium.com/@plehoux).

We are probably not good at writing compelling and viral content. It's hard. It's a unique and rare talent. You need to write about subjects that matter to people, subjects of our time.

To me, 37 signals (https://m.signalvnoise.com) are the master of this game.

I don't think blog post are dead; it's just harder to get noticed. But isn't it the same for everything else.

I enjoyed the blog post and did, in fact, learned about the crew product. :)
Yuck.

Everybody should read this article.

If you don't here's a summary:

- Valeant is a struggling little pharma in early 2000s.

- They recruit their favorite McKinsey strategist - J Pearson - as CEO to change.

- Pearson's strategy is to cut off all R&D to drive up profits.

- Keep prices at "expected" levels that bake in high R&D. Instead just eat the profit.

- Rinse and repeat through acquisitions.

- Not enough money on the table from that. So let's raise prices dramatically. Find new ways of fucking over the system of slow-to-move regulators and insurance companies. Like let's combine generics and "rebrand" them and price gouge.

- Participate in Wall Street financial engineering to "merge" with a Canadian company to enjoy lower tax rates despite HQ and CEO operating in New Jersey.

- Charlie Munger, Buffet's partner, saw the debacle for what it was stating that he was "holding his nose", as one of his largest shareholders began investing heavily in Valeant.

- And now my favorite part - Bill Ackman who is probably best known for his crusade against Herbalife's business practices - LOVES this company. Takes a huge bet, helps Valeant drive takeovers.

- The thing begins to come unglued when the sheer audacity of Valeant extends to pretending that they're smaller, specialty pharmacies and are flatly skirting the laws through financial and legal engineering.

This whole article literally made me sick to my stomach.

It's disgusting.

How the two worst pieces of shit - in two markets notorious for pieces of shit - Wallstreet & Pharma - managed to come together for one ultimate shit show is amazing in its blind luck.
Que new James Bond plot, the bad guy disables radio 4 to launch nuclear armageddon - Bond in race against time to find the spare parts needed to restore the radio.
Human behaviour, eminently hackable. Just like any complex system.

Also I totally see someone hacking this system to their own benefit, if they're not doing it already. I also see markets arising in hiring people to help you hack your score. And that's with officials looking actively for rule breakers. That said I bet most people will fall in line.
I should add that the tribes who lived in the frozen lands eventually went out to sea and became whale hunters - an even larger food source, with even less competition.
It's all relative. Sure, Phoenix is expensive compared to Detroit, but that doesn't mean it can't also be cheap compared to Boston, Seattle, NYC, DC, or just about anywhere in California.

http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/real-estate/T010-S003-home-pri...
Nothing is ever 100% safe and everything has its own problems. Initramfs-based full disk encryption is easy and effortless to do, and the value is most definitely greater than the effort required. I know multiple of cases where a simple FDE would have helped to greatly reduce the harm done.

You can host your own servers, but even that is not 100% safe. Someone can break to your hosting space and inspect the servers. And that of course requires quite a deal of effort.
This looks promising https://github.com/jordangarside/Meteor-GraphQL-PostgreSQL-D...
Works well for me! Great work.

It would be nice if the URL updated to reflect which videos were being streamed, and which layout you were in, that would make configs more copy-paste-able. One of hte great features of multitwitch.tv is that it's easy to craft/copy-paste a URL that leads directly to both games.
Looks like AAPL is #8 on the WSJ short list: http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3062-nasdaqshort-hig...

Netflix is there too, tho... Maybe some folks are betting the international thing won't work. hmm.
Ask HN: Which keyword research tool do you use for AdWords campaigns?
Hi,

I haven't run an AdWords campaign in probably years. We are working on a new product and think this time SEM might be a better fit for us.

Could anyone help with some suggestions as to what I can use to research and identify the right keywords to target with the AdWords campaign?

*Just launched a quiet little Beta so I don't have much info on SEO keywords or much activity to measure.

Thanks in advance!
I agree, and you know what? I think online newspapers could be so much better.

Imagine an online paper where, instead of just mimicking a real newspaper with story after story, a site that collects facts, history as it happens, and weaves them together to form a cohesive stream that a reader can explore in all kinds of innovative ways.

You can still have he said / she said news. Still make it dramatic, but allow the user to follow the protagonist, step back in time to see what else they have said, what brought them to this point in time. Or folly the ripples outwards, how did what was said affect others, how did it interact with other stories.

I want to do an online news startup one day. It will be one where everybody thinks I'm crazy when I start it.
I've often said that the key to improving investment is to eliminate corporate taxes, tax foreign currency movements (when money moves out of the country), and to put limits on the amount of unutilized/under-utilized assets a corporation can hold onto, and for how long.

Corporations better serve the public good when they are spending, and beyond that spending domestically. By shifting funds out of the country and/or otherwise sitting on assets, there's a reduction in economic potential as a whole and said corporation is less serving of the public good.

Corporations are meant to serve the public good by encouraging investment and limiting liability of investors not involved in decision making. Corporate behavior today doesn't reflect this.
What's Square going to do when Apple gets rid of the headphone connector?
The spirit of the constitution protects individual rights

Do you support polygamous marriage?

It's not activism to say that discrimination based on sexual orientation is unconstitutional.

It's not bigotry to say that marriage is a societal institution and society can define it.

Any feelings you have about the definition of marriage based on culture, tradition, or god's divine law are irreverent to the legal institution of marriage established by our secular government.

You're projecting. I have no feelings about what the definition of marriage should be.

I have feelings about who should decide such definitions.

Furthermore, if you would like to take a few minutes to review my comment history to see if I have ever used "God" or religion as the basis for any argument, I'll wait. You're attempting to setup strawmen against which you can argue.

Like I pointed out earlier. In states where marriage was redefined legislatively, there was nothing like Proposition 8. Haven't you wondered why that is?
If there were an ad blocker which blocked the entire page if ads were present, would you use it?

At the very least, you should know by now that most major websites depend on advertising revenue. So I assume you won't click on any of them. I also assume you never use Google or Facebook.
I didn't lay any blame. But people got in way way over their heads with banks happy to make giant loans with no reason to care if it could be paid back.

http://thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-g...
I would try to get away with the most minimal thing possible. Ideally I would do the same thing flash games have always done and create a cookie for the user.

If they need to login from a different place, I would put a simple 1 line form and button for emailing a link that would allow them to do that.

If it was necessary, I would give them the option to backup their account to an email address. This would just set the hash to something new so that the old cookie info no longer works, and they only have to click the reactivation email.

If this is an account where virtual goods are purchased (like Steam) and so there is actual value to the account, I would do email + phone backup. Phone backups aren't good enough on their own because people switch phone numbers. Emails aren't good enough on their own because people reuse login data all the time. This is the only case where I wouldn't store login data using cookies.

Forcing registrations and logins on the user really doesn't make sense 99% of the time.
I'm actually a bit dizzy from shaking my head.
Doesn't the old saw about "never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity" comes to mind instead? American political leadership is desperately incompetent and is obsessed with avoiding bad publicity at all costs. That more than adequately explains our comically ineffectual war strategy.
Olin College students create machine that makes pancakes
Tokenize C, C++ and Objective-C files with clang
marketing's incessant notion that lying to people is like a science of making money just makes me sad. make a good product, be honest about it, change plans if noone cares, what's so bad about that?
>Why not just move south

It seems like the real question is, why move north in the first place? Following big game? Sick of your war-mongering neighbors to the south? Less competition for resources?
It's all about distances. The planets we can see with the naked eye are at most 11AU from us (Saturn is at 10AU at aphelion).

For comparison, Neptune is never closer than about 29AU to us. Brightness goes down as the square of the distance. But it gets worse, because that's brightness at given source brightness. Planets don't radiate intrinsically; they reflect sunlight. And sunlight brightness drops off as the square of distance from the sun. Which is to say that even if they were the same size and albedo (they're not), Neptune would appear about 81 times dimmer than Saturn to us. Oh, also (linear) angular size goes down linearly with distance. So if you want to see the two planets as disks of the same size, you need to have a field of view three times narrower, which means you need 9 times as many of them to cover the sky. And if you want the same amount of light gathered, you have to spend 81 times longer gathering it, per the above brightness calculation.

All of which is to say that the time needed to do an "equivalent" sky survey N times further away (within the solar system, where all the illumination is coming from the sun) scales as N^6. And planets do move, so you might still miss one if you survey a place where it's not yet, then take a while to get to where it used to be, such that it has moved. This is why Neptune was found via its gravitational interactions followed by a survey of a small part of the sky, not brute-force observation.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the proposed Planet Nine orbits 20 times farther out than Neptune. 20^6 is 64 million. So if we assume we've pretty much surveyed everything out to the radius of Neptune's orbit at some resolution, and then spent about 64000 times as much time surveying stuff out to the distance Planet Nine is proposed to be at, at the same resolution (I doubt we have), then we've probably surveyed about 0.1% of the stuff out there.

I can't tell you what the actual number is, unfortunately, but I suspect the answer is we haven't really done very good systematic surveys out at that distance.
You can still do it electronically, it'll just take more than a few minutes as it has to run through the bank's daily reconciliation process. That's probably OK though, I doubt many people have the need to transfer > £250,000 and the entirety to be available immediately.
It is nice to have somewhere to live though
They weren't ape-like idiots, but nonetheless newly arrived Homo Sapiens used noticeably more sophisticated tool-making techniques. This is one of the ways archaeologists are able to distinguish Neanderthal sites from, say, Cro-magnon sites. It is also thought that modern Homo Sapiens lived in groups much larger than Neanderthals did.
Interesting but not surprising that it existed. Reddit gold works because they have hundreds of millions of users and it probably barely pays the bills. Many smarter people have tried tackling the problem, but I don't think drastic online economic changes can grow organically without some sort of catalyst. Maybe if a browser like the one linked in the OP could get enough of a userbase that it becomes a force.
Ahh you mean like pushstate into the addressbar. That's a great idea. One of the issues has been losing the streams you were watching upon refresh
Certain kinds of events and tournaments (e.g. dreamhack) will divide their games across multiple streams. If you wanted to keep tabs on all the games, this is one way to do that.
How to Start a Company in 72 Hours (and Build a Ton of Velocity by Yourself)
Aha - sounded too good to be true.

I suppose it depends on how fast we accelerate them upto right speed

So if we imagine a Nimrod style dish on top of an aircraft near space, and say orbital speed is 30Mach or about 21,000mph call it 30kph for ease, and minimum useful weight would be 500g we need to input ... 54MW?

And control travel around a dish tighter than anything previously seen.

Yeah - nice idea ...
> This is why I cannot give much credibility to anarcho-capitalist states. Simply removing a visible state does not preclude shadow governments from forming.

If a government is formed, shadow or not, wouldn't that necessitate removal of the "anarcho" qualifier?

In a similar vein, it seems to me that the term "anarcho-anything state" is logically inconsistent, unless one exclusively uses the "chaos; disorder" definition for "anarcho-" instead of the "without rulers" definition.
It doesn't need to be fixed. It's just that everyone who creates content wants to play big brother. It's the person who's forcing you to create accounts, not the technology.
"A few influential people did."

yup, that was us.

Sorry, I am not sure what point you are making with the second line.
You buy the neighborhood with the price of a home (in theory). Invested neighbors keep appearances up, elect good leaders, push for better schools etc. Once the value starts dropping, none of that is necessarily a given. In my area once gorgeous suburbs became gang centers just a decade or two later. Not exactly a great thing given the recommended home stay for a starter home is about 5-7 years in order for you to "make your money back" should it even go up.

Not to mention a lot of consumers view home ownership as the single largest investment they make, so they are sitting on their retirement.
My million-dollar idea: FedEx and UPS should offer their own version of Amazon Prime that works from any web site. That would really level the playing field for other online stores.
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It's not harsh if it's all you know.
> I like to think our destiny is to colonize other planets.

Why? I'd rather live in a mostly automated robotic leisure society where I "work" 10-20 hours a week and enjoy my life here than break my back mining space rocks for some market wage so it can be put into some mass advertised consumer product no one really needs. And then what? Dig up that planets resources and continue on to the next ad nausea?

I think if we could pick a purpose it would be endless comfort and leisure. This could be possible once we finally nail some things politically and technologically. The idea that we'll export 20th century capitalism to the stars seems very questionable to me (The same way its laughable to look back the the USSR's ideas of exporting Communism to the stars or just another step back into exporting feudalism/slavery/mercantilism to the stars being just as silly). By the time that's feasible we'll see 20th century capitalism as antiquated because we'll be able to do some much more with AI and robotics. Scarcity will be much less of an issue.
For those that won't click through, a very short explanation given by the author: "Is Planet Nine gravitationally dominant? I think it is safe to say that any planet whose existence is inferred by its gravitational effects on a huge area of the solar system is gravitationally dominant."

He then goes on to give a more technical argument.
I've played Elite: Dangerous a little bit and have been meaning to get a better control setup for it. The ship's cockpit has an amazing amount of depth to it. And I love how screens in your ship react to being looked at.
Probably because of the other people already living there.
TrumpScript: Make Python Great Again
What amazes me is that people can't imagine how primitive the world must have been 45,000 years ago. How far back does recorded history go? 6000-8000 years? 600 years ago most humans thought the world was flat.

There's some crazy statistic that 80% of Americans live within 50 or 100 miles where they were born.
Two? You'd better have a darn good plan for your life and a supportive partner or you'll be darn lucky to have more than one.
Yes, it's definitely r^4. If we assume that the planet is far from the sun compared to the earth, such that the earth-planet distance and the sun-planet distance are both approximately r, then the amount of light the planet gets from the sun is proportional to 1/r^2. Then the planet reflects that light in all directions, and the fraction of it that comes back to us on earth is also proportional to 1/r^2. 1/r^2 * 1/r^2 = 1/r^4.
Upvoted for tempering the aggression and because I agree with you. As far as I can tell your interpretations of the statistics are correct. I don't see how an argument can include information stronger than the statistics of indirect detection of the object (without direct detection).
Carmack likes what he sees so far:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/689248999845437441
I think there are many variations on the idea that have been proposed, e.g. StarTram [1].

Wikipedia in general is a good starting point to look at some of the launch methods proposed over the years [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch
I think most of these are fun, and relatively harmless. And I think showing a spatial connection between states by having elements move is very useful.

However, the ones that involve new UI elements moving into place are all slightly too slow: almost all of them would get annoying to use once you were familiar with the app: you'd end up feeling like you had to wait before you could tap. Add an increasingly-behind-spec phone (don't they always seem to be?) and the delays would get truly aggravating.
It already happened starting in December. House prices are down and competition has dropped. We'll see if this trend continues in January but my bet is that price houses will continue downward. The only problem is that interest rates continue to be low, so some people will always have the ability to outbid others.
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